People Jesus Met Along the Way: The Pharisees
People Jesus Met Along the Way: The Pharisees by Rev. L. John Gable
February 12, 2023
We have been talking recently about people Jesus met along the way and today we look at the Pharisees, in my opinion among the most confounding and confusing characters in the Gospels and admittedly Jesus’ interactions with them only added to the confusion. He had more confrontations with them than any other.
I asked the folks at the pastors’ Bible study to give me their first impressions of the Pharisees and nearly to a person everything they said about them was negative. Perhaps not a fair estimation of them, but certainly understandable when we read about their interactions with Jesus.
Let’s start with who they were and how their ilk came in to being. The sect of the Pharisees arose in the Old Testament period of the Exile when the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed and the people carried off to Babylonia. The whole system of Israel’s worship and identity was shaken: no land, no Temple, no sacrificial system, so in Exile the Law became the center of life and teaching, rather than the priestly role of the sacrificial system. During that time the religious leaders began to advocate for certain practices to be put in to place in order to ensure that the Law was kept sacred. That makes sense. Admittedly the Law, such as the 10 Commandments, can be very vague. We read, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” or “Honor your mother and father”, and everyone nods in agreement. But then someone would invariably ask, “So what does that mean, to work on the Sabbath, or honor my parents?” and in response the religious leaders of the day started to put specifics in to place to better interpret or clarify the Law. Again, this sounds very helpful, and overtime this great body of teaching came to be called the Tradition of the Elders, as Jesus refers to it in our lesson this morning. So, fast forward, at the end of the exilic period when the people returned back home and the Temple was reestablished in Jerusalem there arose a natural conflict between those who put their emphasis on the simple telling of the Law (Remember the Sabbath/Honor your parents) and those who put their emphasis on the Tradition of the Elders. The Sadducees were in the former camp and the Pharisees, also referred to in the Gospels as lawyers, were in the latter. The Pharisees were of the opinion that the Law had to be safeguarded by the addition of additional laws (613 of them) so they build a fence around it by adding literally thousands of rules and regulations which they then put in to practice for themselves and so were critical of those who did not.
So, were the Pharisees good guys or bad guys? Your call, but without question they were hyper-religious and ultra-conservative. Ask them and they would say they were maintaining this elaborate system of regulations in order to protect the sacredness of the Law; others would say the rules and regulations had become more important to them than the original teaching of the Law itself.
That may be a long way of introduction but it gives us reason to see why Jesus had so many confrontational interactions with them. Invariably Jesus was doing things which got the religious leaders of the day all tied up in knots, like when He ate with tax collectors and sinners, when He healed people on the Sabbath, when He told stories about folks like the Pharisees who walked past people in need like the guy on the side of the road after being beaten and robbed because they were more concerned about their ritual cleanliness than they were his very basic needs for help and healing. Isn’t it interesting that the religious folks rejected Jesus and the non-religious folks were drawn to Him? Jesus was an obvious outsider.
In our Gospel lesson it was the Pharisees who raised the question of Jesus as to why His disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating. They weren’t concerned about good hygiene as much as they were following the prescribed dictates of their rituals.
Jesus was firm in His response when He quoted the prophet Isaiah, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines. You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human traditions.”
It would be relatively easy for us to listen in on these conversations which Jesus had with people He met along the way and think to ourselves, “Whew, I’m glad He was talking to them and not to us”, but not so fast. I can’t help but think that there is a little bit, or perhaps more than a little bit, of the Pharisaic tendency in us and it is relatively easy to see how we got there. We love God, we want to be obedient to God, so we establish certain practices and principles to help us protect and maintain our faith and that is all good and well unless or until we are more intent on keeping our traditions than we are the commands of God.
My guess is a number of us can remember in childhood the things that we could and could not do on a Sunday: “yes” to church and family, “no” to movies and the mall. How did those rules and regulations come in to being? Someone, most likely the religious leaders of the day, instilled them in us for the very reason of protecting the sanctity of one of the 10 Commandments “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” And that was beneficial, as long as that was the primary intention, but along the way the rules and regulations and restrictions became the focal point. We began to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. The maintenance of the fence became more important than the thing the fence was supposed to be protecting.
