10. THE LEAVEN OF THE PHARISEES AND SADDUCES
Matt. 16:1-12; Mark 8:10-21.
This new collision between Jesus and His
opponents took place shortly after a second miracle of feeding similar to that
performed in the neighborhood of Bethsaida Julias. What interval of time
elapsed between the two miracles cannot be ascertained;[10.1] but it was long
enough to admit of an extended journey on the part of our Lord and His
disciples to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, the scene of the pathetic meeting
with the Syrophenician woman, and round from thence through the region of the
ten cities, on the eastern border of the Galilean lake. It was long enough also
to allow the cause and the fame of Jesus to recover from the low state to which
they sank after the sifting sermon in the synagogue of Capernaum. The unpopular
One had again become popular, so that on arriving at the south-eastern shore of
the lake He found Himself attended by thousands, so intent on hearing Him
preach, and on experiencing His healing power, that they remained with Him
three days, almost, if not entirely, without food, thus creating a necessity
for the second miraculous repast.
After the miracle on the south-eastern shore,
Jesus, we read, sent away the multitude; and taking ship, came into the coasts
of Magdala, on the western side of the sea.[10.2] It was on His arrival there
that He encountered the party who came seeking of Him a sign from heaven. These
persons had probably heard of the recent miracle, as of many others wrought by
Him; but, unwilling to accept the conclusion to which these wondrous works
plainly led, they affected to regard them as insufficient evidence of His
Messiahship, and demanded still more unequivocal proof before giving in their
adherence to His claim. "Show us a sign from heaven," said they; meaning
thereby, something like the manna brought down from heaven by Moses, or the
fire called down by Elijah, or the thunder and rain called down by
Samuel;[10.3] it being assumed that such signs could be wrought only by the
power of God, whilst the signs on earth, such as Jesus supplied in His miracles
of healing, might be wrought by the power of the devil![10.4] It was a demand
of a sort often addressed to Jesus in good faith or in bad;[10.5] for the Jews
sought after such signs--miracles of a singular and startling character, fitted
to gratify a superstitious curiosity, and astonish a wonder-loving
mind--miracles that were merely signs, serving no other purpose than to display
divine power; like the rod of Moses, converted into a serpent, and reconverted
into its original form.
These demands of the sign-seekers Jesus uniformly
met with a direct refusal. He would not condescend to work miracles of any
description merely as certificates of His own Messiahship, or to furnish food
for a superstitious appetite, or materials of amusement to sceptics. He knew
that such as remained unbelievers in presence of His ordinary miracles, which
were not naked signs, but also works of beneficence, could not be brought to
faith by any means; nay, that the more evidence they got, the more hardened
they should become in unbelief. He regarded the very demand for these signs as
the indication of a fixed determination on the part of those who made it not to
believe in Him, even if, in order to rid themselves of the disagreeable
obligation, it should be necessary to put Him to death. Therefore, in refusing
the signs sought after, He was wont to accompany the refusal with a word of
rebuke or of sad foreboding; as when He said, at a very early period of His
ministry, on His first visit to Jerusalem, after His baptism: "Destroy this
temple, and in three days I will raise it up."[10.6]
On the present occasion the soul of Jesus was
much perturbed by the renewed demands of the sign-seekers. "He sighed deeply in
His spirit," knowing full well what these demands meant, with respect both to
those who made them and to Himself; and He addressed the parties who came
tempting Him in excessively severe and bitter terms,--reproaching them with
spiritual blindness, calling them a wicked and adulterous generation, and
ironically referring them now, as He had once done before,[10.7] to the sign of
the prophet Jonas. He told them, that while they knew the weather signs, and
understood what a red sky in the morning or evening meant, they were blind to
the manifest signs of the times, which showed at once that the Sun of
righteousness had arisen, and that a dreadful storm of judgment was coming like
a dark night on apostate Israel for her iniquity. He applied to them, and the
whole generation they represented, the epithet "wicked," to characterize their
false-hearted, malevolent, and spiteful behavior towards Himself; and He
employed the term "adulterous," to describe them, in relation to God, as guilty
of breaking their marriage covenant, pretending great love and zeal with their
lip, but in their heart and life turning away from the living God to
idols--forms, ceremonies, signs. He gave them the story of Jonah the prophet
