[0:00:00] Kenny Embry: In this episode of Balancing the Christian Life, we take a look at the Pharisees. Welcome to Balancing the Christian Life. I'm Dr. Kenny Embry. Join me as we discover how to be better Christians and people in the digital age. She was a woman whose name we don't know. She was scared, but she was convinced. She knew that important people wanted her dead. Not everybody, but just the people who could do it. Her seven sons were in the same danger. The king was determined to rid Israel of what he saw as a ridiculous religion, filled with silly restrictions and a diet that made no sense to him. Then the soldiers came for the mother and her sons. They brought her and the boys before the king. This king set pork in front of the oldest son, and told him to eat it, that's all he had to do. He refused, so they killed him slowly, while his mother and his brothers watched. They turned to the second son, same offer, and same answer. Before he died, he said, "The King of the Universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for His laws. Then the third, then the fourth, one by one. And the whole time, their mother didn't beg them to give in. She stood there and encouraged them, in the language of their fathers, hold on. God gave you breath, and God will give it back. When only the youngest son was left, the king himself tried to talk her into saving just one. Just get the boy to eat. She leaned over to her son and told him to be brave, like his brothers. He refused to. And last, of course, they killed the mother. Today we're going to be talking about the Pharisees. We don't know whether this woman was a Pharisee or not. Chances are she wasn't, because the name probably came after this incident happened. But we do know that the Pharisees grew out of this world, this was their spiritual lineage, and her story is one the heirs would tell again and again. In this episode, we're going to be giving a lot of history, and I feel the need to apologize to my wife and people like her right now. These are the people for whom a history lesson is a nice nap, and some of you are already looking for the next episode of a different podcast. So, before you go to Crime Junkie, let me give you the conclusion so you know where we're going to end up. Here it is: Jesus said some of the hardest things he ever said to the Pharisees, and he meant every word. They made real mistakes. They were hypocrites. They took their traditions and made them sound like more than just good ideas, but like laws from God Himself. They used whatever power they had to push people back to God, whether they wanted to go or not, loading them with heavy burdens and throwing people out of the synagogue. And when God Himself showed up, they were too afraid to look at what he was doing right in front of them. But the mistake we can make is to see them as cartoon villains. We can easily dismiss the kind who know their evil, complete with the buzz saw in the background and the damsel in distress tied to a log. So I need to make an admission that you may find a little strange. In this episode, I'm going to argue for the virtues of the Pharisees. They deserve the criticism, especially since most of it comes from Jesus himself. But that criticism only makes sense if you see them the way the first century did, when being called a Pharisee wasn't derisive, but it was a compliment. What we're missing is what they got right, and Jesus saw that too. If you don't believe me, look at two of the most famous Pharisees we know, Paul and Nicodemus, and then the Pharisees with no names who became part of the first Christians, their love for God's law could lead them straight to Jesus, and the mistakes the others made weren't exotic. I found every mistake they've made in me. Jesus himself told the people what to do with the Pharisees: do and observe whatever they tell you," he says in Matthew 23, but not the works they do. Keep some of it, leave the rest. That's what we're going to try to do in this episode. I should tell you up front, I'm not a scholar of the Pharisees. I'm a guy with a podcast who has read several books by people who are. So here's how this works. The facts I give you come from sources you can actually check: the Bible, a first-century Jewish historian named Josephus, and the Jewish tradition written down both the Mishnah and the Talmud. The specific references are in the show notes. So go there, look them up. Don't take my word for it. When I connect those facts and tell you what I think they mean, now those are my conclusions. They're inferences. Weigh them, and in a few weeks, I'll be talking to somebody who is actually one of the foremost scholars about the Pharisees. So I'm sure she'll have something to teach me as well as you. The beginning story of the mother and her sons was about 167 B.C. A Greek king named Antiochus Epiphanes had decided that Jews should just give up on the religion. No more Sabbath. No more circumcision. No more scripture. The temple in Jerusalem was turned over to a Greek god. Her story comes from Second Maccabees chapter seven. It's not in your Bible, and the details may have grown in the telling, but the people who kept it knew what it cost to love God's law. They knew this story. If you've studied your Daniel, you'll recognize Antiochus Epiphanes. Daniel 11 describes a contemptible ruler whose forces would profane the temple and set up the abomination that makes