Audio only:
Joe responds to the common claim that the Catholic Church are the modern day Pharisees.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and a common
CLIP:
Accusation against Catholics is that we’re modern day Pharisees. I think Pharisees and 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.
He was telling the Pharisees, your sons of the devil, he said, “I knew your father. You’re just like them.” 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.
Joe:
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, solo scriptura. 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 a 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 sow 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 points where 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 10 commandments by wiping your shoe, something’s gone wrong. And there were even Pharisees who recognized this problem. Remember John nine. 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 pointed 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, and 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 we were just too permissive. This is what we might call the Corban problem. In Marks seven, 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’s 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 is why 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 10 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 Corban, 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 Corban? What on earth are the Pharisees doing here? And many times the way Christians tell the story, it sounds like the Pharisees have just invented some flimsy loophole.
Second
CLIP:
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 Corban and suddenly you don’t have to do the right thing by your parents anymore.
Joe:
But if the Corban controversy sounds to us like just flimsy self-serving argumentation, I think it’s because we don’t know what Corban means, where it comes from or why it was such a big issue, both in Jesus’ day and before because many Christians have been taught it was just something that the Pharisees invented.
CLIP:
Now, to be fair, I did some study and I was not able to establish with perfect clarity exactly how old we think this Pharisaical Corban tradition is.
Joe:
So let’s be clear. Corban itself is not a Phariseical invention or just a manmade tradition. Corban is the Hebrew word for gift, for making an offering to God. Giving Corban 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 Corban. We clearly should. Jesus says that if you’re offering your gift at the altar and there 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 offertories in which we bring our gifts to the altar. That’s Corban. Jesus is not condemning or abolishing any of that.
He endorses it. Okay, so what is the Corban controversy then? It specifically involves when you offer something as Corban 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 Corban, as the offertory. 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 death the rashly declares that if they win the fight against the Eminites, 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 lying since she’s his only child. But he says to her, “I’ll ask 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’d kind of usurped this authority from the priest and tried to give it to judges in 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 10 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 just invent special rules.
They’re 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 force 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 then 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 them 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 the 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 10 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 weightier 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 is become Christlike. Or take this example. 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 offer such service as 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 is 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 in 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
CLIP:
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.
Joe:
We have a tradition here in the West of not ordaining married men to the priesthood or 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’ve practiced 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 chapter 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 is strangled and from the word there is poornea, 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 one Corinthians eight, St. 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 liberty and he says that 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 St. Paul put it, we must take care less this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the week. Since by sending against our brethren and wounding their conscience when it’s weak, we’d sin 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 meet on Friday. Notice though, 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 Phariseical. 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 dispensed 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 manmade 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, Gamalio, 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. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.