And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? (Matthew 9:10-11)
It is a rare occasion when one can say something positive about the Pharisees as we meet them in the Bible. It’s hard to remember, for example, given their vicious party spirit and their murderous intentions toward our Lord, that they began as a sincere reform movement within Judaism.
The original Pharisees were appalled at the immorality of their own nation, even as it claimed to be the Chosen People of God. Most of their neighbors were criminally ignorant of the Holy Scriptures, of God’s revelation of His laws and promises. Those who did not actively deny the basic doctrines of Biblical religion had probably never even heard of them. And so, the Pharisees set out to do something about this sad state of affairs, and they were opposed even by the priests of the temple who had fallen so far into apostasy that they had begun to deny the resurrection.
The Pharisees most brilliant and enduring contribution to religion was the religious school, called the “synagogue,” which means “a gathering together” or “congregation.” They built these places of Scripture reading, prayer, preaching, and study everywhere that they could, and a form of them is still with us today, not only as the synagogues of the modern Jews, but as a part of Christian life.
We Christians still call ourselves “congregations,” as the local gathering of the Body of Christ because even before the founding of the Christian Church of the New Testament, the Pharisees understood that real religion required more than one remote Temple and whatever devotions went on in each isolated household. True religion needed to be made public everywhere, as the households of the people of God assembled in the sight of their neighbors, to demonstrate that God was not their private possession, but that they belonged to God, and that God had made them something greater than they could be on their own by gathering them together on Earth as in Heaven.
When Christianity did come, and our Lord founded His New Testament Church, the Apostles and disciples did not abandon this heritage. The meeting places of Christians remained synagogues for all intents and purposes, but with one all-important addition.
Now that Christ had ascended into heaven to offer Himself, once and for always, as the one sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, there was no more need for an earthly temple of sacrifice for sin. But there was a need for Christians to share in that one sacrifice of Christ, and for them to participate in Christ’s one offering of Himself by the sacrifice of their own lives to Him in praise and thanksgiving.
In one sense, a Christian must and should do this everywhere and always, but Christianity because it is a Biblical religion, is not solitary, private, or a disembodied abstraction. Christianity is a religion of revelation, of the making visible of God’s good will and mercy, so that the Apostles constantly thought back to the Last Supper, where our Lord gathered them together, not only to teach them, but to institute the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion with God, which continues as the making visible of our Lord’s death and our redemption from sin by His offering of Himself.
In the Holy Communion, we participate in Christ’s one offering by receiving His Body and Blood, and by being His Body and Blood; and what the Holy Communion gives us, among other things, is a living, earthly picture and exhibit of the Temple not made with hands, of the holy place of God where Jesus Christ offers Himself to His Father for us. We see that in our church architecture: a picture of the holy of holies, and in our very theology of Holy Communion wherein the bread and wine act as holy instruments through which the Holy Spirit allows us to feast in Heaven with Christ in the Heavenly Holy of Holies described by Paul in Hebrews.
Thus, the local Anglican Church remains today both a synagogue and an exhibit of the heavenly Temple. The first part of the Holy Communion service, up to the offertory, with its prayers, Scripture lessons, and sermon, is the service of the synagogue, as are the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, and the Litany. These services, along with the rest of the order of Holy Communion, are called the “regular” services of the Church by our Prayer Book, which means that they are the “rule” (from the Latin regula) of our religious lives. And the Holy Communion itself, from the offertory on, remains our uniquely Christian participation in the life of Heaven, our vision of the Temple of God. Take all of this symbolism away, and we get what many modern churches have become, a Study Hall with varying levels of good music and stage-craft.
For an Anglican, even our Catechism classes, our Bible Studies, and the other Christian education we offer through the year are to a large extent a legacy from the Pharisees through the 1st century church. So, where did the Pharisees go wrong, and why were they left behind by Christianity?
The answer begins in the name “Pharisees,” which means “the separated ones.” The Pharisees set out to build a wall of the Law and manmade traditions around the faithful, to separate them from the rest of the people of the world; and that was where they made their fatal mistake, in misapplying the law of God in two critical ways.
First of all, the Law of God is, indeed, a call to righteousness, but in God’s way and not in man’s way. The Law, faithfully followed, does not teach us our superiority to other men, but our inferiority to God. In striving to obey the Law, we discover that we fall short of the glory of God, so that, if we are to be redeemed from our failures and weaknesses, He must do it, and not we ourselves. Moreover, a life according to the Law does not separate us from other people. The Chosen People were called to be a blessing to all the families of the earth, and the Law, as much as the Gospel, is evangelical. It is the good news of God’s promises of fellowship with men, just as the Gospel is the fulfillment of that promise.
A life lived in the struggle to keep the Law was meant to be a good example that invited others into the same struggle to conquer the evil self-destruction of our fallen world, in favor of love for God and Man. And that is where the Pharisees’ second critical error becomes apparent, since they perverted the Law into a demonstration of their own goodness, instead of God’s goodness. They exchanged “morality,” the daily living according to the Law of God and a willingness to repent when obedience failed, for “moralism,” the self-serving demonstration of their own imaginary moral superiority over others.
Now moralism, of course, was not their unique failing. The moral reform movements of the last century have degenerated into moralism in our own society, so that a public display of self-righteousness and a holier-than-thou attitude are considered equally essential by today’s faction of Pharisaic Christian and their many, many pagan counterparts. Their replacement of Biblical morality with a sort of “social niceness” neither offers a sinner a better example nor a hope of redemption, and sadly, that veneer of niceness hides a boiling cauldron of sin and death ready to erupt when circumstances allow it.
And that brings us to the question with which we began, the questions that the Pharisees asked our Lord’s disciples: Why does your Master eat with publicans and sinners? This is the right questions, but it was asked for the wrong reason. The Pharisees wanted to shame Christ for eating with tax collectors and others whose daily occupations made them ceremonially unclean. It never even occurred to them to consider that they were sinners, too, and that Christ was willing to eat with them.
Christ’s answer, that the well don’t need a physician, but they that are unwell, comes down to a series of implicit questions of His own. Where else should a sinner go, but to God? And where else should those who love God go, but to the sinner, whom God loves, but is in need of a good example and a call to repentance? And how can the faithful be corrupted by their obedience to God’s commandment that they love their neighbor as themselves? And why did the Pharisees think themselves righteous, when they were breaking that very commandment?
The Pharisees, as our fellow human beings under the fall, have offered us both a good and bad example to follow. Their love for the knowledge of God inspires us still, even as their moralism, ostentation, and disdain for the lost show us the worst excesses of the “religious” person who falls into self-destructive self-righteousness and forgets the humble righteousness of God. Today, just as on the day when our Lord called St. Mattew from collecting taxes for the pagan empire subjugating his own countrymen and then ate with him and his friends, it is only in knowing our Lord Himself and following in His example, that we can truly tell which is which, and separate the good from the evil.
May we never be afraid to follow the example of our Lord.