PHARISEES ANCIENT AND MODERN [Updated October 4, 2016]
It was a smallish group, so I decided to engage them in dialogue:
‘Who knows who the Pharisees were?’
They did. ‘The Pharisees got a pretty nasty press in the New Testament – particularly Matthew.’
‘Now tell me all the good things you can think of about the Pharisees.’
I wrote them up on a blackboard:
The Pharisees knew their Bibles; were disciplined in prayer; fasted twice a week; gave about a third of their income to their church; were moral (very moral); many had been martyred for their faith; they attended ‘church’ regularly; they were evangelical/orthodox; and evangelistic (Jesus said they’d even cross the ocean – a fearful thing for Jews – to win a convert).
There was a deep silence. I asked ‘Peter’ sitting at the front: ‘What’s wrong?’ He pointed to the list and said ‘That’s us!’
‘Is it?” I responded. ‘Then you’ve got a problem: Jesus said these sorts of people are "children of the devil!"’
Then we did an inductive exercise on the question: ‘What’s so wrong with this list of admirable qualities?’ Short answer: it omits what was most important for Jesus. Whenever in the Gospels he used a prefatory statement like ‘This is the greatest/most important thing of all…’ none of the above were
emphasised by him.
So what was Jesus’ emphasis? Yes, loving God, loving others, seeking first the kingdom = obeying God the King … And, from two Gospel verses the evangelicals/orthodox have rarely noticed – Matthew 23:23, Luke 11:42 – justice/love, mercy, faith.
None of these were on the Pharisees’ list. But they’re the most important of all, according to Jesus.
Have you noticed items like justice/love don’t get into our creeds or confessions of faith or ‘doctrinal statements’ either? (I’ve written a book about that: Recent Trends Among Evangelicals ).
Back to the Pharisees. Our text (Matthew 12:1-21) is about the problem of religious ‘scrupulosity’… Jesus and his disciples were walking on the Sabbath through the fields on their way to the synagogue, to church, and they were hungry. So as the law (Deuteronomy 23:25) allowed, they plucked some ears of corn to eat. The Pharisees had problems with their ‘reaping’ on the sabbath. In fact, the disciples were breaking four of the Pharisees’ 39 rules about work on the sabbath: technically they were reaping, winnowing, threshing, and preparing a meal!
Now the modern picture of the Pharisees almost certainly
trivializes – or demonizes – their piety These were good people with good
motives. But they were ‘good people in the worst sense of the word’. More on that
later…
Jesus’ response is to argue from two precedents (lawyers/legalists are at home there) –
precedents about necessity and service.
David and his friends were hungry, so ate the forbidden bread (though note that when King Uzziah invaded the sacred area from another motive – pride – he was
on the sabbath – killing and sacrificing animals: so Jesus is saying that if
struck with leprosy, 2 Chronicles 26:16). Then the priests did a lot of ‘work’
sabbath-work has to do with the necessities of life and duties of sacred
temple is here; God wants mercy to have priority over sacrifice; and ‘the Son
service, it’s O.K. and the *spirit* of the fourth commandment is not violated.
Then Jesus reinforces all this with three arguments: someone greater than the
of man is lord of the sabbath’. Or, as the New Interpreters’ Bible
Commentary puts it (in a way that would appeal to a rabbinical way of
arguing): ‘Since the priests sacrifice according to the law on the sabbath,
sacrifice is greater than the sabbath. But mercy is greater than sacrifice… so
mercy is greater than the sabbath’ (Abingdon, 1995, p.278). I like Eugene
Peterson’s translation of this section in The Message: ‘There is far
more at stake than religion. If you had any idea what this Scripture meant – “I
prefer a flexible heart to an inflexible ritual” – you wouldn’t be nitpicking
like this.’
Then we have the story of the man with the withered hand.
Jerome, the fourth century bishop-scholar, says some ancient Gospels tell us
his name was Caementarius – a bricklayer – and he said to Jesus: ‘Please heal
my hand so that I can earn a living by bricklaying rather than begging’. The
Pharisees challenge him: ‘Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?’ Now there’s a
technicality behind that question, and Jewish scribes used to debate it: is it
lawful for a physician to heal on the sabbath? If the answer’s ‘yes’ how about
someone else, like a prophet? The Shammaite Pharisees did not allow praying for
the sick on the sabbath, but the followers of Hillel allowed it. Arguments,
arguments: ‘arguments by extension’ to which Jesus answers with an ‘argument by
analogy’. If the sabbath laws allow you to help a sheep, why not a person? (But
then, the Essenes wouldn’t have rescued a sheep either: gets complicated!).
So Jesus healed the man.
