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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