Pigeons, Temples, and ‘Stop being such a Pharisee, why don’t you?’

Any well established Christian knows if you want to deliver a sick burn, squarely at the foot of another Christian, you call them a Pharisee.

Imagine it: a heated debate in life group, over… over… (something ridiculous, lets say) ‘Christians should always carry first aid kits!’

And those involved have joisted with scriptures. Back and forth.

‘Scripture instructs us to be ready for every good work! – 2 Timothy 3:17’

‘Yeah but our battle isn’t against flesh and blood – Ephesians 6:12 – so more so instead of the first aid kits we should have anointing oil and be praying for people rather than offering them plasters!’

And so on and so forth.

And it goes back and forth, and the others in the life group feel a bit awkward because they aren’t certain Matt and Shauna will ever speak to one another again given how much this has escalated.

Will it be the end for the Tuesday Night Life Group for under 30s at Jason’s House?

Perhaps they’ll have to have a ‘church split’ over the whole first aid kit theological Great Schism!?

And then Shauna throws her nose into the air, ‘Matt!’ she declares, ‘stop being such a… PHARISEE!’

And everyone gasps, and hands are thrown into the air and… well I’m being a little facetious but you get the picture.

There is no better way to spurn another Christian than to call them a Pharisee.

Pharisee – in the Bible was a sect of Judaism, often singled out and given a good telling off by Jesus in the Gospels.

They were a collection of people who exercised their faith legalistically. They ticked all the boxes, followed all the rules, made up their own rules in addition to the rules in the scripture we are familiar with.

And you dare be a little Flexy Lexi with your faith? To ground it on wishy washy things like love, and gentleness and soft and fluffy things rather than ‘Do This!’ ‘Do That!’ ‘Show Everyone How Super-Spiro You Are!’ … well, clearly you aren’t a good follower of God.

Jesus would address the Pharisee directly, and I suppose the reasoning behind Matt and Shauna’s exchange culminating in an accusation that one or the other was a Pharisee was that when Jesus mentions Pharisees we should take notice.

The reason we should take notice is that he is addressing those who are already followers of faith, like us. And the hope is that there are learnings here for us.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut… these days I think that’s all we think a good Pharisee Comparison is good for. And it isn’t. And there are more, and incredibly pertinent parallels to draw and possibly a little more useful, especially these days as echoes through Christendom are full of whispers that God is up to something new.

That the church is changing. We are changing. And all the things we thought were how we should be, all the tassels and the rules and methodology is coming into a season of recalibration.

The social climate of Jesus’ time and ministry is critical in understanding the contexts and learnings from groups and individuals mentioned in the Gospels, and subsequent letters of Paul and the Other Crowd.

In fact, the social climate was very much why Jesus was arrested and crucified in the first instance. The Sanhedrin (which was essentially the group of important Jews who formed a council, headed by the High Priest) were uncomfortable with Jesus and what he was getting up to.

They were concerned about revolt.

See, the members of the Sanhedrin – much thought around the Sanhedrin suggests this was both Pharisee and Sadducee alike – operated in quiet ‘Nothing-Going-On-Here’ with the Roman Government of the time.

For ages and ages the Jewish people had been oppressed by their captors, since the exile to Babylon. They had been treated badly, had their choices and ability to worship and carry out their own customs taken away from them.

So under the rule of the Roman Empire there was a type of comfort.

The Romans weren’t a fun, ideal time at all, they were still oppressive, and heavy handed, they sat on the Jews and put pressure such as heavy taxation to the Temple on God’s people.

But they weren’t tooooooo bad.

Kind of like when one smaller cat sees a much bigger cat and so it freezes and walks quietly sidewise as not to be seen or make too much of a disturbance.

Under the Roman Occupation, the Sanhedrin to some extent were allowed to control their own people. They had legislative abilities, they could operate in some degree of authority, and best of all, they were allowed to practice their religion.

See Herod had been a bit of a wanna-be Jew, and to keep the Jewish people happy, he built the ‘Temple of Herod’ in 17BC, and while the people of Israel were taxed heavily for this in the form of the Temple Tax at least they could worship, you know?

