Matthew 15

The controversy over hand-washing is a controversy about the relative authority of oral tradition (the tradition of the elders) and the written Torah. Jesus' response moves the argument to a more fundamental level: the tradition of the elders can in practice require acting against the written commandment, as the Corban ruling shows (allowing a man to devote money to God and thereby avoid using it to support parents, while honoring Father and Mother is a commandment). The teaching that follows — it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles — is one of the gospel's most radical statements about purity, and it points toward the later Gentile mission: if what defiles is not external but internal, the purity boundary between Jew and Gentile is not where the tradition of the elders had located it.

The Canaanite woman episode is the most ethnically explicit encounter in the gospel, and it is staging a tension the gospel is living with: the mission has been restricted to Israel (10:5-6, 15:24), and yet the centurion in chapter 8 had already received what was asked, and the Magi in chapter 2 had already come. The woman's response to the dog saying — yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table — does not challenge the restriction but works within it, accepting the diminished position and asking only for the overflow. Jesus' declaration that her faith is great is the same declaration he had made about the centurion in chapter 8. The second feeding that follows, in predominantly Gentile territory, extends to the Gentile crowds the same abundance the feeding of the five thousand had extended to the Jewish crowds.