The wrong pedigree

 This week's verses are Matthew 23:29-36:

“Woe to you, experts in the law and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have participated with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ By saying this you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your ancestors! You snakes, you offspring of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?

“For this reason I am sending you prophets and wise men and experts in the law, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, so that on you will come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. I tell you the truth, this generation will be held responsible for all these things!

 These verses are part of a series of commentaries Jesus makes on the shortcomings of conspicuously moral people. The Pharisees, as we've mentioned before, were the upstanding church people of their day. Today, in our post-modern world, the moral landscape is more varied, so we might find people like Pharisees just as easily among woke atheists as we might among self-righteous Christians.

In this case, the Pharisees were practicing 20/20 hindsight and judging previous generations for their shortcomings. We like to do that a lot nowadays: People are always quick to say "Well *I* wouldn't have owned slaves if I was alive 200 years ago." or "Well, *I* wouldn't have stood idly by as police rounded up innocent Jews and sent them to prison camps in Nazi Germany." or "I wouldn't have settled on Native American land or supported Apartheid or refused to admit women to various institutions." And while those are all horrible things, in reality none of us knows exactly what they would do in a situation they have never been in, in a world they've never known personally.

We look at people in another time and another culture we couldn't possibly understand, and apply an exacting set of standards we don't even apply to our current time, in our current culture, to ourselves, who we understand very well. Most of the time the people making those kinds of statements very much do refuse to admit people of certain genders or ethnicities to their institutions, own several items of clothing and electronics that were made today by slaves, and are aware of horrific oppression going on in various parts of the world right now, for which, if they do anything at all, it's to post something on social media or carry a printed sign in a comfortable protest near where they live, on a weekend when they don't happen to have any other plans.

We don't like to look at ourselves critically. The ego wants to be blameless. And even if we do examine ourselves for faults, we know so much about ourselves that we can find plenty of nuances in our actions and make no end of excuses to exonerate ourselves. That's why we like so much to judge people who are far away, or who are different to us, or people we don't very much like in the first place. It's easier, and it feels better somehow.

So the Pharisees were vigorously signaling their virtue by condemning the generations who came before them. "Oh it's so horrible what they did to the prophets. *We* would never do something like that! And we want say for everyone to hear that it is never OK to hurt prophets!" Never mind that they themselves were descended from the same people they were condemning and could justifiably have had some humility as a result. For them, it was a nice easy paper target to shoot at. From a safe distance.

So Jesus calls them out for their hypocrisy. He calls them snakes and vipers, which is a pretty serious insult seeing as Satan himself is portrayed as a serpent. He asks them how long they will escape being condemned to Hell, which is even more serious. Not only is their hypocrisy serious and life-threatening, but it's extraordinarily lucky for them that they haven't been caught and thrown into Hell over it already. That's a stark contrast to the orgy of self-righteousness they were celebrating moments earlier!

Jesus condemns them by promising them the exact situation their ancestors had, knowing that they will do exactly the same things they condemned their ancestors for. All of their words of condemnation and judgment for those who killed the prophets would be their death sentence when they themselves would kill the prophets of their own time. Their lack of humility would be their undoing. They would be hung on the very gallows they'd built for their ancestors. And they would deserve it.

Understanding what's happening in these verses should make us very scared about how we confront evil in the world around us, now or in the past. We naturally think we would be the good guys, the heroes, the ones who get it right, the ones who support the underdog, who sacrifice to do the right thing, but there's a reason  those people stand out: They're rare. Statistically, we are unlikely to be those people.

When put into those situations ourselves, we would likely discover, to our horror, that we are just as depraved as those people we point the finger at. Would you handle homelessness gracefully? Do you have what it takes to navigate addiction, mental illness, betrayal, war, starvation, prolonged brainwashing, all without doing something regrettable? Probably not.

And so when we make a point of self-righteously condemning people who do X or Y, without fully understanding the lived circumstances of people who do X or Y, all while proudly proclaiming that we ourselves would find it unthinkable to do anything like X or Y, we may find ourselves in a situation where we end up doing exactly that, probably without even realizing it. It's a terrifying possibility that should drive us all to seek what humility we can in how we view the world around us.

Imagine the shock of the Pharisees, who thought they were particularly good people, only to wake up too late to the fact that they were condemned to Hell and were exactly the sort of people they'd very vocally said deserved it. They made a big spectacle to condemn their ancestors, only for Jesus to point out that they were the same breed of person and liable to do the same things, as he would later prove.

We live in an increasingly polarized world, with media that very intentionally tries to nurture this self-righteous indignation in us. How can we, ourselves selectively-bred offspring of vipers, then escape the condemnation of hell?

Jesus. We have to understand that Jesus' death on the cross was meant to accomplish something, not just for "people" but for us. We can't say someone else is beyond redemption and then ask to be redeemed as though the same seed of depravity isn't in us both. And we all need redemption, even if circumstances haven't yet brought that fact to the surface.

So next time you find yourself wanting to be conspicuous in your moral superiority, remember the Pharisees and what Jesus said to them. And let their eternal damnation scare you straight out of your self-righteous hypocrisy and into a humility that is simply thankful for the cross.