“These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” (Matthew 15:8)
Sinners never made Jesus angry. He was concerned about them, he saw in them a brokenness that needed to be fixed, but never was he angry at them. All the lowlifes and corrupt people of his day were drawn to him and in the hearts of each one of them, they found a friend in Jesus. You would think that such a holy man would reserve his closest friendships for the religious leaders of the day, but he most assuredly did not. In fact, the religious leaders of the day (the Pharisees) wanted no part in Jesus and were the only people that could do what no sinner could do… Make Jesus angry!
Pharisees were not bad people, they were misguided people. That is the mistake that we sometimes make. We cast them as the villains of the New Testament, but these people committed their lives to living out God’s law, following it precept by precept, living by the very letter of the law. Their problem was that they were not doing it for their hearts, they were doing it for their egos. That is why Jesus said of them, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” The Pharisees were responsible for leading God’s people closer to Him, instead they only pushed them farther away by heaping on them rule after rule. Not to mention, at the same time, they thought that they had it all together themselves.
I think it is important to realize that Jesus was not angry at the Pharisees because their “hearts were far from Him”. I think it actually grieved him deeply that they were far from God. What made him angry was that they were causing others to be far from him! They were the “blind leading the blind” and if “a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a ditch”.
Look, you and I are not Pharisees, but we are representatives of God. We lead and influence people by the choices that we make and we cannot lead people if we are blinded into thinking we don’t have any problems. We are just sinners needing Jesus and that is the message that we need to project to the world.
At Rhapsody Church we have this saying, “It’s not about me”. The Pharisees made a choice a long time ago that it was going to be about “them”. We have the same choice to make. We can be like the Pharisees and make it all about us, or we can be like Jesus’ sinner friends and make it all about him.
Prayer: God, please teach me that what I do matters. Help me to conduct myself in a way that honors you and does not cause others to stumble.
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