It’s usually common sense to follow
the direction of the king in Alice in
Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the
end: then stop.” But with today’s gospel, it seems best to go in the other
direction — to begin at the end, where Matthew tells us that Jesus said, “Unless
your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never
enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Okay, to get into the kingdom of
heaven I’ll have to be more righteous than those people. I hope they’re not
terribly righteous so that I won’t have too hard a job. And I think I remember
from some sermon, or maybe a Sunday school class — anyway, I remember that
Pharisees weren’t very good people. They were self-righteous and greedy and
hypocritical. This won’t be hard. I can be better than a Pharisee.
Not so easy after all
But no such luck. It seems that real
Pharisees weren’t all like that. Christians have sometimes caricatured them,
making them into cartoon villains, but Pharisees in general weren’t like that. As
with any group, some were hypocrites — the Greek word literally means “actors” —
just going through the motions of obeying God’s law. They enjoyed the acclaim
their appearance of piety gave them, and some apparently were concerned mostly
with benefiting themselves.
But most Pharisees were quite good
people. The whole point of being a Pharisee was to keep God’s law as carefully
as possible. They even had extra rules that weren’t in the Bible to be sure
they wouldn’t even get close to breaking God’s law.
So they worshiped regularly and in
the proper way. They would never use the Lord’s name in vain or commit adultery
becaus
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