NOTES for Mat 23:13-22

As we can see, Jesus' assessment of the Pharisees, with all their deeds and all their activity, was sometimes quite severe. What drew His strongest condemnation? At first glance, the things in question are quite varied. There is the violation of basic moral norms under cover of the law, oaths that were formally permitted but in fact violated the Torah, and the spread of one's religion which, according to the Savior, does not bring anyone closer to the Kingdom.

What do all these things have in common? In essence, only one thing: replacing content with form. Strictly speaking, the formalization of religious life is the main thing for which Jesus reproaches the Pharisees. Of course, every religion tends toward formalization, but if a religion is born on the basis of a revelation received from God, as was the case with Yahwism and the Judaism that grew within it, there is always a certain spiritual potential within it that allows such formalization to be resisted. It is another matter that using this potential is often troublesome; formal religiosity usually creates fewer outward problems, and not everyone decides to resist it. Jesus reproaches the Pharisees precisely because they did not do this.

Of course, the Kingdom that He brought into the world does not fit within any religious framework, even when the religiosity into whose framework people try to fit it is living and sincere. But in that case, the bearer of such religiosity still has the possibility of using it as a kind of spiritual springboard for a leap into the Kingdom. The same cannot be said of religiosity dominated by formalism: on the way to the Kingdom it can become only a brake. Meanwhile, as we can see, by Gospel times there was already more than enough religious formalism in the Pharisaic brotherhood: by then the brotherhood movement had existed for more than a century, and the tendency toward formalizing religious life within it, if it had not prevailed, was at any rate very visible.

And yet, even against this background, Jesus does not reject the whole Pharisaic tradition at once, but draws attention only to its quite specific forms and expressions that are in no way compatible with the Kingdom. For He knows that religious people, too, can enter the Kingdom. If, of course, they do not put their religion ahead of the Kingdom.