Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You lock the Kingdom of heaven before men.
You do not enter yourselves,
nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.
As religious leaders with the authority of the seat of Moses, scribes and Pharisees ought to have done what they could to unlock the Kingdom of heaven before men. Yet their authority did not have that effect, and could not, because of their hypocrisy. They caused scandal by giving a bad example of lives ostensibly formed and directed by the law of God. If they were truly representatives of God as they claimed, what would that say about God himself? It would seem to have implied that God was distant, caught up in nitpicky details, and generally more concerned with ritual than mercy.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You traverse sea and land to make one convert,
and when that happens you make him a child of Gehenna
twice as much as yourselves.
The scribes and Pharisees appeared to make converts, not so that those converts would grow in the image of God, but rather in their image. Such converts could become so deeply lost by way of the teaching and example that they received that it would be even harder for them to get unstuck than it would be for the scribes and Pharisees. The scribes and Pharisees hadn't watched their own religious performance and assumed it to be normative. On some level they probably still understood the ways in which their interpretations of the law were motivated by their own convenience, rather than a desire for truth. But their disciples might infer that such novel interpretations as they saw demonstrated were the only ones possible.
“Woe to you, blind guides, who say,
‘If one swears by the temple, it means nothing,
but if one swears by the gold of the temple, one is obligated.’
We can see that they were guides blind to what truly mattered because they looked at things in a merely human way. Even foreigners might be impressed by the gold of the temple without understanding what made the temple sacred. But the temple was not sacred because of the gold. One could not make a temple to Artemis any more sacred by adding precious metals. It was rather because the temple was sacred that it was appropriate to pull out all the stops in building it, and using the best materials at hand.
And you say, ‘If one swears by the altar, it means nothing,
but if one swears by the gift on the altar, one is obligated.’
You blind ones, which is greater, the gift,
or the altar that makes the gift sacred?
The altar, it would seem was perhaps just a stone slab, or something equally visually unimpressive. The scribes and Pharisees therefore said that the gifts places upon it had the greater value. But the value they saw was only the natural value such things possessed. They failed to see the value they gained in the eyes of God when they were placed before him as gifts. But this was possible because of the altar. And since the altar did this, not for one gift only, but for every gift offered, it should have been clear that it had the greater value.
One who swears by the altar swears by it and all that is upon it;
one who swears by the temple swears by it
and by him who dwells in it;
one who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God
and by him who is seated on it.
We are given the impression that the scribes and Pharisees made a lot of promises that they weren't really planning to keep. They wanted to be seen as trustworthy with no intention of honoring the trust placed in them. And this was the example they set, and the model their converts had to emulate. They prioritized the things of earth and the riches of this world over and against the things of God, and made pious excuses for doing so. They were not interested in the truth so much as enough appearance of the truth to prevent others for questioning their actions.
We are all representatives of the Kingdom of Jesus on earth, some of us in big and official ways, others in small and more hidden ways. But regardless of the scale of our ministry we are all called to act with integrity. We must avoid the tendency to only hear the word of God when it praises us or condemns others. We should learn to be more open to all of the ways in which the word of God values in others what we ourselves neglect or devalue in them. So too should we be attentive when the word of God offers us a critique of our own thoughts, words, and deeds. Just as with Jesus speaking against the Pharisees, such criticism is designed not to condemn but to heal, and to unlock the Kingdom for more and more people.
No comments:
Post a Comment