This coming Sunday is the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time. In the previous post we considered the second of the three critiques of the scribes and Pharisees: they burden others while failing to act themselves. This post considers the final critique: they act for the wrong reasons: to make an impression on others

5 All their works are performed to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels. 6 They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues, 7 greetings in marketplaces, and the salutation ‘Rabbi.’ 

This charge levied against the scribes and Pharisees addressed some degree of vainglory. Jesus judges that their religious practices were designed to win the approval of other people rather than that of God. These verses strongly echoes Matthew 6, where Jesus has already spoken of their absorption and focus in gaining human approbation for piety rather than God’s approval – in this matter they are hypocrites. There is a contrast in their “performance.” One part is for the masses of people in their “accessories” in dress (phylacteries and tassels). Another part is aimed at their peers and those who can confer higher social status. Combined this performance extended into worship.

Scholars who hold that Matthew is also commenting on the circumstances faced by his community of Christians, note that post the 70 AD-destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Roman army, the emerging rabbinic leadership emphasized eternal signs of piety, not because they were hypocrites interested in externals, but because it served as distinctive markers for the holy people of God in a pluralistic society. While this is perhaps a minority view, it is still a pathway for what begins as a worthy endeavor (distinctive markers) soon becomes the very problem that the verses describe as hypocritical.

The Lukan narrative of people clamoring for “higher” seats at the dinner gathering is perhaps also reflected in the archaeological recovering of early Jewish synagogues which seems to have individual places of seating apart from the benches for the people.

Phylacteries were the small leather boxes (tefillîn) containing key texts from the law which were (and are) worn on the forehead and arm in literal fulfillment of Deut 6:8; 11:18. They were presumably intended as a spiritual aid for the wearer, but they provided an opportunity for religious ostentation: either the boxes themselves or the straps by which they were fastened could be made more conspicuous by making them wide.  The “fringes” are the tassels (ṣîṣît) on the corners of Jewish cloaks which were required by Num 15:38–39; Deut 22:12. In biblical times they were worn on the ordinary outer garment, as Jesus himself did (9:20; 14:36); it is only in subsequent Judaism that the ṭallît, the fringed shawl worn especially for prayer, has developed. The fringes too were intended as spiritual visual aids (Num 15:39), but to increase their length was an obvious way to draw people’s attention to one’s piety. Their length was discussed in Jesus’ day, the school of Shammai favoring longer tassels than that of Hillel (Sipre on Num 15:37–41). [R.T. France, 2007, 861]

Image credit: Woe unto You, Scribes and Pharisees (Malheur à vous, scribes et pharisiens) James Tissot, 1886-1894, Brooklyn Museum, PD-US