SKANDALON 4 (f): Jesus a 'scandal' to the Pharisees

Next on the list of those ‘scandalized’ by Jesus are, rather less surprisingly, the Pharisees. In their case, the word has more or less its modern meaning: their sense of propriety and self-righteousness was constantly outraged by Jesus’ teaching and life-style, and the behaviour of his disciples. But although such confrontations occur frequently in the gospels, only once are we told that they were scandalized, even though that must have been their default mode when Jesus’ name was so much as mentioned. This occurs in Matthew 15.12: “Then the disciples came to Jesus and said, ‘Do you realise that the Pharisees when they heard the teaching were scandalized ?’” It is not entirely clear from the context what teaching (literally ‘word’) the disciples are referring to; there are two possibilities, though they are closely linked. The chapter begins with the Pharisees complaining to Jesus that his disciples eat their meals without first ceremonially washing their hands, as prescribed by “the tradition of the elders”. Jesus’ reply is in two parts. The first is a counter-attack: he accuses them of using this tradition to set aside the clear imperative of the word of God – the fifth commandment, “thou shalt honour thy father and mother”. A man could evade this obligation to care for his parents in their old age by claiming that the money needed to do so had been pledged to God; this sounded pious, but in fact was breaking God’s law. The ceremonial washing which the Pharisees thought so important was not, in fact, required by scripture, and for Jesus it was scripture that was God’s word, not tradition. The second part of his answer made another important distinction, between external, ceremonial cleanliness, which was merely a matter of ritual washing, and real inner cleanliness of the heart, which was what mattered to God. What made you unclean in his eyes was not what you ate but what you said, since your words all too often revealed the true state of your heart. No meat, therefore was ‘unclean’, nor did unwashed hands make you unclean in God’s sight – it was the state of your heart that did that. As we have seen, this was a lesson that Peter himself needed to have repeated three times in his vision at Joppa before he accepted it, and which many Jewish converts in Rome had still not grasped. In quick succession, then, Jesus has attacked and exposed first “the tradition of the elders” where it runs counter to scripture, and then the rituals of purification which leave the heart untouched. So it is not surprising that the Pharisees were scandalized – and equally scandalized, most probably, by both parts of Jesus’ riposte. Their religion was essentially one of scrupulous externals and numerous traditional rituals, and the self-righteous hypocrisy which the observing of these bred in them hardened their hearts to the word of God. Today, too, the living Christ can be a scandal to those whose religion is essentially Pharisaic, based on human tradition and external ritual.