Holier than Thou?
Luke 6: 1-11
Gettysburg Presbyterian Church
Daniel T. Hans
November 11, 2007

“Mirror, mirror on the wall?  Who’s the holiest of them all?”  This variation on the evil queen’s question in the Snow White story is the driving concern of the good and holy people of Jesus’ day.  The question leads us to its abbreviated version: Holier than Thou?  Are we holier, morally better, religiously superior, and personally closer to God than other people who differ from us?  This internal and external controversy has been brewing throughout the history of religion.  We see the controversy escalate in Jesus’ ministry in our passage this morning.

I

To examine this brewing controversy that contributes to Jesus’ death, we look at the religious climate in which he ministers.  While Jesus is the Savior and Lord for us Christians, we must never lose sight of his Jewish-ness.  Jesus is a Jew living in a time of conservative revival of Jewish pride.  It’s a time of religious purism under the influence of Jewish puritans called Pharisees. The Pharisees usually get a bad rap by us preachers; and it is often an unfair and cheap shot.  So let’s look at how and why the Pharisees became such holier-than-thou religious puritans.  To do so we need a quick review of Israel’s history. 

The people of Israel believed they had been given God’s promise of blessing which included their own promised homeland – a permanent place of belonging.  However, in 587 BC Israel was defeated by the Babylonians.  Their political and religious leaders were led into captivity in Babylon.  Having lost everything, they began to ask themselves: How did we end up here?  They concluded that disaster struck as a result of disobedience to their God.  So, when opportunity arose to return to Palestine and rebuild their nation, they were determined never again to break God’s commandments.  To insure this goal, the religious leaders created protective rows of rules to surround the Ten Commandments. These lesser human rules would guard against getting close to breaking any of God’s Big Ten Commandments. 

By the time of Jesus’ ministry, the Pharisees had crafted over 600 religious rules that soon became ends in themselves.  God’s commandment said to keep the Sabbath day holy. In order to insure that no one violated the Sabbath day, all sorts of lesser rules about what one could and could not do on the Sabbath soon replaced keeping the Sabbath holy.  “Holy” means set apart for special use and service to God.  The Pharisees were like the mother who got pregnant in high school.  When her daughter reached her teen years, that mom wanted to insure that her daughter did not do the same, so she imposed harsh, unbearable restrictions on the young girl.  Ostensibly the rules were to protect the girl but ultimately the rules smothered the girl’s independence and her life.

II

Often those who are most rigid in their religion are living a faith based on fear rather than a faith based on trust and joy and hope.  Such were the Pharisees with whom Jesus did battle.  They lost sight of the reason for God’s commandments which is to define what life in relationship with God and with others should be.  Religion’s rules replaced faith’s relationships.  The Pharisees, then and now, had good intentions but lousy methods.

These Pharisees are defined by one word: self-righteous.  As we saw last Sunday, when these, who are so right in their own eyes, ask Jesus why he associates with those who are so wrong in their eyes, Jesus says he has come to call, not those who are right but, those who are willing to admit they are wrong.

Harvard Chaplain Peter Gomes in his good book titled, The Good Book, warns that “a surplus of virtue is more dangerous than a surplus of vice.”  Why? “Because a surplus of virtue is not subject to the constraints of conscience.” (p. 51)
The self-righteous, who are sure they are in with God and others are out, are farther away from God than they realize.  C.S. Lewis has said: “Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God, [but] the proud, the self-righteous are in that danger.  (The Problem of Pain, p. 98)

There is no harder person to reach with the grace of God than the one who is sure she is right.  Such a person issues a verdict without a trial, such a person offers an opinion without reflection, and such a person condemns another without looking at his own faults.  And let me add, there is as great a danger of being a self-righteous liberal as there is of being a self-righteous conservative.

Today is our Stewardship Sunday.  Sometimes, we feel very holy, very self-righteous about our personal giving to God.  That is until we put things into perspective.  Later in his Gospel, Luke gives us a glimpse at giving-put-into- perspective.  This scene is contained only in Luke’s Gospel.  (Luke 21: 1-4)
“Jesus looked up and saw the rich people putting their gifts into the [Temple offering plate]; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins.  He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.’”
That scene is humbling even to the holiest among us, who are the most generous givers in our own eyes!

III

In this morning’s passage, to the Pharisees, the action of picking grain on the Sabbath breaks the law against working on the Sabbath.  The Sabbath day is a good thing. We need rest from work; we need a break from the rat race; we need to know life can go on without us at the controls; we need time to focus our lives on God.  But we need not get fanatical about it!  The Pharisees were getting fanatical.  They were, in the words of Mark Twain, “good in the worst sense of the word” and in the words Fred Buechner, “trying to be more spiritual than God.”  The “Thou” over whom we try to be more holy is not only other people.  The “Thou” can also be God.  Sometimes, we can come across as holier than God!

