NOTES for Luk 11:52
It was precisely the Pharisees and scribes, those for whom all relations with God were reduced to the fulfillment of commandments and the numerous rules and regulations derived from them, who aroused Christ's greatest indignation. In such a legalistic approach, the God Who Is, the Living God, becomes unnecessary: it is enough that He once gave His law and then may no longer appear. In that case, the person who has refused direct connection with God becomes a self-willed interpreter of God's commandments, gradually substituting human commandments for the Law of God (compare Mark 7:6-8) and considering their fulfillment the path of salvation. All this is completely opposed to God's design for relations between Himself and man, for the accomplishment of which Christ came into this world. But Jesus' special anger fell on the lawyers not because they themselves were walking the path of self-justification that leads to destruction, but because they made themselves the spiritual authorities of Israel, declared their path to be the path of righteousness and salvation, and taught others to imitate them, thereby moving away from God.
One should not think that legalism died together with the Pharisees and scribes who were contemporaries of Jesus. The apostle Paul also fights the temptation of legalism with all his preaching, because this "virus" very quickly penetrated the newborn Church. And now, in any confession, in any Christian community, we meet the same claims to the "key of understanding," the same substitution of living relations with God in the current of the living stream of church tradition by the thoughtless fulfillment of rules and customs accumulated by one denomination or another over the course of its long or short history. Let us try, without violating these rules and while preserving agreement in our Church, at the same time to seek something greater: the meeting with Christ and the filling with the Holy Spirit that will make us bearers in our hearts of love for God and for people.