for August 25
Tuesday of the Twenty-first Week of Ordinary Time

I am soooo tempted to read today’s gospel as if it appeared on the Inquirer’s editorial page, calling out telegenic and media-famous fakes whose polished exteriors hide grasping and greedy hearts. But as is always the case—as a Catholic who learned to read her Bible in the the light of Vatican II’s insistence on applying the tools of scholarship available to us—I must slow down and consider the historical context of this passage and the way it fits into the evangelist Matthew’s narrative as a whole.

So who are these scribes and Pharisees? They are leaders in the religious community that Matthew’s first listeners were once a part of, but are now separating themselves from. The scribes and Pharisees are rivals for religious authority. This may explain some of the rhetorical ferocity in this chapter of Matthew. It should also remind us that the scribes and Pharisees belong to a particular place and time. They are not a stand-in for all of the people of ancient Israel (the people, by the way, to whom Jesus preached the good news!), much less are they proxies for the Jewish people down through the ages. 

The ‘woes’ directed against these particular powerful leaders are in the form of prophetic denunciation. This is a literary device that names an evil action, pronounces a judgment, and warns against imitating it. In Matthew’s gospel, these denunciations also serve to build dramatic tension, linking the earlier conflict between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees to his arrest and death in the chapters to come.

Even with this understanding that Jesus’s anger is directed at the hypocritical leaders of a particular movement, time and place, it is still very tempting to treat this passage from Matthew as a checklist of the sins of those whose power over me I dislike and resent. In doing so, it is easy to forget how much power I have—power conferred by an education that led to a paying job and a well-stocked refrigerator in a safe home in a country where I have the right to vote. All in all, my exterior is pretty shiny. But what’s inside? I should be running this checklist on myself as well!

Which leads to another temptation with this gospel passage: it is very easy to slide right over what comes after the harsh words “you have neglected the weightier things”, paying no attention to what follows: “these you should have done without neglecting those.” Any thorough self-examination will soon reveal my own tendency to pride myself on being faithful to the matters I judge to be important, while neglecting those I find as easy to omit as a sprig of herbs garnishing a dinner plate.

My temptation to be like the historical scribes and Pharisees by straining out gnats and swallowing camels is particularly strong when I feel, as Paul put it to the Thessalonians, “shaken out of my mind,” as so many of us have this year. In such times, it is much too easy to hold fast to the letter of the law than to undertake the more complicated practices of judgment, fidelity, and mercy. And so Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians is also a good one for these days: 

May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his grace, encourage our hearts and strengthen us in every word and deed.

—BJ Brown

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website.