Who Were the Pharisees?

by Rev. Eric Folkerth

We had an interesting little tangential discussion yesterday in staff that I want to share with you because it fits into a broader point that’s important to make each Lenten season.

We were looking at this Sunday’s scripture, which begins with the line, “At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’”

After a pause, Jonathan Palant asked us, “So…who are the Pharisees?”

I chuckled a little and said, “Those are your guys.”

Jonathan looked momentarily confused and immediately picked up his phone and turned to Google. And while he did, we all had a brief history lesson for our whole staff about the religious leaders of Jesus’ time.

Despite the fact that Pharisees were Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ day, Jonathan —as a present day Jewish man, living two thousand years later— had never heard of them.

And if you are surprised by this, to all of my Christian friends I say: of *course* he hadn’t! 

For many years, when I teach the Gospels to Christian people, I try to make the clear point that it is extremely *dangerous* to conflate the depictions of 2,000 year-old religious *leaders* in our Bible stories with the lives, faiths and experiences of contemporary Jewish *people* today.

This is such an obvious point to make. And yet, so often it seems to slip past my present-day Christians. 

Countless times I have been in Bible studies where Christians assume the hard Gospel messages about two-thousand-year-old Jewish leaders somehow applies to everyday Jewish-humans in the present day.

Quite the opposite is true. The Jewish faith has grown, changed and evolved much in the ensuing 2,000 years since the Gospels were written. The Rabbinical phase of Judaism wouldn’t emerge until centuries after Gospel times. The entire order of Pharisees would disappear and eventually be replaced with “Rabbis.” (This is a gloss, but just stay with me…)

More tragically, the word “Pharisaical” has taken on a negative connotation, and far too much Christian theology has either insinuated or boldly stated that “the Jews killed Jesus.”

This, of course, is extremely dangerous theology. Quite interestingly, this very verse cited here shows that the Pharisees were not a monolithic group. Some of them were apparently quite sympathetic to Jesus and even sent him news that his life might be in danger.

Jesus was killed by Roman power. It does appear that many Jewish *leaders* collaborated with Roman power and, at the very least, allowed the state execution of Jesus to go forward.

The final irony, of course, is that CHRISTIAN leaders far too often stand in the moral and theological place of the Pharisees of old.

Take the Russian Orthodox Church for example, it appears to be standing with Russian leaders to provide spiritual authorization to the horrific war now taking place in Ukraine. Their support for the Russian government provides a disturbing theological rational for this unjust war. 

But Christians in America far too often wrap themselves in the flag of the United States rather than the truth of the Gospel message. In other words, as Jesus says, we should take the log out of our American eye before we only critique Russian Church leaders on this.

But all these examples point to the truth: Christian pastors, Christian leaders, far more often play the moral and metaphorical role of the “Pharisees” in our present-day than do present-day Jews.

God calls us to name this clearly so as to avoid tragic transference and denial of our own culpability.

We Christians continue to “resist” God’s grace in ways that mirror the Gospel Pharisees.

Let’s hope and pray we continue to embrace Grace…for ourselves and for the world.