So often you will hear like for like comparisons made
between church leaders and Pharisees. People will say stuff like: Jesus reserved his harshest
criticisms for the religious leaders. A famous passage where Jesus does this is
Matthew 23 where Jesus gives us such pearlers as: “2 The scribes and
the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, 3 so do and observe whatever they tell you,
but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. 4 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” (vv.2-4).
Or how about this: “15 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” (v.15). Or this one here, “You blind fools” (v.17). “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” (v.27). And my favourite verse in this whole
passage - “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape
being sentenced to hell?” (v.33).
So, they were lazy, hypocritical, whitewashed tombs, snakes, vipers,
and children of hell. I could give you a rundown of modern versions of all
these insults, but I want to keep my job as a pastor, so I’ll let your
imagination run wild. But suffice it to say Jesus hammers these
mongrels with enough invective that we can pretty accurately declare that
he didn’t like these guys at all.
Now, the common, and very
powerful application that is often made is as mentioned above: Jesus reserved
his harshest criticisms for the religious leaders, and therefore so should we.
And there is certainly more than a grain of truth in this, as the Pharisees
were religious, they were often leaders, and as Jesus said, they sat in Moses’
seat. This application is then further extended to filter down to every level
of the church leadership, and then on to all Christians who have what is
considered unreasonably high standards of behaviour, or are considered too
judgemental, or who add to the commands of scripture, or who nullify passages
of scripture because of certain traditions, etc. Every Christian is aware of
the way this teaching on Jesus' anger towards Pharisees is used to challenge
church culture.
I have made many similar applications myself in many sermons
over the years. And I will put my hand up and admit to being a Pharisee more
than once, and I take very seriously the need to examine myself, reserve judgement,
and seek not to put burdens on people with my teaching, so as to not be a
Pharisee in practice. But I know I don’t do it perfectly, I admit that, many of
us Christians fail in this regard more than we should.
Now there are those who see Jesus attacking these religious
leaders and they add this to their application of this passage: you should
never use such strong or harsh language with non-believers, because Jesus only
reserved it for Christian leaders. But here is the quandry: the Pharisees weren’t church leaders.
So, to compare them to church leaders is not quite exact or completely
accurate.
The Pharisees would
better be described as thought leaders, culture leaders, culture pushers, or
even culture watch dogs. Some of them would have been synagogue leaders, and members of
the Sanhedrin, or part of the Levitical priesthood, etc. But there is a really
big difference between Jewish culture in the 1st century AD and
our culture in the modern West that people often miss: the Jews in first century Israel, and indeed prior
to that century, lived in a culture that did not separate the Church and the
state, as we do in our modern culture. Therefore, in their culture there wasn’t
a distinction between the religious leaders, and secular leaders, there was
just the leaders. Our modern culture has, to a large degree, split the leadership of
the church, and the wider society apart. Where, apart from the occasional
exception, religious leaders and, say, government leaders, or culture leaders
are not the same thing.
So, it would be much more
accurate to say that Jesus was attacking the leaders of the Jewish people. When he says that they
sat in Moses’ seat this means that they sat in the role of judgement of the
people on what was right and what was not right. Moses was a prophet, he was a
Levite, but he was also a judge who had to determine what we would consider
both civil and religious matters of law. So being in Moses’ seat would include our modern
equivalent of religious leaders, and it would also include, judges, politicians
at every level, media commentators, opinion journalists, and many other people
in our modern culture.
Indeed, if I were to explain
it this way: the Pharisees were the equivalent of the thought police in their
day, who rallied up antagonism against those who broke social taboos, expected
synagogue leaders to tow their very strict, but to some degree subjective,
interpretation of a morality code, who got people fired and persecuted for not
living according to their values, and made everyone around them walk on egg
shells regarding what they said and did…who would this remind you off?
Well it sounds so much more
like the modern progressive left than the actual Church in 2019.
Don’t get me wrong the Church has engaged in such behaviour at
different points in the past, and likely will again in the future. But the
Church is no longer the dominant cultural force in modern Australia. People
don’t get harassed at work for not wearing crosses, or Jesus fish, and not
celebrating Christmas. They get harassed at work for not wearing rainbow flags,
or celebrating pride month, or sharing Bible teachings that contradict our
sexular culture.
The new cultural leaders have a very different ideology to the
Pharisees of the 1stcentury, but they are the exact same type of
person: they are the people who want to enforce their morality on others, who
make others feel judged and pressured into complying, and who, even though they
are a minority, punch above their weight precisely because they are so radical.
So, when you realize that Jesus wasn’t talking to church
leaders, he was talking to culture leaders in a religious society, and that
equivalent people in culture can be found both inside the church, and outside
the church, then you realize that Jesus didn’t reserve his harshest words just
for corrupt religious leaders. He reserved his harshest words for leaders who
harm people. He reserved
his harshest words for leaders who police people according to ridiculous
standards of morality, they themselves don’t even try to uphold. He reserved
his harshest words for those who like whitewashed tombs virtual signal on the
outside, but on the inside have evil intentions, and love the attention virtual
signalling affords them.
If you took a Pharisee and transported him to today’s world, he
might not recognize much of the world we live in today. But he would work out
pretty quickly who to cosy up to so that he could gain the social recognition
in society he craved, and it would be just as likely he found those people
outside the church as in it.
If this is the case, and
it surely is the case, then maybe we in the church should not get so pedantic
and precious when every now and then someone responds to the Pharisees of the
modern sexual culture in the same way Jesus spoke to the Pharisees of his day.
Every culture has its harmful culture police, who place insane burdens on
people’s backs. And in every culture they should be challenged by those who
believe in the beautiful, the good, and the true, whether they go to church or
not. And if sometimes they are harsh, like Jesus was harsh to the Pharisees in
sharing his message, then that's ok. There are many things we should imitate
Jesus in, and one of those things we should imitate is Jesus' anger towards
leaders, whether thought leaders, culture leaders, or other people powerful
people, who harm people with their ridiculous virtue signalling moral policing.
The next time you see someone challenging the cultural progressives the way Jesus
challenged the Pharisees, harshly, rather than simply telling them to be more
polite, stop for a moment and ask yourself: might their anger be warranted?
There are times when it is the only just response. We should be slow to anger,
but not so slow that we allow people to be harmed.