Pharisee
The very name, Pharisee, is a byword for hypocrisy, aloof disdain and pettifogging adherence to arcane and meaningless ritual, but it’s worthwhile remembering that when Jesus went against them, He was taking a considerable risk. Not in worldly terms, because the Pharisees were not temporally powerful in ancient Israel, something which often surprises people these days; it’s been forgotten that in the time of Christ, they were a favoured and popular group among the Jews. That’s something else that surprises many people as well, but it’s true, and there was good reason for it.
As a group, they dated back to the time of the Seleucid Empire, some three hundred years before the events of the Gospels. Unlike the later Roman conquerors, who had a live-and-let-live mentality when it came to the religious philosophies of their subjects, the Seleucids were an actively Hellenizing force who not alone came into conflict with the Jews, but caused a significant sociological chasm to develop between those who were prepared to accept the changes, and those who were not. That chasm ran along classic lines of “elites v common people”, and in this division, the Pharisees were firmly on the side of the people.
They are most remembered from that period through 1 Maccabees 2, when they refused to fight on the Sabbath and were slaughtered. Their deaths sparked a reconsideration of whether or not it was permissible to fight on the Sabbath, the priest Mattathias successfully arguing that it was. The sacrifice of the Pharisees ultimately led to the rebirth of Israel, at least until the Roman conquest, but their courage was remembered by the Jews and gained them much credit.
This credit grew exponentially when compared to the Sadducees, of whom more anon, but the period between the two empires is the seed bed of the Pharisees’ growth, and added to their kudos amongst the people at large. The reasons for this are arguable, but one – a subject not much in vogue these days, even in quarters where maybe it should be – is holiness. It’s a curious thing that, even today, many men will give a year’s salary to build a church, but think hard of spending money on a new coat, and a certain grudging admiration is still given to people like Francis of Assisi by people like Margaret Thatcher. How much more curious that such attitudes should be prevalent among people like the Jews of the Bible, whose existence would have been considerably more precarious and uncomfortable than our own. Are we hardwired for holiness? Are there things we value beyond bread?
Maybe so, for while Christ did excoriate the formalism of the Pharisees’ displays of holiness, He never excoriated holiness itself.
Then Jesus spoke to the multitudes and to his disciples, Saying: The scribes and the Pharisees have sitten on the chair of Moses. All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do: but according to their works do ye not; for they say, and do not. For they bind heavy and insupportable burdens, and lay them on men's shoulders; but with a finger of their own they will not move them. And all their works they do for to be seen of men. For they make their phylacteries broad, and enlarge their fringes. And they love the first places at feasts, and the first chairs in the synagogues, And salutations in the market place, and to be called by men, Rabbi. But be not you called Rabbi. For one is your master; and all you are brethren
Matthew 23 1-8
This seems rather schizophrenic if holiness is not important. Do what they say, but not what they do? What’s going on here?
II
To understand this, you need to understand what holiness actually is. We hear the word these days and we immediately think unctuous self-righteousness or, at best, an ascetic religiosity, but that’s not what it means. The Catholic Encyclopaedia defines the word as having two aspects which have become obscured due to inconsistent translation in the Latin Vulgate. The Vulgate is an imperfect rendering because it uses one one Latin word, Sanctitas, interchangeably to convey two distinct, though not entirely separate ideas from the original Greek scriptures: hagos, referring to that which is different, set aside or reserved (like the holy vessels on the altar), and hosios, that which is sanctioned by a higher law, especially the divine law.
When one separates oneself in the name of holiness, the immediate reaction of others is often that we are being holier than thou, but the true goal of separation is to draw the mind away from the world and towards God. Consider: is it wrong for a priest, when reading the Gospel aloud at Mass on Sunday, to read it from an iPad? Well, strictly speaking, no, yet the very idea is somehow distasteful to us. Why? Possibly because iPads can be used for any number of things, pornography being the most obviously repellent, and we do not wish the Word of God to be contained in the same vessel as these worldly things. We wish it to be hagos, set aside or reserved for no other purpose, that the Word may draw us towards the Speaker. This is where the Pharisees went wrong. The Catholic Encyclopaedia says of them that, “a growing sense of superiority to the heathen and idolatrous nations among whom their lot was cast came to be one of their main characteristics. They were taught insistently to separate themselves from their neighbours.” But with true hagos, if there is separation from your neighbours, it is incidental; it should never be an end in itself.
Still, under the yoke of the Roman Empire, it’s easy to see how the Pharisees would have a high status in a “keepers of the flame” sort of way, yet Jesus repeatedly warns against them. What’s going on here? A clue may be found in Matthew 15 21-28
And Jesus went from thence, and retired into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. And behold a woman of Canaan who came out of those coasts, crying out, said to him: Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David: my daughter is grievously troubled by the devil. He answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying: Send her away, for she crieth after us: And he answering, said: I was not sent but to the sheep that are lost of the house of Israel. But she came and adored him, saying: Lord, help me. Who answering, said: It is not good to take the bread of the children, and to cast it to the dogs. But she said: Yea, Lord; for the whelps also eat of the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters. Then Jesus answering, said to her: O woman, great is thy faith: be it done to thee as thou wilt: and her daughter was cured from that hour.
This is weird on so many levels. Usually, the first – and only – thing we notice about this paragraph is the use of the word “dogs” to describe gentiles. We’ll get back to that, but first, does Jesus not here seem to be separating himself from the Canaanites? “I was not sent but to the sheep that are lost to the house of Israel.” On its face, this would actually seem to put Jesus in the same camp as the Pharisees. Read it again: at first, He even refuses to answer her at all, let alone cure her daughter. He only does so after His disciples urge Him to send her away. Some might interpret that as an irritated response, just to stick it to His disciples, yet why be irritated at all? Sending her away would only be the logical culmination of a refusal to deal with her. There’s something more happening here.
One thing that may not be immediately apparent is the humour of the exchange. As I remarked in my previous essay on Judas, we don’t often associate humour with Jesus, but He was completely human; it’s not unreasonable to assume He had some sense of fun. Every human does. But where’s the humour here? If someone called me a dog after I’d asked for help, I’d likely slope off in a huff, assuming I didn’t smack him a left-hander first, but that is not what the woman does. She continues to plead with Jesus for His help. You could put this down to desperation, but could you not equally ascribe it to that paradoxical, often unspoken, language which sometimes passes between people when they trust and understand each other spontaneously? It’s more commonly seen between men, where we regard it as banter, and when it does cross the gender line it can seem almost flirtatious. If that’s what was happening, then Jesus was conveying two things. The first was to the woman. He was drawing out her faith and telling her that her daughter would be cured because of it. Perhaps she understood this instinctively. Perhaps she just realised he was teasing, which would explain her response in kind, referring to herself and her fellow gentiles as “whelps”.
The second was to His disciples. Was He using the word “dogs” for their benefit? You could write a thesis on this, but in fact, the best way to understand it is to realize that, under the influence of the Pharisees, the Jews would routinely use the word “dog” to reference any gentile. It was a contemptuous attitude, and it was actually considered ceremonially unclean among some Jews just to be in a gentile’s presence, a taboo so strong that Paul had to publicly rebuke Peter at Antioch for refusing to eat with gentiles before the early Church could even begin to overcome it. (Galatians 2:11) Does this sound like the Jesus Who asked for water from the Samaritan woman (John 4 7-10), or Who cured the servant of the centurion? (Luke 7 1-10)
The solution lies in the word He is actually recorded as using in the original Greek text, kunarion. Kuon, the word commonly used to refer to gentiles, does carry a contemptuous charge. It means something like a wild dog, a rabid beast, but the closest translation in English for kunarion would be something like “puppy dog”, or “pet dog.” This completely changes the connotation. In fact, Jesus was teaching His disciples a vitally important lesson by demonstrating the faith of the Canaanite woman to them. By His silence to her, He was actually talking to them. He was rebuking them. I would go so far as to say, He was shaming them. “Is this not how you would have Me treat the gentiles?”
But if it is shameful to take such an attitude with gentiles, surely any separation from others is equally shameful? Actually, no. In my previous essay on Judas Iscariot, I opined that when St John calls him a thief, as he does in 12:6, the theft he – John – was referring to was the theft of the glory of God. This is a hard lesson, but men seem to have extreme difficulty understanding that, while they may be as good as each other and anyone else, God is not anyone else, and no man is His equal. We may sell spikenard to feed the poor, but we may not steal it from God to do so, because God is better than us. His glory trumps our hunger, and to that end, there are certain things set aside for Him and, after a fashion, that includes us. Where the Pharisees went wrong was in failing to realize that it means all of us, not just one tribe. This is why they called gentiles dogs, and it’s why Jesus called them out on it in Matthew 15, above. Everybody is holy, or should be, because everybody belongs to God.
Thus, when Jesus tells his listeners, “All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do”, He meant what He said because the Pharisees were right, as far as that went. The problem was that they were forgetting the reason for separation, the second part of holiness, ie, that which is sanctioned by divine law. The Pharisees value did not lie in themselves, it lay in God’s ownership of them, and God owns everyone, even gentiles. Why is this so? Look at it this way. In the movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Harrison Ford finds the Holy Grail, it is itself a singularly unimpressive vessel made of base material, not one of the fabulous gold and silver cups that surround it. What made it special was that it contained the blood of Christ. The cup itself is of little consequence; any vessel can hold His blood, but the vessel that does hold it is holy.
III
If this is a tortuous explanation of an arcane matter, it is not unimportant in the light of the current civil war being fought for the Catholic Church, a war that can be reduced to a single question – what is Catholicism all about? Is it about “the Church of the poor”, as many Jesuits – among others – would have you believe?
This is Pope Francis, from 2019: Each individual Christian and every community is called to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully a part of society. This demands that we be docile and attentive to the cry of the poor and to come to their aid. The Church has realized that the need to heed this plea is itself born of the liberating action of grace within each of us, and thus it is not a question of a mission reserved only to a few…it means working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor, as well as small daily acts of solidarity in meeting the real needs which we encounter.
When you concern yourself with “the structural causes of poverty”, you’re a politician. That’s fine: get your teeth whitened and kiss all the babies you can find, but it’s not rendering onto God. It’s not what Catholicism is about. The first duty of the Christian is the salvation of his own soul; the “small daily acts of solidarity in meeting the real needs we encounter” is part of our spirituality, “working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty”? Not so much – the poor you will always have with you. That doesn’t mean you don’t care a rap about them, but you need to accept there’s not going to be any Earthly paradise. As good as we can make it, it’s never going to be great, and what’s good in this life is the incidental trail of grace we leave as we move through it. The poor are not the measuring stick of our virtue.
But the Pharisees were not the only ones to face Christ’s rebuke.
And in the hearing of all the people, he said to his disciples: Beware of the scribes, who desire to walk in long robes, and love salutations in the marketplace, and the first chairs in the synagogues, and the chief rooms at feasts: Who devour the houses of widows, feigning long prayer. These shall receive greater damnation.
And looking on, He saw the rich men cast their gifts into the treasury. And He saw also a certain poor widow casting in two brass mites. And He said: Verily I say to you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast into the offerings of God: but she of her want, hath cast in all the living that she had.
Luke 20 45-47, 21 1-4
The scribes sound a lot like the Pharisees, with whom they are often associated, but in fact, they were a strange, hybrid caste, somewhere between the people and the priests. Charged with the recording and interpretation of the law — theologians, in other words — they were respected by the people for their patriotic stand against the Seleucids, but on a par with the priests because of their education and wealth. It was almost inevitable that such a narrow and proud group should, being jealous of their standing, drift eventually into the orbit of the priesthood and degenerate into legalism and casuistry. It all has a very familiar ring to it, don’t you think? Which brings us to the Sadducees.
IV
Parallels are never exact, but maybe it’s worth taking a closer look. The Sadducees took their title from Zadok the priest, whose name meant, “to be right”, and from which one may surmise they were hard men to shift from a course once set. Hard, but not impossible. There are records of the Sadducees coming off second best in debate with the Pharisees, notably over the issue of Jewish succession law. This is somewhat involved, and the details not really pertinent to us today, but the core of the clash was the suspicion – probably justified – that the Sadducees were playing fast and loose with the rules to skim off disputed inheritances in their own direction, something they were in a position to do since their traditional role involved internal administration of the Jewish state and the gathering of taxes. This was curtailed somewhat after the Roman conquest, but they still had a finger in the pie.
