The Pharisee Chronicles, Part XIV: Compassion vs. Problem Solving

[Like I mentioned earlier, this series on phariseeism began as a series of thoughts I mulled over during my bike trip this summer. I was originally planning on building a logically progressing profile of the problem of Christian "religiosity", but I'm finding that I'll have to settle for jotting down a bunch of snapshots instead.]

One of the things Jesus repeatedly accuses the Pharisees of is their inability to understand compassion. This is also an attribute of the "pharisee" I'm talking about in this series.

Now the Christian pharisee obviously knows that compassion is one of the virtues he's supposed to strive for, and, in his own way, he does have something like compassion. (Just like, "in his own way", the pharisee has his own versions of all spiritual virtues.)

If you share a problem or a struggle with him, he at least would like to see this problem solved. He's not indifferent to it. In fact, one of the things you're not likely to hear a pharisee say is, "your sins and struggles are none of my business."

But the pharisee's solution is usually an oversimplified one, more or less like this:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYLMTvxOaeE

There is no real compassion. Sure the pharisee wants to see the problem solved, but that's because the problem itself is an annoyance to him. It is one of the many things that are wrong with the world and that produce a discomfort and anger in him (see previous entry).

But compassion is not the same thing as "trying to get the problem out of the way as fast as possible." Compassion means suffering along with someone: "com" = with, and "passion" = suffering. Similar meaning, similar combination of roots, as the word "sympathy".

Once again, the difference between Jesus and the Pharisees is that Jesus becomes like us. He accuses the Pharisees of putting heavy burdens on people and not lifting a finger to help them. But Jesus, though he tells us to take up our cross, goes before us carrying his. He does put a yoke upon us, but his yoke is light, and he yokes himself alongside us so that we can learn from him and work with him, and so that he works with us and suffers alongside us.

The pharisee offers problem-solving advice, but it's generally misguided advice because he doesn't bother trying to relate to the problem, to really suffer under the difficulty, first. In fact, one of the most aggravating attributes of a pharisee is that the less he can relate to your problem, the more confident he is in his "solution" and the more frustrated and disappointed he is with you for persisting with not winning your struggle in spite of his "help".

As a recovering pharisee, I'll tell you a little secret: the pharisee doesn't really WANT to feel compassion, he doesn't really WANT to understand your problem. Real problems and real struggles are messy things, things that would challenge his simple view of the world. If you tell him that you sometimes doubt that God is good, or that you can't control your overeating or your alcohol consumption, or that you gossip about things you know you should keep secret, or that you still can't forgive someone for something they've done to you long ago, or that you have irrational fears, his go-to answer is "stop it!"

The pharisee believes that whatever you're struggling with is your own fault for not trying hard enough to put an end to it, and he doesn't really want to open his mind to the possibility that he may be wrong. But maybe there is in fact nothing you can do about your sin except to wait on the Lord and to trust His forgiveness in the meantime. (Why else would we need Jesus?) This is the condition you have to live in, and the pharisee does not want to share in this suffering (have "com""passion", "with""suffering"). Our most stubborn sins become deeply entrenched in us precisely because of our constant attempts to beat them away through our willpower. Relinquishing our attempts and trusting in God is a very hard step, and it becomes harder when you have someone with spiritual-sounding arguments about why your willpower is the way to go.

Here is the tragedy: the pharisee, in trying to "solve" your problem, increases the burden. You, struggling under the greater burden, find your problems worsened. This in turn frustrates the pharisee, to whom you just look like an example of someone obstinately refusing what's best for them. He'll increase the intensity of his problem-solving technique, which will cause your burden to grow heavier, etc.

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part XIII: Anger

I'm generally skeptical of "personality tests". This is because most personality tests I've encountered seem to be cold reads which combine flattery (usually telling you how unique or intelligent you are) with vague, universal platitudes (stuff like "even though you like having things organized, there are pockets of chaos in your life"). A lot of times personality tests sound just like horoscopes to me.

But when I read Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert's book about the Enneagram, it struck me as something legit. Maybe that's because the nine personality types in the enneagram sound (in this book) very much like people you've actually met, with real foibles and aggravating idiosynchracies. Above all, I find both the psychological and spiritual explanations enlightening, accounting for both our individual uniqueness and our need for redemption.

But looking at results for internet searches about the Enneagram personality types, I'm finding the same sort of shallow cold read material that I find for other personality tests, which makes me suspect that maybe there are many personality tests out there that I'd find legit if I got an actual explanation, rather than these online tests.

At any rate, I found it interesting that Rohr and Ebert consider the Ennea Type ONE to be something of a "born pharisee". Type ONE is sort of an obsessive perfectionist, especially in moral matters. Hard on self and others. Punctual. Frequently derisive of just regular fun stuff. A strong believer in willpower and rationality, and often suspicious of emotion.

Type ONE has a vision of how the world should be, and is constantly disappointed in the reality he finds. His friends, his community, his job, his political party, his family, his car, his house -- everything around him is something that he had high expectations of when he was coming in, but that turned out to be different than he expected. Type ONE is naturally drawn to religion, because at least God can be counted on to be perfect (although he finds, if he ever admits it to himself, that even God is infuriatingly messy in His mysterious ways).

