What Exactly Was Jesus' Problem With the Pharisees, Anyway?

I was talking with Ruth, and she said how dumb she found it when school passion (Easter) plays, or movies or whatever, depict Jesus as what she calls "Valium Jesus."  With the blank face. Even when being tortured and killed.  Impassive.  I always tend to call him "Stoner Jesus."  You know?  People are afraid to imagine him with emotions, so he is just kind of...blank.

   Now the scriptures say he cried, they have him giving a number of challenging, wild, crazy-sounding speeches, they have him being scary enough to clear an entire marketplace worth of people and animals out of the temple at Jerusalem, and they have him expressing a lot of frustration as well.  And one thing that is pretty clear to me, upon reading the gospels, is that he treated Pharisees differently from how he treated anyone else.  Focused on them repeatedly.  Was harsher about them. What was all that about?

    Jesus of Nazareth has become nowadays, for many people, little more than the patron saint of serenity, and meek, mild tolerance and kindness.  "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" is how a lot of people need to see him.  Some who said not to judge, and to nice to everyone.  The god of Nice.

   I think this is back to that "control" thing.  If he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, conventional modern Christian culture would tell him to cheer up, to rejoice, to get Prozac, to think on whatsoever things are good etc.  If he was angry or frustrated or impatient, he'd be once again told that he'd lost control of his holiness and to go fix it.

   Because, if he was Jesus, God become human to show how it ought to be done, and he cried, and shouted, got angry, frustrated, impatient and outraged and stuff like that, then wouldn't that mean either:

a) he wasn't perfect

or

b) that stuff didn't make him imperfect, though it doesn't sound terribly like controlling one's emotions?

As I've written before, this conundrum has folks scrambling to argue that he didn't really get angry, or certainly didn't ever lose his temper with anyone, or that because he was God, that this made it one of many things he could do, but we can't. Of course this effectively removes him as any kind of role model for us.

   Jesus was challenging to most people.  But there was one group he seemed to keep coming back to, over and over again.  It wasn't the half-Jewish Samaritans (He even made one the "star" of a story).  He didn't rant and rave against the Romans who occupied Israel at that point.  (He even praised the faith of a Roman soldier.  Contrasted the soldier with how faithless he felt the Jews were.)  It was the Pharisees, who were the Jewish religious elite, who he took aim at.  They got both barrels, over and over again.  There is no parable of the Good Pharisee.  And Saul of Tarsus had to stop being one and become a new person entirely, with a new name, before God got any use out of him.

   Jesus goes into Jerusalem, and in public places and in synagogues, quite unprovoked, warns the regular folk not to be like the Pharisees.  That they'd have to do better.  That their faith, their relationship with God had to run deeper.  And he uses a word for them that he just might have been the first person to ever use in quite that way.  It's the word that in English is "hypocrite." Hupokrités. That word means "actor."  Literally "someone performing under a mask."  Someone fake.  Plastic.  Putting on a piety show for the world. 

  I think it's safe to say that, along with "whitewashed sepulchres" and "offspring of vipers," that this word shows what Jesus' problem with them was.  Backstabbing, pious-seeming fakers, showing off their religion.  And Jesus never let them alone.  Actually walked into Jerusalem on a few occasions and went into the temple or the synagogue and provoked an argument with them.  Waited until they showed up, in one particular case.

The Christ's Complaint

Again, but in reverse order, it's clear that Jesus took exception to their venomous scheming and backbiting and treachery, in calling them "offspring of vipers" and asking them "why do you seek to kill me?" when they weren't admitting to that, but were looking to have him killed.  This is very in keeping with the Old Testament, which speaks out against people who are underhanded, who oppress the vulnerable, who delight in the downfall of others, and whose feet are "quick to shed blood."

   Next, the imagery of a tomb which is full of rotting bodies inside, but is painted gleaming white outside (along with the image of a bowl which is polished up bright and clear around the outside, but left filthy inside) shows that he's looking on their hearts, rather than their lifestyles.  He's seeing people who were extremely religiously pious in their lifestyles and habits, but inside, they were twisted, decaying and dark; just like behind you, they were apt to stick a knife in, for political reasons.  His only comment on their clothes is to disdain their attempts to look religious.  And he also disdains their need to sit in a special seat of honour in the synagogues.