To anyone familiar with the machinations of Catholic chanceries around the world – and most egregiously, in the US – this is a disquieting echo from history. Diamond Jim Brady leaves an endowment to the parish of St Aloysius. The parish thrives over the generations, but then suddenly, the local bishop decides to “merge” it, for which read, close it down and transfer its flock to a neighbouring parish. It is, of course, a complete and fortuitous coincidence that by so doing, the endowment Jim meant for St Aloysius’ now reverts to the diocesan chancery. God works in mysterious ways, yadda, yadda, yadda, and not just in the US. We see it increasingly too in the Vatican’s interest in traditional orders of nuns who are sitting on lucrative land banks in areas desirable for “development”, such as the Benedictine sisters at Pienza in Tuscany, who are living off donations from the faithful, having recently found their miniscule bank account frozen by the Church.
One could, of course, ascribe such villainy to individuals rather than institutions. It’s a classic question – do individuals corrupt the institution, or does the institution corrupt the individual; the significant difference between the Sadducees of ancient Israel and the institutional Church of today is that the Church does not actually mandate the shell-gaming of endowments or the blackguarding of nuns. It just seems to work out that way a lot of the time. The Sadducees, on the other hand, liked to live large and die comfortable, and they made no apologies for it. It was, in fact, something of a creed with them. Without getting too deep into their philosophy – difficult to do anyway, since they left no writings which survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD – they didn’t believe in an afterlife. There was a theological reason for this. One of the Sadducees, Antigonus of Sokho – whose Greek name suspiciously reflects the divided loyalty of the Sadducees – developed a doctrine mandating that one serve God without thought of reward, as a loyal servant labours for love of his master. Somehow, the subsequent Sadducees contorted this to mean there was no reward in Heaven, and this being so, one should live as well as one can in this life. You can see where a philosophy like this might lead, and unfortunately, this outlook, although recognizing God in the abstract, is dangerously close to a total lack of supernatural faith. In any event, it was a philosophy which fitted well with the prevailing Hellenistic spirit of the world at the time, but the Jews in general were...well, a little less enthusiastic. So, we have a high priesthood in thrall to the world – the Seleucid Empire, initially, and later the Roman – a bureaucratic class in thrall to the priesthood, and a laity who were out of patience with the pair of them. It’s a disquietingly familiar story to modern Catholic sensibilities, and you can see why the Pharisees might have gained an edge among the people.
The name Pharisee means something like “those set apart”, and they were noted for their ritualistic piety. “Apart” from what is not entirely clear. It could mean from the impurity of the gentiles or non-religious Jews, or it could mean specifically from the willingness of the Sadducees to treat with the world. Whichever it was, it does seem to be a reaction against something, and since there are always gentiles around, a reasonable speculation is that they formed in response to the corruption of the Sadducees and their “live fast, die fat” doctrine. This, of course, would seem to indicate that they thought of themselves as the good guys, yet their memory today is not a fond one, and their very name indicative of venality and unctuous insincerity, which is the cross the traditional Catholics of today find themselves labouring under. Is this fair?
Only if the traditionalists have made the same mistake as the Pharisees – have they set themselves apart because they look on others as dogs? I don’t think so. I think the Sadducees are back in control of the Temple. What I’m seeing from the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy is a deistic vision of God, a kind of cosmic watchmaker, on the eighteenth century model, disinterested in His creatures on the individual level. No senior Churchman would admit such a thing, of course, but I cannot explain the accelerating worldliness of the Church in any other terms. Simply put, Rome should not be interested in who sits in the Oval Office, and nor should it differentiate between the Democratic or Republican Parties, but it is and it does. Why? Because if God is an absentee landlord, to quote Al Pacino, then it’s up to the tenants to decorate the lodgings off their own bat, because you ain’t gonna be joining Him at the Big House, at least if we believe the Sadducees. And the traditionalists think that attitude is shameful. Are we right?
I say yes, we are. Separating from such a materialistic philosophy is no sin and very Catholic. The trick is to separate for the right reason, to remember it’s the philosophy one is separating from, not the Church and not the people in it, and to keep that reason to the front of your mind. That’s where the Pharisees derailed. They separated as an end in itself, or at least it became an end in itself – the first places at feast, the first chair at the synagogue, etc;. By a different route, exactly the same thing happened to the Sadducees: God is real, but when we die, we’re worm food, so eat, drink and be merry today.
It’s a very narrow path to tread, and it’s strewn with rocks and stones, but it can be done. Just ask the most famous Pharisee of them all, one Saul of Tarsus.