Hypocrisy’s Blindness – 8/24/25

On June 25th, 1876, Colonel George Armstrong Custer personally led 265 of his men from the 7th Cavalry against a much larger force of Sioux and Cheyenne. The final battle near the Little Bighorn River in central Montana lasted only about 20 minutes and resulted in the deaths of all 265 men, on what came to be known as “Last Stand Hill.” The bodies of the soldiers were found several days later, spiked full of arrows, some hacked beyond recognition.

The victory was Sitting Bull’s finest hour, and really his swan song. For when word of Custer’s demise traveled east (somehow, on the 100-year anniversary of the American Revolution), Custer became a martyr. Congress and the military were galvanized, and the Sioux and the Cheyenne were defeated. Within four months, they were back on the Dakota Reservation.

There are so many moral and military questions that surround these events. I’m going to lock in on just one of them that has haunted me: Why would a military commander like Custer (who was not a newbie, very experienced) lead the men he loved— and he loved them. Two of them were his younger brothers, his brother-in-law, his nephew… Why would he lead all these men he loves into what anyone can see is going to be an obvious massacre? Sprinkled throughout Nathaniel Philbrick’s well-researched New York Times bestselling book, The Last Stand, are some clues. I’m only going to mention two.

One is obvious: overconfidence. Custer knew the Indians they were tracking numbered in the thousands. His own Indian scouts had warned him, but he believed his 7th Cavalry could win anyway. His primary concern was that he was afraid the Indians would scatter. In this, he grossly underestimated the leadership skill of Sitting Bull. Custer assumed that the different tribes that were often at war with each other would not come together to fight. But Sitting Bull was able to build them all into quite the formidable fighting force.

Reflecting on the character and personalities of these two leaders is fascinating. Think of the name “Sitting Bull.” It communicates a calm, strength of resolve. That is Sitting Bull. Custer was hyperactive. He forgot to take his meds. He was chaotic, which made him—on the positive side—absolutely fearless in battle. Even the Indians acknowledged he was a fearful foe. Except he tended to live his entire life as if he were intoxicated.

As Nathaniel Philbrick partially humorously describes,

“Custer did not drink; he didn’t have to. His emotional effusions unhinged his judgment in ways that went far beyond alcohol’s ability to interfere with clear thinking.”

He didn’t need alcohol. Overconfidence.

2. Craving for glory. Custer spent the final nights of his life writing letters and articles, so we don’t have to guess what he was intending. In one of his last letters to his wife, Libby, he wrote,

“Think of the valuable time lost.”

He was referring to the Democratic Convention opening in St. Louis on June 27th, which he was beginning to realize he would miss. He needed a quick military victory so he could return in glory to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and then begin his lecture tour (the exhibition was from May to November).

His mind seemed to be preoccupied with reputational and political aspirations rather than on the mission at hand. This seems to have blinded Custer to several things: One, apparently, Sitting Bull had been open to peaceful negotiations. But more importantly, it blinded him to the insanity of attacking a much bigger force.

In Matthew 15, Jesus confronts a very different kind of blindness, but there are similarities. Look at verse 14 in Matthew 15:14.

“Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”

Like Custer, something is blinding these religious leaders, and the consequences for them and those who follow them are lethal when the blind lead the blind. So what is preventing these religious leaders from seeing what truly matters?

The short answer, here in Matthew 15, is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy. Hypocrisy can be a form of insanity. It is a spiritual psychosis that disconnects us from reality. We can’t see what matters because we’re focused on what doesn’t. Specifically, in this context, you can define hypocrisy this way:

Hypocrisy is when we are blinded to God’s Word by man’s word.

We are blinded to God’s Word by man’s word. We can’t see what matters because all we’re seeing is what doesn’t.

If you’re visiting, we’re journeying through the Gospel of Matthew (for several years), and we’ve come to chapter 15. We’re going to see the first half of chapter 15 unfold in three stages: the contention, the confrontation, and the clarification. We’re going to look at the first two today, and then, Lord-willing, come back next week and look at the next paragraph, which unfolds that third clarification.

1. The contention. The contention in verses 1-6, or the disagreement. What’s the disagreement over? It comes in two parts. First, the religious leaders ask Jesus a question, but their question is really an accusation. Look at verse 1.

“Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, ‘Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat’” (Matthew 15:1-2).

Jesus and his disciples are still up in Galilee, near the Sea of Galilee. This posse comes from Jerusalem, which tells us the significance of the events are ramping up because now you have a group coming from headquarters to try to figure out why Jesus and his disciples are not in compliance with the tradition of the elders. As you know, if you jump through to the end of the story, everything’s heading for Jerusalem.

What is the tradition of the elders? This is an oral tradition that was passed down from generation to generation by the religious leaders. Eventually, in the second century A.D., it was codified in what is called the Mishnah. The Mishnah gives very specific instructions concerning their concern, here in verse two, that they do not wash their hands when they eat. Their concern was not hygienic, but ceremonial.

The Mishnah had very specific instructions:
the amount of water used,
the utensils used,
the purity of the water,
the posture when pouring,
the way to hold one’s hand when pouring…

All of this was clearly delineated, and the consequences for not complying were serious. There’s one Rabbi described who questioned these hand-washing instructions. He was excommunicated, and when he died, they put a rock on his grave symbolizing “He died worthy of stoning.” They didn’t kill him, but they’re essentially saying he should have been stoned.

Here’s the thing: none of these requirements are in God’s Word. In Leviticus 22, there are some specific washing requirements for priests in the middle of their Levitical duties. That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about here. These are ordinary people eating ordinary meals who are encumbered with a series of traditional requirements that demand attention.

Look at Jesus’s response:

“He answered them, ‘And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” (Matthew 15:3)

Notice how Jesus responds to their question that is cloaked as an accusation with a question that is cloaked as a counter accusation. Why does he do this?

Imagine going to the emergency room. You check in. They ask what your problem is. You say, “I’m sweating. I think I have a fever or something. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I am sweating.” They say, “Okay. We’ll run some labs.” A little bit later, the doctor comes out. She says, “Sir, you need to lie down on this bed. We’re going to take you back. We’re very concerned that you might be having a heart attack. A small one, but a heart attack. Right now.”

You look at her and you say, “Are we missing each other? I came in to talk about my sweating, and you’re talking about a heart attack. I didn’t come in here to talk about a heart attack. I came in here to talk about sweat. How did we get on heart attacks?”  The doctor is looking at you like, “What is your problem? Do you not realize your primary problem may be a heart attack, and you’re worried about your sweating? If we can address the real problem, the lesser problem will be taken care of.”

Jesus is doing the same thing with the religious leaders. “You guys are all uptight about a man’s word, and I’m talking about God’s Word. God’s Word is more than man’s word. You want to talk about sweat? I’m talking about a heart attack. Very different conversation.” They accuse him in the form of a question. Jesus comes back at them and says, “Listen, we need to reframe this whole conversation to see what really matters.” It’s even worse than that.

Think about the context. What have we been talking about for weeks? Jesus feeding thousands of people miraculously. Jesus walking on water. Jesus calming a storm. Jesus healing people as they touch the fringe of his garment. Healed! And you guys want to talk about hand washing requirements? What are we missing here? “I have sweat.” So Jesus offers a case study in verse four to help us see the point.

“For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die’” (Matthew 15:4).

Jesus is quoting two scriptures to illustrate his point. One, Exodus 20:12a,

“Honor your father and mother…”

Second one, Exodus 21:17,

“Whoever curses [or reviles] his father or his mother shall be put to death.”

Jesus is simply saying God’s word is crystal clear: he values honoring father/mother. Look at verse five. The “you” there in the Greek is emphatic. “But you,” God says.

“But you say, ‘If anyone tells his father or his mother, “What you would have gained from me is given to God,” he need not honor his father’” (Matthew 15:5-6a).

That is super confusing because if we don’t understand the cultural background, it doesn’t make sense to us. Basically, what they were doing was setting up religious trust funds. They called them “corban,” corban, which simply meant “legally devoted or given to God.”

Imagine you have a good job, you’re making money, and you want to make sure some of it is set aside. You can devote it to God, even if you haven’t even given it. That’s in this religious trust fund. Years later, your friend comes to you and says,

“Hey, I live right down the street from your parents. I know they can hardly walk right now and aren’t able to work—” Remember, this is before any kind of social security.

