Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Recently, I was talking about Jesus' interaction with Nicodemus. And as part of that, I talked about Jesus' relationship to the Pharisees. The Pharisees are not the cartoon villains of the New Testament. If there's any group that Jesus most closely aligned with in terms of his approach to God in the gospels, it was the Pharisees. And I've touched on this before in sermons when it's come up, but I haven't really had a chance to sit down and to lay out some of the arguments behind why we think Jesus thought this way, and where he aligns in terms of the various groups in the early, New Testament period, and how that should influence the ways that we read the Gospels and think about our Jewish neighbors as Christians today.
Jeremy Duncan:So first off, am I arguing that Jesus was a Pharisee? Well, no. The Pharisees were a somewhat nebulous and loosely aligned group of teachers, but there was somewhat of a structure to the Pharisaical tradition, and they were largely located in and around the city of Jerusalem. Jesus obviously comes from the Galilee up north. He's a poor itinerant preacher who travels around in the countryside, proclaiming the kingdom of God.
Jeremy Duncan:However, Jesus does interact with Pharisees, some of which he interacts with quite positively, others obviously quite negatively. But the core of Jesus' message, although it doesn't align perfectly with the teachings of the Pharisees, is most closely aligned with that of all the groups, and we should understand that as Christians. So this is a bit of an oversimplification, but there are 4 major groups around the time of Jesus, vying for popularity within the Jewish communities. Those were the Essenes, the Zealots, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. Now the Essenes were a group that were basically an apocalyptic group that decided that culture could not be saved.
Jeremy Duncan:Society was too far gone, and the way to honor God and serve God was to retreat from society out into the desert to create enclaves of holy communities. This is actually where the Qumran communities come from where we found the Dead Sea Scroll. So they are out in the desert disengaging from society. That's obviously not Jesus. He is traveling itinerantly through areas poor and populace like Jerusalem, proclaiming the kingdom of God, calling people, to engagement socially, to push the agenda and the kingdom of God forward in the world.
Jeremy Duncan:So he doesn't really align well with the scenes. The Zealots were the group that called for open violent rebellion against the Roman oppressors. They actually believed that, the Messiah would come and rise up to lead a war against Rome to overthrow oppression and bring Israel back to sovereignty. Jesus clearly has pacifistic intentions in his ministry, to the point where he is willing to turn the other cheek to the point of dying, to to get across his message, and to call people to his way in the world rather than ever, turn to violence to promote his agenda. So the zealots are clearly not a group that are well aligned with the ideology of Jesus.
Jeremy Duncan:The Sadducees were probably the closest thing to religious authorities within the Jewish community at the time. They were also the group that collaborated with the Roman Empire, And they did that because the Sadducees were largely in charge of temple worship during the 2nd temple period. They held to the tradition of Torah, the sacrifices, and all of the prescribed traditions that had to be carried out within the temple. And in order to do that, they needed the permission of the Romans, which meant they had to work with, at the very least or collaborate at the worst, with the Roman Empire. Now that gave them, certain privileges in the 1st century, but also opened them to a lot of criticism from the Rose who saw them as a little bit too tight with the Roman Empire.
Jeremy Duncan:Jesus obviously is not part of that. He does not participate in temple sacrifices, and also critiques quite heavily, the Roman Empire and and and the oppression that they're putting on the local, particularly poor Jewish people. That leaves us with the Pharisees, and the Pharisees are a group that were quite innovative because they saw collaboration with the Roman Empire as a nonstarter. And so instead of participating in temple worship, they created what we know as the synagogue tradition today, where you would gather together as community to study Torah, to learn the way of God, and to call each other toward the path in the world that honored God. It was about study.
Jeremy Duncan:It was about reflection. It was about understanding the Word of God and applying it to their lives. They were also quite populist in the sense that they did not participate with the Roman Empire. They did not collaborate with the Sadducees, but they saw a recontextualization of a lot of the practices that set the priestly order apart from the common person. So you'll see the Pharisees promoting things like hand washing before meals.
Jeremy Duncan:That's because that was a practice prescribed for priests in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Pharisees saw that as a way to take back this preparation of our hearts and our bodies for worship with God. They said to the common people, you are just as important as the priests. You should practice these ways to prepare your hearts because there's no priest who's gonna offer sacrifices for you anymore. You are gonna do that in your study of the word of God in the way that you live that out in your life. And so by recapturing and popularizing some of these practices, they actually called the common people forward.
