To Heaven with Scribes and Pharisees!

 

Sermon. St Peter’s, Merton. 16 February 2025.

Lent 2 (Year of Luke)

 

                        Luke 13:31-35

 

Today’s readings are short, the Gospel especially so. A short reading can pack a punch. What is going on, in this punch? If we treat the end as the climax, as is natural, the reading is hard, harsh, and sharp. It has the smell of judgement about it, indeed maybe judgement in the sense of condemnation. Hear again: 

“You were not willing! See, your house is left to you… you will not see me…!” 

We might feel we know why this reading was chosen for the Second Sunday of Lent.

 

So far, so congruent. But there is something utterly surprising about the Gospel text. I wonder if you can spot it. It is hiding in plain sight.

 

I am thinking not of the end but of the beginning. The Pharisees. The role the Pharisees play. The Pharisees appear as… the allies of Jesus. They warn him that his life is at risk and he needs to flee. As we would warn someone we care for.

 

Now, it is true that some say that the Pharisees are opposing Jesus even here. The argument is that Jesus has set his face to go to Jerusalem [Lk 9.51] and meet his end as a martyr, for God’s purposes, and the Pharisees are trying to throw him off course. But there is nothing in the text to point in that direction. Much more natural is the idea that here the Pharisees are Jesus’ allies. They are worried about him.

 

How does that feel?

Time and again, when we meet the Pharisees in the Gospel, they are Jesus’ opponents. They are portrayed negatively. Yet this text is not actually unique. We might think of what Jesus says of the Pharisees at one point in Matthew [Mt 23.2], that the Pharisees sit on the seat of Moses – so do what they say! Think of the Pharisee Nicodemus, genuinely searching and seeking [Jn 3.1], defending Jesus in the Sanhedrin [Jn 7.50f], helping to bury him [Jn 19.39]. And in Acts, the Pharisee Gamaliel at the very least has an open mind towards the Jesus movement [Ac 5.38f].

 

All of that said, if we were to ask the average churchgoer, maybe even the average Briton: “Who were the enemies of Jesus? Don’t think about it, just give your first answer…” it is still likely that the word “Pharisee” would be voiced. And, yes, there is no doubt that Jesus has some hard words to say against them. I am not trying to deny that.

 

So, even within the gospels, the role of the Pharisees is complex, and can be ambivalent. What of it?

 

Well, here I will say a word from scholarship. For scholars have for some decades now been rethinking who the Pharisees were. Christian tradition tends to say that they were cold legalists. They thought God was distant, or judgemental, or both. They thought that Jewish people should be obsessing about the details of “the Law”, if they were to stand a chance with God. But this isn’t the picture that historical scholarship paints. The Pharisees were – if you can believe it – the reformers. I’ll say that again: the Pharisees were the reformers, the radicals. They had a deep love of the people. Yes, they wanted the ordinary people to live according to the commandments from Moses in detail, but that was because they wanted the ordinary people to be concerned with God and the ways of God. It was not that God was distant or judgemental. Rather, God is close, and is gracious. God has shown God’s grace supremely, by inviting God’s own people to live in a certain way. Why shouldn’t the people – all the people - relish responding to God’s gracious invitation to live well? That was the Pharisees’ view, and, if they had a failing, it was, rather than being too cold, that they were too hot in their enthusiasm for God and God’s ways (as they understood them).

 

The Pharisees as the reformers who really cared for the ordinary people. If we can catch a sense of that, it is a small step to think of the Pharisees as the Jewish group closest to Jesus and his movement. That’s what the historians say. I say again: the Pharisees seem to have been close to Jesus. And, that being the case, we can surely think of Jesus’s harsh words against the Pharisees – which, as I say, are there - not as Jesus condemning his enemies “over there”, but as having a passionate “in-house” disagreement with close associates.

 

You may well say: “So what? Why need we trouble ourselves with the reputation of a defunct sect?” Well, I say something is at stake. You see, the Jewish people – the Jewish people to this day - trace their heritage back to the Pharisees. Among the reformers of the Jewish faith (in Jewish thinking), first came the Pharisees, then came the Rabbis. The Rabbis are the heirs of the Pharisees. Don’t believe me? You can look this up. Rabbi Lionel Blue of Blessed and Righteous Memory wrote an introduction to Jewish life, and he called it: To Heaven with Scribes and Pharisees!

 

To heaven with scribes and Pharisees! Lent is a time of fasting. If you have given up meat, or chocolate, I wish and pray you well. Another kind of fast – a fast that doesn’t come to an end – is to do all we can to fast from prejudice. We can’t eliminate prejudice. We will all have instant and instinctive internal reactions to some people and places and things. But! But we can make sure we are flexible, supple, learning, in our attitudes. Make sure we are willing to think and feel differently about people and places and things, even when it feels strange, even when it turns our understandings and ordering of the world upside down. We can, for example, come to think that the Pharisees were not “the enemies of Jesus”. To say they were is an oversimplification, and worse than that. Perhaps we too might even come to exclaim: “To heaven with scribes and Pharisees!”

 

I wish you a blessed Fast. Amen.