Mat 23:25
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

Mat 23:26
[You] blind Pharisee, cleanse first that [which is] within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

There is another pattern of three here. First, we were talking about what is light and heavy, herbs versus serious matters of morality. Here, we are talking about cleanliness and what is not clean. In the next verse, we move on to beauty and what is not beautiful. I want to relate these ideas to Christ's general pattern of spirit-body-mind-relationships-spirit, but I don't know if I can do it correctly.

If we related to the most common pattern, weight relates to the body, cleanliness to the mind, and beauty to relationships, but I find myself thinking that these ideas relate to all three areas. Physical matter can be light or weighty, clean or dirty, beautiful or corrupt. Mental, emotional, and even spiritual matters can have all these characteristics as well.

This worries me because it may means that Christ is using more than one pattern, wheels within wheels. I find myself wanting to go back through the entire Gospel and see if this pattern of weight, cleanliness, and beauty reappears again and again in some form.

For example, I know that the Greek word that is usually translated as "good" (kalos, kalia) doesn't mean "good." It means "beautiful." I know also that the concepts of emptiness and fullness (light and heavy) underlie the Beatitudes. I find myself thinking about when Jesus cured the lame man at the pool of Shilom (sp?), telling him to take up his bed and walk. The Pharisees criticized the man for carrying his bed on the Sabbath and then Jesus for curing on the Sabbath. His criticism in the previous verse about losing perspective clearly applies. However, I cannot remember the concept of "clean" (katharizo) coming up that often, and always in regards to cleansing lepers (which makes it more physical than mental). Similar terms, such as "pure" also come up very rarely. Perhaps (make that, almost certainly), I am missing something.