Sermons

Last Sunday after Trinity
Sunday 23 October at 10am

Simon Cowling

Readings: Revelations 1 Thessalonians 2. 1-8; Matthew 22. 34-46

Pharisees. Good or bad? Let me set out my stall from the outset. My sermon this morning, taking as its starting point today's Gospel, is in large part an exercise in the rehabilitation of Pharisees. None of what I have to say would raise one single hair of one single New Testament scholar's eyebrow, but to see how little any of it has permeated through to our wider culture, and I include the Church in that, all you need is a dictionary. Look up the word 'Pharisee' in a dictionary and you will almost certainly find the adjectives 'self-righteous' and 'hypocritical' attached to one or more of the definitions given; and of course, don't we all know that's what the Pharisees were like? Jesus called them hypocrites didn't he? And not only hypocrites: whitewashed sepulchres, blind guides, brood of vipers. These and other choice insults can be found on Jesus' lips in chapter 23 of St. Matthew's Gospel, immediately after the series of encounters with the Pharisees in chapter 22, two of which we have heard this morning. Jesus good, Pharisees bad. Case closed.

Except that it's not quite so simple. Listen to this story concerning two rabbis who lived in the generation before Jesus.

A Gentile came before Shammai and said to him, 'You can make me a convert providing that you teach me the whole Jewish Law while I stand on one leg'. Shammai chased him away with a stick. Then the Gentile came before Hillel and said the same thing. Hillel replied, 'That which you do not wish others to do to you, do not do to them. This is the law and the prophets. The rest is commentary; go and learn it.'

Here are two rabbis, both of whom all Jews, including Jesus, would have recognised as Pharisees, who have a completely different reaction to the same question. One reaction, Hillel's, we might characterise as liberal; the other, Shammai's, we might characterise as conservative. What's even more interesting from a Christian perspective is that Hillel's response, 'That which you do not wish others to do to you, do not do to them', is very similar to part of Jesus' response to the Pharisee who asks him, in today's Gospel reading, which is the greatest commandment of all. Jesus says, 'Love your neighbour as you love yourself'. And Jesus comes even closer to repeating Hillel's words in the sermon on the mount earlier in Matthew's Gospel when he says, 'Do for others what you want them to do for you.: this is the meaning of the Law of Moses and of the teaching of the prophets.' (Matthew 7.12)

So, who were the Pharisees? Who were this group of people whom we think of as so completely inflexible, so resolutely opposed to Jesus yet who, on closer inspection, turn out to be rather more diverse than Christians have often supposed? The first point to make is that pharisaism was a lay movement. The Pharisees were quite content to leave matters to do with the Temple to the priestly class in Jerusalem, most of whom were connected with another group, the Sadducees. The Pharisees took seriously the command of the Lord to the people of Israel that we find in Leviticus chapter 19: 'Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.' Their concern was to extend the purity that was required of all who worked or worshipped in the Temple into the everyday life of the whole Jewish people, whether or not they lived in or near Jerusalem. Another important feature of the Pharisees' approach to life was the stress they placed on fellowship. To become and to remain part of a particular fellowship, a Pharisee would have to make certain commitments about lifestyle - including tithing and keeping himself ritually clean. Anything that compromised these commitments made him liable to exclusion from the fellowship. To sum up, pharisaism was a lay movement, committed to the task of making God's people holy, working through fellowship groups.

Well much of this, as may have already struck you, is not very far from what Jesus was up to. When Jesus called his disciples he was a long way from Jerusalem by the standards of the ancient world; and those whom he called, fishermen and others, were therefore not from the priestly class associated with the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus, his disciples and all those who were attracted to them were part of a lay movement. Again, at the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel the very first words of Jesus that we hear are these: "The right time has come and the Kingdom of God is near! Turn away from your sins and believe the Good News!" What is this, but a challenge to God's people to recover, through repentance, a sense of their calling to be holy. And throughout the Gospels we see Jesus in fellowship groups: with the disciples themselves; with Martha, Mary and Lazarus in Bethany; in the house of Levi the tax collector; in the home of Simon the Pharisee. To sum up, Jesus led a lay movement; he called people, through repentance, back into a right relationship with God; and he clearly enjoyed being part of fellowship groups, often sharing food with them.

So where does this leave us? There are those who have actually claimed Jesus for the Pharisees, arguing that the sometimes fierce disputes he is described as having with them are part and parcel of the way that points of Jewish law were debated within the pharisaic movement. This, it has to be admitted, is a minority view. But there is a more widespread agreement that Jesus' attitude to the Jewish Law was, generally, a positive one and that he was quite happy to accept much pharisaic piety. There is an incident at the beginning of Mark's Gospel where the Pharisees question why Jesus eats with the outcasts and tax collectors. Jesus responds by saying 'People who are well have no need of a doctor, but only those who are sick. I have not come to call respectable people, but outcasts.' Our approaches, Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, should not be seen as being in conflict. You have your ministry, I have mine.

Ultimately, the arguments that Jesus undoubtedly had with the Pharisees seem to have been about their failure to carry through their good intentions. Too many people, notably the large population of rural poor and those in occupations regarded as unclean, had no hope of keeping to the purity laws. They therefore found themselves excluded from religious activity. It was these people, whom Jesus refers to as the sick and the outcasts, who became the focus for Jesus' ministry. One biblical scholar has written this:
'There is sense in which Jesus' offer of salvation to all the nation is an attempt to take up once again the torch of pharisaism; to challenge the people of God once again with the demands of the righteous God laid before them in the crisis which is overcoming them as the kingdom draws near.'

For a church that all too frequently seems to prefer looking inwards than outwards, that's not a bad summary of what we should be about either.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay