Jesus and the Pharisees
Throughout the gospels, Jesus and the Pharisees throw down—a lot. True, they don’t come to fist-to-cuffs, but their verbal exchanges are legendary. Who could forget Jesus’s curse-laden denouncement of the Pharisees in Matthew 23? All seven “Woes” are rough. Here’s an example:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell [Gehenna] as yourselves. (Mt 23:15)
“Curse you,” says Jesus, “for you expend enormous energy converting people to a hell-bound path—the same hell-bound path that you’re on!” Like I said, these condemnations are rough.
If Jesus condemns the Pharisees for making people children of hell, he also condemns them for keeping people out of the kingdom of God. His previous denouncement makes this clear.
But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in you stop them. (Mt 23:13)
For Jesus, the Pharisees are curse-worthy hypocrites—stage performers to use a mask to appear as someone else—whose theatrics bar people from the kingdom of God. Notice Jesus’s word choice. According to Jesus, the Pharisees lock people out of the kingdom, fail to enter the kingdom, and stop people who are actively going into the kingdom. Rather than making people citizens of God’s kingdom, the Pharisees make people children of hell…like them.
And now I reach a sobering truth: Most of my teachers and pastors never noted—let alone emphasized—that Jesus’ denouncing the Pharisees as hypocrites had anything to do with the kingdom of God.
I spent years attending church services, Sunday schools, and youth groups and heard nothing about how the Pharisees locked people out of a kingdom they hadn’t entered. Yes, it was there in the text. But my ecclesiastical instructors had interpretive frames that directed their attention and instruction elsewhere. Whereas Jesus focused on God’s Kingdom and decried the Pharisees for being agents of the anti-kingdom, my pastors and teachers focused on people’s personal relationships with God and decried being “religious,” “ritualistic,” or “tradition-bound.” Jesus sang, sorrowed, and cursed in a Kingdom key; my ecclesiastical instructors rarely reached a kingdom note.
The truth that I and many others—probably millions of others—have received a distorted vision of Jesus and the Pharisees terrifies me. I learned that Jesus and the Pharisees clashed but I didn’t learn why. And the “why” really matters: It’s an interpretive key for understanding Jesus of Nazareth. As N.T. Wright and Michael Bird explain:
The clash between Jesus and the Pharisees, therefore, must be seen in terms of two alternative political agendas, generated by the alternative eschatological beliefs of two competing renewal movements….The coming of the kingdom, as Jesus announced it, put before his Pharisaic contemporaries a challenge, an agenda: give up you interpretation of your tradition, which is driving you towards ruin. Embrace instead a very different interpretation of the tradition, one which, though it looks like the way of loss, is in fact the way of true victory, the way of the cross! It was this challenge, we suggest, which generated the heated exchanges between Jesus and the Pharisees and resulted in the plots against Jesus’ life. Jesus’ clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian [i.e., rejected God’s law], or because he believe in ‘grace’ and ‘faith’ while they believed in ‘justification by works’, but because his kingdom-agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic search for national purity and regional hegemony, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the proper vocations to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth.
Jesus and the Pharisees don’t simply disagree. They substantially disagree on central issues about God, politics, eschatology, and God’s Kingdom, and their competing movements carry and perpetuate these differences in lands and communities suffering under Roman imperial oppression and enormous social pressures to betray the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is no wonder that Jesus and the Pharisees regularly threw down.
But it is a wonder—and a terrifying one—that so many who teach and preach about Jesus rarely, if ever, note what I’ve shared. I fear that many, like the Pharisees, are blind guides who bar a kingdom they’ve never entered and make “converts” who are twice as much children of ghenna as themselves.