desolate, and says the people who know their God would stand firm even as they fell by sword and flame. Antiochus Epiphanes wasn't an aberration. God knew he was coming. A family of priests after this would lead a revolt against him. We called them the Maccabees, and against every expectation, they won. They took back Jerusalem and cleaned the temple, and Jewish families still remember it every year at Hanukkah. Somewhere in the years after that, a group of devout Jews starts showing up in the history books with a name, the Pharisees. They believed God would raise the dead. Josephus said that they were considered the most accurate interpreters of the law. Paul called them the strictest party of their religion, and a lot about them would feel strange to us. They kept a whole body of tradition handed down from earlier generations that isn't written in the law of Moses. Mark tells us they wouldn't eat until they had washed their hands a certain way and washed their cups and pots the same way, they tried to keep the priests' rules of purity at their own dinner tables. Their name probably comes from a Hebrew word that means separated. They were set apart, and they meant to be. That's a long way from what we hear on Wednesday night Bible class, but we're not used to thinking of the Pharisees as people who are also really scared. In our minds, they're big and ominous, and they're dangerous to a bunch of people who don't want to get in trouble with God. They look powerful. They look like they can do a lot of damage, but the power that they had was borrowed, and they knew it. Rome ran the country. John tells us the council in Jerusalem couldn't put anyone to death without Rome. When they brought Jesus to Pilate, they said it themselves: it is not lawful for us to put anyone to death. Josephus tells us Rome picked the high priest and removed him whenever it wanted to. Caiaphas got the job from one Roman governor, and lost it to another. Josephus also tells us that for years, Rome kept the high priest's robes locked up in its own fortress right next to the temple, and handed it out only for the holy days. Whatever influence the Pharisees had, they had it because Rome allowed it, and the people trusted, quite frankly, the Pharisees more than Rome. Either one could disappear. The Pharisees were scared, and they had a lot of good reasons to be. They were also scared of God. The prophet Jeremiah had warned Jerusalem that if they kept breaking the Sabbath, God would burn the city's gates. They didn't listen, and Second Chronicles tells us they were dragged off to Babylon. When they came home, people started doing business on the Sabbath again. The book of Nehemiah tells us Nehemiah confronted them. Isn't this what your fathers did? He said, and didn't God bring us all this disaster? Breaking the Sabbath had already cost them their country once, so they were scared of losing who they were. First Maccabees tells us that before the revolt, some of their own people built a Greek gymnasium in Jerusalem. They walked away from the covenant just to fit in with Greece. Nobody forced them to do it. They were scared of Rome. Josephus tells us that in 63 B.C., a Roman general named Pompey took Jerusalem and walked into the Holy of Holies, where only the high priests could go. He did it because he could, and it isn't only Jewish writers who remember that. A Roman historian named Tacitus wrote it down too, and they were also scared of something most of us have never thought about. They were scared of messiahs. Most of us only know about one man who claimed to be the Messiah, Jesus. But he wasn't the first one of the Jews that claimed the title, not even close. The Jews were waiting for the Messiah, a King God would send to set them free. We have a Jewish book of prayers from the century before Jesus called the Psalms of Solomon, that asks God to raise up a son of David to drive out the nations and clean up Jerusalem. On the road to Emmaus, before they recognized Jesus, two of Jesus's own disciples said, "We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel." That was the hope, and every so often somebody stood up and claimed to be that king. Josephus tells us about the time Jesus was born. Herod the Great died, and three men tried it at once. A man named Judas broke into the royal armory at Sepphoris, about four miles from Nazareth, and handed out weapons. A man named Simon put a crown on his head and burned down the palace at Jericho. Tacitus, the Roman historian, mentions him too. A shepherd named Athronges put on a crown and attacked Roman soldiers with his four brothers. Then Rome answered. Josephus tells us the governor of Syria, a man named Varus, marched south with his legions. He burned Sepphoris and sold its people as slaves, and around Jerusalem, he crucified about 2000 men. If you were a boy growing up in Nazareth, four miles from that burned city, that was the story the grown-ups told. About 10 years later, another man, Judas the Galilean, said God alone was king, and paying taxes to Rome was slavery. Josephus tells us his partner was a Pharisee named Saddok. That revolt failed too. The book of Acts remembers him. It also remembers a man named Theudas who gathered about 400 followers and was killed. And the man in Acts who reminded everyone of those two failures was a Pharisee named Gamaliel. So when people started saying a teacher from Nazareth might be the Messiah, nobody in