You may recall, one of my 40 gleanings drew a distinction between tradition and traditionalism. As one has put it, tradition is the living faith of dead people; traditionalism is the dead faith of living people. What Jesus was saying to the Pharisees in our Gospel lesson, and likely to us today, is that the intention of the God-given Law is more important than the fence of the rules and regulations we have put around it in an attempt to protect it. Recent studies show that those inside the church think of ourselves as safeguarding a sacred tradition; while those outside the church consider us to be judgmental, self-righteous, legalistic and hypocritical, not unlike the way the folks in our Pastors’ Bible study described the Pharisees of old.
One way some might think about this inherent tension is by contrasting religion and faith. Faith we might describe as being the intimate, personal, trusting relationship we have with God which we then share with one another; religion is the structure we have put in place to order our lives as people of faith. And those two don’t always align with one another. Is one right and the other wrong? Not necessarily, as long as we keep each in their proper place of priority. Faith without any guidance or instruction, such as we are given in the Scriptures or the confessions of our church, would dissolve in to mere feelings or abstract spirituality; on the other hand, religious order and structure without any inward experience of the presence of God would become burdensome and life depleting rather than life giving. So, Jesus wasn’t rejecting the tradition of the elders cart blanche, but He was reminding the Pharisees to refocus on the commandments of God which lie at their heart.
In our second Gospel lesson a Pharisee approaches Jesus and asks Him, “Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?” Bear in mind, this is a Pharisee asking this question so he is looking for something specific and definitive. My guess is that poor guy left feeling pretty unsatisfied when Jesus answered “Love God and your neighbor as yourself, all the rest is just commentary.” What? That is way too vague, ambiguous, ill-defined for those with an attitude of the Pharisee. Just tell us what to do, Jesus?” But Jesus refused and we read at the end of this section of teaching that after this the Pharisees didn’t dare to ask Him anymore questions.
Jesus here is redirecting them and us to refocus on the central teaching of the Law: love God and love one another. Given that, whenever we find ourselves asking what we should do in any given situation you have heard me say, “When in doubt do the loving thing in the loving way” and then, when we find ourselves resisting doing that, like the Pharisee who walked on the other side of the road when he saw the man in the ditch, we need to ask ourselves, “Why am I resistant? What rules or regulations have I put in place that is keeping me from loving in the way Jesus commands me to love?”
Let me remind you of a Tab story which I just love. For many decades we have had a soup kitchen here and through the years it is safe to say we have served thousands of people, some of which years later have come back to thank us. There is no question that our soup kitchen was founded for one reason and one reason alone: to feed our hungry neighbors. I know that to be a fact because I have visited with those who made that first pot of soup. The practice for many years was for those in need to come to the side door off of Central, stand in line and receive their cups of soup to go. They were not allowed to come in to the building. Why? Because the dining room was very nice, the carpet was clean and the room was already well used for other purposes and we wanted to keep it that way, so policies were put in to place to give guidance as to how the room should be used. I think we can all agree that guidelines are necessary lest everything falls into disarray and chaos. And this system was working just fine, until one hot August day. Our pastor at the time was going out to lunch with a parishioner when he saw that gathering of hot, hungry, tired folks standing in line outside in the heat of the day and thought there is something not right about this, so he opened the door and invited our neighbors in to the air conditioned dining room and they have never left. That is why we call it the Open Door Soup Kitchen, now the Open Door Café.
The original intention of the Café has never changed, feeding hungry people with good food in a safe place, welcoming them as neighbor and friend, but along the way the traditions, the policies and practices, we had put in to place as to who could come in and who had to stay out seems to have become more important to us than the original intention for the ministry. The rules and regulations had to be challenged and changed and eventually they were.
There are other examples we could cite, perhaps many of them, in which “we know what we like ‘cause we like what we know” or “we’ve always done it that way or we’ve never done it that way” has won the day. And those should continually be taken out and examined.
As we do so however I would suggest that we need to do so with an ample measure of grace. There will always be those among us who want to push the boundaries and throw out the traditions of the elders and in doing so can leave us untethered; and there are others who want to hold firmly to the traditions which have been given to us because they have served us well thus far. We can find good examples where both of those responses are beneficial and abused, which suggests to me that Jesus gave them and us good advice. Consider again why we do what we do and when in doubt: Love God and love one another – all the rest is just commentary.
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN