Woes of the Pharisees | S4 E7

This week on The Extraordinary Story, Jesus stages an intervention for the Pharisees, and for me too, in a way.

We will discuss the seven woes of the Pharisees and a surprising hero who is the opposite of what they are.

We’ve discussed my answer to the question, why did Jesus have to die?

Well, today, we’ll get a little bit of the answer to the question, why did religious people want to kill Jesus?

This is The Extraordinary Story, a podcast that tells the story of the life of Jesus Christ.

God himself entered the confusing maze that is our world to transform it into a path that leads to him, today and always.

The Extraordinary Story is brought to you by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

I’m Tom Hoopes.

I’m a writer in residence here at Benedictine College.

Let’s start by reading a brief Gospel passage from the Gospel of Mark that sets the scene.

In the course of his teaching, he said, Beware of the scribes who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues and places of honor at banquets.

They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers.

They will receive a very severe condemnation.

He sat down opposite the treasury and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury.

Many rich people put in large sums.

A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents.

Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them, Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury.

For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she from her poverty has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.

That’s it.

That’s the gospel.

And we talked about how Jesus had to die from the position of Jesus.

What did it mean that he died for our sins?

But now we have to ask, why did leaders in his time want him dead?

We will only begin to answer that question today with a look at the psychology of those who wanted him gone, the Pharisees.

So, to set the scene, we are with Jesus in the last week of his public ministry.

Palm Sunday is a couple of days in the past, and the Last Supper, along with his death and resurrection, is a few days in the future.

Jesus has spent his time spelling out what his world would look like if we followed him.

And various characters have tried to trip him up, including the Pharisees.

So today, Jesus takes time to explain why Pharisees are against him and why he is against them.

Then the Gospel gives a beautiful example of everything the Pharisees are not.

The denunciation of the Pharisees from Mark is very brief, but in Matthew, it’s a much longer diatribe.

And we can’t think of the Pharisees as being unimportant, sidelined characters in the New Testament, because the New Testament authors, inspired by the Holy Spirit, made them a huge focus of the Christian scriptures, using the word Pharisee 97 times in the New Testament.

By word count, you can almost say that the Pharisees are the main villains of the Gospels.

The Pharisees are mentioned six times more than the Sadducees are mentioned, seven times more than the Romans are mentioned, and nine times more than the Samaritans are mentioned.

The only bad guy that gets more mentions in the New Testament than the Pharisees are demons and Satan and the devil.

But it’s also important to focus on the Pharisees because I think I have a lot in common with the Pharisees, and I think you might also.

Sadducees in the New Testament time period were priests, but the Pharisees were laymen.

They were the true believers of their day who wanted to live their relationship with God to the fool.

Just like I do.

They deserved respect for aligning themselves with the chair of Moses, Jesus says, and I too feel like I’m respectable for aligning myself to the chair of Peter.

The Pharisaical movement attracted people for a good reason.

They were trying to preserve the love of God when the foreign occupiers of Israel meant that culture was no longer purely Jewish.

I, too, am interested in preserving Christian culture in a time when it has lost its cachet.

I even share beliefs with the Pharisees.

They emphasize the reality of angels and demons, and I do also.

And they believe that we would all one day rise from the dead.

Me too.

This means that, in fact, in important ways, their teaching prepared the world for Christ’s coming.

And that’s what I want to do also.

In fact, I would be willing to bet I am less holy than the typical Pharisee.

Jesus says he admires the law in much the way the Pharisees do, saying he wouldn’t abolish one iota of it, and then warns, unless your holiness surpasses that of the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of God.

Well, for all these reasons, the Gospel of Matthew chapter 23 scares the death out of me.

That’s where Jesus spends all 39 lines of one of the longest chapters in Matthew, unloading on the Pharisees in a long, impassioned denunciation.

And it’s not just me who should be worried.

The Holy Spirit enshrined the words of Matthew 23, not to preserve a historical record of the faults of the Pharisees, but to speak to his followers for millennia about what we face in our own lives.

In denouncing the Pharisees, Jesus is denouncing religious excess in every age.

The denunciation is long and sustained because it has to be.

Jesus is spelling out exactly the kinds of difficulties we find ourselves in today.

He has to shout the lesson and repeat himself because generation after generation, year after year, we don’t seem to get it.

Matthew chapter 23 has seven uses of the word woe, and the seven woes of the Pharisees have become a shorthand way of describing what he says there.

You can see in them what threaten the Pharisees about Jesus, and you can see what threatens us.

First, Jesus threatens their exclusive club.

