Wednesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

This is one of the Lord’s many condemnations of hypocrisy. Here, I think, he condemns perhaps its most insidious form: the kind of hypocrisy that looks good.

Broadly speaking, in the time of Jesus, the Jews were divided into two large groups, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees would have been the principal party among the priests and religious leaders at the time. They were not well liked. They were regarded as corrupt, and they taught things that the people did not like. The community at the Dead Sea—the community that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls—left us a great deal of material expressing its hatred of the Sadducees. So the Sadducees were not liked by the average person. Many scholars understand the “Wicked Priest” of 1QpHab as the reigning Jerusalem high priest—Jonathan is the most common single identification—and the scrolls’ wider polemic as extending to the other Jerusalem priests who followed him. On that reading, the target is the high-priestly establishment associated with the Sadducean party. The precise identity of the Wicked Priest remains disputed. See 1QpHab VIII–XII; Timothy H. Lim, “Wicked Priest,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 973–76; Alex P. Jassen, “Persecution, Victimhood, and Storytelling in Sectarian Portraits of Present-Time Violence,” in Violence, Power, and Society in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 132–63; cf. Josephus, Ant. 13.288–98.

Into that setting came the Pharisees, who apparently formed a very popular movement, deeply rooted among the people and arising from them. They were not priests and had no authority, but they called people back to the rigor of Jewish life and taught faithfulness to the covenant. The Pharisees were not a priestly order, but priestly Pharisees are attested; Josephus, Life 1–12. Josephus also credits them with considerable popular religious influence although the party of the Sadducees controlled the high-priesthood and the Sanhedrin; Ant. 18.15–17. They decorated the tombs of the prophets and the righteous and reminded everyone what the prophets had said and what these righteous people had done. They truly called people back to living out the law in all its rigor. People liked them. They wanted the faith and these examples, and the Pharisees seemed to offer both.

But as Christ points out repeatedly in the Gospels, that outward appearance did not reveal who they truly were. Beneath it was nastiness. We see that in some of his encounters with them.

As we piece those encounters together across the Gospels, we see that, yes, they have rigor in the law, but no mercy in it. They have no compassion for others and ultimately turn the law into a kind of cruelty. You cannot even heal the sick on the Sabbath. That is cruelty, and it is not what God intends. Jesus also points out their greed. Again and again, he reveals what is actually happening within them.

Despite all their impressive outward appearances, despite all the good they seemed to do—which any good person at the time might have pointed to—Christ tells us that in their hearts they are far worse than everyone else. They are whitewashed tombs, full of nastiness within.

And so this is a reminder that God sees who we truly are. He does not look only at the externals of who we are. Outward actions alone do not reveal the whole truth about us. He looks into our hearts. He knows what motivates us. He knows whether we are truly changing and being conformed to the image of his Son, and that is what matters.

Sometimes, then, we need to be honest with ourselves about our motives: What motivates me? Why am I doing the things I do? What is my actual reason? Have I been lying to myself and saying that I am doing good things for good reasons, when what really motivated me was prestige, the desire to be noticed by others, greed, or something else? Or was I actually doing good for the sake of doing good?

We need to have that honest conversation with ourselves because it is so easy to fall into those traps. Allowing externals to guide us makes it even easier to fall into them, because we can look good while being absolutely awful. So we need that honesty. We need to allow the Holy Spirit to enlighten us and tell us the truth about ourselves and our hearts, so that we can truly repent, truly begin to imitate Christ, receive his forgiveness, and start out on the right path—regardless of what that path may look like to others.