Symphony and Flood

Follow-up to: Song and Rain

"The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?" Luke 13:15

"Don't let yourself get distracted by the small stuff; cut through to the meat of what must be done" is how I could summarize the idea put forth in Song and Rain.

The Pharisees were not wholly bad folk. Despite what they may have transformed into by the time of Jesus Christ, for most of their history at least they were deeply concerned with social justice and even in His day enjoyed mainstream support among the Jewish people. It was a Pharisee, Hillel, who famously stated the maxim, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary." The group arose out of the turmoil following the Exile, concluding that Israel had suffered so because they had neglected to properly follow the commandments of God Because of this they sought to raise the bar and fill the profane life entirely with the sacred: there was no room in a properly holy life for impure things.

Phariseeism anticipated the Church of Jesus Christ in these latter-days with this focus. Their intention was to make Israel live up to its calling as a "kingdom of priests" by laying down the temple ritual onto everyday life. The name itself derived from the Hebrew word pārûsh, meaning "set apart." Over generations they apparently degraded into straining over gnats while swallowing camels, however, and herein we see a warning sign provided us by history and the scriptures: When we forget the principle behind the law and follow the law blindly for its own sake we make are left holding a corpse. The principle is the spirit and the law is the body, and though the spirit is ennobled by a tabernacle of flesh it is nevertheless the superior partner. Without the body there is still intelligence in the spirit, but without the spirit there is only death in the body.