#254 No, Catholics Aren’t Pharisees

Welcome back to Sam's Pupry. I'm Joe Heschmeyer and a common accusation against Catholics

is that we're modern-day Pharisees. I think Pharisees in Roman Catholic leaders have a lot in common

nowadays. Yeah. The reformers chose to follow the Bible while the Jesuits chose to fight against it

on behalf of the traditions and power of the Catholic Church.

The view of the Jesuits toward the Bible could be likened to that of the ancient Pharisees

2000 years ago who opposed Christ. As Jesus said of them, full well, you reject the commandment of

God that you may keep your own tradition. It was telling the Pharisees your sons of the devil. He

said, I knew your father. You're just like him. Can you imagine saying that to the Catholic Church

or just saying that to a denominational church? But Jesus was continually confronting people who had

taken the place of God. The Pharisee connection happens for any number of reasons, but often it

goes something like this. Pharisees back then and Catholics today don't believe in scripture alone,

so the scripture. Instead, we have these other standards as well like tradition. I think these

criticisms misunderstand not only Catholicism, but also what it was that Jesus was rebuking about

the Pharisees in the first place. Many of the traditions in question were attempts to live out the

mosaic law. Now, not only is that not a bad thing, it's an unavoidable thing. Anybody who is

trying to keep the Sabbath holy is going to have to figure out what does and doesn't violate the

nature of the Sabbath day, for instance. But as we're going to see, the Pharisees often fell short,

but they did so in two opposite directions, sometimes by obeying the letter of the law too

rigidly and other times by actually not living out the law rigidly enough. Now, the first of those

two errors is the one they're more famous for. It's that attitude of legalism in the sense of

observing the letter of the law, but in such way that you miss the point of the law. Now, you can

actually see this attitude in some of the Jewish disputes over work on the Sabbath. God set aside

the Sabbath as a day off of work, a day of solemn rest. That's good and beautiful. As Jesus said,

the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. But then people started to worry about what

exactly counted as work. Eventually, rabbis came up with a list of 39 kinds of activities that were

prohibited because they were considered work. So you can't sew or plow or reap. That makes sense.

But you also can't do things like baked bread. Now, in one sense, that also makes sense. Bakers

deserve a day off from work as well. But in another sense, what if you're trying to cook for your

family? So the more people start to worry, they might accidentally be working, the less they're

able to just enter into solemn rest. Eventually, it gets to the point. So rabbis start declaring

things like this. If you've got mud on your shoe on the Sabbath, you're allowed to wipe your

shoe off on the wall, but you're not allowed to wipe your shoe off on the ground, because that

might level the earth, and that could constitute plowing, which is forbidden on the Sabbath. But if

you're spending the Sabbath worried, you might accidentally be violating the Ten Commandments by

wiping your shoe, some things gone wrong. And there were even Pharisees who recognized this problem.

Remember John 9, Jesus heals a man born blind on the Sabbath. But he does so, spitting on the

ground and making clay and rubbing that on the man's eyes. Now, to some of the Pharisees, that looks

too much like work. But as John notes, other Pharisees actually took the opposite view. They put

it out the obvious, how could Jesus be sinning by performing a miracle? Okay, so that's one error

which we associate with the Pharisees, rightly. An obsession with the letter of the law while missing

the point of why the law exists. But the other error is one, as I've said before, that's nearly the

opposite and that sometimes we don't understand, because sometimes the issue wasn't that the Pharisees

were too strict and their observance of the law, sometimes that they were just too permissive. This

is what we might call the Corban problem. In Mark 7, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for rejecting the

commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. Now, Protestants who object to Catholic tradition

love to quote this line. But I suspect that most of the people quoting it don't actually understand

what the underlying controversy was. Jesus points out that Moses had said,

honor your father and your mother. Now, this is our first area of confusion. Originally, that

commandment wasn't so much about kids obeying mom and dad at home, but as St. Jerome was observed,

it was about adult children taking care of their aging and often impoverished parents. In Jerome's

words, the Lord commanded that poor parents should be supported by their children and that these

should pay them back when old, those benefits which they themselves received in their childhood.

So mom and dad gave out of their poverty to raise you kids and now that they're getting old,

they're unable to work maybe, it's your duty to take care of mom and dad. Now, Jesus clearly

takes this view as do his followers. This wise St. Paul can say that anyone who doesn't provide

for his relatives and especially for his own family, he's disowned the faith and is worse than

an unbeliever. This, by the way, is one of the clearest bits of evidence that Mary had no other

children, the fact that as he's dying, Jesus entrusts her to John a non-relative because she has

no other children who could perform this commandment for her. And so it's this sacred duty when we

find in the Ten Commandments that the Pharisees are undermining. But how are they undermining it?

