Jesus and the Religious Leaders in the Bible

In the past few posts I have been focused on contemporary church leaders and their interactions with certain groups of people. I will be discussing in future posts how we should be interacting with contemporary church leaders; but Jesus is our example and we therefore need to look at how Jesus interacted with religious leaders of his day. So let us do this in the next few days, and then we can proceed to look at how we should interact with our church leaders based off of how Jesus did with his.

In Scripture, there are three kinds of church leaders Jesus interacted with: Pharisees, scribes, and Sadducees. So when you are reading scripture and you read that one of these groups is being addressed by Jesus, you need to know that Jesus' harshness in his response is because he is talking to these religious leaders. The Pharisees were a group that had expanded on the Torah (the original law of Judaism and the first five books of the bible). Starting in the 6th century B.C. the scribes had begun writing commentaries about the Torah which became a text known as the Mishna. Many of the laws that developed in Judiasm are from the Mishna, NOT the Torah. This means that much of the law is based off of human interpretation and not the law itself. We see this in Mark 7:1-23 where the Pharisees scold Jesus' disciples for not washing their hands prior to eating. There is no such prohibition in the Torah, but in the Mishna we find a very detailed list of how to properly cleanse your hands before eating, or sleeping, or doing any activity. The Pharisees were scolding the disciples, therefore, not because of an actual law in Scripture, but because of their made up version of the law. We see this often in the Bible. The Pharisees were known for patrolling communities in search of people who were violating their law. That is why we often find Jesus and his disciples walking through town, and being sought out by the Pharisees for some offense.

The scribes, though a separate group, are often linked with the Pharisees. The Pharisees and the scribes were the more educated of the religious leaders.

The Sadducees were a group in opposition with the Pharisees, though they teamed up with the Pharisees against Jesus. They were associated with Temple worship, being in charge of the sacrificial system in Judaism. Therefore, since they were always at the Temple in Jerusalem, we rarely see them confronting Jesus. But the few times they are in Scripture, they do question Jesus' authority, and Jesus calls them on it. They are not as educated as the scribes and Pharisees, but still have some level of education, and receive their position through heredity. They are known for linking themselves with the Roman occupation, giving much of their money to the Roman authorities, in exchange for a leadership position within the government, over the Jews. Needless to say, they were the corrupt politicians of their day.

All of these groups were bringing oppression on the common people and acted in opposition to God's desire to bring the people into relationship with him. The Pharisees excluded people by making them follow laws that were not part of the actual law. They were placing impossible burdens on people. They would not associate with the people who needed God's help the most, like the prostitutes and tax collectors. This is the meaning of Matthew 9:9-13. Jesus is eating with sinners and the Pharisees criticize Jesus for it, the Pharisees having no association with them because they were unclean according to their laws. Jesus, however, would associate with them because they were the ones who needed God the most. And later on in Matthew 21:31 Jesus tells them that the prostitutes and the tax collectors would enter heaven before them, because they believed Jesus message while the religious leaders neglected it. The Pharisees were also twisting Scripture in with the Mishna, which excluded people from the Kingdom of God, when God desired to include people. For all of these reasons, and because the religious leaders with their education were in a position to know better than behave in the way they were behaving, Jesus treated them with harshness.

It is because of the corrupt behavior of the leaders described above that Jesus speaks to them so boldly and harshly and as he does in Matthew 23. It is the Pharisees and Scribes that Jesus calls "hypocrites" and "blind guides" because of their distortion of Scripture and oppression of certain groups of Jews. It is this kind of response that we often see Christians make towards gays and lesbians, towards those who have had abortions, and towards those who have tattoos, drink, or smoke. But to those in Scripture, as we shall see in upcoming posts, who parallel these groups today, Jesus only treated with love, kindness and acceptance. Jesus' interactions with these leaders in Scripture should guide our interactions with the leaders of today, and this will be the topic of my next post.