The Pharisees, the grace of God, and the mission of the church

I noted yesterday that Jesus judged the Pharisees for their self-idolatry and their worship of their own worship, because their focus had shifted from glorifying God to glorifying themselves.  It’s worth noting as well, though, something that’s closely tied to that (and that also ties back to Isaiah’s critique of Israel, on which Jesus draws in John 9):  namely, they had committed their own version of blind Israel’s other biggest sin (besides idolatry).  Just as Israel had looked down on the nations as enemies, rather than seeing them as their mission field, so the Pharisees looked down on non-Pharisees as inferiors, people to avoid rather than people to bless. One of the things they objected to about Jesus, remember, was that he hung out with lowlifes and sinners, whom they themselves despised and hated. In this, too, their essential blindness was revealed, because it showed that their true focus wasn’t on God; they couldn’t see that the “people of the land” whom they loathed, the nations whom they regarded as enemies, were the people God loved and wanted to redeem, just as much as he loved and wanted to redeem them. They were, ultimately, all about themselves, and that’s not what God is on about, or wants us to be on about.The reason, I think, is that the Pharisees had lost sight of the fact that their relationship with God was all about grace, not about their own effort—and make no mistake, they should have known that; we often miss it, too, but the Old Testament really is just as much about the grace of God as the New Testament. That’s why Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, not its replacement. They had lost sight of the fact that even for all the work they put in, they didn’t deserve God’s favor any more than the tax collectors, prostitutes, and foreigners they held in such contempt, and so they failed to understand that their proper response to God and his grace was not to keep it to themselves but to share it. They failed to understand that God calls his people to mission—to the mission of the Servant, to be agents of grace for the world.