LEGALISM EXPOSED

Luke 11:47-54

Once again today’s Gospel speaks about the conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities of his time. Jesus was not always welcome among his people. His life was not easy, neither was it smooth. Today we hear how Jesus chastises the religious leaders, the Pharisees and the scholars for being double-minded and for demanding from ordinary people standards which they refused to satisfy.

In our passage he uses harsh words: “Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets whom your fathers killed. Woe to you scholars of the law, you have taken away the key of knowledge.” We have to remember that the ordinary Jews depended on these Pharisees and scholars for the interpretation of the Law, because they could not read and write. Pharisees and scholars were the voice of the prophets and even the voice of God to the people. They had power. Unfortunately, they used that power to manipulate the law to forward their own personal agenda.

This phenomenon can happen to us in our society today. It can happen that we use our position, our talents, our knowledge to manipulate others. In our society today, a lot of sins and injustices are being committed in God’s name. Today, we are reminded about our role as prophets. Being a prophet is to comfort the disturbed and to disturbed the comfortable. When we find ourselves comforting the comfortable and disturbing those who are already disturbed, this means we have ceased to be prophets. When we no longer challenge ourselves first and then challenge the people around us to go beyond our comfort zones, then we cease to be prophets.

The original sin was man wanting to be like God; man wanting to have power. And we see traces of this in the power struggles illustrated in the gospel today which is also a common sight in our contemporary society. The perfect remedy to this is of course following Jesus, who was a master but chose to serve, who was a king but chose to be slave, who God but chose to be man all because of love. May we all learn from Jesus to avoid the power that lords over and instead to embrace the power that serves and loves.