“…and so we as neighbors are trying to put some food on their table, but they’re starving. Could you help?”

You’re like, “I would love to, but I don’t have any money.”

“But what about that large sum of cash you call ‘corban’?”

“I can’t touch that. That’s given to God.”

Please don’t miss the point. The point is not, “if you’re not financially supporting your parents in their old age, you’re violating God’s command.” That’s not his point here. He is illustrating the way we come up with human traditions that deflect or protect us from God’s clear word, that God says, “Honor your father and mother.”

There are many ways you can do that, but don’t create these human traditions so that you can justify your selfishness or blindness to the command of God. You’re missing the point. A minor word is blinding you to a major word. Do you see that? A human word is blinding you to God’s Word.

That’s the contention/the conflict/the disagreement. Now look at the confrontation. In verse 7, Jesus confronts them directly:

“You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:7-9).

Jesus is essentially saying, “You guys mirror Isaiah’s audience.” Isaiah was an Old Testament prophet. In Isaiah 29 (eighth century B.C., Jerusalem), Isaiah predicted the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, would threaten Jerusalem. “God is going to judge his people, but he promises salvation if you’ll listen.” But Isaiah says, “You guys aren’t listening. As a matter of fact, you’re spiritually asleep.”

If you look at the passage right before the passage Jesus quotes from Isaiah 29 — let me show it to you, Isaiah 29:11-12,

“And the vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, ‘Read this,’ he says, ‘I cannot, for it is sealed.’ And when they give the book to one who cannot read, saying, ‘Read this,’ he says, ‘I cannot read.’”

Those two illustrations highlight the spiritual lethargy of the people in Isaiah’s day. It could be described with two words.

1. They were inactive. “I cannot, for it is sealed.” Wait a second, God is giving you a word? And you’re saying it’s too hard? “It’s sealed. I would have to break the seal. I’m tired.”

2. They were indifferent.

“I cannot read.” We don’t know if that’s genuine illiteracy, but even if it is, it is a stunning lack of curiosity. Somebody comes to you with a word from God, and they say, “This is for you, from God,” and you say, “Can’t read.” You never say, “Hey, would you read it to me? Would you teach me to read? I will do anything to hear a word from God. I don’t need more words from man. I want to hear a Word from God!”

The people did not care. Yet, they still went through the motions. Look at their worship. Their worship: ritual without reality. Ritual without reality.

“This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8).

Their lips are close. Their hearts are far. They have retained the form, they have lost the reality. Right words, wrong hearts.

2. Function without fruit.

“…in vain do they worship me” (Matthew 15:9a).

The word vain means aimless or fruitless. Their worship lacked purpose and productivity. Why? Here’s the climax: because they were

“teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9b).

There’s a ton here, and we’re going to dive in deeper next week when we pick up with the next paragraph, but the one thing we have to get is this: Many of us, I’m guessing many of us in here, think of our hearts as passive. Life happens, people hurt us, “I’m disappointed. Sometimes I get angry, sometimes I’m just blah. Life is blah. My heart is blah. I can learn a new song about God’s glory and my good, but it’s like whatever.”

We often think when we slip in— and we’re all going to be tempted to do “blah,” but we often think when we slip into “blah,” “That’s just the way it is.” But you can’t read Jesus’s words and come to that conclusion. Because what he is saying is that when our hearts grow cold, when our eyes are blind to what is truly beautiful, when we become lethargic/spiritually inactive, we are being bound and blinded by something. It’s not just happening, like Custer.

For Custer, as an experienced military commander, to make the decision he made, it didn’t just happen. Something blinded him. I’ve made a couple of suggestions that may or may not be the case, but seem to be. For the religious leaders who knew more Bible than we know to be so blind, something was blinding them. Jesus is saying, “What is blinding you to the commands of God are the commands of men.” You are so fixated on what people think, what you think, you can’t hear what or see what God thinks.

Richard Baxter, a few hundred years ago, said it well:

“Men God’s laws too many and too strict, and yet make more of their own, and are precise for keeping them.”

