Holy Week Tuesday
Matthew 21-23: Presently the fig tree withered away — Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness — upon you come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar — For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.
Comment:
Matthew 23 is a chapter with brute power. If I were going to preach about the apostasy, I would just read it out loud Elder Oaks style.
The modern Pharisees are the people who make pronouncements about what is moral for our society, which are principally the professors, the ethicists, the journalists, the progressive activists. Like Christ says about the Pharisees, you should do what they preach about fairness and tolerance—but you should absolutely reject their behavior which is angry and intolerant, oppressing and exploiting, and hypocritical.
Our society is post-Christian, just as Israel of Christ’s time was post-Mosaic, so just as the wicked had found a way to use and exploit the Mosaic law during his mortality, during ours the wicked have found a way to exploit Christ’s teachings such as the teachings against Pharisees. The main way they do it is to point at people who are strict in some kind of observance and all them Pharisees, though unlike the actual Pharisees these people are generally marginal outcasts, whereas the Pharisees were rulers and the cutting edge. The goal is to get you to suppress your own tendencies to greater purity and to moderate your witness against sin.
All that said, the tendency to pharisaism is latent in every human heart like a virus.
Here are the three ways that a person can be a Pharisee:
It helps us to spot our own tendencies to being a Pharisee when we try to understand where the Pharisees were coming from. Check out these posts that take you inside.
the Esteem of Men (read the Elder Faust quote in the comments)
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Also, there has been a bunch added to yesterday’s Holy Week post on cleaning the temple. If you are interested in what Christ cleaning the temple tells us about our own society’s prejudices or about the value of the body, check out the update. https://www.jrganymede.com/2023/04/03/cleaning-the-temple/
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If you know LDS people who are trying to heed the call to do a Holy Week study and who might enjoy this series of posts, please send them links.
By Gaudenzio Ferrari – This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29809334
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | Tags: Easter