Dirty Cups

Read Matthew 23:25-28

When Jesus is dealing with the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23 its safe to say that He wasn’t holding much back. He criticized their self-indulgent pridefulness: “They love the best places at feasts, the best seats in the synagogues, greetings in the marketplaces, and to be called by men, ‘Rabbi, Rabbi’” (Matt. 23:6-7). He criticized the fact that they made disciples for themselves, not for God: “For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves” (23:15). He criticized them for their misplaced arrogance: “Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets’” (23:29-30). As one reads thru the entire chapter, it is easy to see what Jesus thinks about them in the repeated metaphors He uses: serpents, brood of vipers, blind, fools and blind guides, … hypocrites.

When we come to Matthew 23:25-28 Jesus identifies the heart of the problem – these “blind guides” did not have insides matching their outsides. They were more than willing to make the outside of their cup clean, but the inside – where it really counts – was dirty. I remember sitting with a youth group once (long ago now) when a man was speaking on this very thing. He had three cups: one clean inside and out, one clean on the outside but dirty on the inside, and one dirty on the outside but clean on the inside. The application was straight forward. When he held up the cups at the beginning of his talk for all to inspect and asked the question, “Which would YOU like to drink from?” Everyone indicated one of the two cups that was clean on the outside because at that point we had yet to see the inside. I mean really, who wants to drink from a dirty cup?

The one thing that has really stood out in my mind all these years is what the man said about cleaning the cups – what he had to do to prepare his “props.” Of course, the one cup that everyone wanted to drink from was the easiest to clean – all of that cup, inside and out, was put in the soap and water and then rinsed. Clean and ready to be used. The cup that was dirty on the inside but clean on the outside, that one was pretty easy to prepare too. Put something over the top – a lid of some sort or a hand – and while the water and soap was used on the outside, it could be kept out of the inside. Clean and pretty on the outside but one look inside that cup and it was obvious no one wanted a drink from that!

This is the very word picture that Jesus uses to describe the scribes and Pharisees – clean on the outside but dirty on the inside. When this thought is coupled with Jesus saying to the disciples, “Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man” (Matt. 15:17-18), the illustration of how the inside influences the outside is made all the clearer. If one is full of “extortion and self-indulgence” (Matt. 23:25), or “greed and self-indulgence” as another translation has it, somehow those things will manifest themselves on the outside. Then when those things do leak out, and eventually they will, a quick little washy-washy soapy-soapy and the outside looks clean again, but on the inside, nothing has changed … still dirty.

But back to the “cup talk,” the last cup, he said, was the most difficult to prepare. The cup that was dirty on the outside but clean on the inside was challenging because while trying to get dirt on the outside, some of that dirt kept getting in … a little bit here, a little bit there. He had to keep going back and cleaning the inside. Over and over he had to stop and wipe the inside out without disturbing the dirt on the outside of the cup. While the props he used were basically “frozen” in time, in the real world keeping the inside of a cup clean while allowing the outside to remain dirty is just too much to maintain. It’s a constant battle, always wiping out the inside without removing the dirt from the outside. The point was easy to understand, even for a young guy with more interest in climbing a tree or throwing rocks at nothing, keeping the inside clean is easier when you keep the outside clean, too.

Are you a cup that someone might want to “drink” from? Maybe a chip here and a crack there, but clean? It’s not a hard decision – drinking from a clean cup is better than drinking from a dirty one.