Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Course 2025
Have you ever wondered just why it was that the Pharisees, who seemed to be everywhere Jesus went, were such prigs? These days we might even call the “Karens,” although I’ve known real Karens and they weren’t so judgmental as the Pharisees. I think the first reading from Exodus might give us a way to answer the question.
The people of Israel had two or three thousand years of history with their God, who is called “The Lord” instead of the mysterious YHWH, a term only invoked by the High Priest on Yom Kippur. Exodus tells us of the stressful and bloody beginnings of the relationship, with the many plagues visited on Egypt leading up to the night we just read about. The Lamb of Passover is killed and broiled and shared, and its blood is sprinkled on the lintels of the doors of the Hebrew’s shacks. Every ritual is carefully choreographed. Over the next couple of thousand years the Hebrews, now enlightened by Torah, fell in and out of the good graces of God, mostly out by worshipping the false gods of Canaan. They even had to endure a couple of exiles, and lots of them died.
What was left in the first century—the century of Jesus—is a people in servitude to Rome, with leadership split between Pharisee and Sadducee, Zealot-revolutionary and Essene, and the ordinary Jew, paying too high a tax rate and scraping by to feed his family. But all of them were survivors, in the strict sense, each party with its own quirks. The Pharisees stood behind the Law and watched for any upstart trying to bring disobedience on their heads. And that’s what they saw in Jesus and his disciples, which today looked like Sabbath-breaking locusts eating their way through fields they didn’t own and hadn’t tended.
Our psalm today is a Passover thanksgiving hymn, one probably sung by Jesus and His followers at each annual Seder gathering. It recalls the witness and death of so many of their ancestors at the hands of the various conquerors of the nation but calls those deaths “precious” to the Lord, in Whom the Pharisees trusted for resurrection from death.
The discussion between the accusing Pharisees and the innocent followers of Christ was a kind of crisis of early discipleship. Jesus was looking forward to the years after His own time on earth when His apostles would go to the ends of the earth, spreading His gospel of faith, hope and charity. His missionaries would go out and take “no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt.” They would sometimes be walking between towns on the Sabbath, and might find themselves in a similar situation, needing to eat but having no way to pay at a drive-through inn. Jesus responded to the Pharisaical complaint with a couple of examples of important Hebrews violating the letter of the law as expanded from the Ten Commandments. But those historical Hebrews were innocent because of their need on mission. And, besides that, someone greater than Moses, the very Lawgiver Himself, was leading the way, and the griping Pharisees because of their inability to hear His Word, were only missing out on the greatest Sabbath of them all.