   I think, just like today, in Jesus' time there were a whole lot of regular folks, who weren't terribly religious or terribly depraved, but who looked to the Pharisees and said "We average folks all do stuff we're not really supposed to.  We're not living quite how we ought.  If we lived how we were supposed to, we'd be living like the Pharisees. They're hardcore.  Those guys are doing it right!"
  And Jesus wanted to warn everyone who would listen, against that. They were to get well and get in touch with God and get the dented up, twisted, rusting parts of their psyches dealt with.  And they weren't ever going to succeed at that by letting Pharisees be "the religious ones" for them, nor by imitating them, and their focus on how they looked, and what others thought.

   Jesus was there, he was walking the walk, he was telling the truth, and the Pharisees, by contrast, were about looking religious and getting the chance to be the punishers of people caught looking less religious. About being seen to be giving money to charity, and going to synagogue and praying a lot and looking pious and so on.
  So they plotted to get him killed, offspring of vipers that they were.  Those vindictive, censoring, repressing, image-conscious hearts didn't get light shone into them and truth spoken into them either.  They got rid of Jesus, to silence his ideas.  For good, they thought.  (Didn't quite work out that way).

Sensible Voices

I think it's very interesting that Jesus' main problem with the Pharisees (them living "for show" lives) expressed in the word "hypocrite" has been utterly subverted today.  Now that's a bit too handy.  Convenient.  Now we use the word to mean that someone is "inconsistent" in their lifestyle.  Not strict enough.  That what they're preaching is stricter than what they're actually living.  Like, one should be a more hardcore Pharisee if one is to avoid being called a hypocrite.  That's totally backwards.
  I think it's clear that whether a Pharisee followed his rules or not, Jesus' problem with him was that he wasn't living an authentic life.  He was a "performer under a mask."  It wasn't like if some of the Pharisees were doing exactly what they said and were following all of the rules, (getting all of their lines and blocking perfect) that Jesus wouldn't have thought of those Pharisees as hypocrites.  It was the "for show" life that earned them that insult.  Playing to an audience.  Looking for acknowledgement as a religious person with exemplary self-control.  (back to control again)
   Growing up, we always knew that some Christians were more, "legal" we called it, not knowing the word "legalism" or "legalistic."  And we felt maybe we should, but didn't really want to, live just like them.  Assumed that God wished we were more like those guys.  But no one ever said in any sermon I ever sat under that the key problem with the Pharisees was legalism. That legalism will keep you from Jesus.  And your legalism will keep other people away from Jesus, too.  So I'm saying that right now.  Because it will.

   In fact, the gospel seems to be utterly at odds with the Pharisee message of placing one's hope for daily life in using careful self-control to keep ourselves from doing bad things.  It isn't about that.  The root problem involves us not only doing bad things, but also not doing good things.  Because at root, it's not about us just doing bad things, but being bad things.  It's not just that we don't do enough good things, it's that we aren't enough good things.
  It seems to me that being able to accept a Jesus who's come to say that everyone's been getting God and religion all wrong, is directly threatened by what the bible calls "the leaven of the Pharisees."  If you've got that puffing up, pride-swelling, shame-based religious yeast fermenting and rotting away in the darkness, you can't let the light of Jesus shine in, or you'll lose all that.  You've got to keep relying on self-control and what things look like rather than what they are, if you want to keep growing that.  Candy shell on a turd.  And that will seem sensible to you.  Like it's the only real option, Jesus not being seen as a viable one.  Not a choice by someone getting real and being sensible.

   Because Jesus wasn't well received by "sensible" people.  In fact, the whole bible is full of stories with "sensible" people who don't have a clue.  Who have missed the point.  Whom God has little to do with, in His work.  

