Want to see the ridiculous lengths some Catholics will go to disavow any connection to The Passion in order to appease a small, unrepresentative crowd of self-appointed spokesmen for Jews as well as Bible scholars who dispute the supernatural and accurate nature of the Bible?
Here we have the specter of a spokesman for the US bishops defending Pharisees:
“The only role the Bible says the Pharisees have in the passion of Jesus is, in one case they try to warn him that there’s a plot against his life,” said Eugene Fisher, the spokesman on interfaith relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C.
Um, didn’t Jesus refer to them as a “brood of vipers?” Maybe Jesus was speaking prohetically of them as a group of fast-paced sexy individuals a la the Dodge Viper. Because of course we must re-intepret Scripture for our own contextualized paradigm.
Or something.
I think the Lord said it best about the Pharisees in Matt 23:
13. “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in. 14. 15. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”
I’d say “child of hell” is strong enough language.
And do you remember the screwtape letters, post log, where Screwtape addresses the graduating class of temptors. He laments over the poor quality of the souls they were feasting on, but then raves over the wine: “What is this, Pharisee???? Delightful”
The Pharisees represent all “men of God” who fail to lead “men to God”! New interpretation by the Lay Bureaucrats at the USCCB: Unwelcome apostacy!
Eugene Fisher as the spokesman for the us Fishers of men… interesting..
It looks as if we are trying to hard to live at peace. The Lord did not come to bring peace, but to “set brother against brother”.
Let’s hope our leadership can someday remember we are not called to be “of the world”, just required to live in it.
I don’t like modern-day lawyers and scribes either (USCCB bureaucrats and biblical scholars). Still, isn’t Fisher right on the particular point? The big shotsinvolved in Christ’s death were Sadducces, and the mob was just a mob.
No matter how bad someone is he won’t be bad in every possible way. It makes sense that the people who actually brought about Christ’s death weren’t self-righteous legalists (Pharisees) but the secularized ecumenical political types (Sadduccees) who end up running the show as a practical matter.