Br. Curtis Almquist

Matthew 15:1-2, 10-14

Jesus was a Pharisee.[i] We cannot know this for sure; however, Jesus was not a priest, so he was certainly not a Sadducee. And given how much Jesus enjoyed dinner parties and the company of women, he was certainly not an Essene, who were monastics in the desert. And given he was not a warrior, he was certainly not in the company of the Zealots. If we presume he had been formed by the Pharisees, this helps explain why the Pharisees get so much press from Jesus, often bad press. Jesus knew Pharisees inside out.

Pharisees were very attractive to multitudes of people. They were rigorous in their observance of the Sabbath and days of festival, of tithing, and of dietary practices. They believed that bad things happened to bad people; they believed in angels; they believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead, in the coming of a Messiah, and the ingathering of God’s faithful at the end of time.[ii]  Pharisees were single-minded in their devotion to God, every day devoting set hours for study, work, and rest.[iii] They knew they were “right,” which means “righteous” in a religious sense.[iv] Especially in a time of anxiety and political unrest, the Pharisees attracted many followers. They were compelling conservatives … which may sound familiar to today.

The Pharisees’ issue with Jesus’ disciples not handwashing before meals was about spiritual hygiene. One could become spiritually soiled in a marketplace by touching an unclean person or unclean thing. That contact would render impure the food the Pharisee subsequently touched. Pharisees washed their hands before, during, and after eating, thereby retaining purity, undefiled. Clearly, Jesus knew about this handwashing practice. Jesus turns the principle of the practice inside out saying, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”

Jesus decries the Pharisees’ keeping up appearances, meanwhile their oblivion to what was going on inside their souls – their arrogance, their damning judgment of those not like them, their indifference to the poor and needy, the “other” people whom Jesus knew also have a place in the heart of God.

The Pharisaical movement died out, but not the fuel rod. We witness today the genocide happening in Gaza and the Sudan; the insidious racism in our own country, the forcible extraction of people who are resident aliens, the building of yet more prisons to make the unwanted disappear. People clinging to their personal power often wash their hands of poor, powerless people.

And yet there is another group of “arch conservatives” with whom I can readily identify. This other group of conservatives are those who in actuality are liberals, liberals who have little-to-no tolerance or respect for anyone who sees things differently. “Conservative liberals.”

Our baptismal pledge to “respect the dignity of every human being” means, at the very least, to listen to one another.[v] It is very difficult to listen when one is dodging stones. And we should hear Jesus’ words to “love our enemies,” which he said in a political context very similar to the upheaval in our own country and our world.[vi] Love our enemies, or at least to pray for love for our enemies. They will certainly not change-for-the-better by our hate. Alongside our prayer and our listening, we must also work for what we can do on behalf of the least, and the last, and the lowly – the anguished multitudes of our own country and our world – to redress the injustice, poverty, and unconscionable suffering which is their daily bread.

[i] The New Testament scholar, Raymond Brown, S.S.: An Introduction to the New Testament (1997), p. 80. Brown quotes Rabbi Harvey Falk in Jesus the Pharisee; A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus (1985), who sees Jesus as a Pharisee of the Hillel persuasion.

[ii] This according to Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J.: The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to Luke 1-9, (1981), p. 581.

[iii] The Order of Carmelites – www.ocarm.org/lectio – on Luke 11:37-41.

[iv] The etymology of the word “righteous” comes from the Old English rihtwis: morally right persons, just, upright, sinless, conforming to divine law.

[v] “The Baptismal Covenant” in The Book of Common Prayer (1979), pp. 304-305.

[vi] Matthew 5:43-48; Luke 6:27-36.