Obviously many Type ONEs become cynical from the constant disappointment. Others adjust their expectations to be more realistic, but they can often only do this in a form of "resignation". Many will simply block away a part of themselves (such as the messier emotions) and actually be fully unaware of this part of themselves for long periods of time. Still others retain an upbeat can-do attitude, not allowing any amount of past disappointments to shake their belief that they can still find the sort of perfection that would truly satisfy them.

But what lies at the heart of all of this is something that you may perhaps find surprising: it is anger.

As this series lumbers on I'm going to say some more about anger, because I think that's a root sin of a pharisee. But for today I'll just finish by saying that I, for one, was very surprised to find the ways that anger expresses itself. I had expected an "angry person" to be the guy who has a hot temper, not the guy who remains perpetually sunny and hopeful.

10-Year-Old ArtIFact, Part 11: I Need Your Grace (Track 8)

I once had a beautiful South American protest song in my head, and wrote lyrics to it, in English, about my dependence on the grace of God.

I figured I wouldn't be able to use the melody that had been going through my mind, so I sent the lyrics to Rob, who set them to music. I thought his music was a little too agressive for what I was thinking of, though, so I wrote another set of lyrics to his melody (this song then became "Among the Dead") and asked him if he could come up with a new tune for this.

The end result was a sober enough song, but neither of us are particularly happy with how it turned out on the recording. I had wanted at least one song that features some Andean instruments, and we have a toyo and a charango in this, but the effect is not the one I had been going for. Our limited studio didn't really give us enough channels to work with, so we ended up making compromises. In addition, the interplay between the Andean instruments and the saxophone, guitar and hand percussion sounded better in theory than in practice. The odd-time groove which alternates 4/4 and 7/8 time might also sound more jarring than interesting.

As far as the text goes, it is interesting to me that if I were to write a song about God's grace now, ten years later, I don't think I'd even take the challenge. It seems to me that my comprehension of Grace has changed greatly. Back then I probably thought of it primarily as the mop and bucket with which God cleans up my mess, rather than a driving power that moves me forward and upward.

Anyway, here it is, if you want to hear it:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ecsYW4dL70

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part XII: Indebtedness

Last week I wrote a piece about the difficulties I have in generating genuine gratitude. One of my handful of regular readers pointed me to wikipedia's take on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude

Mostly it's a long list of advantages you can enjoy if you're a grateful person. For me, reading through this was a sort of depressing experience, even though I'm sure that it was sent to me in the hopes that it would be an inspiring one. It felt a bit like being in a wheelchair and someone telling you how much fun he's having running around. "See how awesome it is to be a grateful person? Only you, of course, are incapable of it."

This illustrates what I mentioned in my last entry: just because you give someone a list of all the advantages of a certain course of action doesn't mean that you enable them to pursue it. Most smokers know the health risks of smoking, but that knowledge doesn't empower them to break free. In fact, sometimes it's that knowledge that keeps them bound (knowing that they're poisoning themselves stresses them out, and their go-to method of dealing with stress is to have a smoke).

But I got some useful stuff out of the article as well. For one thing, it ends by saying that there are exercises to enhance gratitude, which I find interesting. I'm still not sure how much it will help me, because you can't enhance something that's not there, so I still need to find out how to generate a little bit of gratitude before I can go expanding that into a whole lot of it. It sort of reminds me of Jesus' words that "to him who has, more will be given, but from him who doesn't have, the little he has will be taken away."

But my thought for today has to do with the first real point of the article: the differentiation between "gratitude" and "indebtedness".

Indeed, this comes at a good time in my series on phariseeism, because I think that what lay at the root of my phariseeism was a deep sense of "indebtedness". In spite of all the talk I heard about "salvation by grace alone" or "faith, not works", and all that, I still understood the gospel to be very much a reciprocal transaction. Jesus gives his life, so I give mine. I OWE him. And I can NEVER pay it back all the way. So anytime he asks me to do something that I don't want to do, he can say, "Oh, come on. After all I've done for you..." and since laying down his life is an impossible act to repay, I'll be indebted all my life. I felt that the Christian life consisted of submitting to a sort of divine manipulation.

Wikipedia makes this differentiation:

"Gratitude is not the same as indebtedness. While both emotions occur following help, indebtedness occurs when a person perceives that they are under an obligation to make some repayment of compensation for the aid. The emotions lead to different actions; indebtedness motivates the recipient of the aid to avoid the person who has helped them, whereas gratitude motivates the recipient to seek out their benefactor and to improve their relationship with them."

For much of my life I had things turned around. I assumed that by Jesus "paying my debt" it was like the debt had only been transferred. I no longer had to pay a debt to that nasty Satan guy, but I thought that I was now expected to pay back as much as I could to that kind Jesus guy.

This, in fact, can make it even more difficult. If you owe money to a complete douchebag, you get a sort of perverse pleasure out of not repaying him, even if he makes your life miserable in return. But if you owe money to the most kindhearted person in the world, you feel terrible every time you see him. You start avoiding him because you know that you have no excuse or explanation for why you don't have this month's installments with you. This is not the path to a good friendship.

