Less Love, More Spiritual?

Some of our least loving decisions can be made to sound remarkably spiritual.

One of the uncomfortable things I have learned about myself is that, once I have decided what I want to do, I can usually find a convincing reason for doing it. If I want to avoid a difficult conversation, I can call it protecting my peace. If I do not want to help, I can tell myself that people need to learn to stand on their own feet. If someone challenges me, I can decide that they simply do not understand what God is doing in my life.

Sometimes we genuinely do need to protect our time, establish boundaries or recognise that we cannot meet every need placed before us. Yet even good principles can become hiding places. They can help us avoid questions we would rather not answer and responsibilities we would prefer not to carry.

Religious language can be particularly useful in this regard because it gives our decisions a sense of authority. Once something has been described as a calling, a conviction, or an act of obedience, it becomes much harder for anyone to question it.

We may even find it harder to question ourselves.

Jesus speaks directly to this inclination in Matthew 15. Crucially, he is not speaking to people who have abandoned religion. In fact, he is speaking to people who take it extremely seriously. Their problem is not that they have no interest in honoring God.

Their problem is that they have found a religious way to avoid loving someone.

The conversation begins with a question about handwashing.

Some Pharisees and teachers of the law have travelled from Jerusalem to confront Jesus. They have noticed that his disciples do not wash their hands according to the elders' tradition. This is not really disagreement about hygiene. The concern is ritual purity and the traditions that have developed around it.

It is easy for Christian readers to dismiss these practices as pointless rules, but that would be unfair. The desire for purity grew from a genuine desire to honor God in the ordinary details of life. If purity mattered when priests approached God in worship, some reasoned, perhaps extending those practices into everyday life was a way for everyone to express devotion.

It is worth remembering something else. Jesus is not standing outside Judaism, attacking it. This is a Jewish teacher arguing with other Jewish teachers about how God's commands should actually be lived out.

Instead, he asks what happens when a religious tradition begins to work against the command of God it was supposed to serve. The Pharisees begin by asking why his disciples break the tradition of the elders, and then Jesus responds with a question of his own:

“Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?”

It is a devastating reversal.

He reminds them of the command to honour one’s father and mother. In the biblical world, honour was not simply a matter of speaking respectfully or holding warm feelings towards one’s parents. As parents grew older and became less able to provide for themselves, their adult children were expected to care for them.

Honour had to become tangible. It might appear as food on the table, a place to live, or money to meet an immediate need. It was love made visible through responsibility.

Jesus then describes a religious practice that could be used to avoid that obligation. Someone might tell their parents that whatever help they would otherwise have received had been declared “a gift devoted to God.” Mark’s account uses the word Corban, a term associated with something dedicated to God.

The precise mechanics of these vows are difficult to reconstruct. The gift may have been intended for the Temple, or the vow may have made certain resources unavailable to anyone else without necessarily transferring them immediately. What matters for Jesus’ argument is the result: something that might have been used to support a parent could no longer be given to them.

The declaration sounded devout.

The parent still went without.

This is the hidden scandal within the passage. Apparently spiritual commitment had become a way of escaping an ordinary human responsibility.

What did this act of devotion feel like to the parent who still went without?

Jesus does not allow the language of sacrifice to hide the absence of love. He brings the neglected person back into view.

That is why his criticism is so much larger than a disagreement about handwashing or vows. He is exposing how easily religious observance can become detached from the purpose it was meant to serve. A tradition intended to honour God had begun to cancel a command intended to protect people.

Jesus reaches back to the prophet Isaiah to describe what has happened:

“These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

Their religious language remains intact, and their worship continues. Everything sounds right, but something has become disconnected. Their lips speak about devotion to God, while their actions leave another person without the care they need.

The problem is not that they have chosen religion over love, as though the two were always competitors. The problem is that they have imagined that devotion to God can be separated from responsibility towards another person.

Jesus is hardly inventing this concern. The prophets had been saying something similar for centuries. Isaiah and Amos both challenge worship that continues quite happily while people are being neglected. They do not reject worship. They reject the use of worship as a substitute for the life it was meant to produce.

Jesus stands firmly within that tradition. He is not asking people to care less about God. He is asking them to recognize that genuine devotion should make us more attentive to others, not less.

This becomes uncomfortable when we stop treating the passage as ancient disagreement and allow it to examine our own religious lives.

Christians, too, have plenty of spiritual language that can shield us from responsibility. We may promise to pray for someone when practical help is within our reach. Prayer matters, but sometimes the answer to our prayer may involve our own time, money or presence. We can become so busy serving at church that we have little time or patience left for the people waiting at home. We can offer a Bible verse when what someone needs first is to be heard.

None of this makes prayer, church service, theology, Scripture or charitable giving unimportant. They are all capable of forming us in love. The question is whether that formation is actually taking place.

Is my faith making me more available to others or giving me better reasons to keep them at a distance? Is my knowledge making me more gracious or simply more certain that I am right? Is my service an expression of love, or has it become a way of avoiding a more difficult responsibility elsewhere?

There are no simple answers to those questions.

Human relationships are complicated, and love does not mean agreeing to every request. The command to honour parents has sometimes been used to keep people trapped in manipulative or abusive relationships. That is not what Jesus is demanding here. Healthy boundaries can be necessary, and nobody should be told that faith requires them to remain within reach of harm.

Jesus is addressing something very specific: the use of spiritual reasoning to avoid a genuine responsibility we could and perhaps should carry. His concern is not that we fail to meet every need. It is that we allow religious language to silence the question of love before it has even been asked.

I find this passage challenging because I often prefer religious questions that can be answered in principle. These questions cannot.

Who needs care?

Who is carrying a burden?

Who has been left without help because I have found a compelling reason not to offer it?

Love is rarely abstract. It usually arrives with a name, a face and an inconvenient claim upon our time. It interrupts our plans, complicates our priorities and asks more of us than a general feeling of goodwill.

Perhaps that is why religious activity can sometimes feel easier. It allows us to love God in ways we can organize and control. We can choose when to attend, what to give and which causes to support. Loving the person directly in front of us can be far less predictable and much more demanding.

Jesus’ words are searching, but to be clear, I do not think their purpose is simply to make us feel guilty about everything we are not doing.

There will always be more need than anyone can meet. We have limited time, limited resources and limited emotional capacity. Recognizing those limits is not selfish; it is part of being human. The invitation is not to live beneath the impossible pressure of trying to rescue everyone.

It is to notice where we may have used something sacred to protect ourselves from love.

Perhaps we have called avoidance wisdom or called fear discernment. Perhaps we have described our absence as faithfulness because admitting the truth would require us to change.

The command of God was never meant to become an escape from human responsibility. It was meant to draw people more deeply into it.

Perhaps the question is not simply whether our decisions sound spiritual.

Perhaps it is whether they are helping us to love.