Memorial of Saint Teresa of Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
The Pharisees are sticklers for the details of the law, of observing the little things others tend to brush off, gloss over, or forget, so that people will see just how holy and righteous they truly are, and they look down on those who do not carryout every part of the law. Yet Jesus reveals that in obsessing over the little things—and policing everyone else in their adherence to the law—they fail to be attentive to the greater things: judgement and love for God. They could not look on another with mercy, consider that there might be reasons why a person was not keeping the law: perhaps a person was too poor to have a garden to grow the proper herbs for tithing, or could not afford them? Would a Pharisee offer some of their own in order to help a person keep the law? Likely not.
Thus the Pharisees are like unseen graves: to touch ground which contained a dead body was to be unclean, even if you did so without knowing it.
Yet God knows. People may be fooled into believing a Pharisee to be righteous, but they do not see as God sees: God sees their sin, their “rottenness.” Likewise the scribes, those who copy and memorize the Scriptures and create and repair the great scrolls for the Temple and for synagogues, those who know the law and God’s Word better than anyone, are likewise condemned, because they are happy to be consulted about the law and God’s Word, to impose difficult truths on people, but they will not help them to bear it. They are like doctors that are happy to inform a patient of their illness, happy to tell them what to do to become well, but will not give them medicine nor treat them in any way. What good is such a doctor if they will not lift a finger to touch the patient?
And so we must examine our own consciences. How many times we excuse ourselves from confession—for years even—because “we have not done anything wrong.” Perhaps that is true in what we have done, but as we confess at Mass, what about “in my thoughts and in my words…and in what I have failed to do?”