"Religion is an ecological niche," "religion is a social game." This is how many thoughtful and serious people speak about religion. A game... That is exactly what Jesus calls the Pharisees: devout people who know and fulfill all religious prescriptions, who live solely by this and nothing else: "Actors!" It is not that He condemns acting as such; these people are simply playing at what must not be played at.

However much our life resembles theater, God cannot be part of a performance. That is why this social game is completely unacceptable for Jesus: God is too important and too near to Him for such playacting, first praying for show and then deceiving and humiliating, preaching and then forgetting about God, being honest before Him in the meticulous counting of a tithe from vegetables and then deceiving Him with one's whole life. Perhaps this is our human need: to portray someone, to present ourselves as someone... But the Heavenly Father does not play house. His love is real.

The most terrible thing is that the higher a person's calling, the more tragic and painful his falling away, his unbelief, becomes. The Pharisees were religious teachers of God's people, guardians of tradition, law, and Scripture. Jerusalem is "the city of the great King," but it is precisely there that Christ dies. The Jews are the chosen people, "God's own," yet "He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him."

We Christians are also a people chosen by God, children of Abraham by faith, guardians of the Gospel Tradition. Therefore we too walk along the edge of the abyss; we too are in the risk group. At any moment our piety can turn into hypocrisy, conviction in faith into a sense of our own rightness, respect for traditions into legalism. How can we avoid "the leaven of the Pharisees" and still remain God's people? How can we preserve faithfulness to the Gospel without losing Christ?

With each new word, the denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees becomes harsher, and now Christ reproaches them not only for hypocrisy and sinfulness; He accuses the religious leaders of the people of resisting God. Every sin leads away from God, but here sin is made worse by an unwillingness to repent, and enmity with God becomes conscious resistance to His will.

An unwillingness to repent can be covered by pseudo-pious self-deception, when a person does not want not only to admit his own sins but even to see them, while at the same time very much wanting to look respectable. If that is so, then denunciation of other people's sins and outward reverence for righteous people of former years become a very convenient way to show off one's imagined righteousness.

But Christ sees more deeply and directly shows us that both the long-ago crimes themselves and today's loud condemnation of them can be links in one and the same chain. How often His words about the tombs of the prophets and the monuments of the righteous have been remembered in recent years, when the names of the tortured were invoked in vain and their memory was exploited. If there is no true repentance, but only a replacement of it with outward forms, then there is always the danger that, when circumstances change, new Pharisees will again be ready to become persecutors.