At least they could engage with God and carry out the practices of their faith.

And then this Jesus guy rocks up, and he is every shade of interesting. Like it was bad enough that John the Baptist was such a fruit loop what with eating crickets and wearing furs, but this Jesus Guy…? Well he wasn’t nearly as much a weirdo, but he had something really, really scary, that unsettled the Pharisee and Sadducee alike.

He had traction.

And the climate prior to the crucifixion was one of potential political overboil (a great book on this is Dawn of Christianity by Robert J Hutchinson, just an FYI).

And that was the great motivator behind Jesus’ arrest.

The Sanhedrin met together, following the raising of Lazarus and they are thinking, ‘Gosh. We need to do something about this Jesus Guy. Like people are getting way, way too into this guy, and what if we have a total riot – I mean that who Maccabean thing didn’t go too well did it? – and we have everything that we know, that yeah isn’t ideal, but we are comfortable with, taken away from us? What if they take away our Temple? What if everything that we have gotten comfortable with is taken away from us?

And so the Sanhedrin thought okay we need to get rid of this Jesus guy, because he’s stirring up drama, and captured in John 11:47-50

⁴⁷ Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. ⁴⁸ If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

⁴⁹ Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! ⁵⁰ You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

And the rest is history.

See here’s the thing; no offence to Matt and Shauna, but judgmental religiosity was not the only thing Jesus scolded the Pharisees on.

And I guess in today’s world, as the echoes of ‘something new’ and ‘something different’ creeping through our form of faith, I believe there are learnings here from the Pharisees, yes, but also the Zealots and the Sadducees and that literally none of us have a holy cow that isn’t going to be upended.

So let’s start with the pigeons.

I always found the story of Jesus having a melt down in the Temple interesting.

Like, Jesus? You know the guy? Peaceable, chilled out, Jesus? Turning over tables and forming cords into a whip and chasing people out of the Temple.

And look there was a time where I just figured Jesus hated the idea of a bookshop in a church foyer.

But a few years back I was given this particular passage for an assignment in my ‘Israel in the Time of Christ’ paper and it literally blew my mind.

Because of the pigeons.

In the account of Jesus’ big melt down, it makes note very deliberately about the pigeons – and I remember when I went to study this passage I thought, hey hang on – what is up with the specific mention of pigeons?

Pigeons were the lowest and cheapest form of sacrifice of the day. If you were poor, and less than, then you sure as heck can bet that if you needed to make a sacrifice you were gonna sacrifice a pigeon.

Many scholars believe that it wasn’t gift shops Jesus hated here, it was the structure, pomp, the elitism that had slunk into the worship of God. Where particulate people could move into particular spaces, and everything was boxed off and all about hierarchy and importance.

Then later, when Jesus died it is said the veil within the Temple tore. The access to the Holy of Holies ripped open. This again, super resonant with the work of Jesus on earth.

Saying – no more of this box ticking and separation and segregation – the Temple is within you and our humanistic out-workings aren’t pleasing to God. They don’t get us any closer to God.

There’s a heavy dose of Anti-Judgmental-Religiosity here, but underlyingly we need that God is no respecter of persons.

And thus – we should never be.

Learning one off the back of the Classic Christian Pharisee insult: don’t you ever say that some of us have different access to the celebrations (practices) of our faith over others.

As we enter this time of awakening and change and God doing something new, we can be assured that the new doesn’t allocate some people as Pigeon Sacrifices and others as Better-Than. It doesn’t put up curtains or walls.

I also think of the Zealots – both James and John, two of Jesus’ own Disciples were Zealots. Sons of Fire, constantly asking ‘Jesus do you want us to (insert something that seems way, way over the top/violent/like a major social coup)?’

The Zealots of the day were these fired up guys who really wanted God to do what he was going to do, and fix things, but they had pretty strong ideas about what that looked like. What drove them into these spaces, spaces like the Sicarii for example who pulled out daggers and killed Romans at random, was a desire within them to see the ‘right thing happen.’

How many of us can be a little like this?

Consumed in achieving God’s plan for him that we don’t stop to listen?

