A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Jesus said, woe to you scribes and pharisees, you frauds. Now remember, they were the leaders of the people. They were the the prestige. They were the elite.
And Christ says, woe to you scribes and pharisees, you frauds. You shut the doors of the kingdom of god in men's faces, neither entering yourselves nor admitting those who are trying to get in. Woe to you scribes and pharisees, you frauds. He repeats it. You travel oversea and overland to make a single convert.
But once he is converted, you make a devil of him, twice as wicked as yourselves. Now just keep in mind this business of Christ being a good man alone in talking this way. He says our lord says, it is an evil day for you, blind guides. You declare, if a man swears by the temple, it means nothing. But if he swears by the gold of the temple, he is obligated.
Blind fools. Which is more important, the gold or the temple which makes it the gold sacred? Again, you declare, if a man swears by the altar, it means nothing. But if he swears by the gift on the altar, he is obligated. How blind you are.
Which is more important, the offering or the altar which makes the offering sacred? The man who swears by the altar is swearing by it and by everything on it. The man who swears by the temple is swearing by it and by him who dwells there. The man who swears by heaven is swearing by god's throne and by him who is seated on that throne. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. There has been, and I guess there still is, a strong movement on the part of some Jewish leaders in our day to soften the significance that the word Pharisee has come to have in most languages. I was going to say all, but that's a pretty big statement. But certainly in in many modern languages of the Western world, the word pharisee does not have a very favorable meaning.
One of the problems here is that very few of us have a concept of what a Pharisee truly was. Saint Paul was a Pharisee. A Pharisee the Pharisees were almost at the top the the top level of Jewish society, and they weren't all a bunch of hypocrites, a bunch of liars. And our lord's words to the contrary notwithstanding, they weren't all a bunch of frauds. Was Saint Paul a fraud?
So here's an instance. Look the word Jesuit up in your dictionary and see the meaning the word Jesuit has. Some Jesuits don't like that either. So we ought to be careful about this word, Pharisee. On the other hand, this idea of softening reality, of negating facts or blinding ourselves to facts is ridiculous.
It's absurd, and it is lying and is it is being hypocritical. And I'm referring, for example, to the efforts that were made to revise the Oberam and Gall passion play to soften its impact. Well, if you if you begin with the four gospels of Jesus Christ, there's where you begin, and you shouldn't begin by rewriting them. And so when you come to these texts of our blessed lord where where he speaks out so bitterly, he scarcely ever, I don't know, maybe he never has a good word for for the scribes and the pharisees. The word has become a synonym for hypocrite.
Now why? You see, here's the problem. We we have we have the testimony of the New Testament itself that there were good, god fearing, sincere, authentic, honest pharisees. We have the we have evidence right in the New Testament for it, but it isn't much. But it's a lot when you when you when you think of that one of those pharisees was Saint Paul who was no mean character and who has played no mean position and role in the spread of the good news.
He is the apostle of the Gentiles, but he was a Jew and a Pharisee. It's possible that John the Baptist was a Pharisee, possible, and there are others. But the thrust of our lord's words are to the is to the generality, as any general statement is should be understood. It should not be understood in an absolute universal sense. And in that sense, our blessed lord was absolutely scathing, absolutely scathing in his remarks, his criticisms, his judgments on the pharisees.
And today you have an example of it. He not only calls them frauds once, he calls them frauds several times. And keep this in mind, he is talking about the cream of the cream. These are not only the leaders of the people as churchmen, they were also responsible for the civil order. They were men of education and of culture.
They were men of high position, the highest. They were men of great dedication. They were men of absolute, or they tried to be, fastidiousness about the law, about the law as they understood it. And when you use the word law, keep in mind you're not talking about those 10 naked commandments that Moses got on some mountain. You're talking about thousands, thousands of observances which had grown up over the centuries around the different commandments.
And the so what was what was wrong with these men? Take the pharisee who came into the temple to pray, and he comes up right to the altar, and he starts telling god what a good man he is. Read it. And you say, gods, I wish I were that good. So what was wrong with these men that our blessed lord was so bitter about them?
Look at this text today. There was something wrong. There was something radically radically wrong. Christ never used this kind of language for sinners and for some first rate sinners. Never.
You don't find a word like you don't find anything like this as regards Christ's relationship with any kind of sinner. So you see, this is this ought to hit us right between the eyes. What was wrong with these pharisees and these scribes? All I can say is all I can see is what Christ said was wrong. They had lost themselves in things separated from god, and it can happen to us all.
There's a story, I think it's it may be Barry. I think it's one of Barry's stories, where Barry has a husband and wife who are no longer as young as they were when they were married. But they're very devoted to each other. The wife falls down and breaks her leg. And in the process of her recuperation, her husband very tenderly and very carefully, very thoughtfully gets a little footstool so she can prop her leg up on it.
And in that way, her convalescence was speeded up. But the gist of the story, and I forget all about it except this one point, is that long after the leg has completely healed, long after the good lady is up and about and running around, he is still putting the stool under the leg. See, it's lost its meaning, but he's still going through the forms. And that's what can happen to religion. Some people have said the may the worst enemy of religion is religion.
This can be true. This can be true. We can have the shell without any peanut inside. Now you go back and read again the oration for this mass that we pray to god that we may have a a a correct a value of the change of the things of this changing world. That that prayer of this mass, it can be a whole philosophy of life.
Now we're praying to god that we will have that. Why do we pray? It means that we need it. It means that we may not have it. It means that we can lose it.
It we it can mean that we never had it, an evaluation of the changing things or the things of this changing world. Now remember, as long as we are human beings in this world, we live with things. You don't see god visibly present. You don't see spirit. You don't touch it or feel it or taste it or smell it.
And when you do, you better ask yourself, what's wrong with me? Now this is a fact. And we we you take the third the third chapter of Daniel where where he he begs all of creation to praise god. That's fine. But you can lose yourself in the things and forget the cause to god because the things are so real.
And as far as I can make out, that's the that's the sad story of these pharisees. They got so lost in form that they forgot the substance. They got so lost in things, in in manipulating things of this world that the original idea and purpose and motive and goal or reason for doing all of this was lost, It was lost. Just the observance of Sunday, how do you preserve Sabbath? There were thousands of regulations about it.
You could scarcely move without and notice if you broke one of them, then you were unclean. It was very easy to become unclean in Jewish law, believe me. You had to even have your well, you I don't know whether you do or not, but it's absolutely fantastic. So that I say again, the practice of religion is necessary, absolutely necessary. We're most of us are not angels yet.
We are human beings in this world using things, and the best we can do is to pray to almighty god that we will never lose sight of him in them. Name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.