Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Micah 3:5-12
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Matthew 23:1-12
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I want to begin this morning by acknowledging the current situation in Israel, Gaza and that entire region that we often call the Holy Land. It is a situation marked by a complex history, competing claims, and horrendous human suffering. We must be careful in our Christian proclamation and preaching not to add to this fraught and heart-breaking situation through misinterpretation of our scriptures leading either to a fundamentalist Judeo-Christian political-religious dream on the one hand or to hateful anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism on the other. And I say this with full knowledge that people—even us—differ regarding Zionism, Palestinian homelands, and the causes of and justifications for the terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7 and for the ongoing bombardment of Northern Gaza. We plead: Lord, have mercy!For the past several weeks and continuing through this month, we have been and shall be hearing passages from the gospel according to Matthew beginning in the middle of chapter 21 and continuing until chapter 25 with its Parable of the Sheep and the Goats that we will be read on the Sunday of Christ the King. These passages from Matthew’s gospel express a deep tension and conflict between Jesus and the Judean Temple authorities, sometimes so violently that I cringe when I hear them and say inwardly: “Jesus, couldn't you be a bit more diplomatic?” But we must remember that, at least according to Matthew’s timeline, these intense interactions take place in Jerusalem in the very last days before Jesus’ crucifixion. They follow on the heels of his triumphant entry into Jerusalem and his overturning of the tables of the money changers in the Temple with their implicit and not so implicit claim that he comes as the true Messiah, challenging both the dominant institutional expression of Judaism and Roman colonial oppression.
I quote, as I often do, Berkeley Divinity School Dean Andrew McGowan whose commentary offers us some helpful and necessary reminders. He writes of the “…need to contextualize the Gospels of these last two months of the liturgical year within the mounting drama of Jesus 's last days in Jerusalem. His conflict with the chief priest is not the basis for a theory of Christian-Jewish relations; it is an account, in what is arguably the most Jewish of the Gospels (Matthew), of the conflict between the Jewish Messiah and the authorities of the time.”
Again he writes: “…it is important—let's say crucial—to remember there is no conflict depicted here between Jesus and Judaism let alone between Christianity and Judaism. Jesus in this passage [Matt 22:34-46] is being presented as a paradigmatic Jew, both as a teacher of the law more effective than his interviewer, and also as the true Son of David, the Messianic King. Matthew also is clearly Jewish in belief and practice. These are conflicts within Judaism, at this point.” It is important to stress those final words: at this point. That will change over time, but not yet.
Verbal sparring, textual counter-interpretations, and linguistic challenges--at least those that are well-intentioned--were and remain a classic way of moving toward greater truth. This was true in Jesus’ day and remains true to this day in Talmudic studies in Judaism just as it is true in our courts of law where opposing legal teams try to uncover a fuller truth through sometimes difficult and challenging verbal engagement. We see a similar dynamic in so-called Buddhist Dharma combat where teacher and student spar with each other to uncover deficiencies or errors and to move to greater clarity. And so it is, I believe, in these chapters of Matthew’s gospel. Jesus respects Jewish law, and if anything, his teaching seeks to deepen and radicalize the law and its demands though a yet more demanding and interiorized command. And that is, of course, the command to love which is for Jesus at the heart of it all. It is the central and fundamental interpretative principle which governs his, and I hope our, understanding and approach. But whatever else these passages may teach us, we must first acknowledge that they are a debate within first-century Judaism, though they often continue to echo into our own age and within our own hearts.
So what's the problem? Well, it's simple and is in no way unique to first-century Judean Pharisees, scribes or temple authorities. It is that the controlling authorities--the teachers, the religious scholars, the experts--don't practice what they teach or preach or claim to believe. And frankly, this should not surprise us. We are all familiar with this disconnect both within others and in ourselves. But there is more to it than that. For the dissonance between what we say and what we do is complicated by the fact that others, society, the community honors these leaders as if this were not the case. And these very leaders remain blind actors, wittingly or unwittingly playing the role to the hilt, including all the visible accoutrements: broad phylacteries, long fringes and ample robes. This is not a wholesale condemnation of first-century Judaism but rather a withering critique of a compromised institution (the Temple) and of many, though by no means all, of its leaders with their layers of political collaboration and moral accommodation. And it can and does serve as a withering critique of our own institutions and our own characters.
I had to laugh when I saw that Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of today’s Gospel passage in “The Message.” He titled this section of Matthew's gospel “Religious Fashion Shows.” Listen to his, admittedly non-literal, take on the central part of today’s reading:
Now Jesus turned to address his disciples, along with the crowd that had gathered with them. “The religion scholars and Pharisees are competent teachers in God’s Law. You won’t go wrong in following their teachings on Moses. But be careful about following them. They talk a good line, but they don’t live it. They don’t take it into their hearts and live it out in their behavior. It’s all spit-and-polish veneer.
Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next. They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called ‘Doctor’ and ‘Reverend.’
“Don’t let people do that to you, put you on a pedestal like that. You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do. No one else should carry the title of ‘Father’; you have only one Father, and he’s in heaven. And don’t let people maneuver you into taking charge of them. There is only one Life-Leader for you and them—Christ.
The existential danger here, of course, is precisely hypocrisy, that lack of coherence between our teaching and our actions, between what we say and what we do, between who we think we are and who we truly are. That is a danger, yes, and one that applies to all of us at some level, probably at many levels. But there is an even greater danger here, one that's more insidious and damaging. And that is that we begin to believe the idealizations that others project on us and attempt to live into and serve their unexamined fantasies. “Don't let them put you on that pedestal,” says Eugene Peterson. Don't believe and start living your life as if you were something you are not, namely, the unfulfilled and unfillable fantasies of others. Don’t start living into their projections! That, in my book, is the real danger. And believe me, I speak from experience.
It's no accident that our gospel passage ends with an exhortation towards humility over against hypocrisy in both its senses, that disconnect between what we say or believe and what we do or are as well as in the sense of buying into the projections of others. Humility is the antidote to this poison. And humility in our Christian, and particularly on our monastic, tradition is never understood as self-abasement. Rather it names the slow and sometimes painful process of growing into the truth about ourselves so that we can finally live who we are.
Trappist monk Michael Casey in his book “A Guide to Living in the Truth’ reminds us that hypocrisy is a word that refers to a play actor, a pretender, or dissembler. And humility means setting aside the mask. It is, he says: “…a kind of nakedness that allows us to be seen without the bulwarks of social conventions. We present ourselves to others transparently, in all our imperfection and vulnerability. We depend on their goodwill for acceptance and love, not on the success of our efforts at self-promotion. The fruit of humility… is naturalness. Being at home with ourselves. Being ourselves.”
It is this very naturalness, this coming home to ourselves, this liberation from the need to hide from others or from God or from ourselves behind some mask, which is, I believe, the great hope and promise of our faith. And it is a freedom which is needed not just by scribes and Pharisees, but by all of us. Could this be the salvation that Jesus brings? Could it?
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