"As JESUS was speaking, a Pharisee asked HIM to have a meal with him. So HE went and sat at table. The Pharisee then wondered why JESUS did not first was HIS hands before dinner. But the LORD said to him, 'So then, you Pharisees, you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside yourselves you are full of greed and evil. Fools! He who made the outside, also made the inside. But according to you, by the mere giving of alms everything is made clean." - Luke 11:37-41
(Scripture does not demand these ritual purifications that Mark also mentions in 7:3, but the teachers of JESUS' time insisted that they were necessary. JESUS rebels against these new religious obligations. Why do they not pay more attention to inner purification?
Then we read about the reproaches JESUS addressed to the Pharisees on various occasions. If Luke like Matthew has kept these very hard words of JESUS, it was perhaps a reminder that the Gospel goes much further than the vision of the Pharisees, so concerned, as they claimed, for the service of GOD. Some of them were part of the first Christian community, and were influential [Acts 15:5]. Doubtless, the hostile attitude adopted by the party of the Pharisees in the following years accounts for the remembrance of these reproaches. There are surely others and deeper reasons for the many warnings we read in Scripture about Pharisees.
Entering the new Covenant is a free gift from GOD. It is also a gift from GOD to possess a good knowledge of Christian doctrine, or exercise a special ministry in the Church, or belong to a Christian group committed for their faith. Nevertheless there is always the danger to behave as an elite group, thus losing the true humility that should lead us to occupy the last places, where we really should be.)
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