Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Matthew (23: 13-22) in which Jesus calls out the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees saying, ‘Alas for you, blind guides!’.

Fr Paul says this passage brings the first four of the seven ‘alas’s!’ against the scribes and Pharisees.

These are not curses in the sense of prayers against the scribes and Pharisees asking for their condemnation; rather they are statements of the retribution which will overtake them for their conduct.

At the same time, and more importantly for readers of the Gospel in all times, they constitute warnings against Christians who fall into the same traps.

The Pharisees were the party of the Jews most strict and exact in their observance of the Law, building a fence round the Law to ensure that they did not come within a danger-zone of breaking it. In the course of the scrupulous care to avoid infringements it was easy to forget the purpose of the regulations.

Today’s reading seems to envisage those who insist on their own particular pious practices and observances – for every family has its own way of observing the Law – to the exclusion of other ways of observance. Again, the purpose of the Law can so easily fall out of sight.

The ‘scribes’, being literate and experts in the Law, were particularly at risk of canonising their own interpretations as the only acceptable resolution of legal conundrums, and so of excluding others from the Kingdom.

Fr Paul notes, similar dangers lurk for all of us when we are not able to see the wood for the trees.