The pharisee has a keen sense of justice, and that justice is karmic and has little room for grace. That means that even if he has been given something as a "free gift", he will consider it his duty to repay as much of it as he is able.

I still hear many Christians talking as if it is our duty as Christians to "repay" Jesus. I don't know where other people get with this, but in my case, it lead me to despair and anger. And to an inability to comprehend genuine gratitude.

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part XI: The psychology of imperatives, willpower, reason and sin

One of the great steps for me in my spiritual walk was the recognition of the limitation -- indeed the OBSTACLE -- presented to me by my willpower. My thinking went more or less along the lines that Jesus saved me, and that in return I have to try very hard to be good. If I don't do what's good it's because either I don't know what's good, or I'm not trying hard enough.

There are a few problems with this, and I'll get to them eventually. The one I'm interested in addressing here is the idea that we indeed are such simple organisms as to be able to recognise what is good, put our minds to it and "just do it."

I was totally clueless on the psychology and spirituality of our actions. For example, I would probably have gone so far as to believe that if someone has a weight problem, this can be solved by sitting them down, explaining the health advantages of a fit body vs. an overweight one, and then telling them to eat less and exercise more. And if their weight problem persisted, it was (in my mind) because they were undisciplined gluttons.

In a small number of cases, the "explain the advantages of a fit body" method might actually work. But those are exceptions; for the most part, a person who is overweight is already obsessing enough about their body weight, and how to bring it down, and is already trying to work up the discipline for diets and exercise programs, and is generally depressed about it even without having to listen to simplistic answers from people who do not share this struggle.

But that is the way of the pharisee. The pharisee sees the most direct, simplistic manifestation of a behavior problem, and ignores the psychological and spiritual forces that lie at the root of the problem. He believes (I believed this for years, and it sounds heretical to me now) that with a good shot of self-discipline you can solve it all.

And the thing is, it seems to us (especially when we are young) that we CAN control a lot of our behavior through our willpower. But much of this is an illusion we have manufactured because we have not seen the Grace that has been at work.

I know rich people who come from poor backgrounds who have no sympathy for poor people. Their thinking is, "I used to be like that, and look at me now. If any of them wanted, they could work their way to the top like I did."

Because, you know, it is easy to think that if you got rich it is because you "worked your way to the top." It's easy to forget how much of this "working your way to the top" was a fortunate combination of events and circumstances that were completely beyond your control. If someone points this out to you, you can make a long-winded argument to defend the thesis that it WAS your hard work and not the circumstances.

It is the same with a pharisee. You don't want to confess your sins to a pharisee because he has no sympathy. If he also has struggles, he won't let you know, and the areas he doesn't struggle in he considers to be areas he's conquered through spiritual discipline, rather than areas in which God's grace has spared him. He thinks you can "work your way" out of sin just like he thinks he's "worked his way" out of it, and he has no patience with you if you question the value of self-discipline in solving sin problems.

This I think is part of what Jesus meant when he called the Pharisees "blind guides."

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part X: The Older Brother

One of the best-known "pharisees" in the Bible wasn't really a Pharisee at all: he's the older brother in the famous Parable of the Prodigal Son.

So the younger brother demands his full inheritance from the father, squanders it, loses everything, is reduced to herding pigs, then returns to his senses and realizes that he could have a much better life being a servant of his father's. He returns home offering himself to be a laborer, but his father receives him back as a son, and throws a big party.

A well-known heart-warming story of grace and forgiveness and unconditional love. But things look a little different from the perspective of the older brother. Some people think that Jesus added him as a symbol of the institutional religion of the day, but I don't think so. I think he included him in the story because mercy and grace are all well and good if we are the recipients of it, but look a little different when someone else receives it, undeserved, at our expense.

Jesus certainly showed the sibling dynamic in a way that many can identify with. You can talk to many pairs of brothers and you will find that the older one is frustrated by the fact that the younger one seems to "get away with everything," while the younger one often feels judged and disapproved of by his big brother.

A pharisee has a strong sense of justice, and a strong sense of justice requires a sort of karmic worldview: people will eventually get what's coming to them, their good deeds being rewarded and their bad deeds being punished. So a pharisee is offended to see karma thwarted, when a person has done bad but still gets a party thrown for them, and when a person has done good but gets no special rewards.

I always claimed that I was NOT like the older brother, since I was happy to see anyone forsake their evil ways and come to Jesus. I wasn't angry because God forgave them and promised them a bright future they didn't "deserve". I was happy for them.

But I was missing something important in the parable: the younger son in the story gets something that the older son doesn't get, even though he's always wanted it. Sure we can be happy for others to enjoy a glorious afterlife that we know we're getting as well. But can we be happy for those who have taken the low road and then, after making a show of asking for forgiveness, receive something we've always wanted and have never gotten, in all our years of efforts?

The older son thinks that all his years of faithfully working for his father entitle him to something that he hasn't gotten: his father never even gave him a goat for a little party, but his brother gets the fattened calf.

