“In the dark of the night, I was
tossing and turning
And the nightmare I had was as bad as
could be.
It scared me out of my wits –
A corpse falling to bits –
Then I opened my eyes and the nightmare
was me.”
Anastasia (1997)
 |
| Strangely enough, it’s a bit tricky to find stock images of Pharisees, so I decided to run with the idea of perception instead. |
The Pharisees, of course, had no idea
they were pharisees.
Much as the spellcheck feature on my
word processor stubbornly insists with its wavy red underlining that the latter
is not a real word, my good friend dictionary.com begs to differ:
“Pharisee
/ˈfærɪˌsiː/
noun
1. (Judaism) a member of an ancient
Jewish sect that was opposed to the Sadducees, teaching strict observance of
Jewish tradition as interpreted rabbinically and believing in life after death
and in the coming of the Messiah
2. (often not capital) a self-righteous
or hypocritical person”1
So, not every Pharisee was a pharisee,
nor every pharisee a Pharisee; indeed, these days there aren’t any Pharisees
about any more, but there are plenty of pharisees. The two meanings are
ultimately pretty unrelated, and that they should share a word at all would
surely be completely illogical if not for the existence of the New Testament.
If, like me, you grew up going to
Sunday school, I hazard that you may, like me, have encountered a plethora of
stories featuring Pharisees before you had even the faintest idea what one
actually was. Granted, I probably wouldn’t expect the average Sunday school
session to include, in amongst all the crayons and puppets and glue, a nuanced
discussion of the characteristics of various Jewish sects active in the first
century, but some sort of indication of what the term referred to would
have been nice. As it was, all I really picked up was that the Bible seemed to
cast the Pharisees as the Bad Guys, and so, in my mind at least, they simply took
up residence in the same box as Lord Voldemort, Gargamel, and an assortment of
wicked stepmothers, and that was that.
It’s a tough first impression to shake.
Even later, when one moves on to studying the Bible without the aid of such
devices as crayons and puppets and glue,2 and it dawns on one, by
whatever means, that the Pharisees were in fact a group of respected religious
leaders, there seems little reason to question their comfortable position in
the Bad Guy Box. After all, pretty much every time they show up, Jesus has
something distinctly uncomplimentary to say to them, and so that becomes the
sum of how we imagine them. Of course the Pharisees were self-righteous
hypocrites; of course they cultivated a flawless exterior image while
internally putrefying; of course they heaped up burdens on others while
refusing to lift a finger to help; of course they ostensibly honoured God while
being, in reality, so out of sync with him that they ended up arranging his Son’s
execution. Of course the Pharisees were pharisees. That was what they did.
But in actual fact, of course, being a
pharisee was not the defining feature of being a Pharisee. Indeed, some of the
key traits of the Pharisaic sect may surprise you; they did me.
The Pharisees made a point of
maintaining their Jewish distinctiveness while others assimilated more into the
prevailing Greek culture. They believed in life after death – including a
doctrine of resurrection for the righteous and everlasting punishment for the
wicked – while others, notably the Sadducees, didn’t. They believed in God’s
sovereignty over events while the Sadducees didn’t. They believed that it was
possible for worship to take place outside the Temple and specific Temple
rituals, and that all God’s people, rather than just a select group of priests,
had a role to play in religious practice; again, the Sadducees didn’t. They
placed emphasis on prayer and scriptural study. They tried to understand and
apply scripture according to the spirit of what it said, rather than blindly
following the letter of the Law, and were huge fans of reasoned debate. They
considered someone’s learnedness to be a better indication of his capacity for
leadership than his background, so that, while the Sadducees were seen as
elitist, the Pharisees enjoyed a huge popular following.3
The above list is by no means
exhaustive, but is hopefully sufficient to demonstrate that the Pharisees were
actually getting an awful lot right. Much of what they stood for essentially equates
to much of what Bible-believing Christians stand for now; in fact, I don’t
think it would be totally inappropriate to call them the evangelicals of their
day. Turning back, then, to the kinds of things Jesus said about them, we need
to bear in mind how desensitised we are to those grave rebukes simply because
of their prevalence, and try to imagine how utterly shocking Jesus’ statements
would have been at the time. Suppose Jesus called that church leader you really
respect a hypocrite and a blind guide; suppose he compared a Christian author
or speaker whose work you find enormously valuable to a whitewashed tomb full
of bones and uncleanness; suppose he turned round to someone whose godliness
you really admire and asked how he or she expected to escape being sentenced to
hell.4 Now, better still, suppose he said the same thing to you. And
give some thought to what your response would be.
See, it’s not only that the Pharisees
had no idea they were pharisees; pharisees have no idea they’re pharisees
either, or at least, aren’t prepared to admit that they’re pharisees. There’s
actually a rather lovely little paradox here: if my response to being called
out as a pharisee is to insist that I’m not one, on the contrary, I prove that
I am. Only in admitting that I’m a pharisee do I really stand any chance of not
being one, even as I expose all the reasons why I am one. Think of
the famous parable Jesus told of the Pharisee and the tax collector who both
went to pray in the Temple:
The Pharisee, standing by himself,
prayed thus: ‘God I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners,
unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I
give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would
not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be
merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house
justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be
humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.5
If I look at the Pharisees and think to
myself, Wow, those guys were awful – thank goodness I’m not like them, I’m
doing exactly what Jesus so berated the Pharisee in this parable for doing. If,
on the other hand, I look at them and think to myself, Wow, those guys were
awful – I’m so sorry I’m so much like them, I’m actually on much safer
ground. In other words, to swing back round to my opening quotation, I have to
open my eyes and realise that the nightmare is me.6
The bad news is that, in and of myself,
I really am a pharisee – a judgemental snob elevating myself over others for
the stupidest of reasons and thinking myself acceptable before God by some
virtue or other of my own, even as I harden my heart against him. The bad news
is that, left to my own devices, I really would reach the point of being so out
of step with Jesus that I would want him killed. But the good news is that, on
the cross, he took on even these sins as well as every other, claimed the blame
for them, suffered the punishment for them, and broke their power over me
permanently. The good news is that there is grace for pharisees like me. Praise
God.
Footnotes
1 Check for yourself: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pharisee?s=t.
2 I’m not espousing the view that there is categorically no
place for crayons or puppets or glue in adult Bible teaching, merely observing
that they tend to feature less heavily than in children’s.
3 A key source here is Josephus, particularly The Wars
of the Jews 2, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0148%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D162,
and Antiquities of the Jews 18, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0146%3Abook%3D18%3Asection%3D12.
I had a look at the odd encyclopaedia article too: http://www.britannica.com/topic/Pharisee.
Do please feel free to do further research and see whether you think my point
is accurate.
4 All concepts taken from Matthew 23: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23&version=ESVUK.
5 Found in Luke 18: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+18&version=ESVUK.
6 All right, all right, it’s a little bit tenuous, but I
was going to end up quoting Anastasia at some point and I couldn’t come
up with anything better. By the way, Anastasia has been adapted into a
stage musical and is set to hit Broadway at some point this or next year: http://www.broadway.com/buzz/184545/anastasia-stage-adaptation-will-land-on-broadway-in-2016-17-season/.
Hopefully it’ll appear in the West End not too long afterwards.
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