Woe To The Pharisees
WOE TO THE PHARISEES
LUKE 11:33-44
The Pharisees were so preoccupied with the tiny details that they neglected the important things.
Verses 33-36. This passage looks like a fragment of the Sermon on the Mount. The Lord’s teaching, like all good teaching, was repetitive, and this period of his ministry was one of arduous teaching, preaching and controversy. The light was most certainly not hidden. From Galilee down to Jerusalem the light was shining, openly, clearly and with no attempt at concealment. So should the Christian shine in the world’s murk, and the smog of a self-poisoned society.
The strange saying about the eye touches another aspect of truth. There were many blind in Palestine. Bartimaeus was waiting down at Jericho. The light of heaven’s sun was blazing in the Jordan Valley, and sharpening the shadows of all Jericho’s palms and balsam trees. Bartimaeus saw nothing. His eyes were not functioning. If light is to flood the mind, the eye must receive and interpret the conditions without. God’s grace is the waiting illumination of the sun. The eye is the faith which receives. Where grace and faith meet, at that point is salvation.
11:37-44. The washing which the Lord omitted was not a simple act of cleanliness. It was the ceremonial of the Pharisee, a ritual act, ordained and regulated to the smallest detail by the complicated laws which the Pharisees had invented. The amount of water was specified, the movements and attitudes by which it was poured from finger-tip to wrist, and the manner in which hand was rubbed in hand. The regulations governing the cleanliness and uncleanness of tableware were equally detailed. This was the clutter of nonsense which the Lord treated with contempt.
Pharisaism, as his denunciation shows, had much to say of rule and regulation, little about the positive duties of mercy and love. It is still active in the world. To reduce religion to a set of prohibitions and attitudes, while neglecting the committal of the whole person to Christ, is a common fault of man. To judge another for non-conformity with rules and man-made demands which have no root or sanction in Scripture is a by-product of the same pernicious attitude. And yet the Pharisees began well. Thanks to them, in the stern days of exile, the Law was garrisoned and kept. But human institutions can introvert, become an end in themselves, lose their spirit, and perish.