As a high schooler I watched with a great sense of superiority as my peers partied through their teens. I was the "no booze, no drugs, no parties, no women" guy, and proudly convinced that God would one day reward my discipline. But what I failed to realize then was that I was living with a deep suspicion of anything that is fun. I'm not saying that I should have partied it up; but with my strong conviction that a life of ascetic sacrifice would entitle me to a better position with the Almighty I cut myself off from something I have never fully recovered, and that is essential to every Christian: the ability to party. The younger brother had the ability to party, and this ability brought him ruin at the beginning of the story, but also helped him to restoration. (All our strengths ultimately work against us until they have undergone a death process, and our weaknesses become our crowns once they have been resurrected.) The older brother lacked this ability, which means that he didn't get into as deep trouble, but also found it harder to accept his Father's love.

The thing that truly offends a pharisee is that it is all grace. This means that all our labor is in vain, which is a more depressing thought to many of us than the idea that grace will give us much more than our labor could earn us.

The father tells the older brother "all I have is yours." It was not the years of work and being the "good boy" that entitle the older brother to a festive meal. He could have just asked for it, and received it out of the love of his Father, rather than out of the merits of his efforts. The great irony of this parable is that both sons, in their way, demand to be treated like hired laborers, and only the one who thinks he's been a pretty good hired laborer objects to being treated like a son instead.

A Christian pharisee will often claim to believe that "it is all grace", but when it comes down to it, when you watch what makes him tick, what makes him angry, what makes him indignant and what makes him happy, you realize that he doesn't really believe that it's ALL grace. He believes that putting in an extra effort entitles you to more grace. At this point grace ceases to be grace, and becomes another karmic transaction. And the Christian loses something that is essential to his spiritual life: the ability to leave his past behind and just party for once. The younger brother could leave his recklessly mis-spent past behind him and join the party, but the older brother had a much harder time leaving his hard-working past behind him. It's like your bank's archives going up in flames: if you were bankrupt and deeply indebted, you love this new start, but if you were doing great and had payments due you from all sides, you curse your luck.

This is why Jesus said "blessed are the poor in spirit". Unless you are bankrupt, you do not consider a "start over" based on grace alone to be a better position than before.

One last lesson I learn from this story: the two ARE brothers. The differences in their personality do not change the fact that they are sons of the same father, and that the father loves them equally and wants both to share in his wealth and his love. Both have a growing process to undergo, and the Father waits patiently for them to work through it, loving them all the way through the process.

Giving thanks

Well, it's sort of harvest time in the northern hemisphere, different cultures will celebrate "Thanksgiving" or "Harvest Festival" on different days. We got our thanksgiving sermon last week. You know, the message where we are encouraged to give thanks for things.

So I've been thinking about that. And thinking. And not really finding a port of landing for my thoughts. But I'll blog about them anyway, because I can.

Two apparently unrelated stories from one of my friends who's a family man:

STORY #1. He told me that one of his surprises in rearing children was the realisation that, apparently, we don't come equipped with a natural reaction of gratitude. Children need to be TAUGHT that it is polite to say thank you.

STORY #2. He talked about how much homework his kids were getting, and whether we should support a system in which kids aren't being permitted to be kids. I told him I never did my homework in 12 years of school, and look at me today. It struck me that this could either be a cautionary example ("If you don't do your homework you'll end up like Marco") or an inspirational one ("Homework schmomework, Marco never did his either"). It all depends on how enviable you consider my current life to be, which is another way of saying it depends on how much reason for gratitude you think I have.

Let's start with STORY #1. I myself still seem to be stuck at the point of saying thank you because it's polite, and not because I generally feel a sense of gratitude. There are many times when I know I SHOULD feel gratitude, but I don't. I say "thank you" to acknowledge what I know I should feel, or what I am expected to feel, or whatever.

Why do I not feel grateful for most things? Do I feel so entitled to it all?

In a way, shockingly, the answer is "yes". One of the things I've heard too often is the sort of "be thankful that you're not an African war child" talk. And of course I'm thankful that I haven't had to suffer from malnutrition, traumatic scenes of violence, machete-mutilations, etc. But it also feels weird to constantly be telling God "thank you for not letting some machete-wielding psycho amputate my limbs when I was a child." Strangely, it doesn't make me feel more grateful. It makes me feel like, "What sort of a messed up world is this, where children get mutilated with machetes, and you want me to be saying THANK YOU because this did NOT happen to me? How about 'no thanks for running such a f___d-up world in the first place, and putting me into it'?"

I mean, I can understand that we expect our children to say thank you if we buy them an expensive Christmas present. But should they also be thanking us for turning off the gas valve so they won't be poisoned? For making sure that when we hang up the bathroom mirror it's not some hack-job that will fall down and shatter into a thousand sharp shards of glass? For NOT taking the rabid pit bull home with us and releasing it in the kids' playing area? I mean, isn't this sort of the least that you could expect from parents who profess to love their children?

Anne Frank (whose diary I re-read earlier this year) actually has a deep insight into this as well: she says something like, "if you only find your gratitude in comparing yourself to those who are worse off than you, then what do you do when you can no longer think of anyone who is worse off than you?" The fact is, there are people who are genuinely thankful without being able to point at anyone and say, "at least I'm not as bad off as that person."