What does that mean? We all have a Mishnah. We can make fun of it. If you ever read the Mishna (that is, the oral code of the religious leaders), it is humorous in its detail. We can make fun of that because our own Mishnah, our own personal Mishnah, our own little traditions seem very normal to us. We don’t even notice them. That’s just the way we think and what we do. But we are all Mishnah factories pumping out little traditions, thoughts. Every moment, imaginations, preferences— that’s just the way it is. “That’s just a way smart people think. That’s just why I do what I do. Get off my back.”

Even if you’re here today and you’re an atheist and not a Christian, you still have a set of traditions that you live by, by faith. You can’t prove them, many of them, but they guide your life. What Jesus is saying is, if you live by your own personal Mishnah, you can be blind to God’s words because of addiction to your own words.

So what should we do? Psalm 119:32 gripped me by the Spirit last month. I want to show it to you. Verse 32 of Psalm 119,

“I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart!”

“Run” implies energy, passion. It seems to be the opposite of what Jesus is indicting the religious leaders for. The only way you’re going to do that is if you get a heart enlargement. The more my heart shrivels up, the less I will run in the way of his commandments, and the more I will run the way of my own.

What does it mean to enlarge a heart spiritually? This Hebrew word carries two big ideas. One is expansion, and the second is freedom. Expansion and freedom. When God enlarges my heart, he is expanding my understanding so I can see what I could not have seen before. He is freeing me from the narrowness, from the confines of my own claustrophobic affections.

Back in the 400s A.D., Augustine nailed this. Look at his words:

“Enlargement of heart means delight in righteousness. This is a gift of God.”

You can’t earn this or get this on your own. It is a gift of God.

“With it we are not cramped by fear in the observance of his commands but led into the broad freedom of love as we delight in justice.”

You see both ideas: expansion and freedom. Augustine is saying an enlarged heart comes as we turn from the things that squish our hearts to God, and he expands it.

What is squeezing your heart today? This is where “blah” comes from. When you feel “blah” spiritually, it’s because your heart is squished. You have a puny heart. So what is squishing your heart?

I know personally, there’s a direct correlation between worrying about what people think of me or what they’re going to think if something happens or doesn’t happen (or even my interpretation of that, like what I think) — as that rises, what I think about God and his promises shrinks and my heart gets squeezed by fear/the fear of man (which is worrying about what people think, even my own thoughts). Anxiety puts the squeeze on our hearts. Eventually, when your heart gets squished enough, that’s when you kick on the “blah,” because like, “Whatever. I’m tired of thinking about this.”

You’ll notice at the bottom of your notes, there’s a place there to think about a few of these things. My heart is being squished by what? There’s a list I’ll put on the screen: anxiety, lust, greed, pride, fear of man (that is simply other words for worrying about what people think), anger, bitterness (that’s a big one; squeezes the heart), craving recognition, worrying about glory for ourselves, doubts… My heart is being squished by what?

“This is blinding me to…” Like, the promises of God seem so far, impersonal, for someone else. The forgiveness of Jesus that, at one point, ignited my heart with delight is now “whatever.”

That leads us to pray, “Father, enlarge my heart. Open my eyes so I can see. Set me free from the narrowness and confinement of hypocrisy as I repent and turn to you.”

God says this in so many different ways. Think of Jeremiah 9:23-24,

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man [glory or] boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not a rich man boast in his riches—”

Why? Because

“…let him who boasts boast in this, that…I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.”

Do you see the contrast? You’re going to boast in something. You’re going to boast in your might, you’re going to boast in your wisdom, you’re going to boast in your wealth, you’re going to boast in your abilities… As you boast in those, you’re going to become blind to what God really delights in: steadfast love, justice, righteousness. So let’s turn from fake boasting. Let God open your eyes to what he truly delights in, as exemplified in the cross of Christ. Let’s pray.

Father, this is beyond us. We can’t change our own hearts. If you leave us to ourselves, our hearts will shrivel up and be squished by fear, anxiety, bitterness, pride, lust, greed. But our outside will still go through the motions, at least for a while, while our inside is being suffocated. We end up becoming blind to what really matters. But you have brought us here this morning to open our eyes to who you are and what you delight in, to what you’ve done through Jesus, to draw us in because you are the God of all grace. Set us free. Enlarge our hearts. May we as a church be a people with big hearts. We pray in Jesus’s name, amen.