Jerusalem was hearing that for the first time. They knew how it ended. A man claims to be the Messiah. People follow him. Rome comes, and suddenly crosses start lining the road. Hold on to that. Now, let's think about the mistakes of the Pharisees, and there are many. The first is the one everybody already knows. In Matthew 23, Jesus says they tie up heavy burdens and put them on other people's shoulders, and won't lift a finger to help. They do their deeds to be seen. They love the best seats in the synagogue, and being called rabbi. In other words, they're hypocrites. They tithe their mint and dill and cumin and neglect justice and mercy and faithfulness; they clean the outside of the cup, and leave the inside full of greed. Before we soften any of this, hear how hard it is. Jesus called them blind guides. He called them whitewashed tombs, clean and white on the outside, and full of dead men's bones, he said they made their converts twice as much a child of hell as themselves. He told them they were the sons of those who murdered the prophets, and to go ahead and fill up the measure their fathers started. He called them a brood of vipers, and he asked them, "How are you going to escape being sentenced to hell? And he said the blood of every righteous person from Abel on would come on that generation. He meant it. Those last words have been misused for centuries. People quoted them to blame the Jews for everything. That isn't what the text says. God settled that idea through Ezekiel. The son shall not suffer the iniquity of the father. Jesus wasn't handing down guilt to their grandchildren. He was talking to the men in front of him and what they were about to do. This generation meant them. And 40 years later, Jerusalem burned. Now Jesus wasn't telling whoppers about the Pharisees, but he was using language built to get a response. It's slightly hyperbolic, or it's a little bit of an exaggeration. It's not lying because nobody's fooled when Jesus says, "If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out," nobody in the crowd was reaching for a knife. When he says you have to hate your father and mother to follow him, he isn't telling you to hate your parents. He's making you feel the weight of the choice. And when he says the Pharisees strain out a gnat and swallow a camel, well, nobody there was eating camels, but they could picture it, and they were supposed to. Look at how carefully he picked his pictures. Whitewashed tombs. Every spring before Passover, the Jews painted graves white, so travelers wouldn't touch one by accident and become unclean for the feast. Jesus told the people who cared most about purity that they were the thing you had to paint white so nobody would get defiled. That isn't a whopper. That's aimed straight at what they valued most. He spoke the way the prophets spoke to Israel, as one of their own, he wasn't trying to win an argument. He didn't need to win an argument. He was trying to wake them up, and this kind of language makes you hear the truth hard. It isn't how you take it back. Are we hypocrites? Of course we are. James says we all stumble in many ways. Nobody lives up to everything they teach, but what Jesus hit hardest wasn't imperfection; it was the performance, doing it to be seen, keeping the outside of the cup shiny so nobody looks inside. We aren't going to start being perfect. We can only stop pretending that we are, and the more people look up to you, the harder that gets. The second mistake was putting fences in God's mouth. Picture a grandfather in a small village sometime after the Maccabean Revolt. It's Friday afternoon, and his grandson is about to pick up a tool to finish a job. His grandfather stops him. Not yet. We stop early. The boy says, "But the Sabbath hasn't started," and the grandfather tells him what his teacher taught him. We build a fence around the law. It says, "Don't work on the Sabbath. We stop well before time, so we never come close. Frankly, that's an example that I've heard many times in church. How close should you get to sin? Well, you're supposed to flee fornication and stay as far away from sin as you can. The Mishnah says it directly. Make a fence around the Torah, and that makes sense. Then the grandson grows up, adds a little more fence around the fence. His son does the same. Every fence is built out of reverence. But a few generations down the road, and the fence is still standing, but fewer people remember what it was for, or that it's a fence at all. We all have fences. Think about gambling, dancing, and drinking. A lot of us grew up in churches where they were simply off the table, and they were for good reasons. People lose their savings, people lose their marriages, people lose their ability to think straight. But try to find the verse that says never place a bet, never dance, never take a drink. Look, the Bible does condemn drunkenness and greed and sensuality. But the blanket rule isn't there. That's a fence built around commands that are there. That doesn't mean God is telling you to order a highball at the racetrack with dancing girls in the background and let it all ride on a horse named Bad Idea. Fences serve purposes, and if you've ever had to explain to your children what modesty looks like you built a fence that makes all the sense in the world. I've done this as well. I don't drink. I don't use tobacco. Not because I think that the Bible forbids them. I don't because