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"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes, some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!'"
- Matthew 23:27-39
Over the course of the past two days, we've been reading Jesus' critique of the Pharisees and their practices. See They bind heavy burdens hard to bear; and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers for the beginning of this discourse in the temple at Jerusalem. Yesterday, we read Jesus' continuation: "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves. Woe to you, blind guides, who say, 'Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obliged to perform it.' Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold? And, 'Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obliged to perform it.' Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift? Therefore he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by all things on it. He who swears by the temple, swears by it and by Him who dwells in it. And he who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by Him who sits on it. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel! Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also."
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness." Jesus continues His thoughts from yesterday, regarding the difference between the inner life and the external life (and its focus) in the ways these Pharisees are living and practicing their faith. The great difference between internal reality and external appearance adds to the understanding of what hypocrisy is here. His focus, from yesterday's reading, is on the "inside of the cup and dish" -- a metaphor for ourselves.
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes, some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation." What I find interesting about this passage is the form of urgency of the messages of the prophets, wise men, and scribes sent by Christ: they come to save people from their own bad habits and practices -- to save those who are perishing, even the very ones who persecute, scourge, and kill and crucify them. The present inheritors of the places of those who persecuted the prophets of the past are the very ones who claim they would not have done so: and yet are about to do the same to Him (and others who follow).
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!'" This image of Christ as "mother hen" is a very important one, because in it we see His real response as One who is sent. He loves the people He is addressing, and they have failed so in their willingness (or unwillingness) to heed anything He has to teach. It's not a failure of love on His part, but a failure in the response to love ("you were not willing"). The time is up, His mission is complete. He will leave them (take His exodus) at their own hands.
It's interesting to think of how Christ phrases the role of the prophets and saints who are sent to those who persecute them. The real "energy" behind the sending is just that: to prevent their perishing, to save those who are their persecutors. Although God's mercy is infinite, what we find (in my opinion) through the Gospels is that there is a sense in which this mercy can be exhausted, and that is through our own choices not to hear, not to care, not to return and try to change. I believe that the "fire of love" -- in the image, perhaps, of the "fiery ones," the angels of God (most specifically, those who sing the Thrice Holy hymn, and are always in worship at God's throne) -- is a fire of love that seeks to purify, to "burn away" that which is not like the fire and cannot survive in that fire. In this fire of love that is pure holiness we find images that are part of the miraculous lives of saints, or even more powerfully, the burning bush which was not consumed, in which Moses encounters holiness, the I AM of God. The burning bush, for Christians, came to be a symbol for Mary: she who was visited by the Holy Spirit, but in her purity, never consumed. Purity, in Mary, is a profound inner spirituality, a kind of sense of the internal and external being one and the same, the opposite of hypocrisy. This sense of purity conjures up the image of the pearl of great price. Before modern innovations such as cultured pearls, a pearl found in nature was one of pure nacre: something that was the same on the inside as the outside. Again, an image that is the opposite of what Jesus describes here when He speaks of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, those who are like "whitewashed tombs" but are internally full of death and decay and "uncleanness." Let us consider, then, what the point of "holy fire" is: it appears in the saints to heal and purify, to have the effect of sanctifying, it lives in those who can stand in it and not be consumed. Just as a test for gold reveals impurities that burn in fire, this sense of holiness is that which conveys a kind of purity in which the fire of love only finds that which is like itself. In that sense, an image of that which will perish is one in which no love is found in it, no mercy, no sense of wanting to be like God at all. That is, no heeding of the call to turn back toward God; perhaps a sense that God is absent and will not see, particularly in those who wish to have all control themselves (see the parable of the wicked vinedressers). All this is to say that Jesus' criticism of the Pharisees isn't just for the Pharisees, but for all of us, for each of us. It's a way of understanding where we don't want to go, where we lose our way, and go the opposite direction of God's love and God's holy fire. Remember the image of the purity of body, soul and spirit in Mary -- or the pearl that is pure in the most profound sense of that word, with no inconsistency. This doesn't mean we are finished at some point, but rather that we are consistently on the journey of faith; we ask for the fire of God's love to show us the way to be like God, to grow in our understanding of that love and how we practice it and live it, and to allow it to do its work in us. That's just the path we want to be on.
