Healing after crisis

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

Today’s gospel (Matthew 23:13-22) sees Jesus deliver one of his tongue lashings to the Pharisees. Woe to them for avoiding heaven and blocking other people entering therein. Woe to them for turning hearts of flesh into monstrosities. Woe to them for their minute wrangling over minor laws which disgraces the sources of holiness. Although we do not hear them all in this passage, Jesus delivers seven woes or curses upon the Pharisees; not a counterbalance to the seven beatitudes, so much as seven warnings for those who will not bear His yoke.

What are we to make of such behaviour on the part of Jesus? The psychologists are already lining up with their clip board to pathologize this apparently wild conduct, determined that nothing is more all-seeing than the scientific eye. But God searches the hearts and minds of humanity to their very depths in ways no psychologist will ever understand. He knows our wounds, and He knows also how we have wounded others. The next time Jesus spoke with severity of this kind in the gospel of Matthew was precisely in the scene where He foretold the Last Judgement:

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!

What strict accounts must be given and what shaking there will be when the judge is to come, says the hymn the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass. Nobody set it to music better than Mozart.

We wish to displace these accusations of Jesus. Perhaps we are sure they are not aimed at us but only and specifically and exclusively at the Pharisees. Yet in another way, their target is not only the Pharisees but all abusers of religion. It has lately been fashionable to assume the Pharisaism condemned by Jesus is embodied by those who prefer formality in liturgy, but that critique is just a spiritual version of reverse snobbery. Pharisaism in its essence is the use of religion to assert power over others; it is the instrumentalization of religion for purposes other than the glory of God; it is the parody of zeal and devotion. And this sort of power can be asserted not only with the hard-edged sharpness of the Pharisees, but also with the soft-shoe shuffle of the religious poser. Herod Antipas was a poser of this kind, with his fondness for John the Baptist’s preaching, combined with his resolute neglect of the unpalatable moral reform that John called him too. The religious poser thinks John is a Pharisee for being so harsh.

But in the heart of the Pharisees, as in the heart of us all, there are wounded exiles in need of redemption. Perhaps the difference between the Pharisees and us (if we are not ourselves Pharisees) is how we manage those wounded exiles. Do the Pharisees load up burdens on the backs of others precisely so they can avoid facing those burdens in themselves? Do they obsess about the intricacies of spiritual minutiae only so they can distract themselves from the bigger, plainer but more demanding impositions of the gospel? Jesus denounced in them especially their tortured reasoning that acted as a curtain to veil their eyes from the great simplicity of the laws of God. Granted, laws are sometimes not simple, and that is why we need experts in the law. But minutiae that acknowledge higher laws only by rendering them null represent burdens that have gone beyond the pale. It is important here to see that Jesus was not hostile to the keeping of the law which He came to fulfil. He was zealous for its proper understanding; for lower laws to cede to higher laws, as God orders them to do.

Not all the Pharisees were such vipers of hypocrisy of course. In those not moved by the levels of hypocrisy Jesus denounced, perhaps what drove them onto the rocks of legal wrangling was the fear that arises when the highest sources of the law have failed to penetrate to the depths of the human heart. We need laws; we need guidelines. But when they are not understood with the right spirit of charity and equity, then we lose the clarity, compassion and calm that result from the love of God and spirit of justice living in our very bones. Jesus came to recover humanity and to save it from sin, not to deform it in the process. Indeed, to use those oft quoted words of St Irenaeus of Lyon, the glory of God is man fully alive. What is usually not quoted is the origin of those words that are found in his masterpiece Adversus Haereses – Against the Heresies­. And the Pharisees were, in a sense, heretics, not theologically but because their obsessiveness practically deformed the image of God in man, skewering the potential of the simple souls who trusted them. How many faithful Jews were broken by the hypocrisy of these men who lashed their neighbours’ consciences into a crisis of moral and psychological inflammation, like an OCD sufferer who develops a bleach addiction and teaches it to others?

Such wounds on skin or on consciences can only be healed by the most powerful balms and, in the case of consciences, by the gentleness coming from the heart of our Saviour. We sometimes all give way to inner Pharisees who torture others. Maybe there is an inner Pharisee who tortures parts of our own soul. We should not return blow for blow, if this is the case; we can only throw ourselves again and again upon the great healer who came to save us. For those He condemns on the Last Day as Judge are only those who failed in life to seek His loving hand and the healing that He offers, His light eternal, and His eternal rest.