CHAPTER 108.
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Levi
Jesus rebukes the people for selfishness. The Christines attend a feast and Jesus is censured by the Pharisee because he washed not before he eat. Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of the ruling classes and pronounces upon them many woes.
The multitudes were wild with selfish thought; none recognized the rights and needs of any other one.
2 The stronger pushed the weak aside, and trampled on them in their haste to be the first to get a blessing for himself.
3 And Jesus said, Behold the cage of beasts untamed; a den of stinging vipers, maddened by their fiendish greed of selfish gain!
4 I tell you, men, the benefits that come to men who see no further than themselves are baubles in the morning light;
5 They are unreal; they pass away. The selfish soul is fed today; the food does not assimilate; the soul grows not, and then it must be fed again, and then again.
6 Behold, a selfish man obsessed by just one spirit of the air; by the Omnific Word the spirit is cast out;
7 It wanders through dry places, seeking rest and finding none.
8 And then it comes again; the selfish man has failed to close and lock the door;
9 The unclean spirit finds the house all swept and cleaned; it enters in and takes with it full seven other spirits more unclean than is itself; and there they dwell.
10 The last state of the man is more than sevenfold more wretched than the first.
11 And so it is with you who snatch the blessings that belong to other men.
12 While Jesus spoke a certain woman who stood near exclaimed, Most blessed is the mother of this man of God!
13 And Jesus said, Yes, blest is she; but doubly blest are they who hear, receive and live the word of God.
14 A Pharisee of wealth prepared a feast, and Jesus and the twelve, together with the masters from afar, were guests.
15 And Jesus did not wash his hands according to the strictest Pharisaic rules, before he ate; when this the Pharisee observed he marveled much.
16 And Jesus said, My host, why do you marvel that I did not wash my hands?
17 The Pharisees wash well their hands and feet; they cleanse the body every day when, lo, within is every form of filth.
18 Their hearts are full of wickedness, extortions and deceit.
19 Did not the God who made the outside of the body make the inside, too?
20 And then he said, Woe unto you, you Pharisees! for you tithe mint and rue, and every herb, and pass by judgment and the love of God.
21 Woe unto you, you Pharisees! you love the highest seats in synagogues and courts, and bid for salutations in the market place.
22 Woe unto you, you tinseled gentry of the land! no man would ever think you servants of the Lord of hosts by what you do.
23 A lawyer sitting near remarked, Rabboni, your words are harsh, and then in what you say you censure us; and why?
24 And Jesus said, Woe unto you, you masters of the law! you heap great burdens on the sons of men, yea, loads by far too great for them to bear, and you will never help to bear a feather’s weight yourselves.
25 Woe unto you! you build the tombs of prophets and of seers; they whom your fathers killed; and you are parties to the crimes.
26 And now behold, for God has sent again to you his holy men-apostles, prophets, seers; and you are persecuting them.
27 The time is near when you will plead against them in the courts; will spurn them on the streets; will cast them into prison cells, and kill them with a fiend’s delight.
28 I tell you, men, the blood of all the holy men of God that has been shed from righteous Abel down to that of Zacharias, father of the holy John,
29 Who was struck down beside the altar in the Holy Place—
30 The blood of all these holy men has made more red the hands of this ungodly generation.
31 Woe unto you, you masters of the law! you snatch the keys of knowledge from the hands of men;
32 You close the doors; you enter not yourselves, and suffer not the willing ones to enter in.
33 His words provoked the Pharisees, the lawyers and the scribes, and they, resenting, poured upon him torrents of abuse.
34 The truths he spoke came like a thunderbolt from heaven; the rulers counseled how they might ensnare him by his words; they sought a legal way to shed his blood.