As a child in Sunday School, I sat through a lot of flannelgraph lessons. For those of you not familiar with flannelgraph, a flannelgraph was a blue board on which cardboard characters would be stuck to illustrate a Bible story. I don't know how my Sunday School teachers ever managed to present a comprehensible story on a flannelgraph board. Presenting a whole story usually required 50 cardboard figures that the teacher had to balance on her lap while trying to keep a class of 25 children interested in her story. The main problem was that there was usually more than one cardboard figure for each character. You didn't just have a cardboard Jesus. You had a sitting Jesus, and a standing Jesus, and a praying Jesus. Then, you had the disciples in a group of 12 standing. Then, they came in a group of 12 sitting. Then they came in 4 groups of 3 with 6 standing and 6 sitting. And they came in another arrangement of 4 groups of 3 with the six that were standing sitting and the six that were sitting standing. It was all very confusing, but the teachers always managed the story flawlessly.
I bring up flannelgraphs because of today's chapter where Jesus castigates the Pharisees. On flannelgraphs, you not only had Jesus and the disciples, you also had the Pharisees. You had the Pharisees sitting and the Pharisees standing.....You get the idea. Like Jesus and the disciples, the Pharisees came in lots of poses. But there was one thing that was consistent with the Pharisees. They were always sneering. You see, not only did Jesus and the disciples have different body postures, they also had different expressions. There was smiling Jesus and serious Jesus. There were smiling disciples and fearful disciples. But the Pharisees had only one facial expression: permanent sneer. In addition, all of the Pharisees always had a very dark visage. Even as a five year old, I could look at the Pharisees and understand the message: the Pharisees were evil men. The artists who made flannelgraph figures made it very clear. Pharisees were the type of men who kicked dogs and took lollipops from babies. It was no wonder that Jesus didn't like them.
For years, I was sure that my flannelgraph training was right. I was sure that the Pharisees were the most despised men of their generation. That is why I was so surprised to find that the truth is actually quite different. As I read about first-century history in Israel, I found that Pharisees were not universally despised. In fact, they were largely beloved. In the time of Jesus, the Pharisees were enormously popular with the people. Everybody agreed that they were holy men, completely devoted to God. People in the first century wanted a Pharisee as a neighbor. They wanted their daughters to marry Pharisees. Rather than being universally despised, Pharisees were the object of universal admiration and affection. They were admired as truly religious men. No one in their wildest imagination could have imagined that God was unhappy with the Pharisees.
Yet, in Matthew 23, Jesus makes it very clear that God indeed is very unhappy with the Pharisees. Their religion does not follow the teaching of God. It circumvents that teaching through the rule of men. Their religion does not touch the whole person. It changes the outside while leaving the inside alone. Their religion did not center on pleasing God. Instead, it centered on pleasing men. In almost every way, the Pharisees are found deficient.
Many evangelicals could not imagine that God could be unhappy with the evangelical church in America. But the story of the Pharisees raises the troubling prospect that God might not be as pleased with us as we would hope him to be. We are troubled by many of the same flaws that troubled the Pharisees. We are more interested in man's rules than God's Word. We change the outside but our hearts remain dark and sinful. We are not trying to please God. Our religion is about a performance for other people. Jesus words call us to take stock of our own faith tradition and community. His words call us to ask the question: are there still Pharisees among us today? Or to personalize the question, Might we be Pharisees ourselves?
The day I found that out I became very uncomfortable. I had always assumed that I was
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