October 24, 2019 – 1 Corinthians 2:8

None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
—1 Corinthians 2:8

Who brought this infamy about?22 To begin with, there were the Pharisees. They disliked Christ, and they said so. They resented the intrusion of this layperson—and an ill-educated man at that—into their domain. His teaching, or much of it, seemed to them sheer blasphemy. His habits they thought disgusting. You can always tell people by the company they keep, they sneered, and glanced scornfully at the rabble with whom Christ was not ashamed to mingle. Yet they were zealously religious people, keen churchgoing folk, as we would say, more keen and zealous by far than we are. They prayed, they fasted, they disciplined themselves along lines that might well make us much ashamed. They were good people in their way, devout and desperately in earnest, so far as they saw.
But they made two mistakes. They were apt, as Jesus told them bluntly, to keep their lives and their religion in separate compartments. To pray and fast and keep their multitudinous rules was hard but, after all, a good deal easier than to be kind and unselfish when that clashed with their desires. They hoped and felt that it might do instead. They prayed long and ardently, but it had small effect on their characters. Their temper remained uncurbed, their animosities hardly checked, nor did that seem to vex them or to make them feel that something was wrong somewhere. That that was the goal of religion had not struck them. And so, while praying and thronging to the temple day by day, they planned Calvary and worked it out into a fact of history.
This is a warning for us all. For Jesus tells us that his experience has taught him this—people can be eagerly, even fussily religious, and yet nothing may come of it in their characters. He pursues us in this matter with blunt, pertinacious questions, difficult to face. These prayers of yours, he asks, what are they doing in you? Do they end with themselves? Are they really making you more like God, or do you run them up as a cheap substitute for worthy living? [Regarding] your knowledge of the Father and of the human community—is the [former] forcing you to live your life in God’s way? Is the [latter] making your conscience more acute to things about you, so that you can’t pass by, now, on the other side, happy in your own comforts, until these wrongs are righted?
—Arthur John Gossip