I know myself, and I have a terrible feeling that I wouldn't be able to stop if I started. As a friend of mine used to say, where there's smoke, there's usually fire, and I don't like playing with fire. Again, the problem isn't the fence. The problem is when we put our fence and try to put it in God's mouth. That's what Jesus called out in Mark seven. Some Pharisees noticed his disciples eating without washing their hands the traditional way, and they asked why. Jesus answers with Isaiah, "They teach as doctrines the commandments of men." Then he says, "You leave the commandment of God, and hold to the tradition of men." And he gives them an example. God said, "Honor your father and mother," but their tradition let a man declare his money Corban, or given to God, and then he no longer had to use it to support his parents. A rule that sounded devout let him walk away from his own mother and father and call it worship. Jesus says, "You are making void the word of God by your tradition." That's what happens when a fence carries God's own authority. It can overrule the very command it was built to protect. You can see it on the Sabbath as well. Jesus walks into a synagogue, and there's a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees' own tradition already said that saving a life comes before the Sabbath. The Mishnah later wrote it down. Whenever a life may be in danger, that overrides the Sabbath. So the question was where the line was: Is a withered hand an emergency? Jesus asks: Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, they say nothing. He heals the man, and Mark says the Pharisees went out and started planning with Herod's supporters on how to destroy him. And let's be clear, Jesus is picking a fight here. He knew what he was doing. He knew when he was doing it. The fence had been built to protect God's Sabbath. That day, it stood between a man and the God who wanted to heal him. Fences have another way of going wrong; they turn into badges. Some Pharisees formed fellowships with strict rules about tithing and purity, and the Mishnah says a member wouldn't even be a guest in the home of an ordinary Jew who wasn't careful about those things. Who you ate with showed whether you were in with them. That's why it bothered them when Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, and why some of them could say of the ordinary people following him. This crowd that does not know the law is accursed. And if you were in, you could be put out. When Jesus healed a man born blind, the man's own parents were afraid to talk about it, and when the man defended Jesus, they threw him out of the synagogue. We do this too, and nobody plans it. It forms around good things. Think about the Wednesday night Bible study. It is a genuinely good thing. I'm not criticizing it, but God also doesn't command it. Leadership encourages it. Serious people come, and before long, everybody notices who's there and who isn't. Coming starts to mean you're committed. Some people come to be seen. Some stop asking questions because they don't want to be on the outside. The fence becomes a badge, and the fear of losing the badge keeps everyone quiet. That brings us to the third mistake, and frankly, I think it's the worst one. John tells us that many of the authorities actually believed in Jesus, but they wouldn't say so because they were afraid of the Pharisees, and how they would put them out of the synagogue. They love the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. Remember the crosses when people started calling Jesus the Messiah. The leaders in Jerusalem weren't hearing good news; they were hearing the start of another disaster, so they never really checked to see if he was. Nicodemus stood up in the council and asked whether their law judge a man without first giving him a hearing, and they brushed it off. God Himself was doing miracles in front of them, and they knew they were miracles. The council said it out loud. This man performs many signs. Nicodemus had already worked it out in his head. No one can do these things unless God is with him. The power had to come from somewhere, so where? Some of them said he cast out demons by the prince of the demons. That answer let them stop asking, and I understand why. The conclusion was uncomfortable. If this man was from God, well, everything changed, and if the crowds made him king, it might mean 2000 more crosses on the road into Jerusalem. We like to think that miracles would settle the question for us. If I'd seen it, I'd believe, but the miracles in the Bible don't hold people for long. Israel walked out of Egypt without lifting a sword, and God split the sea in front of them. Three days later, they were complaining about water, and within a few months, they were bowing to a golden calf. But Jesus treated their answer about the prince of demons as the most dangerous thing they ever said. He warned them that every sin and blasphemy can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be. And Mark tells us why he said it, because they were saying he had an unclean spirit. They were looking at the work of God, and calling it the work of the devil. After Jesus healed the man born blind, some of the Pharisees asked Jesus, are we blind too? And Jesus said, "If you were blind, you would have no guilt. But now that you say we see, your guilt remains." Their claim to see was what made it worse. So when Jesus raised