Two notes at this point:
#1 Jesus asked the man to stretch out his hand, to do as much as
he could. Jesus often did that in his healings. It’s the same today: we get
help any way we can, and do what we can. Jesus still heals: sometimes slowly
(always slowly in cases of sexual/emotional abuse), sometimes instantly;
sometimes with, sometimes without, the help of medicine…
#2 I was a co-speaker at a conference with the Dr Paul Yonggi
Cho, pastor of the largest church in the world. He said: ‘Every miracle
recorded in the New Testament, including the raising of the dead, has also
happened in Korea: we are praying for some miracles not mentioned in the Bible,
nor recorded in Christian history. Like the replacement of a limb – an arm or a
leg – that’s not there . We’re believing God for that…!’ Do what you like with
that one!
We ought to make a little excursus at this point. What’s the
Sabbath all about? Two things, basically: faith and rest. Faith that God will
supply our needs if we don’t have to work all the time; and rest so that our
lives will be in balance. As you know, I counsel clergy: that’s what John Mark Ministries is about. They’re often burned out. But when they are, it’s almost always associated with a failure to
take the idea and practice of sabbath seriously. They don’t take a day off: a
day off is any day (for pastors it’s often Thursday) when from getting up to
going to bed at night you are not preoccupied with your vocation. Isn’t it
interesting that in our leisure-oriented culture, there’s also more fatigue? A
lot of people are just plain tired.
The five-day work week is a recent innovation, but ‘leisure’ and
‘sabbath-rest’ are not the same. Gordon McDonald, in his excellent book Ordering
Your Private World has a chapter ‘Rest Beyond Leisure’ which I urge you to
read. He writes: ‘God was the first “rester”…Does God need to rest? Of course
not. But did God choose to rest? Yes. Why? Because God subjected creation to a
rhythm of rest and work that he revealed by observing the rhythm himself, as a
precedent for everyone else… [For us] this rest is a time of looking backward.
We gaze upon our work and ask questions like: “What does my work mean? For whom
did I do all this work? How well was my work done? Why did I do all this? What
results did I expect, and what did I receive?” To put it another way, the rest
God instituted was meant first and foremost to cause us to interpret our work,
to press meaning into it, to make sure we know to whom it is properly
dedicated’ (Highland, 1985, pp.176-7).
The Pharisees had lost sight of the essence of the sabbath.
Alister McGrath says in his NIV Bible Commentary: ‘The Sabbath was
instituted to give people refreshment, rather than to add to their burdens’
(H&S, 1995, p.242). Precisely how you keep the Sabbath today will be
governed by love for God and neighbour, and the kind of work you do. If you’re
a manual worker, rest. If you’re sedentary, do something physical. Make sure
it’s ‘recreational’ for you – re-creating your body, mind, emotions and spirit.
Jesus healed… and ‘the Pharisees conspired… how to destroy him’
– destroy the One through whom we have life. (When you’re beaten by goodness,
reason and miracle, you have no other option but rage). And ‘great crowds
followed Jesus’. They knew he loved them. He taught them and healed them. While
the Pharisees were into destroying, Jesus was healing. The Scottish Baptist
preacher Matthew Henry makes a good point here: though some are unkind to us,
we must not on that account be unkind to others.
Sometimes I talk pastors who are being ‘destroyed’ by Pharisees.
They are still with us. Why? It’s all about what American social scientists
call ‘mindsets’: the mindset of the Pharisee and that of the prophet are
antithetical: they can’t get along.
Let me explain.
The Pharisee is concerned about law: how to do right. Now
there’s nothing wrong with that as it stands. Except for one thing: you can
keep the law and in the process destroy persons. I have a friend who lectured
in law in one of our universities, before he got out of it all in disgust. He
said with some conviction: ‘The whole of our Western legal system is sick,
unjust. For one thing: if you’re rich, and can afford the cleverest advocacy,
you have a pretty good chance of not going to jail; but not if you’re poor.’
There’s something wrong with a system supposed to preserve ‘fairness’ when
double-standards operate…
There’s a tension between law and love. Law is to love as the
railway tracks are to the train: the tracks give direction, but all the
propulsive power is in the train. Tracks on their own may point somewhere, but
they’re cold, lifeless things. But love without law is like a train without
tracks: plenty of noise and even movement but lacking direction. Both law and
love ultimately come from God. We need God’s laws to know how to set proper
boundaries and behave appropriately: without good laws we humans will destroy
one another. Prophets, in the biblical sense, try to tie law and love into each
other. The O.T. prophets were always encouraging people to keep the law of God.
But the greatest commandment is love: love of God and of others.
The Australian Uniting Church Interim Report on Sexuality
looked at these two issues. It answers them very well. The question: ‘How can
homosexuals (etc.) know they’re loved by us?’ is addressed with deep
compassion. Marginalized people ought to feel they’re accepted in our churches.