Jesus says, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, and neither enter yourself or allow those who would enter to go in, end quote.

Well, this is an overarching criticism Jesus has against the Pharisees.

They see religion as a club that is more special the more elite it is.

They lock people out or treat people outside the fold like they are second class.

And you can see why they do this.

They are the chosen people after all, and God has literally commanded them to separate from the pagan ways of the world.

In the same way, the Bible tells us that we are children of the light who are called out of darkness.

But when we take the special status of our relationship with God as a way to feel superior to others and exclude them, we are not acting like God who reigns on the just and the unjust, the way he put it.

As Jesus puts it, they bind heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with their finger.

Notice how this subtly undermines what Jesus commanded earlier.

Peter received the keys of the kingdom to let people in, not to lock people out.

And immediately after giving Peter the keys, Jesus told his disciples that they must carry crosses, not put them on other people.

No one wants to be turned out of their exclusive club and forced to serve those who previously served them.

Yet, this is how the religious of the day could see Jesus’ project.

But next, Jesus threatens their pride of accomplishment.

He says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, then make him twice as much a child of hell as yourself.

This one seems hard to understand at first.

After all, Jesus is the one who tells his followers to go and convert the nations.

But here, he complains that the Pharisees have actually done it.

The difference, though, is in the word proselytize, which is different from win over or convert.

Pope Benedict XVI once emphatically wrote that the apostolic and missionary activity of the church is not to be identified with the drive for efficiency at all costs.

But religious people often treat apostolic work more like Sam Walton than St.

Francis.

We think we’re better if we have more, bigger numbers, celebrity converts, social media attention, secular success.

This leads directly to instrumentalizing and objectifying the souls we are supposed to love and nurture.

So, not only does Jesus threaten their exclusive club, he also threatens their personal pride of accomplishment, which is a significant need in their psychology, one that men in particular are fixated on.

Then Jesus takes away the temple, which is their hope.

Jesus says, 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.

End quote.

Well, the externals of religion are important.

Exodus specifies the vestments priests wear, and the Psalms and Jesus both praise Jerusalem’s elaborate temple.

But when we value the trappings over God himself, we’re doing something monstrous, like valuing a wedding ring more than a spouse.

But the Pharisees likely see even more at risk.

For them, their temple is their identity.

For the Jewish people, destroying the temple would be like what destroying Mecca would be for the Muslims.

The temple is a place whose very location and existence is tied up with their meaning, their purpose, their identity.

You see that in the way Jesus treats the temple.

It is his father’s house, and he sees it as a place of great importance, a place he has to cleanse.

But he also made his opponents upset by saying he is greater than the temple and by predicting the temple’s destruction.

In fact, at this same point in the story, we hear this in Mark, quote, As he was making his way out of the temple area, one of his disciples said to him, Look, teacher, what stones and what buildings?

Jesus said to him, Do you see these great buildings?

There will be not one stone left upon another that will not be thrown down.

End quote.

So Jesus is telling the Jewish people that the physical marker of Jewish greatness that they rely on for their self-worth is going to go away.

And what is going to replace it?

Him.

That’s a huge blow to them.

And it’s something I can relate to, or anyone can relate to who decides to put their faith in God and connect themselves to a religion.

Everything that gives us comfort, all the material things that are important to us, all the society’s accepted ways of being great, they all go away.

It seems insane that you would stop relying on the visible things that you have always relied on and accept faith in an invisible God instead.

Well, the Pharisees are going through exactly this experience, and they see the person who is threatening their worldview as a problem to be eliminated.

It’s like telling somebody who is grasping at a rock in a flood that they can let go and they will be washed to safety.

It’s really, really hard to do that.

Really, really hard to believe that.

But then after taking away that marker of their worldview, Jesus takes away their legal certainty also.

Jesus says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

If you tithe, mint and dill and cumin, you have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith.

He goes on, but his point is, the minutia of the law, from tithing to uncleanness, was meant to acknowledge that God rules supreme in every aspect, large or small, of our life.

But once the Pharisees begin prioritizing the minutia of the law, such as keeping their wine free of gnats, which were the smallest of the unclean animals, they lose the plot over the bigger issues.

Jesus speaks about this metaphorically by citing the largest unclean animal when he says, They strain at gnats while swallowing a camel.

When we focus on the rules instead of their object, we invert their intent, turning the church into a bean-counting bureaucracy and faith into a petty superstition.

Jesus threatens to make that impossible.

By insisting that their relationship with God is what matters, and not their rules, He threatens the whole system of salvation that the Pharisees were comfortable with.