Someone once asked me if I had ever thanked God for being "fearfully and wonderfully made". I haven't. And I think there's a similar blockade here: if God is the great Artist, you could EXPECT His work to be functional. Should I go around thanking Him because I am not a formless gelatinous mass?

Maybe I should. But this sort of thinking does something weird to me. It's as if I'm trying to manipulate myself into seeing the glass as being half-full by doing mental exercises in which the glass is completely empty. At some point, these mental exercises themselves create a reality of sorts, and my mind is full of empty glasses that exist in order to point out to me that my glass is not half-empty, but half-full. And now say thank you for your half-full glass, you undeserving wretch.

I suspect there must be more to gratitude than optimism ("the glass is half full" is viewed as an optimistic statement, but that doesn't make it a thankful one). But certainly being able to view something as positive helps you to muster some feeling of gratitude for it.

But the problem is that my approach has been precisely the opposite: I'm supposed to first turn into a pessimist who expects to get machete-mutilated, and then feel a sort of relief and gratitude that it DIDN't happen to me.

Now this links in with STORY #2. You could say, "if you don't do your homework, you'll end up like Marco, renting a tiny flat in Amsterdam's red light district, working night shifts at a hostel, with no car, no wife and no lucrative recording contract with a major label -- no recording contract at all, in fact." Or you could say, "Marco never did his homework, but that never made a difference. He's traveled many countries and lived many adventures. He's now living in a sweet little place in downtown Amsterdam, debt-free and working a job he loves and getting more vacation days in a year than your daddy gets in a decade. Pretty sweet, eh?"

It's all about frame of reference. Some of my old friends are living the American Dream. Some of them are very depressed. Many have debts. Some have no health insurance. Some make lots of money. Some have lots of friends. Some seem very happy. Some are traveling around the world. Some have jobs they hate. Some have jobs they love. Depending on which aspect of which of my friends' lives I focus on, I can either look good or look bad -- but that's it. It's more of a competition to see who's more priviledged than a genuine exercise in thanksgiving.

The funny thing is (and now I'm getting to the point of all this writing) that I'm only just realizing to what an extent I've been trying to live inside a contradiction all my life. On the one hand, I was supposed to be thankful. On the other hand, I was supposed to be ambitious, refusing to be content with anything but shining success. In other words, I was supposed to be content AND discontent.

Maybe this is an inescapable condition we find ourselves in as humans. But for me, the demand was always accusatory (I'm speaking of our "inner pharisee" these days...). If I was dissatisfied with my lot, and expecting more from life, there was a voice inside me that said, "stop whining and start thanking God that you have all your limbs, you little baby." And if I was enjoying some simple pleasure, a voice said, "killing time again? You were meant for much more than this, you pathetic underachiever." A moment ago I was supposed to be content for having my body parts intact, and already I was supposed to "not settle for" -- be DIScontent with -- anything but preternatural success.

It's funny when I look at the life plans I had in my early to mid twenties: on the one hand I was trying to figure out if I could make a living as a hobo, and on the other hand I had a firm faith that someday you would see my name in lights. I was an underachieving megalomaniac. This contradiction first became clear to me about two years ago, during my pilgrimage, and I'm slowly realizing to what extent it explains so many other aspects of my life, like my inability to feel gratitude.

So let me finish this long ramble by saying I have no answers to the question of how I can become genuinely thankful. But I'll tell you what I'm gonna try not to do: I'm gonna try not to skew my frame of reference around, comparing me to people who are worse off than me in order to generate a feeling of (guilty?) gratitude for "at least not being them", and I'm not gonna sabotage my feelings of gratitude (if they do arise) for being underachieving or too easily pleased.

I mean, who can ever become genuinely grateful by being shamed into it?

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part IX: The last word is "effort"

There's that scene in "Anchorman" where the characters played by Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate are co-anchors for the news program even though they have an ugly personal rivalry going on between them. This spills over into the actual newscast as each of them tries to wedge in their established closing line as the last word. Ferrell says "You stay classy, San Diego" and Applegate says "Thanks for stopping by", to which Ferrell replies, "but mostly, stay classy." "Thanks for stopping by." "Stay classy." etc.

This reminds me of the sort of conversation that we often have going on in our minds, as the different viewpoints we're considering try to get the last word in. As a good Christian, my inner pharisee knows that it's by grace that we're saved. But he believes (and had me convinced for a long time) that after the saving work is done, it's now all about getting me to put more effort in. And more. And then some more. He gets all uncomfortable if love or grace are to have the last word. If someone says, "God loves you", my inner pharisee wants to add, "but He also wants you to try your best." If someone says "God forgives you" he adds, "but don't do it again." If someone says "God is love", he says, "but He's also wrath and punishment."

For many years -- decades even -- I'd get uncomfortable with people who would talk about God's love and leave it at that. I'd feel that they made things too easy, because if someone believes that God is all love and forgiveness, this would surely result in licentiousness and everyone would just go out and do as they please because "God forgives them". As a true pharisee, I thought that the message "try harder" should be given the last word.