Jeremy Duncan:They were seen as populist in a lot of way, and a lot of people were quite profoundly grateful for that kind of significance placed on their lives as as just common people. That wasn't all we've seen as a heavy burden for everyone. Now one of the other reasons that you see Jesus interacting with the Pharisees, as the largest group he's critiquing in the Gospels, is because by the time the stories of Jesus are being written down in the second half of the first century, a major historical event has happened, and that is the destruction of the temple, by the Romans in 70 AD. And so after that, the Sadducees are gone. They they don't exist anymore.
Jeremy Duncan:There is no more temple worship. There is no purpose for the Sadducees to exist socially. The scenes are long gone out in the desert. They have seen what has happened when Rome has come into town, and that has only furthered their conviction that their best bet is to stay far away from Jerusalem, from the cities, to remain in their isolated local holy communities. And the Zealots, sadly have been wiped out violently.
Jeremy Duncan:They opposed Rome violently. Rome returned with even more bloodshed and they were largely wiped out for about a 100 years until there's another major revolt, against the Roman Empire. But in the late 1st century, the Zealots are are really not a force because they have been decimated. That means when the gospel writers are gathering up the stories of Jesus, where he's interacting with other ideologies, other philosophies, other groups, and they're deciding what are the most important to tell. The most important ones are the ones where Jesus is interacting with the only other major group that is still around vying for popular followership at the time, which is the Pharisees.
Jeremy Duncan:The Pharisees have innovated toward communities of interpretive study, and there's the Christians who are now providing this new lens for interpreting the Hebrew scriptures and also, of course, adding the New Testament scriptures to their communities as they gather to read those letters and to do something very similar. And so it's not necessarily that Jesus was most fiercely opposed to the Pharisees, it's that those stories of affirmation and contrast between the Pharisees are the most relevant at the time. And this becomes really important because Jesus is most closely aligned with those Pharisees. He thinks study. He thinks way of being.
Jeremy Duncan:He thinks way of life, interpreting scripture, innovating in our interpretations, and applying it to our modern context so that we can live out the way of God in the world is the way that we draw ourselves close to God. There's also some other really distinct teachings. The Pharisees did not believe in an afterlife that you are going to continue on after you die. They saw in as abstract terms, things like Sheol, or the grave in the Hebrew scriptures, or the bosom of Abraham in terms of going to your ancestors and be part of that that narrative of your people, but they didn't believe in an afterlife where you would experience something after death. The Pharisees and Jesus very much do.
Jeremy Duncan:Now I don't think they go into a lot of detail, but exactly what that looks like and what we should expect, But there is an element that is quite unique to the teachings of Jesus and the Pharisees that believes there is more to what it means to be alive than just the beating of our chest and the breathing in our lungs. There is something eternal about us. And in a lot of these ways, when you see Jesus interacting with Pharisees, he might be pushing back against certain elements of certain teachers, and he might be affirming other perspectives that he's calling his teachers to as well. And you see this in his interaction with Pharisees. Some he critiques quite heavily, others welcome him quite warmly.
Jeremy Duncan:Nicodemus is one example of that where he says, look, clearly we, he speaks on behalf of himself and other Pharisees, we see you as a teacher who's come from God. We know this about you. Jesus dines with Pharisees. He meets with them in their homes. Others he sees as predatory, or using their place of privilege to prey on the vulnerable and the poor in their communities.
Jeremy Duncan:That is not the same thing as saying that Jesus, critiques or holds to account the entire pharisaical tradition. Because the truth is I see a lot of Christian preachers today that I think are quite predatory. I think they tie up heavy burdens, and they are legalistic, and they weigh that down on people, and I think that's not good for people. I think it makes them feel more shame. I think it drives them farther away from the grace of God, that when understood properly, helps us to know ourselves as completely loved, which frees us from shame, which slowly helps us to understand that we don't need the unhealthy practices that we've been part of, the sin that we have cultivated in our lives.
Jeremy Duncan:It helps us to walk away from that. But my critique of those Christian preachers, those Christian traditions that I think are unhelpful, are not my way of saying that I believe Christianity is inherently predatory or is inherently bad. I think the way of Jesus is the way to God. I think the way of Jesus is the way that we find our true value and and grace in our lives. But because of that, I want to call out the expressions in my tradition that I feel are inappropriate.
Jeremy Duncan:The fact that I see Jesus doing that in an intra communal debate with people that he sees as unhelpful, actually to me reinforces the affirmations where Jesus is closely aligned with that pharisaical tradition. Now again, I don't think Jesus was a Pharisee. He's an itinerant preacher from the north. He's poor. I don't think he aligns himself with a particular group, but what I see is a Jesus who sees himself a part at a long tradition of debate, dialogue, critique, affirmation.
