Canter Bridge

The focus of the gospels on presenting Jesus within his real-world Palestinian millieu does not allow for a nuanced portrayal of the Pharisees. It is all too easy to fall into caricature.

Yet even when the proper interpretive precautions have been taken and caveats installed in all the right places, the Pharisee movement appears to have got some things quite wrong. At least when viewed from the perspective of Jesus and his chroniclers, a well-intentioned commitment to fostering holiness across the breadth of their ‘Israel’ had engendered some ugly myopia.

Concern for righteousness easily does that, rendering it potentially one of the most lethal of virtues. Righteousness with a religious or ideological undergirding–think of the zeal of the fundamentalist next door or the ecological warrior down the street–has a very weak tolerance for mercy.

Jesus’ disciples follow him hungrily through a field one Sabbath day and help themselves to what they might have considered their rightful gleanings. For the Pharisees, they do so on the wrong day. Their are six days for looking after one’s belly. It seems irrelevant to waste time wondering what urgent tasks might have kept them from doing so yesterday, the day before, or on any other of the permissible days.

Jesus, it seems, is furious at the self-righteous pedantry of the Pharisees’ complaint:

But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.

They get two things wrong.

First, they fail to understand that the shaping of life by ritual observance and legislative self-denial is meant to do just that: shape life. It is not intended, Jesus seems to teach us, as a strait-jacket that does its constrictive job at all times and in all places with equal and clinical objectivity. Life is the important thing and ritual is quite powerful at cultivating it. But not always and not when clueless to the human beings over whom it extends its sway.

And then they fail to understand that Jesus’ presence in some way claims priority over everything that has been. He is lord in some novel way that rearranges a nation’s furniture if it does not immediately make all things new.

Matthew tells us that Jesus soon heals a man on the Sabbath to drive home the point he makes here in more prosaic circumstances.

Mercy has come. Everything else must find its proper location, meaning, and raison-d’être somewhere down the line. Mercy, for all its pleasant gentleness, punches above its weight.