What I didn't realize is that I had things sort of mixed up. Usually, the most obvious displays of hedonism are not a result of someone believing too much in the love of God and not enough in the judgment and wrath of God. It is very frequently the other way around. If you meet an amoral hedonist, you'll frequently find that he grew up in a strict moralizing context. Usually his lifestyle is not so much banked on the love of God (even though he may talk as if it were), it is a reaction to the talk about the wrath of God. If you meet a former amoral hedonist who turned his life around and you ask what brought about the change, you will very often hear that it was an encounter with the love of God.

There's another way in which strict moralizing backfires, and that can be found in many of the more "liberal" churches: the emphasis gets put only on such ideas as "inclusivity", "tolerance", etc. The sermons are fluffy feel-good stories whose main intent is to sound comforting and inoffensive. A conservative pharisee may think that this kind of flaky theology arose from too many people talking about the love of God and leaving out the judgment of God, but again, he's frequently wrong; it could just as well be a reaction against all the condemnatory talk that people have had to listen to for too long. They want to focus on God's love and acceptance, and sometimes the only way they know how to do this is by dissolving traditional Christianity until it is all watery.

In fact, the great frustration of the pharisee is that the more he preaches hellfire and brimstone, the more people will shut their ears to his message and go their own way. And the more they go their own way, the more he feels that they need to hear about hellfire and brimstone.

And often he can achieve temporary success, especially with the psychologically weaker part of the population, by telling them how bad hell is. But in general, in the long run, the message will have the opposite effect. And he thinks that they're going astray because of all of these softies preaching God's love instead of God's judgment, but he's got the psychology wrong; there's only a part of us, and a weak part at that, that will reform based on threats of punishment. A true change of heart will not often occur under these conditions.

The change of heart occurs when the last word is given to the love of God.

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part VIII: Fear of contact

[With apologies for yesterday's discussion, I'm continuing my exploration of that religious character we've all met and who is commonly called a "pharisee". And (again with apologies) I'm continuing to use that word, meaning no disrespect for Judaism of this or any age. ]

Since I've moved to Amsterdam my eyes have been opened in a new way to that other group of people frequently mentioned in Jesus' interactions and teachings: the tax collectors.

This was forced on my attention because many of the monuments in Amsterdam have to do with the German occupation during WWII. The resistance fighters and the victims are (rightly) honored. But the uglier side is that there were also Dutch people who collaborated with the German occupying forces. Naturally, these opportunists and traitors don't have any monuments erected to them.

But these collaborators are the equivalents to what the tax collectors of Jesus' time were -- men working for the Roman oppressors and enjoying the perks that came with that job. No wonder a so-called "moral teacher" would raise eyebrows by eating and associating with them, as Jesus did with Zacchaeus and Matthew (to name only two). It's like the new preacher in town attending the private pool parties of mafia bosses; you'd have to wonder what kind of deals were being struck there.

The "pharisee" is concerned about this kind of contact, and I think he fears three things: 1. contamination, 2. loss of reputation, and 3. implied approval. If Jesus spends his time hanging out with traitors and opportunists, won't he 1. start becoming like them, 2. lose his authority due to all the gossip he will generate, and 3. (perhaps most seriously) won't he give the tax collector the feeling that there's nothing wrong with being a tax collector?

In one of the most gentle scenes between Jesus and the Pharisees, he answers their query by telling them that a doctor comes for the sick; the healthy don't need him.

I grew up on the mission field, where most Christians are already all about going to the "sick", and are sometimes harsh towards those who just "hang around with those who are healthy and don't need a doctor". But even outside the mission field, most Christians I talk to are aware of the need for "getting your hands dirty in the work of the Lord", or whatever your lingo may express it as. They generally don't object to you mingling with all sorts of unsavory types if what you're doing can be described as "ministry".

But the problem is that what Jesus was doing did not strike the outside observer as "ministry." He seemed to just be having a good time with some immoral people.

I have no doubt the Pharisees had been trying to get the tax collectors onto the path of virtue. They had a large interest in the moral rectitude of their entire nation. And yet, all their attempts could not do what Jesus achieved in the course of one meal: both Matthew and Zacchaeus were changed forever. Radically changed.

So what was Jesus' secret? How could an hour of eating together do more than decades of moralizing?

Well, I think that question answers itself: an hour of eating together does more than decades of moralizing. More good, anyway. Decades of moralizing can do a lot, but mostly it's damage.

A "pharisee" will try to help people by the best way he knows: to tell them, "look, I try hard and am a pretty good person. You could try to become a bit more like me." Jesus does the opposite: instead of just telling us to become more like him, he first takes the step by becoming like us. In a way, his message WAS as radical as "there's nothing wrong with being a tax collector." Not that Zacchaeus and Matthew weren't immoral men; but their immorality didn't prevent Jesus from associating with them and ACCEPTING them. And once they felt accepted, repenting of their immorality seemed like an easy, even no-brainer, thing to do.

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part VII: a semantic digression

I don't know if I have more than eight regular readers of this blog, so when one of them has a comment/question/request, he or she represents a high percentage of my readership, so I usually try to take it to the blog. Today's entry is one that I totally wasn't planning on putting in this series, but am including because one reader brought up a good point.

