Hilton Head Island, SC – December 8, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Micah 5:18-24; Matthew 23:1-8; Matthew 23:29-39
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Thus you witness against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.” – Matthew 23:31
First, a few words about the word “religiosity.” My Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines religiosity as religion that is “excessively, obtrusively, or sentimentally religious.” Religiosity is religion that is too much, too showy, over the top, cloying. It is an off-putting, teeth-grinding, hypocritical sham. It is Elmer Gantry, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart in spades. It is religion that is all show and little substance.
Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the four Gospels will recognize that the primary theological enemies of Jesus were the scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and the temple priests. But the two groups who are most frequently mentioned are the scribes and Pharisees.
Over the centuries prior to and during the time of Jesus, Jewish religious leaders gathered to determine what each of the 600+ separate Old Testament laws meant. Opinions varied on these matters over time, and it became the duty of the scribes to write down what the sages decided, and further, to delineate in detail their rationale for what they said. But make no mistake about it: for this kind of Jew, the Torah, the religious law, was the be-all-end-all of religion.
The word “Pharisee” meant either “Separatist” or “Puritan.” In other words, the great majority of this particular kind of Jew deliberately separated themselves from all other Jews, whom they considered impure, because they didn’t follow every single dictate of the Torah as interpreted by the Pharisaically-recognized religious lawyers over the centuries.
It would be very misleading were any of us to suppose that Pharisees were common, because they weren’t. On the bulletin cover this morning is a quote from William Barclay, the famous 20th century Scottish New Testament scholar, who claimed that there were never more than 6000 Pharisees at any one time. I don’t know how he arrived at that figure, but I have such respect for Willie Barclay that if he said it, it must be so. But the point is this: a small group of extremist Jews made it their business to follow Jesus constantly and to confront him fiercely.
To understand who the scribes and Pharisees were is to compare them to groups that now are. They were the equivalent of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan or the Salafists of Egypt or Libya or the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Pharisees weren’t violent as some of these Muslim groups are, but they were every bit as fanatical. Among contemporary Christians they are like the strictest examples of Amish or the kind of people who, 30 or 50 or 100 years ago, established blue laws which forbade the sale of liquor or tobacco altogether, and kept business establishments of almost all varieties closed on Sundays. Some of us who by now are old-time South Carolina immigrants can remember when no alcoholic beverages could be sold anywhere in Beaufort County on Sunday. When that blue law passed into oblivion, no mixed drinks could be poured out of big bottles of booze on Sundays, but only very little, very expensive bottles. Further, you had to pay an additional tax to buy a mixed drink on Sunday. People who are devoted to religious laws like blue laws can create the most bizarre rationales for their cockamamie codes of behavior.
Among 21st-century Jews the people most like the scribes and Pharisees are the charedim of Israel. These ultra-orthodox people live entirely by themselves. They will not allow outsiders to come into their communities on Shabbat, nor will they allow their women to go out in public unless they are dressed in black from head to toe, preferably with a veil over their faces. Up until the last year or so, charedi men have refused to serve in the Israeli Defense forces. They spend their entire lives in study of the Torah, and they are paid to do so by the state of Israel. There are far more than 6000 of them, but nonetheless they are a small fraction of the total Israeli population. However, as with the Pharisees, the influence of the charedim far outweighs their numbers.
People of this religious ilk love to display their religiosity in public. I will never forget the first time I personally experienced this phenomenon. It was in 1975, and a group of seven Christian clergy, led by a wonderful Reform rabbi from Summit, New Jersey, were going to Israel for our first visit there. We flew on El Al, the Israeli national airline. When the sun arose over the Atlantic, a number of Orthodox Jewish men opened wide the shades on their windows, stood up in the aisle of the airplane, wrapped phylacteries around their arms and onto their foreheads, and began loudly to say their prayers, swaying back and forth as they did so. Mind you, it was 2 or 3 AM New York time, but by then it was 6 AM over the Atlantic, and these chaps always got up at sunrise to strap on their tefillin and say their prayers. At the time I was both awestruck and impressed by the quaintness. Now that I am old and crotchety, it just irritates me in retrospect. Why should the rest of us have to be awakened by these practitioners of ultra-religiosity, when we needed all the sleep we could get, especially crunched into the fetal position on El Al?
All people are free to practice their religion as they choose. But they have no right to try to force their religiosity onto the rest of us, through blue laws or Sharia law or any other such religious laws. They also are free to say that the rest of us are going to hell because we don’t do what they do, but they shouldn’t be allowed to make life hell for the rest of us in the process.
Now perhaps you understand better the reasons why Jesus was so opposed to the type of religion represented by the scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and priests, and conversely, why they were so opposed to the teachings of Jesus. To them, Jesus seemed to welcome outsiders and riff-raff, and many religious people look askance at outsiders and riff-raff. Even corrupt tax collectors and prostitutes were invited in, for heaven’s sake! What a theological travesty!
Trudy Yates, my conscientious Cotwolds clipper, sent me a long story from The Times of London about a secular Jewish teacher, Eve Harris, who took a job teaching English literature at a school for charedi Jewish girls in London. I am going to devote more sermon time to this than to a normal illustration, because it illustrates so well in 21st century terms what Jesus was up against in the 1st century. The school, Ms. Harris quickly discovered, was an institutionalized means of preventing the students from knowing what is going on outside the walls of their homes and their school. She wrote, “The result is a childhood preserved and extended to its full limits, not curtailed by worldly knowledge of adult things. What struck me most profoundly, as I compared the girls with the numerous 12 and 13-year-old I’d taught (some of whom had had children at that age) was that at 12, 13, 14, 15 these girls are still innocent.” If you believe the world is evil, you’d do everything you could to keep your children from being exposed to that evil, right? Well that’s what religious extremists have always done, regardless of what religion it is.
