Main news for 21 March 2020

In the Pharisaic milieu, enormous attention was given to tradition, especially religious tradition. Naturally, the Pharisaic brotherhood relied on the sacred books: the Torah and the Prophets. Besides the ones familiar to us, Jews also include among the prophetic books Joshua, Judges, the Books of Samuel, that is, 1-2 Kingdoms, and the Books of Kings, that is, 3-4 Kingdoms. Meanwhile, the prophets spoke very bluntly about the spiritual state of the society of their time, and for that they were often persecuted. And the sacred history set out in the books that we Christians usually call historical evaluates the spiritual situation in pre-exilic Israel quite severely. The Pharisees agreed with this assessment, though they applied it specifically to the pre-exilic period.

Much here was built on a kind of contrast between the pre-exilic situation and the post-exilic situation in general, and the contemporary situation, in the sense of the Gospel period, in particular. It was assumed that every apostasy, violation of the Torah, impiety, and everything else for which God punished the people in pre-exilic times had remained there, in those pre-exilic times. Now, during the Savior's earthly ministry, everything was thought to be different. There was no longer any place in Jewish society for former apostasy and violations of the Torah, and people thought that if the pre-exilic prophets could look at the people, they would be satisfied. Outwardly everything really did look that way: no paganism, no open apostasy, and not even any open violation of the Torah was, as a rule, allowed by any Jew in those times.

And the prophets who had formerly been persecuted had now become a kind of national hero, people who had once been persecuted and even killed but who were now honored by decorating their tombs and building monuments for them. Meanwhile, in fact nothing had changed in principle: the religious Pharisaic environment remained just as unreceptive to living Revelation as the half-pagan surroundings with which the pre-exilic prophets had to deal. It resisted God's plans and God's action just as before, though outwardly in a different way from pre-exilic Jewry.

And it reacted no less harshly to the bearers of living Revelation. The earthly path of John the Baptist, for example, as well as that of the Savior Himself, is clear confirmation of this. That is why Jesus says "woe" to the self-satisfied and outwardly devout Pharisees: they do not oppose the ancient prophets not because they have understood and taken in their preaching, but simply because now, having become part of the tradition, it has largely ceased to be living and therefore has ceased to be dangerous to their religion.

Any Revelation that posed even some danger to them in this respect was rejected in the same way, and even more harshly than in pre-exilic times. This means that the thoroughly and deeply religious Pharisees were no closer to the Kingdom than their half-pagan ancestors, and they had nothing to boast about except decorated tombs. But neither tombs nor monuments bring anyone closer to God.

The One who could open the Kingdom to them was rejected by most Pharisees in the same way their ancestors rejected those prophets whom the same Pharisees, at least in words, honored. History was repeating itself, somewhat differently in form but exactly the same in essence. It was the history that had ended in the Babylonian defeat then and was leading the people to the catastrophe of A.D. 70 now. Therefore the Savior's "alas" sounded very timely. Unfortunately, very few heard Him. And then the history of ancient Judea ended as it did. Rejection of the Messiah and the Kingdom is always a path to catastrophe, just as rejection of God is.