Pharisees R US

I grew up despising the Pharisees. After all, in nearly every episode of the Gospels where they appear, they are Jesus’s implacable opponents. And Jesus Himself denounces them as hypocrites (Matt 23).

But in Jesus’s day, the Pharisees were widely admired for the strict adherence to the Law. And the New Testament itself presents a nuanced picture of the Pharisees. For instance, we know that Nicodemus, the leader who sought out Jesus early in His ministry and who later became a believer, was a Pharisee (John 3). And we know that there were believers in the early church who “belonged to the party of of the Pharisees” (Acts 15:5). But because so many of the Pharisees opposed Jesus and His message on legalistic grounds, the word “pharisaical” now carries only negative connotations of pious self-righteousness and judgmental hypocrisy.

Then one day it struck me: I am more like the Pharisees than I would care to admit.

• They were men of the Word.
• They sought to preserve the ancient traditions.
• Their blind spots were cavernous.
• They had turned spirituality into performance art.

In other words, I realized that I would have made a good Pharisee.

I was reminded of that unpleasant epiphany recently as I was thinking about Jesus’s parable of the lost son. Jesus told that story, along with two other stories of lost things found (the lost coin and the lost sheep, Luke 15), in response to the Pharisees who criticized Jesus for his social engagements with unsavory sorts.

But the story of the lost son doesn’t have a fairytale ending. After the prodigal comes to his senses and returns home in disgrace, and when the father graciously forgives him (he doesn’t even let him finish his confession!), the story turns to the elder brother’s sullen response.

If the Pharisees had been listening closely, they would have realized that when Jesus got to the elder brother, he was talking about them. He was inviting them to see what their reaction to Jesus’s unorthodox friendships looked like from God’s point of view.

You remember how the story goes: when the elder brother learns that their father has welcomed home his wayward brother – the same man who had disgraced the family in the community – the elder brother storms out in a cold fury.

The story ends sadly, not with the elder brother repenting and joining in the celebration of his lost brother’s return but with the father pleading for him to give up his resentment and self-righteousness and join the celebration.

There are two lost sons in Jesus’s story.

The rebellious son comes to repentance and returns to his father’s gracious embrace. But as the story ends, the dutiful son is on the outside looking in, lost in his self-righteous arrogance and resentment. He is lost in his own “far country,” his arrogant self-righteousness.

Since Jesus leaves the story there – with the father pleading with his son to relent and join the celebration – we don’t know if the elder brother did, after all, repent of his own sin and return to the father.

Which was precisely the point: the Pharisees were the elder son. Would they recognize and acknowledge their own sin and repent?

Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son explores this parable in great detail. Nouwen observes that repenting of wild rebellion is easier than repenting of self-righteousness.

The younger son’s rebellion was so obviously immoral that everyone could see that he was in the wrong. He was the last one to see what was obvious to everyone else all along; when he comes to his senses, he repents and he returns.

But Nouwen points out that the self-righteous arrogance of the older brother is intertwined with virtue in a way that makes it difficult for him to detect his sin and even more difficult to repent of it. All he can see is his own faithful service to his father; he doesn’t need to repent.

And thus, as I have meditated again on Jesus’s parable, this high-achieving, dutiful man of the cloth has had to come face to face with his own sin. I can see in the Pharisees –and now cannot unsee – an ugly reflection of my own sin.

Which explains the title.
 
Almost.

Paul, you may ask, it’s fine if you want to acknowledge that you have Pharisee-like tendencies, but why the plural in the title? Why “Pharisees R Us”?

I chose the plural partly because of the obvious play on words (“Toys R Us”) and partly because “Pharisee Am Me” would be awkwardly Yoda-like. But mostly I chose the plural because I believe that my malady is not unique. In fact, I believe that the same blind and arrogant pharisaism is a contagion that has made its home in many of our hearts.

In a church culture where we condemn sin and praise virtue, it’s easy to build a list of respectable sins that we are willing to overlook in ourselves, even as we roundly condemn the sins of others. In other words, it’s far too easy for us to reinforce our own collective self-righteousness.

I heard a story once about a pastor who told his deacon board that their next meeting would be in the local bar. The men sat there nervously in that unaccustomed atmosphere for an hour before the pastor said it was time to leave. Later one of the deacons asked why the pastor had insisted that they go through that weird exercise.

“I just wanted you to see what Sunday morning in church feels like for some people.”

Ouch.

“Pharisees R Us” indeed.

May God’s Spirit convict us of our own sin and bring us home from our own far country.

Persevere
Paul Pyle,
Pastor of Discipleship