for a sign, in mystic allusion to His death; meaning to say, that one of the
most reliable evidences that He was God's servant indeed, was just the fact
that He was rejected, and ignominiously and barbarously treated by such as
those to whom He spake: that there could be no worse sign of a man than to be
well received by them--that he could be no true Christ who was so
received.[10.8]
Having thus freely uttered His mind, Jesus left
the sign-seekers; and entering into the ship in which He had just crossed from
the other side, departed again to the same eastern shore, anxious to be rid of
their unwelcome presence. On arriving at the land, He made the encounter which
had just taken place the subject of instruction to the twelve. "Take heed," He
said as they walked along the way, "and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees
and Sadducees." The word was spoken abruptly, as the utterance of one waking
out of a revery. Jesus, we imagine, while His disciples rowed Him across the
lake, had been brooding over what had occurred, sadly musing on prevailing
unbelief, and the dark, lowering weather-signs, portentous of evil to Him and
to the whole Jewish people. And now, recollecting the presence of the
disciples, He communicates His thoughts to them in the form of a warning, and
cautions them against the deadly influence of an evil time, as a parent might
bid his child beware of a poisonous plant whose garish flowers attracted its
eye.
In this warning, it will be observed, pharisaic
and sadducaic tendencies are identified. Jesus speaks not of two leavens, but
of one common to both sects, as if they were two species of one genus, two
branches from one stem.[10.9] And such indeed they were. Superficially, the two
parties were very diverse. The one was excessively zealous, the other was
"moderate" in religion; the one was strict, the other easy in morals; the one
was exclusively and intensely Jewish in feeling, the other was open to the
influence of pagan civilization. Each party had a leaven peculiar to itself:
that of the Pharisees being, as Christ was wont to declare, hypocrisy;[10.10]
that of the Sadducees, an engrossing interest in merely material and temporal
concerns, assuming in some a political form, as in the case of the partisans of
the Herod family, called in the Gospels Herodians, in others wearing the guise
of a philosophy which denied the existence of spirit and the reality of the
future life, and made that denial an excuse for exclusive devotion to the
interests of time. But here, as elsewhere, extremes met. Phariseeism,
Sadduceeism, Herodianism, though distinguished by minor differences, were
radically one. The religionists, the philosophers, the politicians, were all
members of one great party, which was inveterately hostile to the divine
kingdom. All alike were worldly-minded (of the Pharisees it is expressly
remarked that they were covetous[10.11); all were opposed to Christ for
fundamentally the same reason, viz. because He was not of this world; all
united fraternally at this time in the attempt to vex Him by unbelieving,
unreasonable demands;[10.12] and they all had a hand in His death at the last.
It was thus made apparent, once for all, that a Christian is not one who merely
differs superficially either from Pharisees or from Sadducees separately, but
one who differs radically from both. A weighty truth, not yet well understood;
for it is fancied by many that right believing and right living consist in
going to the opposite extreme from any tendency whose evil influence is
apparent. To avoid pharisaic strictness and superstition, grown odious, men run
into sadducaic scepticism and license; or, frightened by the excesses of
infidelity and secularity, they seek salvation in ritualism, infallible
churches, and the revival of medieval monkery. Thus the two tendencies continue
ever propagating each other on the principle of action and reaction; one
generation or school going all lengths in one direction, and another making a
point of being as unlike its predecessor or its neighbor as possible, and both
being equally far from the truth.
What the common leaven of Phariseeism and
Sadduceeism was, Jesus did not deem it necessary to state. He had already
indicated its nature with sufficient plainness in His severe reply to the
sign-seekers. The radical vice of both sects was just ungodliness: blindness,
and deadness of heart to the Divine. They did not know the true and the good
when they saw it; and when they knew it, they did not love it. All around them
were the evidences that the King and the kingdom of grace were among them; yet
here were they asking for arbitrary outward signs, "external evidences" in the
worst sense, that He who spake as never man spake, and worked wonders of mercy
such as had never before been witnessed, was no impostor, but a man wise and
good, a prophet, and the Son of God. Verily the natural man, religious or
irreligious, is blind and dead! What these seekers after a sign needed was not
a new sign, but a new heart; not mere evidence, but a spirit willing to obey
the truth.