Last week one of my handful of regular readers sat down with me at dinner and asked, "how come you're using the word 'pharisee' for your series about legalistic religious bigots? The Pharisees were a school of first-century Jewish religious thought who might have been very different from the 'Pharisees' you describe, and they get a bad rap from the way the word 'pharisee' gets used in contexts like your blog." He said that using this word creates a negative bias which, at best, makes people unable to read the New Testament in an open-minded way, and at worst constitutes a form of anti-Semitism, since today's Jewish faith owes much to the way the Pharisees maintained the tenets of Judaism into the post-temple period.

At first this felt a bit like I was a med student writing a report on cancer and then hearing someone accuse me of naming a disease after a sign of the Zodiac, and how unsensitive it is for all those horoscope-reading people born in late June to have their sign associated with a killer disease, and why don't I just call it "abnormal cell growth" instead of "cancer". Well, the answer is that "cancer" is already the accepted word being used to name the disease, and is the most succinct way of defining it ("abnormal cell growth" doesn't really mean exactly the same thing).

But of course there are differences. "Pharisee" (with a capital "P") and "pharisee" isn't just coincidentally the same word, like "cancer" and "Cancer". When we talk about a judgmental legalist being a "pharisee", we do imply a belief that first-century Jewish religious authorities were judgmental legalists. In many Christian circles (and on this blog) it is taken for granted that Jesus' works and teachings stood in contrast and conflict with theirs.

I was presented with four arguments to challenge this view:

1. Sure Jesus said harsh things against the Pharisees. But he also said harsh things to his disciples, calling Judas a "devil" and addressing Peter as "Satan".
2. We are told that Jesus preached regularly in the synagogues. Since the synagogues were run by the Pharisees, we can assume that they were on good terms with Jesus to keep inviting him to speak.
3. We are given evidence that Jesus had friendly down-time with Pharisees such as Nicodemus and Simon "the leper", so we can assume that his confrontations with "the Pharisees" were disagreements with only part of the group -- maybe even a minority.
4. Jesus might have been a Pharisee himself. Certainly the Apostle Paul was, and even after decades of doing missionary work in the name of Christ he still spoke of himself as a member of the Pharisee school.

Well, I think that all four of these arguments need to be contextualized, but let's let them stand as is for now. My effort here is to see whether our association of (small "p") phariseeism with the original Pharisees is justified or not, and even that would take more space than a blog entry of polite dimensions if fully explored.

Let's assume we have an unbiased reader who has never heard of the Pharisees or the word "phariseeism". This person is given a primer on first-century Judaism, including these four arguments in favor of the idea that Christ and the Pharisees were on pretty good terms with each other. Then let's say this unbiased reader proceeds to read the New Testament. What will he find?

I think he will find, more or less, this:

From the beginning of Jesus' public ministry all the way to his execution, practically every page of the gospels shows him involved in confrontations with the religious authorities of his day. Sometimes they are called "the teachers of the law", sometimes "the Pharisees", sometimes "the Pharisees and Sadducees", sometimes "the Pharisees and teachers of the law", sometimes "the chief priests", etc. Even though some distinctions are made between these groups, they are generally portrayed as one religious entity most frequently called "the Pharisees".

There's no end of juicy stuff here. These people accuse him of breaking the Sabbath, of being a glutton and a drunkard, of breaking Moses' laws of ceremonial cleaning, of associating with sinners, and of being in league with the devil; they are infuriated by the things he says and the healing miracles he performs; they demand a sign from him, they lay out traps to trick him into saying something that will get him in trouble, they try to lynch him on a few occasions and are frequently plotting his arrest or his execution, and they eventually turn public opinion against him to pressure Pilate (by threat of mob) to have Jesus killed. They even stand under the cross mocking Jesus as he is drawing his last breaths.

But Jesus dishes out some pretty fantastic stuff against these people too: He calls them "hypocrites", "whitewashed tombs filled with dead bones and uncleanness", "children of the devil", "sons of hell", "blind guides", "a perverse and adulterous generation", and "a brood of vipers". He warns his disciples to be on guard against "the yeast of the Pharisees". He tells the crowds that one's righteousness has to be better than that of the Pharisees if one is to make it into the Kingdom of Heaven. He accuses the Pharisees of "swallowing widow's houses," of "neglecting the important matters of the law", and of "killing wise men and teachers." He tells them that they're less likely to make it into Heaven than prostitutes and tax collectors are. He tells several parables directed against the Pharisees, one of which has them represented by evil and murderous tenants who will be "brought to a wretched end."

These are not just rebukes, like his harsh words to his disciples; these are confrontations and showdowns.

No one can accuse me of "reading these things into the Bible", or of "getting a bad image of Pharisees because I approached the text with a negative bias". This series of confrontations is what any open-minded reader will see as one of the constant themes of the gospels, and indeed of the whole New Testament.

