WHITE-WASHED, MARBLE, GOLDEN TOMBS REMAINS A TOMB (22nd Sunday)

“HE is always shocking His fellow countrymen by doing the wrong things (according to them), the things they have been taught not to do.” The above quotation by the Rev. Ronald Knox, better known for his English Translation of the Holy Bible, in a nutshell, describes Christ’s approach in His teachings.
If our Lord seems to impair the effectiveness of His mission, by keeping too quiet about it, or by delivering His message in terms which people can’t understand, we must suppose that He had a good reason for such behaviour. But what is even more difficult to account for, is what you may call His deliberate disregard of appearances.

Here is this ancient people, the Jews, in the days of Christ, whose whole notion of religion is bound up with the Law of Moses. It has been their ideal of life, their philosophy, for whole centuries; they have gone through unheard of persecutions rather than giving up their religion, rather than betraying the belief of their fore-fathers.

It is a fact that the provisions of the Law have grown more complicated and more exacting as time went on. To blame for this was their culture and their character, helped along by the Pharisees, and their mission to break up every single law into a myriad of other laws, and coloured by their interpretations. No doubt, through poring over every single Law for so long, the fanatical Pharisees have developed ‘legalism’ in its most perfect term.

Now why is it that our Lord is always going out of His way, or so it seems, to flout their favourite scruples? Always telling people ‘to carry their beds on a Sabbath’; ‘sitting down to eat without the ceremonial washing of the hands that has become customary’; ‘dining with tax-collectors and sinners’, people who had almost lost their consciousness of Jewish nationality. The list is unending.

Why did Jesus Christ want to come to earth as a Jew (the multi-billion dollar question) … and then throw overboard all their cherished observances of Judaism? It was surely, because He saw one failing, among many others, as characteristic of the Jewish nation in His day. They had too much regard for appearances; they were always bothering about what other people would say … and this is common to all the human race as a whole. Against that background of ‘shams and pietisms, the straightforwardness of His nature revolted … the ‘spirit’ and not the word.

Against the people who were ready to clean the ‘outside’ of the cups and dishes … the part that showed, that was visible by onlookers … leaving the inside dirty and grimy; against people who made long prayers and swallowed up the property of widows. He would be contemptuous of appearances, in protest against the spirit which thinks of appearances and nothing else. We are as God sees us. Let us not fall under the condemnation of those Pharisees who “valued their credit with men higher than their credit with GOD.”

Adapted from Ronald Knox Commentary