Exactly. Because they're saying that if a man tells his father or his mother what you've gained

from me is Korban, that is, given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his

father or mother. Now, this, as you might imagine, is where a lot of Christians get confused.

What is Korban? What on earth are the Pharisees doing here? And many times away Christians tell

the story. It sounds like the Pharisees have just invented some flimsy loophole.

Second question. Do you think the Pharisees themselves felt that they were disobeying God's word?

Surely not. Surely at some level, they were persuaded by their own rationalizations.

What seems like flimsy self-serving argumentation to us? Call something Korban,

and suddenly you don't have to do the right thing by your parents anymore.

But if the Korban controversy sounds to us, like just flimsy self-serving argumentation,

I think it's because we don't know what Korban means, where it comes from or why it was such a big

issue, both in Jesus's day and before. Because many Christians have been taught it was just something

that the Pharisees invented. Now, to be fair, I did some study, and I was not able to establish

with perfect clarity exactly how old we think this Phariseical Korban tradition is.

So let's be clear. Korban itself is not a fairsacal invention or just a man-made tradition.

Korban is the Hebrew word for gift for making an offering to God. Giving Korban to God is very

clearly biblical. The term is used 82 times in the Old Testament, and it has a specific sense of

a sacrificial gift brought to the altar. The controversy is not over whether or not we should give

Korban. We clearly should. Jesus says that if you're offering your gift at the altar and they

remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.

First, be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. So yeah, Christians are

meant to still have altars, and we're meant to still make offerings in which we bring our gifts to

the altar. That's Korban. Jesus is not condemning or abolishing any of that. He endorses it. Okay,

so what is the Korban controversy then? It specifically involves when you offer something

as Korban to God with an oath. The oath is such an integral part of this that many Jewish sources

like Josephus speak of the oath itself as the gift, as the Korban has the offeratory. So the

entire question turns on this. If a man has sworn to God, he's going to give him everything that he

has, and then realizes that his mom and dad need his help, what's he supposed to do? Or to put the

question another way, if someone rashly swears to God to do something that turns out to be stupid

or evil, are they still bound to uphold that oath? Hopefully, once you understand it in that way,

you see, this is not something the Pharisees have just invented. This is an age-old problem that

people have been struggling to resolve as far back as the Old Testament. In the Old Testament,

we actually see people making rash oaths several times, and treating even those rash and wicked oaths

as binding. The most infamous case of this is in Judges chapter 11, in which Deft the rashly

declares that if they win the fight against the Emanides, he'll sacrifice to God as a burnt offering,

whoever is first to come out of his house to meet him, even on his face that's a terrible oath,

and it backfires pretty predictably because it's his daughter who rushes out to greet him.

Now, the man's heartbroken at this, but he sees himself as bound by an oath that he rashly swore,

even though fulfilling the oath involves killing his own daughter and ending his family lines,

and she's his only child. But he says to her,

Alas, my daughter, you've brought me very low, and you've become the cause of great trouble to me,

for I've opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow. And you'll notice even the

daughter doesn't think he can get out of it. She mourns as well, but they view themselves as bound

because an oath is so important. Now, by the first century, this had actually been relaxed a little

bit. Jewish leaders had invented dispensations from rash oaths. Originally, the high priest was the

one viewed as having this power, but by the time of the Pharisees, they kind of usurped this

authority from the priest and tried to give it to judges and courts. But either way, without an

official dispensation from somebody else, the high priest or the judge or the court, if they swore

an oath to give everything to God, they were bound by that oath, even though it meant they would

be unable to fulfill the ten commandments. They'd be unable to honor their father and mother by

caring for them in their old age. Now, notice here, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and plenty of other Jews

are not trying to disinvent special rules or trying to do right by God. They're trying to make

sure that when they swear to God that their word is good. But as Jesus points out, in this particular

case, they're completely missing the forest for the trees. Yes, it is good to care about our word

to God and honoring the promises we made him, but it's more important to care about God's word to us

and his commandments for us. So if the question is whether to obey what God has told us to do,

or to obey what we've told God we're going to do, well, we clearly have to obey God rather than

ourselves. In other words, Jeff that never should have made a rash out to God, but even after he

made it, he would have been better off violating it rather than committing murder. So when Jesus

accuses the Pharisees of leaving the commandment of God and holding fast the tradition of men,

or when he accuses him of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep their tradition,

the problem isn't that they have scripture and unwritten tradition. That's trying to turn the

Pharisees into a Protestant caricature of Catholics. The problem is that the Pharisees have taken an

interpretation of the law that was often so robotic that they missed a point of why they were doing

what they were doing, why they were observing the law in the first place, or they would insist on

a good principle like vow keeping in such a blind way that they would uphold it even if it violated

the law. Put in this way, the issue isn't that they were so focused on keeping the law, it's that

they weren't keeping the law. The Sabbath isn't a day of solemn rest if you spend the whole thing

fretting about whether or not you're resting enough. The Ten Commandments aren't being observed if

you have a loophole for a rash oath. So they've worried so obsessively about the details of the law

that they've missed the meat of it, the heart of the law. As Jesus tells them, they've neglected the

way to your matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith. These, he says, you ought to have done

without neglecting the others. So if you're worried about becoming a Pharisee, this is the key.

