Jesus loved the Pharisees during His ministry, and He still loves Pharisees today. And God can save Pharisees, even Pharisees like us. So if you find someone hardened in their pride and self-righteousness, don’t give up.

The Pharisees are, in many ways, the main bad guys of the gospel accounts. They were the ones who rejected Jesus because He called out their sin, and they were the ones leading the charge to have Him arrested and crucified. They were evil, and in some ways they were the worst kind of evil, because they were the kind of evil that genuinely thought they were good. The Pharisees are the foil for the true purity and holiness of Jesus. They seem to be almost without hope.

But there is one little verse in Scripture that throws this nice, clean little paradigm on its head. In Acts 15 we find the young church in the midst of the heated debate over whether Gentiles should be required to keep the Mosaic law. In the middle of that discussion, Luke throws us this little nugget: “But there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5).

Now, it’s not necessarily surprising that Pharisees who believed in Christ would think Gentiles should keep the Mosaic law. To be fair to them, this was a more difficult question at the time than we might think. Why wouldn’t followers of the Jewish Messiah expect non-Jews to start living like Jews if they wanted in? This issue hadn’t been officially decided yet by Jesus or the apostles. That was the point of the council they were calling. But what might be surprising in all of this, if we are paying close attention, is that there were Pharisees who were followers of Jesus! As the early Christians were debating this very live issue, we hear that there was a group of Pharisees who had converted to the faith!

With this in mind, I want us to go back to the gospels and look carefully at Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees. Too often I fear that we read the gospels and think that Jesus was simply scorched earth when it came to the Pharisees. We might get the impression that Jesus saw the Pharisees as a lost cause and simply wanted to see them and their movement burn to the ground. Now, Jesus did have strong words for the Pharisees and their followers. But Jesus loved the Pharisees. And whatever Jesus did, it apparently worked, because we find Pharisees in the early church.

I want to suggest three principles for how Jesus reached the Pharisees. I think that doing this will be an encouragement to us to not give up on the Pharisees in our life, or on anyone for that matter. So, what did Jesus do that worked so well?

Jesus Didn’t Shut Down Conversations

Jesus is often remembered for His harsh words to the Pharisees. Passages like Matthew 23 come to mind, where Jesus calls them whitewashed tombs and warns that they are making their converts into twice the child of hell they are. But those weren’t the only conversations Jesus had. In fact, early in His ministry a very prominent Pharisee named Nicodemus came to Jesus by night (John 3:1), and Jesus welcomed Him. We don’t know why Nicodemus came during the night, but some have suggested it was out of fear. If that was the case, it didn’t stop Jesus from engaging with him. On another occasion, Jesus is invited to the home of a Pharisee for a meal, and He accepts (Luke 7:36).

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