Pharisees vs Saints
**Rowland Croucher**
law’ – are sinners who do not want to change; Pharisees do not know
they’re sinners – and also do not want to change; Saints know they’re
sinners and do want to change. I see vestiges of all three attitudes in
myself...
Remember saints are not proud of what they’ve ‘achieved’ – they are/have
nothing not already given. Pharisees tend towards hubris: their
cleverness (they think) is mainly of their own making...
Saints sincerely believe ‘God hasn’t finished with me yet’. Pharisees
are stuck where they were: they find it difficult to say (of an idea,
for example): ‘Hey, that’s interesting... I must do more thinking about
that. Maybe God is in this new thought.’
Christian Pharisees mainly preach from Paul (an ex-Pharisee) – and
resonate with his judgmental passages. Saints tend to centre on the
parables of Jesus, and especially the Sermon on the Mount: so the
epistle of James, our Lord’s brother, who exposed Judaistic legalism, is
their favourite. They love this: ‘The wisdom from above is first pure,
then peaceable , gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good
fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And the harvest of
righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace’ (James 3:17,18).
Saints earth their missional imperative in Jesus’ mandate in Luke
4:18-19 (mission is compassion and justice, and more than words).
Pharisees prefer Matthew 28:18-20 (authority, go, teach, baptize): they
are polemical, adversarial (I’m here to change your thinking/behaving).
Pharisees are conformists: and desperately need others to be/believe
like them. (Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge suggests that the source
of our convictions lies more in social pressures than in independent
thinking about the pros and cons of an idea. Peter Berger - Invitation
to Sociology - writes about our being a prisoner or a puppet in the
society which controls our behaviour, attitudes and faith).
(I haven’t been able to read the responses to these little homilies, but
if anyone reacts totally negatively, they are declaring themselves: like
the Pharisees in Jesus’ day, they will avoid the central issues and
attack the person – as an idiot, ignorant, ‘of the devil’ etc. ). The
saint’s reflex question is ‘Lord is it I?’ believing that God has yet
more light and truth to break forth from his Word. Pharisees prefer
point-scoring.
Only one thing is important: to be a saint.
More – much more – to come...
Other articles in this series: see http://tinyurl.com/4zqqus
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Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/ (20,000 articles 4000 humor)
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