But they don’t, generally, so we’re more like the Pharisees than Jesus in that
respect. (I once discussed the issue of the legalization of brothels with a
couple of women from the Prostitutes’ Collective on ABC TV. In the middle of
it, one of them turned to me and said, ‘You Christians hate us, don’t you?’ How
would you have responded?)
But the other question's more complex: ‘What is God’s will in
God’s word-in-Scripture about all this?’ Briefly: Jesus did not set aside God’s
law, but fulfilled it, by embodying the great law of love in himself. To the
woman caught in adultery he first says 'I do not condemn you.'
But what about those laws in Leviticus 18 and 22?
Ten years ago well-known American Evangelical Tony Campolo,
interviewed on ABC radio, was asked ‘Tony, what are your views on homosexuality
and the church?’ Tony: ‘I am conservative on this issue: I believe erotic
attraction between members of the same sex is not God’s intention for us.’
‘Ah-huh, so what should the church do?’ Tony: ‘The last thing the church should
do is to be legalistically prescriptive about the behaviour of people like
homosexuals. We have to do more – much more – than simply prescribe celibacy
for other people!’ (The interviewer didn’t know where to go after that!). But
now a postscript: Tony Campolo has changed his mind about those laws. Try a
google search to discover a paradigm-shift on this question happening all over
the world. (For some of my views on LGBTI issues see the article Homosexuality
and the Bible)
The last section of our Gospel reading takes all this further: Jesus the prophet
was fulfilling the Scriptures. As God’s chosen servant whom God loves and in
whom God delights, Jesus was a meek Messiah, not a warlike one. And he
‘proclaims justice’ (v.18), indeed ‘brings justice to victory’ (v.19). Now why
is justice so big for prophets – and for Jesus (but not for Pharisees)? Hang in
there. Fasten your seat-belts. There’s some turbulence coming as we close.
First a word to the prophets in this congregation. ‘Prophets’?
‘Here?’ Sure. Well, who are they, and why don’t they – or the church – know who
they are? Why don’t we recognize and commission them? Why don’t we hear them
speak a special revelation of God to us? Ah, there are several answers to that.
Mainly, of course, prophets are somewhat unpredictable. I’m studying the second
half of Jeremiah at the moment to write some Scripture Union notes: here’s a
guy who tells the king and the army to surrender to the enemy, otherwise
they’ll be wiped out and/or carted off into captivity. Not the sort of message
to stiffen the resistance of your armed forces! So they tossed him into a
septic tank. Prophets disturb the comfortable; pastors comfort the disturbed.
But we don’t want to be disturbed. And so the church organizes its life – its
doctrines (like ‘prophecy isn’t needed anymore, we’ve got the Bible, and
preachers’) and its structures (by-laws and committees to cover everything) to
exclude this more spontaneous ‘word from the Lord.’ And prophets tend to major
on social justice which isn’t nice for middle-class people – more about that in
a moment.
But you can’t get away from the high priority the early church
and the Hebrew people put on prophecy.
What is this gift? ‘The gift of prophecy is the special ability
that God gives to certain members of the Body of Christ to receive and
communicate an immediate message from God to his people through a
divinely-anointed utterance’ (Peter Wagner, Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your
Church Grow, Regal, 1979, p.228). Prophecy isn’t just predicting the future,
though it can include prediction. Prophets aren’t always right: so they ought
to be in submission to the leadership of the church. Prophets aren’t adding a
67th book to the Bible. The canon of Scripture is closed: the prophet is simply
bringing a biblically-relevant message from God to us today, for our situation.
Are prophets sort of carried along by the Spirit? In a sense, yes. Michael
Green writes: ‘The Spirit takes over and addresses the hearers directly through
[the prophet]. That is the essence of prophecy’ (I Believe in the Holy Spirit,
Eerdmans, 1975, p.172). Do prophets tend to be political activists? Often yes –
as in the Bible. And today, therefore, such people are unlikely to be pastors
of churches – if a pastor has a prophetic gift they’d better have also an
independent income! ‘Since their message is frequently unpopular, they would
feel restrained if they were too closely tied to an institution. And many
church institutions feel uncomfortable with such prophets around too much… they
tend to shun church bureaucracies and prefer to be outside critics’ (Wagner, p.230).
Now there are varying points of view – between and among Pentecostals and
Evangelicals about the ministry of prophets, and this is as much as I want to
say about it all here. Except for this: if God gives you a special message for
your church, write it down, and give it to the leadership: and hold the
leadership accountable about praying over it, and then leave the decision about
whatever happens with it to them.