Jeremy Duncan:Someone who is within the community working to reform the community and to drive it closer to God. As a Christian who comes along 1000 of years later, I, of course, believe that Jesus is the fullest expression of how we get to God. Jesus is the divine, fully present for us to understand, but to see that divine expression in dialogue, in community, pushing and pulling and working to reform our perspectives on God is actually something I take great value in. Now there's a couple misconceptions of the pharisaical tradition that I think are important for Christians to understand and to incorporate into our, reflections on the Gospels and what we see there, but also our Jewish neighbors and the rabbis down the street from us who are absolutely going to see themselves as a descendant of the pharisaical tradition. So first of all, the term Pharisee.
Jeremy Duncan:There are 2 theories etymologically on where that word comes from. The first is to separate a verb. The second is to interpret. And that comes from Parush or Parushim, which would be a a plural noun derivative of of that verb to interpret. And, it's debated on where it comes from.
Jeremy Duncan:I think the second has, probably a stronger case, But I do think, importantly, what we should understand is the Pharisees did not see themselves as separated from the common people. They may have seen themselves as separated in the sense of being holy or called to be holy, just like the early Christians believed themselves to be holy ones and separated ones. But this was not a way of being elitist, that we are separated from the common people. In fact, they were a very populous group that was innovating in ways to make the common people feel separated in the sense of holy, or to interpret in the sense of being part of a tradition that was making sense of the word of God in the time and space that they were occupying and living in. So first of all, even that term Pharisee is is not a is not meant to separate the Pharisees from the common people.
Jeremy Duncan:It's it's meant to be, an invitation to all the people that they were teaching. Second, I think we want to think about what we mean by religious authorities, because the Gospels actually make a distinction. In in John, for example, he talks about the Pharisees and the religious authorities. That's because the Pharisees were not in any way an authority, either politically or religiously in the 1st century. They had no control over anyone.
Jeremy Duncan:If people follow the teachings of the Pharisees, that was completely voluntary. Now they may have given them respect. They may have given them relational authority, but the Pharisees had no position to impose that on anyone. If anything, it was the Sadducees that were the group that had some authority because they controlled, the temple and the practices that happened therein. The Pharisees, if they had any authority over people, was strictly relational and strictly given by the people who chose to follow them.
Jeremy Duncan:And so when Jesus critiques the religious authorities, that is different from when he is critiquing the Pharisees, and we should understand those those 2 different groups, and what Jesus is talking about when he confronts them. The third, I think one of the big misconceptions is that the Pharisees were very rigid and they put a lot of burdens on people and the people resented them for that. Well, certainly some Pharisees very much did tie up heavy burdens and weigh people down and Jesus is quite critical of that just the same way I would be quite critical. A very legalistic Christian teachings today, but that is not a reflection of the whole tradition. That is a critique Jesus puts on specific teachers that he thinks are not worthy of being followed.
Jeremy Duncan:And again, that critique being applied to the whole is an oversimplification and and a gross misinterpretation of of the words that he says. At the same time, those practices that most people accepted from the Pharisees were again seen as an invitation to provide more meaning to the common person, and to invite the common person into the holiness, and the holy practice, and the separation, as as being set apart that used to be preserved only for the priests. It was a way of inviting all of us into that heart of connection in preparation for God, and that's something that Jesus does as well. We see him very early in his ministry take the practice of the Mikvah, or the ritual cleansing, baptism, and turn that into a repentance of sin, and a cleansing of the heart, and preparing of our inward ways to encounter God. That's what happens when he's baptized.
Jeremy Duncan:That's a very similar idea to what the Pharisees are doing. Jesus just wants that to be an invitation and a welcoming approach and not something that ever starts to feel like a burden that's being put on someone. But at the heart of it, I think it's very similar, and this is important because it leads into a second piece here. I think often we think of the Pharisees as putting shame on people for being clean or unclean. And that's, you know, a very understandable misreading for those of us who've grown up in Western culture.
Jeremy Duncan:Today in modern culture, we understand clean and unclean as having a moral element to it because we know that unclean means dirty, and there's hygienic reasons behind why we wash our hands and we stay clean and all that becomes very important. There is a moral element to it. In the 1st century clean and unclean did not carry moral weight to it. It was simply a sociological or a societal way of preparing yourself to encounter God. And here's a couple examples here.
