"I am the Gate for the Sheep" (John 10): Poor Pharisees

Those Pharisees just can't seem to catch a break. Not only do the Pharisees seem to get a raw deal in the Gospels and Acts, but their name has been associated to everything from legalism, hypocrisy and general religious villainy. But were the Pharisees so bad? Let's take a look at this group.

The Pharisees were religion for the common person. Far removed from the privilege and power of the Saduccees, who controlled the Temple and cultivated a very close relationship with the Roman power system, the Pharisees had no earthly power outside of the synagogue. And so rather than try to ally with the Sadducees, the Pharisees simply brought the faith to every day life. The Pharisees believed in reading the entire Bible (then the Old Testament), as opposed to the Sadducees which only read the books of Moses, ignoring those books that talked about Temple corruption. The Pharisees believed in miracles, the supernatural and the resurrection of the dead. The Sadducees, however, believed in none of those things. To them, God was pretty much done working. The Pharisees held a high standard on morality and believed that obedience to God was important. Many of us also hold that obedience to God is pretty important. In other words, the Pharisees represented the most faithful in Judaism at the time of Jesus... at least on paper.

Where the Pharisees went wrong is where so many "religious folk" go wrong today. You can have all the right doctrines and beliefs, even appeal to right living and deny a vicious, power-hungry hierarchy. You can read your Bible every day, pray even more than the Bible recommends, give a precise offering of 10% of everything you own, but still be missing something. In John 10, Jesus tells the Pharisee that sheep run away from a stranger's voice. The very next sentence describes the Pharisees as "not getting it." They are a stranger to God.

The symptom of being estranged from God is one's capacity or incapacity for love. John 10 comes on the heels of a man being thrown out of the synagogue for being healed on the Sabbath. A cold lack of empathy and love turns the celebration of a dramatic healing into a trial and banishment.

The scary thing is that if it can happen to the Pharisees, it can happen to anyone. So let us together take our love temperature, that our capacity to love and understand one another might grow into the One who truly understands and loves- Jesus Christ.