None so blind

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be found via this link. 

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23: 13-22) sees Jesus at His most strident not to say relentless. The trickery of the Pharisees and their sidekicks, the scribes, needs to be called out, and Jesus puts them to a withering analysis, but it is an analysis which is full of spiritual light, for unlike first-century or indeed twenty-first century religious enthusiasts, God does not separate the heart from the mind, nor indeed spirituality from the moral law.

It has become fashionable to talk about the Pharisees as rigorists: those who bang a drum loudly for some value (and who secretly are unfaithful to it). And yet is it not Jesus Himself who tells us that He came not to do away with the Law but to fulfil it, and that not one jot or iota would pass away until all things be fulfilled? Jesus, the merciful rabbi, does not tell the woman taken in adultery not to worry about it, or that He has a moral sticking plaster for her immoral bobo; He says to go and sin no more. So, there is a paradox here, as in so many places in the faith. As one teacher put it to me, Catholics should be tough on principle but easy on people; liberals are easy on principle and tough on people. We might add as a corollary that Pharisees are tough on principle and tough on people. Only, their toughness with regard to themselves involves the evasion and self-justification of those who are spiritually immature. Christ’s remedy for sin reaches right down into the depths of the person; it is not content with surface compliance, and it is revolted as the simulation of rectitude, especially when it hides inner disorder. There is a difference between those who wish to seem and those who wish to be. And while sincerity is not salvation, it is an implicit condition of it; nobody will be able to fake their way into heaven.

And yet the story of the Pharisees is not yet done. Jesus unpicks their pretensions with unrelenting clarity.

First, they make salvation or reconciliation with God impossible, or so difficult it is a cause of discouragement even to the earnest. Here again we meet a paradox, for Jesus Himself says the path to destruction is broad and easy, and yet He promises His friends that He goes to prepare a place for them. We dishonour God to speak as if we’re a dead cert for the everlasting bonfire unless we are extremely lucky (not many people still talk like that but a few do). On the other hand, we also dishonour God equally if our surety of salvation is actually presumptuous, as if our religion is like one of those schools where all get prizes. Last week we read the parable of the king who, do not forget, compelled all-comers into his banquet only for him to eject a man who had no wedding garment. We’re invited to the supper of the Lamb and the door is open, but we cannot take it for granted: God is asking for our all, or all that we can humanly give Him, for in return He will give us Himself and everything else will be added on! Still, as St Paul says, we work out our salvation in fear and trembling.  O Lord, don’t trust Philip, was St Philip Neri’s favourite prayer. For God is not the unreliable partner in the bargain; we are.

Second, Jesus condemns the zealotry of the Pharisees in this gospel. This was not about outward proselytization, for the Jews did not go out to recruit converts; this was about the internal waves of spiritual reform movements (like the Pharisees, or indeed like COLW). There is all the difference in the world, however, between sewing the seed and industrially farming it. A balance is needed here. For several decades, the emphasis has been laid on encouraging the seeds of the Word that are already in hearts and cultures, but the wisdom of one metaphor should not drive out the wisdom of another. If the cockle cannot be uprooted with the wheat, that does not nullify the problem of the thorns and bramble that choke the growth of God’s seed. God does not want recruitment through compulsion, and the deeper our relationship with Him, the more we enjoy freedom from sin, and still the love of God urges us, as St Paul says. The Pharisees were obsessed with all the push factors of religion, while at the same time making these so desperate that few could live up to them. We in contrast must emphasise the pull factors without neglecting the push factors. We might not like to recognise it, but Jesus mentions hell more frequently than He mentions heaven in His preaching. You would not think so today!

The balance is not complicated; Jesus’ last comment on the Pharisees cuts their complicated self-justifying legal arguments to pieces. He is not interested in service through sophistry. Life is complicated, but we cannot avoid the essence of the sometimes-hard choices we need to make. We cannot, like the Pharisees, render the law null through a legal quibble. Where is our sincerity?

The tragedy of the Pharisees is that they knew the Law, and could even identify the greatest commandment, and yet they never for a moment seem to have grasped the passionate love of the Lord for His people nor the implications of that passion for their own path through life. Would that we not share their blindness.