And here’s the thing. God had no problem with the passion of James and John, and I think on the absolute d-low he probably found them funny. But Jesus called James and John to be disciples, despite them being a little extra – because this became their strenghts.

There are a lot of needs and gaps in society at the moment.

Hurt people.

People who are in difficulty, who aren’t listened to, who are spurned by society, who are spurned by the church and it is super easy to turn into a bit of a Sicarri about it and get consumed by our own opinions of how to fix things.

But we need to never stop listening and seeking God and allowing his plan to be outworked through us, rather than us being the zealots of what he think he wants to accomplish.

When we stop asking God first, and running off our own endevours often this is a breeding ground for a misaligned faith.

In the midst of this chaos, in the world we live in where people ‘hate Jesus, but not the church’ (which yes, I totally get) we can become a bit militant. And we need to not.

God will accomplish what he accomplishes but we can guarantee it will not take any form of shape we anticipate.

The final learning I want to dwell on is the Sadducees.

Often we don’t dwell on this particular sect of Judaism because we are too busy calling people Pharisees – kidding! (But sort of not.)

Sadducees were a powerful group, often high up within society (not just the Jewish society, but that of Rome)

And they were a little different to the Pharisee because Sadducees according to some scholars were a little theologically light. They were only interested in the Torah, they didn’t believe in resurrection, they were not overly ‘spiritual’ and did not believe in spirits or angels.

Many scholars have commented that modern day Sadducees are those who depart from the spiritual side of faith in exchange for the practical ‘doings’ of faith.

Additionally, often highlighted is the Sadducees desire to curry favour with agents other than God and his desire for us to live holy and righteous lives in worship to him.

People who want to seem right from the outside, not just the ‘perfect’ Christians, but those who become more concerned with the outworking of the Christian Faith, and have a form of godliness and not the power (2 Timothy 3:5)

In today’s shift within Christendom we see this. After all, people like Jesus, just not the Church. So often we can fall into a trap where we lull unsuspecting unbelievers into thinking ‘Christian’s aren’t that bad’ by tickling their fancy with things that curry the favour of the world.

Just as we aren’t to be religiously judgmental we aren’t to curry favour to try to retain the temple.

Oh please – we beg to the world we live in now – please let me have what I know of my faith life? I won’t make waves, I won’t get all Zealot on the whole thing, please just let me have my familiar cage.

But I believe we are entering a season where we need to get out of the known and be comfortable with entering the unknown.

God is doing something new, and fresh and begging for the same, and for things to just keep ticking along – as long as we have our ‘temple’, well? We might just miss what God is up to.

I spoke with a friend recently, about some moves within Christian Circles to split services for different people groups, and while I understood it in head it did not sit well with me.

‘It works for me, I always liked a smaller church service anyway.’ she said – and it rung to something within me that I suppose was a challenge.

Have I become too used to what my faith looks like, in public form, and in expression that I completely missed that God might actually be doing something really, really different?

Changing the shape entirely?

What an amazing, challenging, scary but awesome thing?

So wherever you sit today: Pharisee, Zealot, Sadducee let’s shake it off.

Shake of this obsession to ‘get back to normal’ and instead be comfortable that clearly it seems obvious God is up to something totally new. And this will require flexibility, and not crowding around the known, and familiar, and defending that over God’s desire to do whatever he wants to do.

To the Pharisee – regardless of what we know of now, we know God never divided or segregated. He tore the veil, he threw over the tables of the pigeons.

To the Zealot – remain flexible and mailable to understand that God knows what he is up to, and we should never get lost in what we think he is doing.

And to the Sadducee – currying the favour of anything or anyone else other than God and his desire for us to live in holy worship to him, is not his plan for us. So take it to the foot of the cross and leave it there.

I for one am challenged, and inspired, because look there are learnings here for me.

But God is clearly up to something new. In a world where church hasn’t been done normally for eighteen months at least, and society has become divided and defensive in a way we haven’t seen for a long while – tell Matt and Shauna to calm the farm.

We all sit somewhere on these spectrums and we all have something to learn.

So let’s stop trying to keep the peace, and our familiar, comfortable cages, and get on board with this brave new world God is ushering in.