Pharisees, My Grandmother, and Me

This morning, I'm thinking of my grandmother, of all the rules that governed her life.  I remind myself that she was born in 1914 and all the changes that she saw.  At some point, it's no wonder that she clung to her rules to feel safe.  

But to a woman (me) born in 1965, some of her rules seemed incomprehensible to me:  don't drive at night if you're female, don't earn more money than the man in your life, don't work or shop on a Sunday (that included washing the car) but do prepare a big meal ready to eat right after church.  My grandmother believed in ironing and making a dessert from scratch every day; later I found out that she made a dessert from scratch every day because my grandfather thought a meal wasn't complete without sweetness at the end.  

I think of my grandmother who fumed about the neighbor cats who used her flower beds as a litter box.  I think of her keeping her kitchen scraps separate from the rest of her garbage and digging those scraps into the strip of earth by the back unattached garage, long after she stopped having a garden or a flower bed.  I think of her making fig jam, even though she didn't like figs or fig jam, but to leave the figs to the birds seemed wasteful to her.

I think of Jesus, who was surely preaching to people like my grandmother, and reacting to people like my grandmother who wouldn't be able to abandon the rules that gave her life structure or meaning.  My grandmother viewed the developments of the 60's, 70's, and 80's with some amount of fear and horror, not by seeing the potential for human growth and development.  One of her highest priorities would be keeping families together, and women leaving the home to earn money began the dissolution of that family structure that she saw as the higher good.

Once I learned about the back story of the Pharisees, the back story that the Gospels don't give us, I have had more sympathy for them.  They believed that by followed rigid rules and staying true, that the Jewish community would be safe.  They didn't see themselves as hidebound and rigid--most of us don't.

In some ways, the Pharisees were correct--if everyone had followed the rules and kept their collective heads down, they probably could have avoided the wrath of Rome.  Likewise, my grandmother was correct in certain ways--if I had followed her rules, I might have had a more peaceful marriage, but I would have been smothered in ways I might have never realized.

Jesus comes to call us to living in a new way--to leave the structures that would keep us safe but smothered.  Jesus comes to remind us that the structures that proclaim that they are keeping us safe are often making us less safe in ways that we don't realize until it's too late.

Many of us congratulate ourselves for the ways that we've left those structures behind, but we don't realize how we've embraced other systems of rules that are similarly stifling.  Happily, Jesus is there, again and again, reminding us to leave those rules behind and follow a new way, an inbreaking community of God kind of way.