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Growing up, the Pharisees were the villains in so many of my Sunday school classes.
Everyone knows the story of the Pharisees confronting Jesus about the woman who committed adultery, pointing to the religious law as reason that the woman should be stoned.
It was a trap: would Jesus follow the Jewish law and condemn the woman to be stoned, in violation of the Roman law the Jews were currently under? Would he advise them not to stone her, breaking the Jewish law and therefore breaking his message of obedience to God?
The answer that Jesus gave radically redefined everything: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
A piece of the text that is not often remembered is that Jesus hardly even acknowledges the Pharisees. He is drawing or writing in the sand and they have to ask him twice before he gives his iconic response—only to go back to his writing in the sand. It is implied that he continues to focus on drawing in the sand while the Pharisees, one by one, slink away knowing that Jesus had evaded their trap and turned it back on them.
Only when they have all left does Jesus then look around—and I believe there is a heavy dose of sarcasm when he asks the woman “Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?” When she answers that they have not, Jesus delivers the other iconic piece of that passage “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.”
There are countless tales of Jesus’ confrontations with the Pharisees and their ilk: flipping the tables in anger at the money-changers in the temple; challenging their concept of Sabbath law when they wielded it against him and his disciples; and so on and so forth.
So it is disheartening to see some of the very people teaching those kinds of lessons in the churches of my childhood to be filling the role of the Pharisees, and not Jesus, today.
The latest of these examples is the circumstances surrounding the inclusion of an LGBTQ+ pride float in the annual Prattville Christmas parade. Clean Up Alabama, the group that has challenged the inclusion of LGBTQ+ materials in libraries, jumped up to call on the city to remove Prattville Pride from the parade.
A Facebook friend and former church member posted that her husband had personally called Mayor Bill Gillespie and that it appeared likely the float would be allowed to stay in the parade. While the post said she was not encouraging others to take any specific action, she also said that there was no better way to show disapproval and make change.
When I commented asking how Christians removing themselves as either spectators or participants in the Christmas parade would further the kingdom of Christ, one of my own relatives commented back to me about how “liberalism has taken hold” of me, and that “the world cannot be brought into the church.” They even went so far as to say that God is not just a God of love, but of anger and hurt, and that “God hates queers.”
Of course. a government-sponsored Christmas parade is not the church, but the world, and as I try to square up that passage about Jesus, the Pharisees and the adulterous woman with the current climate—its hard for me to see the religious right as Jesus defending the woman and not the crowd of Pharisees with stones in hand.
Even if you believe that homosexuality is a sin, you can still reach out to people in our community who are hurting, who feel unloved and unwelcome precisely because of the Pharisees who are more focused on the splinter in their neighbor’s eyes than the logs in their own.
When asked what is the greatest commandment of all, Jesus replied “To love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might; and the second is like unto it, love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The Christmas parade is for your neighbors as much as it is for anybody. If you disagree with Prattville Pride, you could certainly protest—if that’s what you think Jesus would do. Or maybe you could meet the people, learn about their experiences, try to understand them and even befriend them. Only then would you have an opportunity to share with them your beliefs, even if that ultimately falls on deaf ears.
Jesus made a habit of meeting with sinners, and the Pharisees are always there in the background, scoffing at him. This holiday season ask yourself: who am I in this passage?
