Christ’s Gospel, the Pharisees, and Today’s Christians

Jesus’ anti-Pharisee polemic routinely provides fuel for the polemic of revisionists against orthodox Christianity, and more generally against social and political conservatives. They are cast as heartless authoritarians, especially as modern versions of the religious authoritarians with whom Jesus engaged. To this way of thinking, the New Testament epistles, on which so much Christian theology is based, can be seen to misunderstand the gospel of salvation from suffering as a gospel of salvation from the wrath of God.

How can Jesus’ love and compassion and his condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees be compatible with the many other religious and moral threats and condemnations in both testaments? This writer is only a layman, certainly not a Biblical scholar, but as I have devoted a number of years to defending Christian faith and life from liberal/left efforts to destroy it by requiring complicity in sin and silence about Biblical morality, it is reasonable to consider why today’s traditional Christians, trying to live by the Bible, are not in fact Pharisees, obstructing a gospel of liberation from oppression and pain.

The key, I believe, is that Jesus came as a savior, not a judge. The excitement of the arrival of the messiah pervades the New Testament. Jesus very reasonably proclaimed a gospel of humility and love, as he did in the Sermon on the Mount, if he is announcing a kingdom in which God is king. He very naturally had a ministry of healing and exorcism to address widespread afflictions of body and soul. Those who came to him seeking deliverance from the problems in their life had already exercised the faith in him that he required, as he often said they did.

But Jesus did commonly refer to himself as “Son of Man,” an office of judgment in the Book of Daniel, to which he was evidently referring in his account of the last judgment. The apostles on the other hand never refer to Jesus as “Son of Man;” for them he is “Savior” and “Lord.” Yet warnings of the judgment and the terrible destiny of the condemned are not uncommon in Jesus’ teachings and parables. Unlike Peter and Paul, who ministered in the Greco-Roman world, Jesus did not normally confront people who disagreed with or were indifferent to the faith and morals expounded in the Hebrew Scriptures. But he did have a doctrinal disagreement with the Sadducees, and strongly denounced their denial of the resurrection. With the Pharisees, it was not so much doctrinal or moral disagreements as it was hypocrisy. Jesus did not condemn the law and its requirements of holiness, but insisted on charity as central to the law. Jesus clearly required a heart commitment to God and neighbor, shown in one’s own life.

Among the things that are unmistakable in Jesus teachings is the forceful admonition that mere external observance of religious requirements is inadequate to salvation. James the Lord’s brother, reasonably believed to be the author of the Epistle of James, was perhaps closest to the gospel of Jesus in his concern for both charity and holiness, when he referred caring for widows and orphans in their affliction, and keeping oneself “unstained by the world.” This reflects Jesus’ admonition to purity of heart and condemnation of lust in the Sermon on the Mount. Thus the command to charity is not at all the same as saying that the requirements of holiness and abstinence from sin expounded in the Hebrew Scripture, and which the Pharisees were trying to observe, were oppressive or wrong. Instead, warnings, parables, and fear of God’s wrath are an important part of Jesus’ teachings.   

And so it was for hypocrisy that the first century Jews who rejected or ignored Christ were condemned by Paul in the second chapter of Romans, while pagans were condemned in the first chapter for their acceptance of depravity the Jews understood to be sin. These condemnations are entirely in line with Jesus’ teaching. The real Jesus recognized that sin comes from the human heart. It thus reasonably has to be constrained by the Bible’s moral law. He clearly reiterated the moral laws of the Old Testament in his vice lists, while setting aside the ceremonial commands where these were burdensome to human life.

Jesus’ condemnation of sin and promise of salvation from sin is clear in the very first word in his ministry (“repent,” Matt. 4:17), in the promise of Gabriel to Mary that Jesus would “save his people from their sins” at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, and the summary of Jesus’ gospel at the end of Luke as a gospel of repentance. We are told in the famous third chapter of the Gospel of John that people are “already condemned” apart from Christ, and will remain condemned if they do not surrender their lives to him.

There is hardly any gospel at all if we do not enter Christian life through the narrow gate of repentance from sin to wear the easy yoke of Christ. Otherwise, love of God and neighbor no longer merely summarizes all God’s commands. Instead, the commands of love are relativized to self-defined need. In the end, self-assertion becomes the absolute.

Cultural revolutionaries have taken Jesus’ polemic against the Pharisees to justify their polemic against traditional authority in the name of self-will. But this misunderstands Jesus’ ministry. Of course his ministry largely involved healing. He was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He healed them and exorcised demons. But he was not an antinomian, setting aside the moral law (Matt. 15:1-20; Mk. 7:1-23). Jesus indeed set aside mere ceremonial commands relating to external religious observance as just noted, but not moral commands relating to God and neighbor.

And the consequences of disobeying God and his binding commands are eternal death, which Jesus’ command to everyone to repent (Lk. 13:1-5) makes clear, and likewise his admonition against facilitating sin (Matt. 18:7-9).  Jesus healed people who were objectively impaired in body or captive to demons. He did not save by giving people the evil desires of their heart. Jesus healed, he did not maim (as is now being demanded of religious hospitals and medical providers). To receive him as Lord, as all true Christians do, is to receive him as the God of Israel, who required obedience of Abraham, the father of all who have faith, regardless of pain to Abraham or others (Gen. 22:1-3).

We need to remember, as has already been suggested, the difference in situation between Jesus’ ministry and the mission of Peter and Paul. Jesus came to a pious and fearful people, convinced of the truth of God’s Word and the binding nature of the moral law. This was true of tax collectors and sinners as well as priests and scribes and Pharisees. This was not the case (at least with respect to piety and fear toward the God of Israel) in the Greco-Roman world, where Paul preached, nor for the general public today.

And so Christians are not acting as self-righteous Pharisees when we condemn sin in the wider world, as Paul did on Mars Hill, and to the idolators of Iconium. It is instead the reigning doctrine of moral autonomy (self-law) which is the true self-righteousness, advanced (hypocritically) by those who accuse Biblical Christians of being self-righteous. The righteousness we advance is not our own, but God’s righteousness, fully realized in Christ and credited to us, even if not fully realized in our lives. The gospel is not (primarily, at least) therapeutic, but corrective. In the Scripture passage Evangelicals love to quote, God’s Word is to be used “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness.” It is not in our own selves, but in that Word that we find salvation and holiness and love.