In Mark’s Gospel at this point, Jesus asks the “holy” Pharisees a simple question of perspective: Were people created to keep a day of rest and worship or was a day of rest and worship created to refresh people? (2:27)
Were we made to keep laws or were laws made to help us?  Laws are not ends, but means to protect and preserve the good.  In making the simple claim: The Sabbath was made for people not people for the Sabbath, Jesus demonstrates his priority on people over rules.  People were not created to keep rules; rules were created to help people.

IV

The next “hot water” incident happens on another Sabbath day as Jesus heals a crippled man’s hand.  Again, Jesus challenges the Pharisees’ understanding of God and God’s law by asking whether God wants us to use the Sabbath to promote healing or to prolong brokenness.  Here again, I refer to Mark’s recording of this incident which varies slightly from Luke’s version. In Mark, strong emotion arises within Jesus.  Jesus is grieved over the Pharisees’ goodness that cannot see God’s goodness and angered over their holiness that cannot see their own sin.

What are we to make of Jesus’ grieving anger?  It’s possible to love some things so much that we are angry when those things are threatened, abused or rejected.  We love justice so much that we despise injustice; we love kindness so much that we despise cruelty; we love honesty so much that we despise lying.  Jesus loves God, his heavenly Father, so much that he despises anything that blocks the way to God.  The holy law that was to be a pathway to God has become a roadblock.

Jesus is angry but his angry reaction is different from our angry reactions.
He attacks the problem not the person.  Although the problem originates with the prejudiced and self-righteous Pharisees, he still wants to move beyond their self-proclaimed goodness in order to offer them God’s grace.
Later, Jesus realizes that sometimes the person is so much the problem that you can’t challenge the problem without also challenging the person.   Later, he angrily blasts the Pharisees calling them a bunch of white-washed tombs who offer spiritual death rather than spiritual life.  Jesus’ anger confirms his humanity and his holy anger confirms his divinity.  God is angry at sin.  God is angry at anything that damages his good creation and keeps people from his grace – especially when religion is used to block people from God.

I think what gets Jesus’ goat the most is the holy people’s failure to reply to his question about whether we should try to do good by showing love or merely try to be good by following rules.  They remain silent.  Jesus recognizes the danger of silent self-righteousness.  He recognizes the peril of an unwillingness to humbly admit to a necessary level of agnosticism.  We don’t know everything; we can’t know everything.  And no one is ever right all the time, except one, and he is the one asking the question in our passage.

Nothing would have delighted Jesus more than to hear the good and holy people of his day admit to the limit of their knowledge and admit that, while they believe they are right, they might be wrong.  Whoever lacks this healthy dose of humility becomes holier than God, at least in his or her own eyes.     I like what Susan B. Anthony once said.  She was the woman who throughout the 1800s fought for the right of women to vote.  Susan B. Anthony said: “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” (from Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor, p. 7)

The greatest antidote to the disease of holier than thou is a healthy dose of honest humility.  In days of old in Vienna, Austria, King Franz Joseph ascended to the throne in a ceremony in the Cathedral of St. Stephens.
As he approached the cathedral doors he found them locked.  He announced, “I, Franz Joseph the Emperor of all Austria-Hungary, demand admittance.”  A lowly church attendant inside replied, “We do not know the Emperor of all Hungary-Austria.  Who is it that demands admittance?”  Then the emperor said, “I, Franz Joseph, demand admittance.”  Again, the reply was, “We do not know Franz Joseph.  Who is it that demands admittance?”  The third time the emperor called out but this time his tone was subdued and reflective, “I, a sinner, request admittance.”  Where upon the doors flung open and words rang out, “Permission is granted: enter sinner.  You are known to us.”

Repeatedly, Jesus gives his opponents the chance to admit their own fallibility but they will not do so.  Unwilling to take a hard look at themselves, they take a harder look at Jesus and begin to conspire to get rid of him.

V

In these conflict stories, we have a clash of definitions of holiness.  The self-righteous are holy by their definition and by their efforts.  Their holiness is based on a religion of merely keeping the rules.  Jesus’ understanding of holiness is different.  His definition of holiness is based on a relationship with God expressed through living in the grace of healing forgiveness and offering that grace to others.

If we think we can make our way to God by our own efforts, we are farther away from God than we realize.  If we are unwilling to admit our own sin and unwilling to accept God’s free gift of grace in Jesus, then we have become holier than God.  There is only one way to come to God and that is as a beggar in need of a handout.  There is only one definition of holiness that God accepts and that is the recognition we are all sinners in need of grace.

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