• The priest Eli expressing his concern to the weeping, babbling, praying Hannah that maybe she was drunk and shouldn't be at the temple, 
• David's older brother Eliab expressing his concern over what looked to him like a brash teenager who just wanted attention and shouldn't be hanging around,  
• King David's wife Michal expressing embarrassment and concern about his subjects seeing David's undignified, unkingly dancing and thinking he shouldn't be doing that, 
• Job's "comforting" friends assuming that they knew what was going on between Job and God and it just had to involve Job being secretly sinful and needing to repent, 
• Judas Iscariot expressing concern over Mary wasting expensive ointment by pouring it on Jesus (shouldn't have done that!) rather than selling it and giving money to the poor, 
• the prodigal son's elder brother expressing his concern that prodigal behaviour shouldn't be rewarded,  
• Jesus' brothers warning him he shouldn't go into Jerusalem to fight with Pharisees, 
• people expressing concern to Jesus over how unpious it looked for his disciples to be picking grain to eat when they were hungry on the Sabbath, so they shouldn't do that,
• people asking whether the blind man or his parents sinned, 
• people expressing concern about Jesus healing people on the Sabbath, because you shouldn't do that,
• people expressing concern over Jewish Christians eating with gentile Christians, because they shouldn't do that,
• people expressing concern that gentile Christians weren't being required to get circumcised (sans anaesthesia), because clearly they should be made to do that,
• people expressing concern over Christians possibly buying meat that MIGHT have been part of a pagan ritual before being sold afterward and you shouldn't do that.  

It goes on and on.  Sensible voices "expressing concerns."  Over how things looked.  Over the appearance of propriety.  Over purely imagined harm or entirely made-up disaster scenarios.  Making things worse in the name of keeping things from getting worse.  Disrupting good by claiming to speak for good, and interfering with someone who's doing the Real Deal.  Doing nothing but being careful about everything.  Being concerned only with being concerned.

Modern Pharisees

All of this speaks pretty strongly to me, because I grew up with this.  Of course we heard read aloud at church every word that Jesus is recorded saying to and about Pharisees.  And of course we applied it all to other Christians, and in particular to people who "said one thing and did another" rather than to religious playactors.  To Catholics, rather than to us.  To people who weren't strict, like us.  Who one could see were clearly less legalistic than we were.
   And a lot of us were pretty fake.  Performers under masks.  Our life decisions were being made solely on how things might look. We really fussed over how Christians talked, and what kind of shirts they should not wear, and what shouldn't give them any joy.

   When I was a teenager, one summer I signed an electric bass guitar out of the music room.  So, I had a new instrument to try out, all summer long.  And that kind of thing was very good for me in a time when not much in my life was terribly happy.  And I was happily plugging it in and trying it out and my mother stood looking at me for a minute, troubled, and then said "Imagine if Mrs. Hayhoe could see you right now."  Life was like that.  When I went to my first movie at 21, I drove an hour away so no one would see me pop that cinematic cherry, even though I knew that my going to see Star Trek 6 was a good thing that God had no problem with at all. (We'd talked about it for an embarrassing period of time).
  By that point in time I was no longer afraid that God would make me smash my car if I went to Star Trek 6.  That superstitious fear had dried up and died, very slowly.  But I was afraid my close Brethren friends and relatives would draw away from me, after "expressing concerns" at my worldliness/lack of legalism, and that I would soon be kicked out of the church, banned globally from social events and taking communion.
  And all of that happened, of course.  But I can't say "It all started with going to see Star Trek 6 and not hiding it."  Because that isn't true.  By the time I was 21 and had gone and seen it, all of that Pharisee-style ecclesiastical vengeance was more or less a forgone conclusion and had already started happening to a large degree.  I had Brethren friends who were getting the same treatment too.

   But all that's trivial.  Here's the worst part:
We had our first local division in 1991, and we kept more than our share of Pharisees.  We lost the lion's share of the teens, twentysomethings and thirtysomethings.  We wouldn't so much as let them use a 20th century translation of the bible.  Add hymns more recent than 1881 to our hymnbook.  Pray without using "thee" and "thou."  We wouldn't give them anything.  We smothered them with expressed concerns and punished any and all lapses in legalism.  And we were gearing up to have another division once the glow of the first one fully wore off.  We were spoiling for it.