Lazarus, the leaders didn't ask him what it meant, they called a council, and the reason was Rome. If we let them go on like this, the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation. Caiaphas, the high priest, said it was better for one man to die than the whole nation. And John says they made plans to kill Lazarus too, because people were believing in Jesus on account of him. When the evidence walked out of the tomb, they planned to get rid of it. In their own minds, they were serving God. They were serving God while they were killing God. Jesus never did what those other messiahs did. When a crowd tried to make him king, he slipped away alone. He told Pilate his kingdom was not of this world, or his servants would have been fighting. The people who wanted him to be the Messiah reached for swords. Jesus refused one, and they still looked at him and saw the next uprising. About 40 years later, Rome destroyed Jerusalem anyway. 60 years after that, one of the most respected rabbis of the day hailed a rebel named Simon Bar Kosiba as the king Messiah, and Rome crushed that revolt too. They weren't wrong that false messiahs were dangerous. They were just wrong about Jesus. Do we let fear decide what we'll look at? Fear of what people will think, or of losing our place, or where hard questions and their answers might lead. I know I have. It doesn't feel like fear from the inside, though. It feels like being responsible. Now, I don't want to be called a Pharisee either. The dictionary defines it as a self-righteous hypocrite, and I don't know why anybody would want that name. But Paul did; he listed among his credentials, and nobody blinks about being called a sinner. Quite frankly, that's a worse indictment, and we all recognize ourselves in it. Look, that's what the Pharisees were: blinded sinners who used the right tools in the wrong way and end up self-righteous and hypocritical. We rankle at the word, but we participate in the actions. Part of the reason is that we've turned them into villains, like Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter or Darth Vader. Nobody watches Star Wars and worries about becoming Darth Vader. Two-dimensional enemies are easy to swat down, but you can't be self-righteous unless you care about righteousness, and you also can't be a hypocrite unless you know what good looks like. There's another danger, and it's just as serious. Everybody who disagrees with us can become a Pharisee, but some people will read Scripture more strictly than you, and some less strictly. Faithful people have done that for centuries. Calling someone a name over it is a childish fight. That's different from a false teacher. Jesus said, "You'll know them by their fruit," and when the televangelist on the private jet tells you it costs money to spread the gospel. Well, the fruit is obvious, but throw out the word Pharisee at every brother who disagrees with you, and it stops meaning anything. By the time Jesus's warning really fits, well, nobody hears it. And let's face it. Not all the Pharisees were the same. Look, Nicodemus was a Pharisee. He came to Jesus at night with questions, and he spoke up for him in the council. But think about when he did his most public work for Jesus. After Jesus was dead, when Jesus couldn't do anything for him anymore, Nicodemus walked out in the open with about 75 pounds of spices to bury him. It was the day before the Passover. That morning, the leaders wouldn't go inside Pilate's headquarters, so they wouldn't be defiled before the feast. Touching a dead body made a man unclean for seven days, and Nicodemus did it anyway. That's a Pharisee who stood by his convictions. Gamaliel was a Pharisee too, and he told the council to wait and see. Some Pharisees warned Jesus that Herod wanted to kill him. Acts tells us some of them became believers. Who wouldn't want to be Nicodemus? Friend of mine reminded me that once they became Christians, they stopped being Pharisees. Maybe, but what does that mean? That they stop being hypocrites on purpose. The Pharisees never taught that hypocrisy was a good thing. Paul did stop trusting his pedigree; he counted it as rubbish to knowing Christ. But years later, on trial, he still said, "I am a Pharisee." He didn't stop loving God's law; he stopped counting on his pedigree to save him. And Paul never says he was a Pharisee for the wrong reasons. He said he had lived his life before God in all good conscience, he said he was convinced he ought to oppose the name of Jesus. Ought, the law said that a blasphemer had to die, and if Jesus was only a man claiming to be God, well, Paul was doing his duty. He was just wrong about who Jesus was. He later wrote that he acted ignorantly, and he still called himself the foremost of sinners. Ignorance explained it; it didn't excuse it. Peter said the same about the leaders. He told them in his second sermon, "You killed the author of life, and then I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your rulers, not malice, ignorance, and still, the worst thing anyone has ever done. I know this sounds weird, but the Pharisees did so much right, and they did so many things wrong. Their problems are the same problems as being a sinner. The same ones you run into copying David or Abraham. You don't have to clear their name to learn how easy it is to make their mistakes. Jesus said that they were wrong because they were, but you don't have to call