NOTES for Mat 23:13-22

We should understand the denunciations of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law more as road signs warning that there is a cliff beyond this turn or that ice may be found here. In other words, they should serve us more as a warning of danger to our spiritual life than as an occasion to share the Savior's anger by condemning one group of people or another. In Russian, the word “Pharisee” has lost every positive connotation and retained only negative ones. Yet these were highly educated people, many of whom were disciples of Jesus. We must not forget this.

In this passage Christ speaks of those for whom the temple is more important than God. And how often this happens among us. How often people endowed through their upbringing with the most refined aesthetic sense nourish their church life only on the beauty of ritual. And how often people go to church only for companionship that saves them from the loneliness of the metropolis, or indeed from any loneliness, forgetting that God is what matters most in the Church.

Christ's fiery, scourging sermon is addressed to the scribes and Pharisees. Having practically monopolized the interpretation of Scripture, these people turned the living word of God into a rigid set of rules that they themselves did not keep. Moreover, behind this fence of what Jesus calls “command upon command,” the fundamental commandments given to Moses become almost invisible—the commandments in which God revealed His love and care for the people of God. Thus those raised in the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees were denied access to what matters most: the loving and merciful God, and the gates of the Kingdom proved closed to them. It is no accident that Jesus warned His disciples so strongly against the leaven of the Pharisees. But can we say that we are entirely free of it? Do we hear Christ's voice crying, “Woe to you!”?

Today's bitter words of Christ about the scribes and Pharisees, who barricaded the entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven with their religious stereotypes, should be considered in parallel with the words of the Almighty, "You shall not make yourself an idol." Alas, the human being has a frightening ability to make idols out of everything. After all, everything that is so important to the scribes and Pharisees is objectively good. Prayer is vitally necessary, and so are preaching and preserving the temple... But all this can be forms in which love for God is expressed, or it can be a means of walling oneself off from God. The word "hypocrisy" in Greek means first of all pretense. Here is what matters to understand: we can pretend to love God, but we will manage to deceive only ourselves, not the All-Seeing One.

These words of Christ are given in the Gospel not only, and not so much, in order to condemn our hypocrisy. It is simply that since God sees us in truth, hypocrisy becomes meaningless, and therefore there is hope that He will help us be freed from it.

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.

One harsh statement after another falls with a steady rhythm, denouncing the scribes and Pharisees for hypocrisy, folly, and blindness. Those who had been entrusted with serving God and His supreme truth not only failed in their ministry, but were also tempted to use their position for selfish purposes. This is why they are held to a stricter account than “ordinary” sinners.

We would very much like to apply these words, addressed to the intellectual elite of ancient Israel, to them alone. But that will not work. The One who warned us to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, by uttering this denunciation through the centuries, also warned us about our responsibility for the results of our ministry.

The easiest thing in such a case is to begin recalling how one Christian or another acted in ways that match what Christ listed. Such a “debriefing” is necessary, but first of all everything said here must be understood as a warning to us ourselves. Let us therefore try to remember whether we too have ever cared more about outward propriety than about truly overcoming sinful inclinations.

Otherwise, we ourselves will become like whitewashed tombs that, in addition, search for impurity in others.

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?

"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.