Easy to be a Pharisee

A few weeks ago, I blogged about an older man disrupting our service to yell at a young man up on stage wearing a hat.  Truly, it was a generational difference:  Young men today wear their hats all the time, indoors and out. This man yelled at him, accusing him of being disrespectful.  The older man then left in a huff with his wife following after him.

My pastors then spent time emphasizing how God welcomes us all to His table; you come as you are.  I made the analogy in my blog that if a church is a hospital, then people are welcomed to come in bleeding, sick and disoriented.  If we stop them at the door and say, "Oh, I am sorry.  We can't let you in like that.  You need to clean up first," then why are we here as a church, representing the work of Jesus on this planet?

Look at Jesus responded to the messiness of humanity: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." (Luke 5:32) 

Sinners know they need Jesus.  The "righteous" are so caught up in themselves that they think they have achieved what God demands, so they go their merry way, condemning others for their failure to be like them.  Their "righteousness" has set the standard whereby they judge everyone else.

But we do not set the standard, no matter how good we are.  The standard is set by God and is of God.  Paul argues that as good as the Jewish people are, even compared to the Gentiles, everyone falls short: 

"What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:
    'None is righteous, no, not one;
    no one understands;
    no one seeks for God.
    All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
    no one does good,
    not even one.'” (Romans 3:9-12) 

That is quite the indictment, but if God Himself is the standard, then there is no way we are going to ever reach an equal equivalent, and thus judging one another is ridiculous.

But we do judge.  The older man judged that young man because in his generation, you doffed your hat as a sign of respect.  Fair, but not biblical.  The older man said that young man was being disrespectful to God.  I believe him yelling at that young man, disrupting the service and causing a wounding of the Body of Christ that day was even more disrespectful.

But lest I come off as a Pharisee, I had to have the Holy Spirit remind me not to make God's love conditional, so I said nothing to him earlier that morning about taking off his hat. He comes from a church that is saturated in works, and makes God's love conditional on how well you perform those works.  And of course, you are  never good enough, because there is always so much to do for a large and demanding church. 

As we read the gospels, we are horrified at the Pharisees' behavior.  They sniped at Jesus' teachings, accused Him of being demon-possessed, questioned His choice of followers and who He associated with, where He got His authority,  discounted His miracles and then after He raised Lazarus from the dead, plotted to kill Him.

What?

When did the Pharisees become, well, Pharisees?  There were exceptions of course:  Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, but if there were others, they were probably cowed into silence by the subtle intimidation of their colleagues. 

They started out wanting to study Torah, and to live a life that reflected God's work in them.  They saw themselves as the representatives of Israel, to the world and to their fellow Jews, and believed they were role models for the faith.

Not a bad goal.

But what happened?  They added a layer of oral law, because they deemed the Law of Moses was somehow inadequate to navigate all disputes.  The Britannica puts it this way:

"The basic difference that led to the split between the Pharisees and the Sadducees lay in their respective attitudes toward the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the problem of finding in it answers to questions and bases for decisions about contemporary legal and religious matters arising under circumstances far different from those of the time of Moses. In their response to this problem, the Sadducees, on the one hand, refused to accept any precept as binding unless it was based directly on the Torah—i.e., the Written Law. The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed that the Law that God gave to Moses was twofold, consisting of the Written Law and the Oral Law—i.e., the teachings of the prophets and the oral traditions of the Jewish people. Whereas the priestly Sadducees taught that the written Torah was the only source of revelation, the Pharisees admitted the principle of evolution in the Law: humans must use their reason in interpreting the Torah and applying it to contemporary problems." [1]

None of that sounds unreasonable. But Jesus, in His list of woes against the Pharisees, sees their tenacity to the Law has instilled in them a wicked attitude, filled with blindness and hypocrisy:

No. 1: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others..." (Matt. 23:1-5)

The teachers want to teach, but they themselves do not live our their teaching. 

No. 2:  “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves." (Matt. 23:13-15)

With your deception, you end up misguiding those you teach, because you do not live by the truth, so you can't teach the truth.

No. 3: “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred?  And you say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred?  (Matt. 23:16-19)

You pick and choose, based on your own standards, what is righteously done and what is not.  You pervert what is sacred and model that to others to follow. 

No. 4: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!" (Matt. 23:23-24)

You major in the minors:  You worry about the little details you can control, all the while missing the most important things to God.  You'd be humbled if you saw what God saw.  

No. 5: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean." (Matt.23:25-26)

You look good on the outside and everyone looks at you and admires your righteousness, but inside,  you are quite the opposite. 

No. 6: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness." (Matt. 23:27-28)

Hypocrisy is utterly unacceptable, because although human beings can't see it, God can.  God matters. Your keeping up of appearances does not. 

No. 7:  “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’" (Matt. 23:29-30)

You act as if you would never behave in such a dishonorable way, but given enough offense and anger, one day you will kill the Prophet:  Jesus Himself. 

In other words, Jesus is not saying rules are bad, but when you dehumanize people ("We are not like those people!") and elevate the rules ("Everyone needs to do what they are told!") which are impersonal and not made in the image of God, and then not obey them yourselves, Jesus is not pleased.  At all.  He wants to see you humbly walking with your fellow human being, not standing there waving a finger and condemning them.  

In other words, He wants us to act like citizens of the Kingdom of God. 

So, let us return to the young man with the hat.

If the older man, instead of disrupting the service and yelling at him, had come up to him later and  quietly talked with him, that would have been a start.  But there still is a problem with that.  The older man had not cultivated a relationship with this young man.  He hadn't gotten to know him, and had not even tried to understand even a small part of this young man's story.  Instead, the older man relegated the young man to "that kid with a hat" (Did the man even know his name?  I think not) and felt that the violation of a cultural (not biblical rule ) allowed him to be a Pharisee, and uphold a standard at the cost of this young man's dignity.  

Rules and regulations are neat and clean, black and white, and there's no need to explain them--just do them.

Right? 

But are we sacrificing a person to an impersonal rule, because we really don't want to roll up our sleeves and get to know the person?

"But," someone might say, "That man spoke the truth in love."

Did he? He stormed out of church and then screamed at the pastors through the door of his home after they came over and tried to reconcile.

Where was the love? 

Do we then throw all rules out the door?  Well, no.  But we must ask ourselves some penetrating questions, in order to avoid becoming Pharisees, based on Jesus words: 

1.  Are we living out the rules ourselves or do we give ourselves an exemption because the person we are involved with needs these rules, but we, in our superiority, do not?

2.  Are we so convinced of how right we are, we never examine ourselves against Scripture and so we pass on our knowledge to others, with the very real possibility that we are deceiving them? 

3.  Do we let the culture of the past or the present decide what is right?  Have we idolize a period of time or a practice that again, is not biblical, but we think it's so important that it ought to be? 

4.  Do we feel the larger forces of life are controlling us, so we decide to control our little corner of the world like a tyrant, believing everyone should see things the way we do? 

5.  We talk a big talk, but we don't walk the walk because why should we? We are better than everyone else.  We allow ourselves a little sin because we have it all under control; they don't. 

6.  Hypocrisy is what others do.  Us?  We may not be consistent, but at least we stand for something, darn it!

7.  Anger can lead to murder, Jesus taught.  But we feel we have a right to our anger, because we are right, and everyone needs to get that. It's not like we are actually killing anyone (except maybe their  spirit). 

Jesus summarized how we are to approach rules and those who break them in a Kingdom of God way: 

"But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." (Matt. 23:8-12)

[1] "Pharisee/Jewish History," Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pharisee.