"So the Pharisees said to one another, 'You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.'" - John 12:19
Often, I think we parallel the Pharisees to anyone but ourselves. It terrifies me, actually, to realize that there are people in the world who can see God incarnate proceeding down their street like the King he is, and still miss him. What hardens a heart to that point? Is pride that binding? But then I see the attitude of the Pharisees within myself, in the dark crevices and bad days of my heart. We wonder why Jesus put up with them as much as he did, yet we then need to consider ourselves.The problem I see in the Pharisees is a problem we still carry today. They were so gung-ho on Moses, the law, and scripture that they missed the driving force of it all - that is the Christ. The fundamental truth was shrouded by the reminders warped. The physical glory of God Almighty walked by them and their response to one another was, "we are gaining nothing." No, I say! You are gaining everything by his presents! But their sights were set elsewhere - on the law and letter, on politics, on the preservation of tradition and self.
And we're not far off from this. Our church, our Christian community, is so zeroed in on translations, debates, attractions, political correctness, the kitchen sink and the Queen of England that it ends up that Jesus just gets in the way. We get caught up in our own agendas, and little by little our view of scripture narrows, our compassion for the lost world dwindles, and our purpose wanders until we miss the Christ riding down our street. We see God working in and around us, but it's not how we imagined or planned it, so we harrumph, "we are gaining nothing."
And I say these things with this in mind - that there are not many outright Pharisees in the Christian world, but there is a little bit in each of us. We are skeptical and we are selfish, we carry pride and our opinions are finite to us. This may consume you or it may just be a nagging fly in the corner of your spirit that you have to keep in check from time to time. But at the end of the day, we all have a choice to make and it is the prize of warfare in the Heavenly Realm - when we see Jesus coming, and our souls leap as John the Baptist leaped in Elizabeth's womb, what will we do?
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