Another thought during ASB

"'But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it.'"
Luke 11:42-44 (ESV)

I was reading through Luke during ASB in the ESV Bible version, and this particular passage struck me the night I was reading it. It made me think--are there modern-day Pharisees? Yes, I think there are some that "obviously" are. Yet less obvious are the ways in which we ourselves act like the Pharisees of old. I'm including myself here, too. There are obvious tithes we make, like reading the Bible daily and doing quiet times, along with the financial side (these would be the mint, rue, and herbs). We sit at church, with the feeling of belonging there, with the feeling of this territory being ours. We sit in the sanctuary, and yet forget that the place we are in is holy, that it does not belong to us, but to Him who died for us. We greet each other happily, but also noisily, showing off our connections to one another, even if only to people within the same group--some whom we know, some whom we don't. And the last sentence, especially, hit me. "For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it." I don't know exactly what it means, but according to Wikipedia:

"Within Judaism, in which contact with a corpse confers uncleanness (see Numbers 19:11-22 and Tractate Oholoth in the Mishna), an unmarked grave opens up the possibility that a pious Jew could become defiled without being aware that it happened. The Jews of early times, therefore, sought to avoid unmarked graves by two means: clearly designating cemeteries beyond the limits of their villages and cities, and making graves and tombs obvious by whitewashing them. This is the background for Jesus' comparison of the Pharisees of his time to white-washed tombs (see Matthew 23:27-28) and to "unmarked graves, which men walk over without knowing it" (Luke 11:44). Jesus warned that the Pharisees were defiling others by their hypocrisy, misplaced priorities, and selfish ambition."

And that makes me wonder if our "hypocrisy, misplaced priorities, and selfish ambitions" are leading non-Christians or new Christians astray, if someone who met us would even have the sense that we were different, and different in a good and sanctified way. It convicts me that sometimes we tithe our daily quiet times, our weekly meetings and our church attendance, and then forsake and forget about doing justice and loving others, both Christians and non-Christians, the attractive and the unattractive, the rich and the very, very poor (in worldly wealth and in spirit).

Ah...then woe to us! We must check ourselves before we continue to go on in this way. What are we doing to love the poor, the lost? What are we doing?