THANK GOD I'M NOT LIKE THE PHARISEES

Ember Wednesday in Lent

The Pharisees are the bad guys of the Gospels. Whenever they show up, a fight’s about to happen. “Show us a sign,” they ask of Jesus. “Prove to us You are Who You say. Then we’ll believe.” If we know the Pharisees are itching for a fight, we also know that the Lord Jesus gave ‘em one, time and again. “No, you pack of snakes,” He answered, “you won’t believe regardless of what you see. You’re already convinced—go crawl back into your pit.”

I used to wonder sometimes, when I paid attention in church and wasn’t thinking about girls or imagining I was one of Stonewall Jackson’s boys chasing the Yankees across the Shenandoah Valley, why Jesus always seemed mad at the Pharisees. He called them hypocrites, vipers, “whited sepulchres”—all kinds of names. “Show us a sign.” What’s so bad about that? I wouldn’t mind one every now and then myself.

Unlike teen-age boys, the Lord sees beneath the surface. He knows the hearts and minds of His questioners before they even formulate their questions, and He knows the difference between a real question and a baited one. His harsh words to the Pharisees are meant to crack the hard shells of their self-satisfied certainty, their spiritual arrogance and their blindness of heart. He doesn’t hate them. He speaks sharply because He loves them. He doesn’t care about winning arguments but healing souls.

The Pharisees had truth on their side. They knew the Jewish Creed perfectly, many could recite all 613 Commandments (most of us have trouble remembering just ten), they assiduously kept every "jot and tittle" of the Law. They were right and they knew it. They had no need of Jesus to come around and ask if they kept the Law in their hearts. They wore it on their arms and foreheads in phylacteries.

Jesus didn’t just confront the Pharisees of His day. He looks across the centuries and speaks to the Pharisees still with us. Don’t look around the room. He’s talking to you and me. When we, in the secret place of our heart, condemn the prostitute and the addict, the homosexual and the member of our family who’s an embarrassment at Thanksgiving, knowing we’re better and quietly relishing the fact, we’re fanning our own pharisaical fires. When we ignore the dirty kids from the house down the street but donate money for charitable work in exotic places, we’re straining after our own gnats. When we smirk at the faltering faith of others, knowing our own is correct, we’ve strapped on invisible phylacteries of gigantic proportions.

We’re not called to approve the behavior of prostitutes and addicts and homosexuals and weird Uncle Willie or pretend that Mormonism and the odd, New Age beliefs spouted off by the lady we see at the store now and then (who still wears burlap skirts from the 60’s) are the equivalent of the Nicene Creed. Where the Pharisees failed was not in knowledge, but in love. They didn’t love those who needed it most because their religion got in the way. Their religion blinded their faith. Jesus snapped at them to wake them up, to open their eyes. He fixes his loving but stern gaze at us, two thousand years later, and warns us of the same. Our faith is meant to set us free, but if it becomes a wall to separate us from others, even members of our own family, we aren’t free, we’re enclosed. Our religion has put love to flight.

The Creed isn’t a checklist to tell us who’s right (us!) and wrong (them), it’s the Church’s affirmation that God is love. It says God has revealed Himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and we believe Him. “If you are My disciples,” the Lord Jesus says, “love one another.” I may not be able to explain the doctrine of Trinitarian perichoresis, but I know whether I love my neighbor or not.

When Jesus, after His Resurrection, walked along the shores of the Sea of Galilee with Peter the Denier He didn’t say, “Peter, do you grasp the intellectual importance of what has transpired?” He said, “Peter, do you love Me?” His question cut straight to Peter's heart, through his failures and rehearsed excuses and enabled him to see.

Someday you will come face to face with the One Who walked with Peter, and He won’t give you a quiz on how many sacraments there are or what homoousion means. He will ask you the same question He put to him: “Do you love Me?”

The exercises of Lent, our almsgiving, fasting and prayers, can be acts of sacrificial love or forms of pharisaic correctness. Our faith can be a wall to keep people out, or a door to let them in. Let this Lent form your answer to His question.