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| Purity and Monotheism |
In the Old Testament period unclean eating and unclean people were equally forbidden. Some have tried to link the lists of unclean foods with in-edibility, but that is reading into the Bible more than it says. The whole of the laws of clean and unclean are summarized by Peter’s remarkable revelation that we should no longer call any person unclean (Acts 10:28). And so in Matthew 15:10-28 Jesus began leading his disciples into this new understanding by confronting a Gentile woman of a region with a particularly heinous history, Canaan. Though every nation has human rights skeletons in its closet, a recent example of similar shame might be found among modern Germans. Jesus’ confrontation was an object lesson for his students. It was a practicum in understanding that faith makes anyone clean, no matter what their historical background.
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