Let us go back to those two Gospel texts evangelicals (like me)
have ignored for 500 years: Matthew 23:23, Luke 11:42. Jesus is inveighing
against the Pharisees, and saying that despite their religiosity they’ve missed
the point – which is justice/love, mercy and faith. Justice comes first (as
with the prophet’s message Jesus is quoting: Micah 6:8). Why? Simple: justice
is all about the right use of power; it’s about fairness; it’s about doing
right – particularly for the poor and oppressed. Social justice is all about
(it’s *only* about) treating others as being made in God’s image; human beings
with respect and dignity and infinite worth. Justice is about the most
important characteristic of human beings – their Godlikeness. Homosexuals, for
example, aren’t just individuals who parade their gayness in Mardi Gras
festivals. They’re made in the image of God. Hitler was made in the image of
God; so was Stalin; so is Pol Pot and Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein… And so are
the people in church next to you this morning. CSLewis says somewhere (The
Weight of Glory?) that if we realized who the others really were with whom we
were worshipping, we’d be tempted to fall down and worship *them*!
There’s probably something of the Pharisee in all of us. We take
two good gifts from God – law and truth – and create all sorts of legalisms and
dogmatisms to save us the trouble of loving people we don’t like. What is your
spiritual ‘achilles’ heel’? How does the devil get to you? One of our ‘18
questions‘ for retreatants asks: ‘For what non-altruistic motives are you in
ministry?’
Have you noticed that in the ministry of Jesus, the message of
repentance was mainly aimed at religious people, church-folk, like us? When we
elevate law over love; rules and precedents and structures above persons; when
social justice is not at the top of our agenda; then we’ve got some repenting
to do. Pharisees are people who know the Bible and miss the point. Lord help
us!
~~
P.S. 1. The statement about ‘trivializing the Pharisees’ refers
to several problems biblical scholars have about the Pharisees in the NT in
general and Matthew in particular. See, eg. the excellent article on the
subject in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (Doubleday, 1992).
2. And yes, I’m aware of the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul’s
possible move from the more tolerant school of Hillel (Gamaliel was a
Hillelite) to the more rigorous conservative school of Shammai when or before
he became a persecutor of the church…
3. See Michael Hardin’s The Jesus Driven Life (a couple of
reviews on this site) for a critique of the Pharisees’ Bible Study methods:
‘Jesus critiques their study of the Scriptures… as missing the point’ (p. 251).
‘One of the claims [of Jesus] is that his hearers “do not know God” [John
8:28-29]… astonishing because these teachers and “theologians” were people
steeped in their Scriptures…’ (255).
~~
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations
Seven Underlying Themes of Richard Rohr’s Teachings
Fourth Theme: Everything belongs and no one needs to be
scapegoated or excluded. Evil and illusion only need to be named and exposed
truthfully, and they die in exposure to the light (Ecumenism).
The Sin of Exclusion
Meditation 10 of 52
Those at the edge of any system and those excluded from any
system ironically and invariably hold the secret for the conversion and
wholeness of that very group. They always hold the feared, rejected, and denied
parts of the group’s soul. You see, therefore, why the church was meant to be
that group that constantly went to the edges, to the “least of the brothers and
sisters,” and even to the enemy. Jesus was not just a theological genius, but
he was also a psychological and sociological genius. When any church defines itself
by exclusion of anybody, it is always wrong. It is avoiding its only vocation,
which is to be the Christ. The only groups that Jesus seriously critiques are
those who include themselves and exclude others from the always-given grace of
God.
Only as the People of God receive the stranger, the sinner, and
the immigrant, those who don’t play our game our way, do we discover not only
the hidden, feared, and hated parts of our own souls, but the fullness of Jesus
himself. We need them for our own conversion.
The Church is always converted when the outcasts are re-invited
back into the temple. You see this in Jesus’ commonly sending marginalized
people that he has healed back into the village, back to their family, or back
to the temple to “show themselves to the priests.” It is not just for their
re-inclusion and acceptance, but actually for the group itself to be renewed.
Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 28
(Available through Franciscan Media)
Footnote from a friend:
This reflection from Richard Rohr might be one known to you.
Perhaps I might say that you, Rowland, have exercised the
calling of an extraordinary kind of gatekeeper for the Body of Christ here in
Australia today (and maybe extending much wider than our country too). Most
gatekeepers decide who is coming in and who is going out, but in contrast, your
function has been to keep the gates open...
Of course this kind of (subversive?!) behaviour (after the style
of Jesus, I would suggest) has drawn out of the woodwork many destructive
voices. Those who are threatened by inclusiveness wish to point out that you
are not performing the role of gatekeeper as traditionally defined. They
suggest that your activities are not legitimate, and that your open door to the
marginalised and to the questioning voices is plain and simply against the will
of God.
This kind of reaction has been happening for a long time in your
ministry. There are many of us who would thank you from the bottom of our
hearts for your clear, empathetic and compassionate stance in the face of
opposition from Christian / evangelical ‘heavy weights’. I hope that this
insightful statement from Richard Rohr might encourage you and Jan as you are
journeying through this really difficult time.
Updated October 2011 / October 2016
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