Why guilty consciences mock Christ and his Church
When Christ taught about the right use of riches and fidelity to God, the Pharisees mocked him – because they knew they were in the wrong.
When Christ taught about the right use of riches and fidelity to God, the Pharisees mocked him – because they knew they were in the wrong.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us:
How worldly men mock the Gospel when it condemns their hidden loves.
That God sees through appearances, and judges by the heart, not reputation.
Why the rejection of John the Baptist marked the ruin of Israel’s leaders.
He shows us that fidelity to God's law—despite ridicule—is the path to the Kingdom.
For more on the context of this episode, see Part I.
The Unjust Steward
The Preaching of the Cross, Part II
Chapter VIII
St. Luke xvi. 1-13
Story of the Gospels, § 115
Burns and Oates, London, 1887
The Pharisees mocking
The Evangelist next tells us of the effect produced by this discourse from our Lord on His ever watchful enemies.
‘Now the Pharisees who were covetous, heard all these things, and they derided Him.’
The teaching which He had been delivering did not refer to the question of His personal claims, and the like, as to which He had had so many occasions of discussion with them at Jerusalem. It was plain practical doctrine, dealing with the conduct of life, the contempt of the good things of this world, almsgiving, dependence on God, and singleness of service to Him. It was such teaching as might have been left by them to work its own good upon the people and the disciples. There was nothing about it which need be made matter of controversy, they could not calumniate Him, or accuse Him to the Governor, or even say that He was at variance with their traditions or the teaching of Moses.
These men, as St. Luke tells us, were covetous, their hearts were full of the love of earthly goods, which they practically preferred to spiritual goods. The teaching touched them nearly, not in any point of doctrine, but in their own lives and practice. They were precisely trying to serve God and mammon at the same time, and the result was that they were in the case which He described, were holding to their master Satan, and despising and neglecting their true and lawful master God. So His words stung them, and perhaps aroused in their hearts some feelings of self-reproach.
They could not deny the truth or the beauty of His teaching, but they laughed at it, as men of the world laugh at the practice of purity, or of mortification, or prayer, or of indifference to worldly wealth and power, neglect of the tangible and visible goods which to them are alone true. To make use of temporal goods only for the service of God and the good of the soul seemed to them supremely silly and ridiculous, the giving up of substantial blessings for the sake of shadows in the uncertain future.
They understood the advantage of an outwardly respectable life, especially in persons, like themselves, whose profession bound them to such respectability.
But interior purity, detachment from the world and indifference to its gifts were things to be laughed at, with a laughter which had in it a certain angry bitterness, because they could not divest themselves of the feeling that the teaching which they thus affected to despise was, after all, true and necessary for salvation. Worldly men are fond of making a joke of purity, or mortification, and even of heroic charity and self-sacrifice for others. Their laughter has no ring of joyousness in it, it is like music out of tune, not like the fresh simple merriment of innocent gaiety.
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