Eve Harris said the curriculum at the school was very carefully chosen and observed by the head of the department. Art books which had pictures of famous paintings of nudes had stickers over the offending parts. She wrote, “Once I found myself in assembly listening to a woman tell the girls that a married Jewish woman who allows even a strand of hair to show is responsible for the sins of the world.” You can hardly get more puritanical than that, can you?
Ms. Harris ended her piece in The Times with these sad and laconic words: “I came to find the censorship stifling and the sanctioned texts intensely dull. So I left the school, but the girls forever stamped themselves into my heart, contentedly living their lives in a glass bowl, while the rest of us scurried and hurried around them.”
There is something profoundly admirable and profoundly disturbing about people who take their religion to such isolated and isolating extremes. Jesus had high regard for some individual Pharisees, as we see from a close reading of the Gospels. Some scholars believe that Jesus himself may have been a Pharisee. But the tension of constantly doing theological battle with most of these men (and they were all men; there were no women allowed among them) took its toll on Jesus during the three years of his public ministry. It is mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausting for “open” reformers continuously to do battle with “closed” reformers.
Another clipping I received from Trudy Yates told of the new Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Ephraim Mirvis. He attended the Jewish festival of Limmud at the University of Warwick. Some of the leaders of the British Orthodox Jewish judiciary disapprove of this particular festival, because they believe many of the Jews who attend are not sufficiently Jewish. We might understand ultra-religious Jews frowning on any Jews having anything to do with Christians, Muslims, agnostics, or atheists, but isn’t it beyond the pale to frown on Jews who believe and act differently from ultra-Orthodox Jews? Yet this is exactly the situation Jesus constantly found himself in with respect to the scribes and Pharisees.
I was also sent a long obituary of Ovadia Yosef, the 93-year-old Chief Orthodox Rabbi of Israel. He also was the leader of the Shas Party, the Israeli political party for the most conservative religious Israeli Jews. He was a complex man, who bounced back and forth between very hard-line and occasionally moderate political and religious positions. For example, in 2010 he described the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas as “our enemies and haters. May they vanish from the world, may God smite them with the plague, them and the Palestinians, evil-doers and Israel-haters.” And yet it was Rabbi Yosef who said women should be allowed to wear long pants instead of only long dresses, and he approved of bat mitzvah services for Orthodox girls, unlike most Orthodox rabbis. The obituary said 700,000 people attended his funeral, 10% of the Israeli population, not all of them ultra-Orthodox my any means.
For better or worse, people who feel very deeply about religion are more likely to go at it hammer and tongs than are people who are moderate and open-minded in religion. This is why Jesus was so frequently locked in theological combat with the scribes and Pharisees. They thought he was anathema, and he thought they were anathema.
Those people for whom the term “religiosity” best describes their religious views tend very strongly to be exclusive in their thinking. That is, they want to exclude nearly everyone, even those who agree with them on some but not all issues, from their fellowship. They separate themselves from the world, because they think that the world and most of its inhabitants are apostate unbelievers, and they make it their business to have nothing to do with them. Those who practice religiosity wear their religion on their sleeves. I deduce that means it would be far better if they wore only sleeveless shirts or blouses.
People who take their religion seriously but never to excess tend to be inclusive in their thinking. They invite others to believe what they do, but they don’t beat them over the heads if they don’t, or can’t, believe it. They usually don’t wear their religion on their sleeves, and so they can wear sleeves. The irony is that the very strict keep their arms covered and the more moderate are more apt to show their arms. I guess it means that if you wear your religion on your sleeves you need to have sleeves to wear it on, or how else will anyone know what you believe?
Is it possible to have the zeal of the religiously very orthodox without also buying into their excessive thinking? That has always been a conundrum for people on both sides of that question. The excessively religious normally believe that their approach to religion is the only proper approach, whereas the less radical normally believe there are many paths to God, not just one very narrow one. If what Jesus is reputed to have said in the Sermon on the Mount is an accurate reporting of what in fact he did say, he may have been closer to the scribes and Pharisees in his manner of thinking than most of us. “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt. 7:13-14). Which is it?
The Gospels are not consistent in the portrait they paint of Jesus, but that is probably because they were written by human beings, and no human being can be entirely consistent. Nevertheless, the scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and temple priests are reported with sufficient frequency to be enemies of Jesus that surely he himself perceived them as enemies. Whatever else he was, Jesus of Nazareth was a dedicated theological debater, and he gave his all to a clear and compelling proclamation of what he considered to be the true nature of the dominion of God. Still, he could never truly be accused of religiosity.
When Jesus so frequently locked horns with the scribes and Pharisees, indirectly it became a factor which led ultimately to his crucifixion. Nonetheless it behooves Christians always to remember that it was not the scribes and Pharisees who killed Jesus. The Romans alone killed Jesus. But they did so with the outsized acquiescence of the scribes and Pharisees. It was not Jews in general who crucified Jesus, nor was it that small group of Jews who were his primary theological detractors. However, the scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and temple priests perhaps had enough political clout to convince a Roman governor to execute Jesus.
Pontius Pilate was determined to keep peace in Judea at all costs. Jesus represented no threat to Pilate nor to the status quo of Rome, and Pilate knew that. Possibly to the world status quo, but not to the status quo of Rome.
It is unfair to the theological enemies of Jesus and to the historical record to accuse them of being the executioners of Jesus. They strongly disagreed with Jesus, and he with them, but they could not and did not crucify him, despite the slant given in some of the Gospel accounts, especially the passion narrative in the Gospel of John.
Religion matters. Faith matters. Belief matters. As far as Jesus was concerned, however, extremist belief is not acceptable. But then, that message is not likely to offend the kind of folks who attend The Chapel Without Walls - - - thank God!