Proper 25 (Yr C) / Pharisees Like Us
In a world that rests comfortably with clear paradigms, the Pharisee ranks amongst the greatest, because at first glance it seems so foreign – so distant. Talk of Pharisees, and you’re talking about enemies of Jesus.
And while many of us might not be the paragons of virtue, few of us would identify ourselves as enemies of Jesus. And as we set the Pharisee in so extreme a view, we can easily dismiss the problem the Pharisee faces.
Pharisees are not simply hypocrites. They are complex people caught up within the world they anticipated. A world they created. Simply put, the Pharisees were the Anglicans of their day. Unlike the Sadducees, who rejected what we would now know today as the Rabbinic tradition, the Pharisees saw the scripture through the prism of the Talmud and Mishna –Rabbinic interpretations of the TANAKeh, that is Scripture.
Paradoxically, the Sadducees both rejected the value of the collective wisdom garnered outside the Temple precincts, suggesting that people had the responsibility to act within the narrow confines of the scripture itself, yet still be bound to the prescripts of the time, eg going to the Temple three times a year: Pesach (
Passover),
Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), and
Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles). Yet with all their legalism, it was the Sadducees who believed in total free will. The line between strict conservatives and strict liberals in the time of Jesus was muddled, leading to inconsistencies, not unlike those we hear in the Gospel today.
In a standard prayer, then and now, a pious Jewish man thanks God that he is not a slave, a Gentile or a woman (
Babylonian Talmud: Menahot Tractate 43b). For the Pharisee to pray,
God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
Is not all that unusual. It’s not so much a prayer of pride than a prayer of gratitude that one is not burdened with the temptations others must endure. And all this occurs in what should be a contemptible place for the Pharisee – the Temple itself. A place of distinction and separation – a place where the powerless are deemed even less powerful for their reliance upon the sacrifices and intercessions of the priests.
The Jew in the pew had little use for people like the tax collector, not unlike our own time. Even as the Romans were paving the roads, providing clean water, and protecting the outlying provinces from wandering hoards, the Jews wanted nothing of it.
Now to our own time. Who are keeping the realization of God’s kingdom from happening by your own estimation? Who’s the tax collector in your world?
And then to place. As I shared earlier, the Pharisee almost had no business in the Temple anyway, though most would grant that the Pharisee had a right to be there. Where do you hang out, presuming God’s holiness to be, but where you might have no business being. It’s amazing the places people look for like minds in the full knowledge of God’s absence.
Then finally – to purpose. If we are to gain solace that, according to the Wisdom of Sirach,
(God) will not ignore the supplication of the orphan,
or the widow when she pours out her complaint.
Who are to be God’s agents – God’s servants to the orphan and widow – to the child in distress, to the mother who has contracted cholera in the refugee camps of Haiti?
Who else are our social pariahs?
Where do we most enjoy being, fully aware that God’s truth and love are distained or ridiculed?
Who among us, like Paul, can count ourselves as libations poured out, as able to look back and count ourselves among those having run the race?
Does keeping the faith mean keeping it as stone, or is keeping the faith mean being witnesses to it in our every life event, especially when it’s difficult, when we run the risk, like the tax collector, of being alone before God – not merely at our last day, but on this one?
