When one reads scripture without the gift of faith (an internal spiritual life, in communion with Christ), the Pharisees’ spiritual ailment will only be interpreted in an artificial and external manner. Thus, externals become the ipso facto measurement for whether a person is a legalist.
Likewise, those who bend the law to appeal to the mere emotional stasis of others, will be seen as “pastoral” and wrongly defined in their approach as “accompaniment”, while in reality it is “gradualism of the law,” which in laymen’s terms is lawlessness or enabling. As such, failing to recognize the soul, they only serve the interests of making someone “feel good” rather than to “be good” in the moral and spirit sense. Thus merely, in biblical terms, serving the flesh.
If all that we do is understood through the lens of a relationship with God (will, intellect and affect), then we can quickly see that the externals were never actually the problem. But I believe without the maturity of faith even in Holy Orders (as is possible since the Pharisees were in such roles of leadership), nothing can change our mind, except for us to encounter and grow in faith ourselves.
This is doubly difficult with us clergy, since it is harder to be honest with ourselves and others of the state of our faith, when we are in a position of leadership and conflate that with being spiritually superior to those we are meant to lead. Perhaps this in part raises the traditional adage that it is hard for clerics to be saved. If it was difficult for the rich, what of those rich in authority/power?
This post may help us to foster genuine accompaniment that doesn’t just accompany those left of Orthodoxy, but in a spirit of integrity, also those right of Orthodoxy. For right doctrine is only tenable when it is received in the context of an abiding interior relationship with God.
Our sympathies for one side and not the other demonstrate in part a defect. We must be sympathetic to all, and to do this we must see in totality the person in whatever state they find themselves in. Calling a group “Pharisees” may just be a way of dehumanizing and demonizing those we do not understand. We trivialize and fail to encounter their wounds, dismissing them as the epitome of scandal.
Like the man who pounded his own chest, we must humbly approach each person, regardless of our sympathies, with an evangelical zeal that places the abiding of a relationship with Christ as the fundamental interpreter of the application of any external or material manifestation of the faith.
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Photo: Yeo Khee, Unsplash / PD-US