Next, having taken away their club, their temple, and their rule book, Jesus gives one of his signature complaints about the Pharisees, one that we have in mind when we call people pharisaical to this day.

They misunderstood the role of the liturgy.

Jesus says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you cleanse the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

You blind Pharisee, he adds, first cleanse the inside of the cup and of the plate, that the outside also may be clean.

Liturgy has always had a crucial importance from Melchizedek to the institution of the Eucharist.

As we spoke about early on in The Extraordinary Story, in fact, its ritual that makes us human, and you could even say that man is a liturgical animal, fundamentally.

But because we are so hardwired to ritual, it is super easy for us to focus on the externals of worship, instead of who we worship.

Again, this makes us monstrous, like a spouse who will only agree to kiss their spouse if their spouse has the right outfit on.

Jesus threatens this misunderstanding of the Pharisees, and it’s significant that He uses the symbol of a chalice to make his point.

He will soon be providing the ultimate chalice of real grace and the new liturgy of the Last Supper, the new Passover, and that’s the liturgy that we have to be clean on the inside to partake in.

We should never skip the body and blood of Christ because we don’t like how it’s being distributed.

The next woe that Jesus delivers follows from what went before.

Jesus takes away the Pharisees’ ability to rely on appearances only.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, Jesus says.

You are like whitewashed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.

End quote.

This is an overarching criticism of the Pharisees.

Jesus describes the same vanity earlier in the chapter by saying, They do all their deeds to be seen by men, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogue, and salutations in the marketplace, and being called rabbi by men.

End quote.

But there’s a subtle but important difference between they perform their works to be seen and you are the light of the world.

It’s the crucial difference between showing off and witnessing.

The Pharisees are right to want a positive peer pressure that keeps people in bounds even by appropriate disapproval at times.

Community is a human good after all, a high human good.

We’re made for friendship.

We’re made to want to fit in.

We’re made for these things to be positive influences in our lives.

But friendship means seeing the good in each other and responding, not using our good to get a response.

We model good not to be admired but to bring out the best in others.

And Jesus takes away this from the Pharisees as well.

But there’s an important apologetics point to put in here.

Jesus speaks to his followers about the term rabbi or teacher in English.

And he says, quote, You are not to be called a rabbi, for you have one teacher and you are all brethren.

And call no man your father on earth, for you have one father who is in heaven, end quote.

Well, Jesus does not literally mean that you can’t call somebody a teacher or your father.

In fact, St.

Paul calls himself father often.

St.

Stephen in the seventh chapter of Acts calls a whole host of people father.

And if you read on in the New Testament, it often insists that the Holy Spirit appoints people teachers.

St.

Bede points out that Jesus does not forbid those to whom it falls by the rule of their office, that they should be saluted in the marketplace or have chief seats at places of feasts.

Instead, Jesus teaches that we be very wary of those who seek them out.

First, we should not be seduced by their hypocrisy, says Bede.

And secondly, we should not be excited to imitate them, end quote.

In other words, God gets it.

People like titles, and titles are helpful sometimes.

That’s all well and good, to a point.

But clericalism is out.

And in this sixth woe, Jesus threatens the whole power structure of the Pharisees, and makes them very angry.

This is true throughout the history of the Church.

In Dante, hell is filled with people who had high office.

Not only do our titles not save us, but they grease the skids to destruction if we neglect our relationship to God.

Last, Jesus takes away the Pharisees’ ability to rely on the faith of our fathers.

Jesus says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn 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.

Thus, you witness against yourselves.

The Pharisees make the ultimate virtue-signaling mistake of thinking that they are as great as those whom they admire.

We do this all the time.

We think appreciating Martin Luther King Jr.

has already made us like Martin Luther King Jr.

We imagine that if we faced a world like our heroes did, we would be heroic too.

But, applauding someone who stood up for what’s right in difficult circumstances is nice, but it no way prepares us to stand up for what’s right in our own life.

This is the final ripping away of what the Pharisees are holding on to.

Remember, these are people who are proud to be sons of Abraham and worship the God of Isaac and Joseph.

These are people who, as we will see, expect the Kingdom of the Great David to be established forever and soon.

For people to pull away their assumption that they are on the side of the great figures of their past is to pull away the foundation stones of their religious identity.

And the Pharisees find it intolerable.

But then, at the most unlikely time, Jesus shines an eternal spotlight on a remarkable example of a good person who is the opposite of the Pharisees.

And it is told in the most ironic way possible in Mark’s Gospel, in the passage we started out the podcast with, in which Jesus says, Beware of the scribes who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the market places, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets.

