Gifts And Laws And Pharisees

Saturday of 22nd Week in Course

When somebody asks me how I am, I almost always answer, “grateful.” One of the big reasons I do that is what St. Paul teaches in our epistle today: “What do you have that you did not receive?” I know that any talent or other asset I have is a divine gift. And any sin that I commit is me messing with that gift, probably because I have lost my gratitude for it. The old hymn is absolutely correct: “all good gifts around us are sent from heaven above, so thank the Lord.”

St. Paul was writing to the church at Corinth, that first-century sin-city where he planted one of his most successful churches. It was also one of his most troublesome congregations. Read the whole letter with a good commentary and you’ll get a good idea of how many migraines that seaport gave him. One of the standout qualities of the church was its use of the spiritual gifts, healing diseases by prayer, making prophetic utterances, praying in tongues, and the like. But they bragged about them, as if they had those powers by themselves rather than as gifts from God. All of us can be tempted to believe that kind of thing about ourselves. You are known by your habit of bringing new members to church, or another organization. You are an organizer of any event, and seem to do it effortlessly. There are many gifts, but we have to remember they didn’t jump from our head like Athena from the head of Zeus. They are gifts of the true God, who is just in all His ways and kind in everything He does.

If anyone has trouble understanding the Pharisees and their mindset, perhaps a contemporary analogy might help. The name “Karen” has been stolen by the culture and is used to refer to anyone who easily finds fault with another person. (I think the culture owes an apology to all women named Karen for that misappropriation.) At any rate, Pharisees were the first-century equivalent in the Holy Land. They kept every minute regulation of Torah, all six-hundred plus, including the ones only the priests were bound to. They looked down on any Jew who did not do the same. Exodus 20:10 tells the Jews they are to do no work on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees extended that to even gleaning heads of grain directly from the fields, nit-picking in the extreme by saying the very act of rubbing your hands together over the grain is forbidden work. Jesus, as He frequently did, turns His response into an effective sermon, comparing Himself to David, His ancestor, and claiming that He was Lord of the Sabbath, the very Lawgiver Himself. In the end of His life, which was the beginning of His New Life and ours, He rested in the tomb on the Great Sabbath, and when He rose on the next day, He transformed the day after the Sabbath, Sunday we call it, to become the Lord’s Day. Blessed be His Holy Name forever.