Of course there are exceptions, and I think one can trust any reader to acknowledge that. I don't think anyone believes that when the Bible says "...the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus" it means that literally EVERY Pharisee (or even a majority of Pharisees) in Judea and Galilee was a part of this plot. I don't think anyone reads Jesus' words "you hypocrites!" as being directed at every single Pharisee who was alive at the time. Sure there were (as Nicodemus implied) Pharisees who believed that Jesus came from God. But this is always the case when you have a group like that -- it gets associated with its most distinguishing features, even if not every member of the group shares them. Not every Communist believes that "religion is the opiate of the masses", not every American Republican opposes gun control, not every member of the Nazi party agreed with the "final solution". But it is not totally unfair to associate Communists with atheism, or the Republican party with defending the rights to gun ownership, or the Nazis with the horrors of death camps. We associate a group as an entity with the defining characteristics of that group, and I don't think we always need to apologize to the dissenters within the group for doing so.

I know that this entry doesn't do nearly enough to deal with these topics in a just manner, but I do believe (and will stand by this view) that the tension between Jesus and the Pharisees as a group is significant enough that we don't do them a great injustice by speaking of "phariseeism" as being that combination of attributes that Jesus addresses (and condemns) throughout the gospels (for example in passages like Matthew 23).

I'm gonna go ahead and further offend one or two readers by claiming that what Jesus brings is, in fact, so radically different than what we expect, that our religious instincts WILL take offense at him. He comes to make us holy, and even though there is a part of us that wants that, there is also a part of us that will resist the process. Call me unfair for referring to this as "phariseeism"; the Pharisees just happened to be the most visible first-hand example of this universal phenomenon.

Mild superpowers

In M. Night Shyamalan's movie "Unbreakable", Samuel L. Jackson's character suffers from Type I osteogenesis imperfecta, which means that his bones break very easily. This leads him to the nickname "Mr. Glass", a sheltered life of avoiding practically all physical activity, and, in consequence, a fascination with comic books. He develops the theory that if his bones are as fragile as glass, there must be someone out there whose body is the opposite of his and who is unbelievably tough. Superhero tough.

Unfortunately I don't think it works that way. Nature doesn't seem to feel any obligation to make the "average" human being truly average by compensating shortcomings in some people with superpowers in others. Still, I often wonder what sort of abilities my antithesis would have.

For example, I have a hard time falling asleep, and yet I need more sleep than most people I know in order to function properly. I know there are people out there who can fall asleep at will, and who can function on a few hours per night. But I wonder how extreme this ability can become. Is there someone out there who, like that kid in X-Men, "doesn't sleep"?

Or, even more attractive, can you imagine having the ability to fall asleep literally at will? Like, standing in line waiting for the show to start, you just take a quick nap? Sit down for a 17-hour flight and fall asleep right away, wake up for the dinner, go right back to sleep? Such a person would never need to experience boredom.

It could get even more extreme though. What if you can cause yourself to fall asleep as deep as any anaesthetic can? If you're a political prisoner and they're taking you to the torture chamber, you go into "deep sleep mode" and they can do whatever they want with your body, you just sleep right through it. Sure you're in screaming pain when you wake up, but the beauty is that you have the ability to fall right back asleep again. You're impervious to all their attempts to hurt you.

Here's another thing I can't do very well: filter sounds. If we're in a crowded area where there are a lot of conversations going on, I'll have a hard time hearing what you're saying to me. I know others who have the same problem, but I know people who can carry on a conversation just fine no matter how much chaotic noise is going on around them.

So I wonder if there's a superhero out there who's got the "super hearing filter". It would be great for eavesdropping, a sort of built-in surveillance mic. Not that your hearing is supernaturally fine, but that you can block out everything except the one thing you're listening for. In practice, in most situations, that would be even more useful than having super sensitive hearing.

What is it that you don't do as well as the average person, that maybe some superhero out there does supernaturally well?

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part VI: "You could be doing more."

We all have messages that go around in our head like broken records.

For the pharisee, the central message sounds more or less like this:

"You could be doing more."

We probably all have this message going around in our head, and it is frequently only the first part of a sentence that ends differently for different people (you could be doing more to make the world a better place, you could be doing more to live a fulfilled life, you could be doing more to achieve the goals you're aiming for, etc.). The pharisee usually makes some moral message of this, a sort of "you could be doing more to please God."

So if reading your Bible for 5 minutes a day is good, and 10 minutes is even better, then you will extrapolate that in your mind to where 30 minutes is even better and 1 hour better than that. You will go to sleep every night with a bad conscience because you could have spent even more time in Bible reading than you did -- no matter how much you did.

Of course there is also the voice of reason which tells you that you must remain balanced, that everything must be done in moderation. But the pharisee can make a moral imperative out of "balance" and "moderation" as well, applying them in an equally oppressive way so that you go to bed every night with a bad conscience because your day wasn't "balanced" enough.

The pharisee will never be satisfied, and will in fact become more and more demanding the more effort you put into "doing more". It may take you decades to figure this out. During those decades you will exert yourself more and more -- joyfully perhaps at first, then with a sort of determination that will make you come across as arrogant and judgmental to those around you (though you probably won't notice). You will split more and more, the part of you that rebels against the pharisee will become harder and harder to control, and you may think for the longest time that this is your "flesh" or your "sinful desires" or whatever Christian lingo you may describe it with. It may never occur to you that the part of you that is rebelling against your inner moralizing voice is in fact being helped along by God to liberate you from religious oppression.

Eventually there will be, I think, only three options: hypocrisy, despair or a surrender to Grace.