Sunday 16th August, Blessed Virgin Mary, 11th Sunday after Trinity

The Pharisees have had something of a bad reputation since the time of Jesus, at least in Christian circles, mostly because they and Jesus kept getting into arguments and he had some pretty strong things to say about them. Indeed, in many Christian cultures, to call someone a ‘pharisee’ is considered rather insulting. The term ‘pharisee’ denotes someone who is hypocritical (pretending to be something they are not), or hyper-critical (judging others and generally being holier-than-thou). And to be sure, neither of these attributes are attractive or desirable, inside or outside the Church.

But let’s be fair to the pharisees. Jesus knew many of them as members of his group of disciples (such as Nicodemus), he went to their houses as an honoured guest and some of them tried to warn him of threats to his life. The Pharisees were a group of very committed Jews, trying to live faithfully in a very challenging pagan culture. Their emphasis on keeping the Jewish law was motivated by a desire to be faithful to God’s covenant with his people, to be distinctive and loyal in a foreign and often hostile environment.

The problem, as Jesus saw, was not with the desire to live faithful lives, but the standard by which life was judged. An over-emphasis on external behaviour led inevitably to legalism, judgemental attitudes, and the exclusion of people who struggled to live up to the Pharisees’ sometimes impossible standards of purity.

This is the point that Jesus is trying to make in our Gospel reading today (Matthew 15:10-28). God is less interested in what you do than who you are. Why? Because what you do flows out of who you are. Christian (or, for that matter, Jewish) faith is not magic – doing or saying the right things in the right way to earn God’s approval. Rather, the test of righteousness is whether we share God’s heart of love for His world, and act accordingly. If we obey God’s law of love for Him and for our neighbour, our fruit will speak for itself.

Every blessing,

Roger