(Please read the Scripture passage before reading the homily.)
Some of our enemies have become our friends and sometimes our friends become our enemies. We fought the Japanese people in World War II and invented the name Japs for them. Now they are our friends and we would never think of calling them Japs. Sadam Hussein was once our friend and we helped him, but then he became enemy and we killed him. We have groups of people living among us whom we call names when we do not like them.
Jesus was probably a Pharisee religiously, as was Paul. The Pharisees at one time defended the earlier believers in Jesus. After the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans, the Pharisees found fault with the believers in Jesus for not having supported the Jewish defenders. The friendly Pharisees became the enemy Pharisees.
Let’s pray, “Fill in the blank”. Where the text reads “scribes and Pharisees”, insert the names of people or groups of people you do not like or whom you look down upon. “Woe to you, ____, you hypocrites!” This would give us the effect Matthew gives us by using “Scribes and Pharisees”.
For a better reading for us, since the Scriptures have to speak to us, let us insert our name in the blank and let us apply the word of Jesus as he calls upon us to repent of our hypocrisies. By our sins and refusals to accept more fully God’s call to us on baptism, we have become hypocrites and need conversion.
Jesus preached to the scribes and Pharisees, not condemn them to hypocrisy, but to call them from hypocrisy. The early Christians used the term Scribes and Pharisees, not to condemn a certain group of people, whether Jewish people who opposed the Christian people or Christian people that forcefully disagreed with other Christian people, but to call the sinners back to God in con version and repentance.
We no longer use disparaging terms for people because we used the terms to condemn them, not to honor them. Matthew’s Christians might have used the term scribes and Pharisees, but they did it not to disparage a group, but to call the wayward back to conversion. We have to honor all people in order to honor the Lord God.