They devour the houses of widows, and as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers.

They will receive a very severe condemnation.

Well, as soon as Jesus points out these guys who are terrible for devouring the livelihood of widows, the very next verses in Mark describe a widow in the act of allowing her livelihood to be devoured by precisely these people.

And Jesus praises her.

Quote, He sat down opposite the treasury and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury.

Many rich people put in large sums.

A poor widow also came in and put a few small cents worth.

Calling his disciples to himself, he said, Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury, for they all contributed from their surplus wealth.

But she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.

End quote.

So here’s this widow putting her last red cent in the depositor of this elaborate temple.

And Jesus loves it.

Wow.

How is that okay?

How is it a good thing that this woman gave everything she has to the Pharisees?

If you and I had been given these circumstances without ever having heard this gospel, we would probably explain why the woman should not give to the temple.

Think of all the reasons she had to not give her money.

First, she’s a widow, so she has no clear means of getting more money.

Second, the people asking her money don’t really need it.

Third, the people asking her money exploit people like her.

Fourth, she should be receiving handouts from them, not offering them handouts from her.

But she gives anyway, and that’s a good thing.

How so?

Well, okay, this is the latest of a number of widows we have seen in The Extraordinary Story.

The baby Jesus began his life bringing comfort to the prophetess Anna for her fidelity to the temple.

Later, he brought more than comfort to a widow of Nain.

He raised her son.

He even used the irresistible prayers of a widow to an unjust judge as a model for prayer.

Widows are mentioned so often because they are an example of an extreme powerlessness in their society.

They had no property, no status, no clear path forward in life.

And this is still the case.

In an August 10, 1994 audience, Pope John Paul II said, Those who are separated or divorced are analogous to widows.

And poverty statistics bear this out.

The greatest cause of poverty in our day is fathers leaving single mothers to fend for themselves.

So how is it okay that this woman is giving her last money to show offs?

I think we saw how it’s a good thing when Jesus asked the rich young man to give all of his money to the poor.

Remember when a young man who had followed the commandments his whole life asked Jesus what more he needed to do to gain eternal life.

Jesus said, one thing you lack, go and sell all your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and then come follow me.

End quote.

The wealthy young man couldn’t do it.

He was too attached to his many possessions.

He discovered that he was not the great man he may have thought he was.

Well, the poor widow should be even more attached to her possessions since she has so few, but she was not.

But everyone shares something of the position of the widow.

We are all placed by God in the world, a place where there are abundant resources, but where at some point we have to fend for ourselves.

Ultimately, the illusion of reliance on human strength is just that, an illusion.

Providence provides for us.

Our job is to accept God’s generosity and respond with our own.

And it should be easy.

Jesus shows how true Psalm 146 is.

It says, The Lord keeps faith forever, secures justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, the fatherless and the widow he sustains.

End quote.

So the widow is showing a radical trust in what she is doing, and God will repay that trust.

And I personally love one implication of this gospel.

I love the implication that church ladies outshine the great people in the faith.

I love this because my grandma was a church lady.

She was a poor Mexican lady who always handed us holy cards when we visited.

She had a calendar up in her house of a religious order known for its fundraising ability.

But she sent her envelopes in dutifully, paying from her social security checks to this much wealthier order.

But my grandmother was agoraphobic and never left the house.

There are other church ladies who give everything to the church in non-financial ways.

You see them volunteering, enthusiastically giving themselves to potlucks, fiestas, picnics, food drives, Christmas committees.

These are women who don’t count the cost or evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts, but give everything they can to God through their church.

They are, in short, the opposite of the Pharisees.

For them, the faith is not an exclusive club, but a welcoming committee.

They aren’t out to win big, but to give continually.

They don’t withhold their affections based on the shabbiness of the church’s externals.

They aren’t counting out their kindness in a legalistic way.

And they aren’t refusing to serve God unless the liturgy is right.

With them, what you see is what you get.

And they aren’t busy virtue signaling.

They’re busy witnessing.

Even Jesus wants to be like them.

Right after the long excoriation of the Pharisees in Matthew 23, Jesus says in Matthew 24, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you kill the prophets and stone those sent to you.

How many times I yearn to gather your children together as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling.

May we all be more like mother hens, like the church ladies who get things done in a quiet way, and less like the noisy roosters who strut and crow instead.

We’ll see just how crucially important this is, in fact, next week on The Extraordinary Story.

The Extraordinary Story is written by Tom Hoopes and produced by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

Benedictine College is transforming culture in America through our mission of community, faith, and scholarship.

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