everything they believed or did evil. Jesus didn't. Were they bad guys? Well, yeah, but so am I. And that isn't a pardon for them. It's really a warning to me. Jesus did see good in them. He told people to do what they taught. Again, in Matthew 23, when he criticized them for tithing their herbs while neglecting justice and mercy, he said, "These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others." He didn't tell them to stop tithing. When a Pharisee named Simon invited him to dinner and judged a sinful woman in his heart, Jesus didn't shame him. He told him a story, asked him a question, and said, "You have judged rightly, before showing him what he was missing. And when a teacher of the law answered him wisely, Jesus said, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." Not far. That's how close some of them were. And don't miss this. Jesus kept inviting them back. He invited Nicodemus to be born again. He taught Simon at his own table, and near the end, after his hardest words about them, he looked at Jerusalem and said, "How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers your brood under her wings, and you were not willing. That isn't a man swatting a villain. That's someone who wanted them home. So what do we do with the Pharisees? Well, I mean, the same thing we do with everyone in the Bible except Jesus. We keep some of it and we leave some of it. Look, don't follow David to Bathsheba or Abraham when he lies about his wife. The Pharisees are really no different. We've just learned to see one side of them. Start with what we owe them. You'll notice that the synagogue isn't in the Old Testament. The law of Moses required a public reading once every seven years. Sometime between the Testaments, Jews started gathering every week in every town to read scripture and talk about it. Either the Pharisees started it, or they did a great deal to spread it, and scholars still argue about which. But it was their kind of place, and Jesus went every week, from what we can understand. Every time you sit in a Bible class and open the text with other people. You're doing something they championed. It's a good tradition. It isn't a command, and Jesus kept it. So, what parts of it do you want to leave behind? The hypocrisy, absolutely. The self-righteousness, absolutely. I agree with you. But do you also want to avoid gathering every week to worship? Do you want to avoid studying Scripture together? Do you want to avoid a public devotion to God? Do you want to avoid their reverence for God's law, or their concern for the people? I don't think you do. Honestly, I'd question a Christian who wasn't trying to do those things. Add their hope in the resurrection, Nicodemus's questions, and Gamaliel's willingness to wait and see what God was doing, and there's a lot worth keeping. Don't miss the irony. They spent their lives debating God's law, and in the end, they were debating it with God Himself. Be careful which parts of them you ridicule. Some of what we laugh at in the Pharisees is exactly what God asks of us. Remember what we said in the first two episodes: a practice can be a pathway to God, or it can become a proxy for Him. The Pharisees weren't wrong to wash or tithe or keep the Sabbath or study the law; those are all pathways to God. Their mistake came when those pathways became a proxy, when the washing and the tithing and the fences replaced God Himself, and when God showed up in person, Well, the proxy got in the way. They were looking right at God and didn't recognize Him. That's why Jesus was so hard on them, not because their tools were bad, but because the tools had taken God's place, and watch for the rest. Not because it belongs to them, but because it's already in us. Pretending, putting our fences in God's mouth, turning good things into badges, and letting fear decide what we'll look at. Look, we won't get it all right. We're imperfect, and we build fences because that's what people who love God do. But we must remember that fences are ours. The certainty doesn't lie in our interpretation; it lies with God. God's word is certain. I'm not, and God seems to care about a heart that's honestly seeking Him. When Hezekiah held a Passover, many people ate it without being ritually clean, which broke the law. Hezekiah prayed for everyone who had set his heart to seek God, and the Bible says, the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people. The Pharisees in the Gospels were in different directions. Some plotted, some stayed quiet, some asked questions, defended Jesus, buried him, followed him, and preached him to the world. So here's my question: If you'd have been a Pharisee in Jerusalem when Jesus came, which one would you have been? I think it's important not that we learn to love the Pharisees, although I do think we need to love all, but that we see ourselves in the Pharisees in the right ways. It is my opinion, and again just an opinion, that the reason Jesus argued with them so long is because they were so close. Think about that. Next week, I'm going to sit down with a friend of mine, Scott Beyer, to talk about godliness and what happens when our picture of God starts standing in for God Himself. And then, as I said, I've got an interview with Dr. Amy Jill Levine, one of the leading scholars on the Pharisees. I've got some hard questions for her, and I suspect she has a few for me. So, until next time, be good and do good.