Jeremy Duncan:When a woman was menstruating, she was deemed unclean. When a woman gave birth, she was deemed unclean for a period after that. No Jewish teacher in the 1st century would ascribe a negative moral value to either menstruation or birth. Those were seen as part of the cycle of life and procreation, and were seen as something quite beautiful and welcome. It was strictly a process of there are things in your life that make you unclean, and you then go through a process of preparing your heart, rededicating yourself to enter back into the presence of God.
Jeremy Duncan:It was just part of the cycle of worshiping God. You become unclean, you prepare yourself and you become clean. This is a moral judgment. And sometimes we get negative about the Pharisees because we think they are scribing negativity to people when they say, hey, you must go through this process of becoming clean again. That's not their intent.
Jeremy Duncan:Their intent is just saying, hey, you should go through a cycle of preparing yourself, getting ready for God. And as example, I do this every time I preach. Part of my ritual is I take some time and I go down into our sanctuary and I walk through and I sit and I prepare pray and I prepare my heart to get ready, to share what I've been thinking about and to speak on behalf of our community is we bring ourselves into the presence of God. In no sense is it because I think that when I do that, I become a better person, a more valuable person, a more worthy person. It's just that I want to prepare myself regularly on a weekly basis to enter into the kind of, liturgy and work and offering that I I want to make on behalf of our community.
Jeremy Duncan:That's a better way to think of this ritual purity in the 1st century. It's not immoral moral. It's clean unclean. It's unprepared prepared. It's just a cycle that that they understood socially in that.
Jeremy Duncan:And so I don't think what Jesus is critiquing is that unclean clean paradigm. What he's critiquing is the ways that that can sometimes be construed as weight or shame that's put on someone. He wants to free us from all of that. The same way that I think he wants to free me from feeling like I have to go through certain steps to be worthy of God. No.
Jeremy Duncan:I go through those steps because they're a way of demonstrating both to God and to myself that I want to be ready. I want to hear. I want to listen. I want to learn. That's good for us.
Jeremy Duncan:Praying the Lord's Prayer every day is good for us, but not because it makes us more morally or valuably worthy of God. It's it's just that preparation of our heart. And so I think it's important that we understand that distinction as well when it comes to the Pharisees and Jesus critiques and affirmation of their teachings. And then finally, I just want to reinforce this idea that the Pharisees are not monolithic. There were Pharisees that really wanted to learn from Jesus, really wanted to incorporate his insights into their way of approaching the divine.
Jeremy Duncan:There were Pharisees that saw Jesus as a threat to their power structures that they had built up over time, just the way that a lot of Christian influential pastors today see any challenge to their authority as a threat. That is part of how humans allow their ego and their aspirations to overtake the goodness of God. That is not to say that Jesus does not see himself as part of a community working to reform and to point that back to the very heart of the divine, the very way of God in the world. And I think the same way that we see Jesus critique and affirm, challenge, and welcome, engage in dialogue, but ultimately chart his own ways toward God is the kind of way that we should, interact with our Jewish neighbors around us. There's a reason that I'm a Christian.
Jeremy Duncan:I follow the way of Jesus. There's a reason that I haven't converted to Judaism, because I see the world through the lens of Jesus. I see it differently than the Jewish tradition, but that doesn't mean that I want to caricature my Jewish neighbors, or that I ever want to misrepresent what they actually believe about God and their path in the world. And in fact, being a Christian who follows a Jewish man who led me on my path towards God, who comes out of the Jewish tradition, there is so much that I can learn about Jesus and that I can learn about the path of the Christian tradition by listening to and being willing to sit at the feet of my Jewish neighbors. There are still gonna be differences.
Jeremy Duncan:That's okay. But when we hold them open handed, and we hold them with grace, and we go into those conversations, not using a word like Pharisee as a pejorative, which is already going to put us at odds with our Jewish neighbors who are going to see their rabbi as a descendant of the pharisaical tradition, then we can actually enter that tradition humbly, willing to learn. But also, of course, following the way of Jesus is the ultimate guide that we believe is going to lead us to the very heart of God. But that kind of humility to listen, to learn, but also not to caricature our neighbor or to see them as a cartoon villain, but to see them as full human beings with tradition, with history, as part of a long history of people who have continued to explore and wrestle with the way of God. I think this is not only kind, but a way that will help us to see Jesus with a lot more clarity, a lot more nuance, and also to read our Gospels with a lot more open eyes than perhaps we have in the past.
Jeremy Duncan:But probably the best way to think about Jesus' relationship to the Pharisees is an intra communal dispute. Not as someone lobbing stones from the road. Jesus is someone who is part of this community, loves this community, and is working to reform this community and move it forward.