The big picture, it's holiness, it's becoming Christlike. Everything else is just a means of getting

there. And so if it keeps you from doing that, don't do that. Don't fulfill the letter of the law.

If it keeps you from doing what the law is trying to make you do, which has become Christlike,

or take this example, like what if you're trying to pray and somebody interrupts you because they

need your help? Should you keep praying? That's obviously a good thing. Should you go help them? That's a

good thing too. Personally, I like the council of St Vincent de Paul, who says it is our duty to

prefer the service of the poor to everything else and to offer such services quickly as possible.

If a needy person requires medicine or other help during prayer time, do whatever has to be done

with peace of mind. Offer the deed to God as your prayer. Do not become upset or feel guilty because

you interrupted your prayer to serve the poor. God is not neglected if you leave him for such

service. One of God's works is merely interrupted so that another can be carried out. So when you leave

prayer to serve some poor person, remember that this very service is performed for God. Charity

certainly greater than any rule. Well, similarly, the code of canon law ends by reminding us that the

salvation of souls, which must always be the supreme law on the church, is to be kept before one's eyes.

All of us, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, you name it. We've got to figure out how to live out

in our daily lives. Those things God has asked us to do. And the important thing to remember in

trying to live that out is not simply what to do, but why we're doing it in the first place.

But okay, there's still one problem left. Aren't Catholics hypocritical Pharisees for holding

to tradition? And not just apostolic tradition, we Catholics hold to traditions which we firmly

acknowledge are not of divine or apostolic origin. I love Catholics. I think that Catholicism

is wonderful truths about Christ, wonderful truths about scripture. With tons of human additions,

it reminds me of the Phariseism Jesus dealt with in his time. We have a tradition here in the west

of not ordaining married men to the priesthood or of getting ashes on our forehead on Ash Wednesday

or any number of other things which we firmly acknowledge do not derive from scripture or even

from apostolic tradition as universally binding. These 100%. Absolutely. These are man-made traditions.

We can call them customs or disciplines and we practice them today. So if that's a problem,

if that's what Jesus is condemning, then we would be in trouble. But it's not. I think the easiest

way to prove that it's not is by looking at the question of food sacrifice to idols. In Acts 15,

the Council of Jerusalem writes to Gentile Christians and declares to them with divine authority that

it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these

necessary things that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from

what has strangled and from the word there is poor Naya, like unlawful marriage is a good description.

On its face, that might sound like they're giving eternal divine commands, but they're not.

And we know that because in 1 Corinthians 8, Saint Paul addresses this same question of eating

food offered to idols and he's fine with it. He explicitly describes it as an area of Christian

and liberty and he says this is because an idol has no real existence. What is going on here?

Well, the point is that what's happening in Acts 15 are disciplines and the point of the disciplines

in Acts 15 are so that you don't scandalize your neighbor. There's nothing wrong with having a

drink, but you don't do it around your Baptist friend if it's going to scandalize his faith.

As Saint Paul put it, we must take care less this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling

block to the weak. Since by sending against our brethren and wounding their conscience when

it's weak, we'd send against Christ. So for the good of the church, the council of Jerusalem has

ordered the Gentiles in the earliest days of the church, not to practice things which of themselves

were perfectly fine. And just as they can do that, so the church today can do that with something

like meat on Friday. Notice so, the council has the authority to take this decision out of the

hands of individual conscience and make it an issue of binding church policy even though it's

clearly not a matter of eternal divine law. That's exactly the kind of tradition that people

complain about the church making today, but the council was right to do so. And it wasn't the

mean fair say call. Rather, the church led by the spirit was giving binding disciplinary instructions,

and when those customs were no longer useful or helpful, the church led by the spirit to spend

with them. So when people tell you that the Pharisees show that it's bad to have traditions outside

the Bible, that is ironically itself a man made tradition. Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for many

things, but never for simply having traditions or customs or rules. In fact, I think we could say

this. One of the Pharisees in particular, Gamelio, St. Paul's teacher, actually offers a strong

argument in favor of the Catholic church. Now, if you want to learn more about what that argument

is or why it points to Catholicism, you're going to have to check out this video right here.