  And all through the 90s?  Young people kept dying.  Car wrecks.  Suicide.  Murder.  That kind of thing.  And there were near drownings and things too.  For a long stretch there, leading right up into the 2003 division, we were losing someone young every single year.  A couple years, it was more than one.  When my friend Doug shot himself fourteen years ago today, one of my first thoughts was "When is this going to end?"

   And there were sensible voices droning on through all of this young death, of course.  They looked at the young people and said things like "Well, she dated quite a few boys" or "I heard he was into drinking alcohol" or "she was getting pretty worldly..."  And then they said something that I think could not be more Pharisee:

"The Lord is speaking..."  

(and there'd be that ominous pause at the end and a refusal to admit what was really being said: that God killed that girl.  For going to the movies and dating a Pentecostal.  And He wanted us all to know how unhappy He was with our lapses in legalism.)

The Lord is Speaking...

I think that when you try to escape a Pharisee Christian lifestyle and mindset, there are things that want to eat you.  Which are guarding that Phariseeland threshold to keep everyone in.  "Seven [things] worse than the first" things the Phariseeland lifestyle promised to rid you of.  And I think when older people talk about death and injury as predictable, sensible, loving divine responses to young people having wine with supper, they are almost giving permission to calamity, or taking a side.  With the things.
   So, we were, many of us living pretty fake, "for show" lives filled with superstitious prohibitions and an almost total focus upon lifestyle, dress and outer appearance.  We weren't seen without our masks on.  We had no Christian liberty because we'd been burdened with the yoke of "not letting our side down" by ever failing to look like a peculiar people who abstained from certain things, much like Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and Muslims do, and we were more than willing, in unceasing political infighting, to cut our own brothers loose if they refused to see things our way.  We silenced people who didn't take a hard stance against alcohol and live entertainment.  And we taught people that their feelings weren't them, but rather, something to not wear, like red socks.  People were (or were meant to be, anyway) self-control.  Non-selves.  That's it.

  We were lucky to have anyone under sixty years old left, and yet we had some, and they had a horrible time.  And then, each year, what would happen as we geared up for our upcoming division, with all of the rumblings and boycotted bible conferences that went along with that, was that suddenly some young person would die.  And that utterly validated some very Pharisee people's very Pharisee view of how God dealt with Christians.  The Lord was speaking.  And as we well know, He mainly spoke through calamity and death.  To warn about people whose legalism was slipping.  Whose feelings were showing.

When Is It Going To End?

Was the Lord speaking?  I think He was. But not to that now-dead young person, taken so suddenly and often quite without any sort of warning.  I think when people tut tutted over the outer appearance, the lifestyles, the clothing and hairstyle choices and patterns of speech of young people who were starving spiritually, given no voice at all, who were in a dog-eat-dog, biting and devouring piety carnagefest, they showed no awareness of what had just happened.
  Some of these Christian young people were lost, in terms of having people to talk to, Christians they could trust, who'd connect them with God instead of saying they had to stop going to movies if they wanted to earn His Ear again.  Open-hearted Christians who knew anything at all about how to love someone who was slightly different or who wasn't sure about all the stuff we had to be sure of.

   So, were older people shocked and saddened when some young guy who'd been known to go to NHL games and maybe have a beer there suddenly died?  I think so.  They didn't feel it like us who were the same age and under the same stressors, though, I really don't think.  And to suggest that the Lord had killed this young guy or girl to scare others into stopping going to NHL games or drinking Coors Lite at the cottage or whatever?  Told me more than I wanted to know.  About everything.

   I recently found out that a young Brethren guy who an awful lot of people loved, who I never knew as an adult, mostly because of not being allowed to attend Brethren stuff since the 90s, died tragically last week.  And people are shocked and sad right now.  Particularly the young people roughly his age and in roughly his situation.  The ones who actually knew and loved him.  

   I know nothing about him except we knew a lot of people in common.  People I love.  And when I heard that in 2014, sensible Job-comforter, Judas-to-Mary voices have been literally heard actually saying "The Lord is speaking..."?  It made me wonder "When is this going to end?"

   What if when we die, a key way in which our value will be seen will involve not how pious and abstinent we are remembered to have been, or how Christian we seemed, but how much of a hole we leave.  How many people we loved.