SKANDALON (g) the Pharisees as 'scandals'

We have seen how Jesus answered the Pharisees’ accusation; let us now look briefly at his answer to his disciples’ question in 15.12, quoted above: “Every plant not planted by my heavenly Father will be rooted out. Leave them be – they are blind guides of the blind”. This clearly echoes the parable of the wheat and the weeds, which we have already visited twice. ‘Seed’ and ‘sower’ are replaced by ‘plant’ and ‘planting’, and it is the Father who is the sower/planter, not the Son, but even so the parallel is unmistakeable: the Pharisees are weeds sown by the Devil, false teachers and blind guides. The parallel is reinforced by two verbal echoes. In the parable (13.29), the landowner is concerned that if his workers gather up the weeds early on, they may also “root out” (‘ekrizo’) the wheat, the word Jesus uses here to refer to the eventual fate of the Pharisees; these are its only two uses in Matthew, and it is only used twice elsewhere in the NT. “So”, the landowner says to his workers (v. 30), “leave them be” (‘aphete’), the very same word Jesus uses about the Pharisees here. The implication is that God’s judgement will come upon them in God’s time, and that the Pharisees who now find Jesus a stumbling-block will be among those ‘scandals’ whom God’s angels gather out of his kingdom and cast into the furnace. Those who teach legalism, it seems, are as much stumbling-blocks to true faith as those who teach licence.