Wednesday in the 28th Week of Ordinary Time, October 13, 2021

Luke 11:42-46

The Lord said: “Woe to you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb, but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God. These you should have done, without overlooking the others. Woe to you Pharisees! You love the seat of honor in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces. Woe to you! You are like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.”  Then one of the scholars of the law said to him in reply, “Teacher, by saying this you are insulting us too.” And he said, “Woe also to you scholars of the law! You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them.”

It may be that what we have in the Gospel reading for today’s Mass is a continuation of the Lord’s rebuke of the Pharisees in the previous verses in St. Luke’s Gospel which constitute the Gospel reading for yesterday’s Mass.   On the other hand, Luke may be adding to it a separate discourse delivered on another occasion, due to the topic.  If this is a continuation, then we must we think of the Lord reclining at table for dinner in a Pharisee’s house and speaking in this way.  We should also consider that he is rebuking us for our sins us as he reclines in our hearts.  He does this not in order to merely complain, but in order for us to seriously consider our lives and our behavior so that we might repent while there is still time.  Urgency rings in his voice here, as though the doors to Paradise were already beginning to close on us forever.

“Woe to you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb, but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God.”  The tithes would go to support the Temple.  The Lord accuses the Pharisees — and us, by extension — of paying no heed to “judgment and the love of God”.  We can improve on the Lectionary translation: “You pass by the judgment and the love of God.”  The verb can also be translated as “neglect”, “pass over”, and “ignore”.  The sense is: You pay attention to trivial things and treat the necessary things with contempt.  The Greek says, “the judgment and the love of God”.  It is not simply “judgment”, which, by itself does not mean much, but “the judgment of God”.  That is, You should be devoted to seeing yourself as God does and repenting, and loving God with all your heart.  We often toy with the trivial in order to justify to ourselves not dealing with really matters.

“You love the seat of honor in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces. Woe to you! You are like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.”  The Lord accuses the Pharisees of pursuing worldly honors which do not last and which may not even be sincerely bestowed.  Rather, we who call ourselves believers should seek praise from our God through the good works we do for him: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”(Matthew 25, 23).  An “unseen grave” was a source of great danger to the Jews because walking over them made a person unclean while unaware of his uncleanness.  His participation in various rituals would then result in sacrilege.

The Lord then takes on the scholars of the Law.  These are not civil lawyers, but are like canon lawyers who are appointed in matters involving Church Law.  These scholars tended to make life more difficult for those who needed their assistance.  We might think of the lawyers in “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens, who fed off an estate case until the estate was gone and there was no inheritance to be handed on. “Woe also to you scholars of the law! You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them.”  These live to be served and to serve themselves, rather than to serve God.  “Woe to you!”  This is not merely a harmless exclamation but an interjection like “Oh no!” which someone might shout upon seeing a tragedy unfold before his eyes.