The spirit of unbelief which ruled in Jewish
society Jesus described as a leaven, with special reference to its
diffusiveness; and most fitly, for it passes from sire to son, from rich to
poor, from learned to unlearned, till a whole generation has been vitiated by
its malign influence. Such was the state of things in Israel as it came under
His eye. Spiritual blindness and deadness, with the outward symptom of the
inward malady,--a constant craving for evidence,--met him on every side. The
common people, the leaders of society, the religious, the sceptics, the
courtiers, and the rustics, were all blind, and yet apparently all most anxious
to see; ever renewing the demand, "What sign showest Thou, that we may see and
believe Thee? What dost Thou work?"
Vexed an hour ago by the sinister movements of
foes, Jesus next found new matter for annoyance in the stupidity of friends.
The disciples utterly, even ludicrously, misunderstood the warning word
addressed to them. In conversation by themselves, while their Master walked
apart, they discussed the question, what the strange words, so abruptly and
earnestly spoken, might mean; and they came to the sapient conclusion that they
were intended to caution them against buying bread from parties belonging to
either of the offensive sects. It was an absurd mistake, and yet, all things
considered, it was not so very unnatural: for, in the first place, as already
remarked, Jesus had introduced the subject very abruptly; and secondly, some
time had elapsed since the meeting with the seekers of a sign, during which no
allusion seems to have been made to that matter. How were they to know that
during all that time their Master's thoughts had been occupied with what took
place on the western shore of the lake? In any case, such a supposition was not
likely to occur to their mind; for the demand for a sign had, doubtless, not
appeared to them an event of much consequence, and it was probably forgotten as
soon as their backs were turned upon the men who made it. And then, finally, it
so happened that, just before Jesus began to speak, they remembered that in the
hurry of a sudden departure they had forgotten to provide themselves with a
stock of provisions for the journey. That was what they were thinking about
when He began to say, "Take heed, and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and
of the Sadducees." The momentous circumstance that they had with them but one
loaf was causing them so much concern, that when they heard the caution against
a particular kind of leaven, they jumped at once to the conclusion, "It is
because we have no bread."
Yet the misunderstanding of the disciples, though
simple and natural in its origin, was blameworthy. They could not have fallen
into the mistake had the interest they took in spiritual and temporal things
respectively been proportional to their relative importance. They had treated
the incident on the other side of the lake too lightly, and they had treated
their neglect to provide bread too gravely. They should have taken more to
heart the ominous demand for a sign, and the solemn words spoken by their
Master in reference thereto; and they should not have been troubled about the
want of loaves in the company of Him who had twice miraculously fed the hungry
multitude in the desert. Their thoughtlessness in one direction, and their
over-thoughtfulness in another, showed that food and raiment occupied a larger
place in their minds than the kingdom of God and its interests. Had they
possessed more faith and more spirituality, they would not have exposed
themselves to the reproachful question of their Master: "How is it that ye do
not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should
beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees?"[10.1]
And yet, Jesus can hardly have expected these
crude disciples to appreciate as He did the significance of what had occurred
on the other side of the lake. It needed no common insight to discern the
import of that demand for a sign; and the faculty of reading the signs of the
times possessed by the disciples, as we shall soon see, and as all we have
learned concerning them already might lead us to expect, was very small indeed.
One of the principal lessons to be learned from the subject of this chapter,
indeed, is just this: how different were the thoughts of Christ in reference to
the future from the thoughts of His companions. We shall often have occasion to
remark on this hereafter, as we advance towards the final crisis. At this point
we are called to signalize the fact prominently for the first time.
This document (last modifiedSeptember 17, 1997) from Believerscafe.com
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