According to the Gospels, the Pharisees had a remarkable ability to look like what they were not.
The crowds around them might have feared them, but they seemed convinced of their orthodoxy and piety. And yet, while the Pharisees looked like pre-eminent people of Scripture, in reality they trampled on it and ignored its truth. While they appeared devout, they did not believe in their own need for redemption. They trusted in themselves more than God. To these faults they added a third, which was both crucial and almost imperceptible: they did not believe in their own need for a new birth.
The issue surfaces in Matthew 15. The complaint of the scribes and Pharisees was not that Jesus’s disciples were proud, immoral, or faithless: it was that “they do not wash their hands when they eat” (v2).
The Pharisees were known for their fastidious adherence to complicated cleansing rituals, but Jesus saw this as symptomatic of a deeper issue. He applied Isaiah 29v13 as a prophecy of Pharisaism: “This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matt. 15v8). They were guilty of caring more for the outward performance than the inward reality. Outwardly, they had no other gods before the Lord; inwardly, they trusted in themselves. Outwardly, they kept the Sabbath; inwardly, they did not rest on the Lord. Outwardly, they were innocent of crimes against their neighbours; inwardly, they treated those not of their sect with a merciless lack of love.
The Pharisees’ external behaviour made them seem impressively righteous, but in their hearts they were outright and thoroughgoing transgressors of the law. Preferring the appearance over the substance of holiness, they camouflaged their sin instead of repenting of it. They were, as Jesus said, “like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness” (v. 27).
This focus on surface matters came from the spiritual short-sightedness of the Pharisees. Jesus called them “blind” (15v14): blind to the Lord’s concern for our hearts, and blind to the depths of depravity in them. Jesus repeated to the people what the Pharisees should already have observed from Scripture: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person. … [W]hat comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.” (Matt. 15v11,18-20)
While their own Scriptures clearly taught that “there is none who does good, not even one” (Ps.14v3), the Pharisees’ externalism worked on the opposite assumption, that humankind is morally neutral. As such, they believed, we all have the ability to make ourselves good by doing good things. Evil thoughts, murder, adultery, and more, instead of revealing anything sinister about our inner being, must simply be the bad choices good people make. For Jesus, on the other hand, evil actions are the manifestations of a deeper, evil nature: “The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil” (Matt. 12v35).
The Pharisees’ blithe and myopic assessment of the human condition allowed for a sunny self-confidence that left them as slaves to sin and self. No wonder Nicodemus the Pharisee and “teacher of Israel” (John 3v10) could not understand Jesus when He said “You must be born again” (v7). Like the other Pharisees, Nicodemus had failed to see the deepest demand of the law and the most basic promise of the new covenant: a new heart and a new spirit (Ezek.36v26). He therefore could not apprehend the righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, which comes only with a new heart.
