Matthew 23 – Woe, Woe, Woe! – Part 2

Last week concluded with Jesus pronouncing two woes upon the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees because they, according to Jesus, kept people out of the kingdom of heaven and raised up followers who were twice as bad as the scribes and Pharisees. These were not, however, the only woes Jesus pronounced on the scribes and Pharisees. This week we will look at the five remaining woes, the next four of which have one thing in common: they accuse the scribes and Pharisees of having an inverted set of values. Jesus said,

16 “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ 17 You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? 18 And you say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.’ 19 You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? 20 So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. 21 And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it. 22 And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.

Matthew 23:16-22

I don’t know if Shakespeare had the scribes and Pharisees in mind when wrote, in his play Hamlet, the words, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” but he certainly could have. This woe, which may at first seem somewhat odd to us, was directed toward those who tried to bolster their promises. We might understand this a bit better if we look at the words James wrote many years later, “let your ‘yes’ be yes and your ‘no’ be no” (Jas. 5:12). James told believers that their oath should be bound, not by sacrifices or gold, but by the integrity of their word, and, as James implies and Jesus states, the integrity of a believer’s word is rooted in the integrity of the throne of God and in God himself.

It is one thing to say, “I’ll repay you that ten dollars,” but it is an entirely different thing to say, “I swear (by the name of God) that I will repay you that ten dollars.” In the former, your promise to repay your debt is rooted only in your word, but in the latter, your promise is rooted in the integrity of the Father, and should you not repay the ten dollars you would be breaking, in a very real sense, the third commandment: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain” (Ex. 20:7). James understood what the scribes and Pharisees did not: vows rooted in God’s name and nature are dangerous; it is better to always speak with integrity than to try and impress others about the strength of your word by invoking the name of the Father. The scribes and Pharisees, however, lost sight of this truth. They saw one’s integrity through the lens of earthly value instead of heavenly value. They forgot the God they were worshiping and bowed to the gods of their own making: gold and sacrifices, for they were what the scribes and Pharisees truly valued.

We might not swear upon gold and other sacrifices today, but we can be guilty of the same error when we root the integrity of a commitment in some sort of fiscal measure or human value. In today’s financial culture, we might have to sign a document or even put up some sort of collateral as a means of validating our word, but we must never think that such collateral is the measure of our integrity. The true measure of a believer’s word and integrity is rooted in the unchanging word and integrity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and his Father. As such, inverting our values and taking the Lord’s name in vain are both evils for which we need protection.

The next woe, also financial in nature, unveils yet another set of inverted standards. Jesus said,

23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!

Matthew 23:23-24

I remember my dad telling us that we were being “maliciously obedient” when we obeyed the letter of the law while avoiding the spirit of the law. That phrase, I believe, perfectly describes what was happening with the scribes and Pharisees. They were more concerned with tithing even the smallest of their items than they were with enacting justice and providing mercy. They maliciously obeyed the law by giving exactly a tenth of their income and goods to the temple, but they neglected to provide shelter for the poor and homeless and did not protect the undervalued from injustice.

The scribes and Pharisees, however, are not the only ones who pay attention to unimportant things and ignore the important. We might not be concerned with tithing spices from our kitchen, but we have other ways of ignoring the unimportant things in life. It is easy to judge the obvious sinful behavior of other people and forget to provide forgiveness, mercy, and compassion. It is easy to dismiss a person’s homeless status as a result of choices we believe they made and not actually feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the imprisoned. It is easy to emphasize law and order and deemphasize love and forgiveness. From such evil we also need protection.

Jesus’s next two woes focus on cleanliness as a way of highlighting how the scribes and Pharisees inverted the important and unimportant. Jesus said,

25 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.
27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Matthew 23:25-28

The scribes and Pharisees may have been the spiritual leaders of Israel and dressed up in fine clothing, but beneath their linen lives lay filth and garbage. Jesus began by accusing them of being filled with garbage but he took a step further when he accused them of being filled with death and defilement. Moses told the Israelites that anyone touching a dead body would become unclean for seven days. He also told them that if they didn’t purify themselves their impurity would defile the tabernacle of the Lord and they would be cut off from Israel (Num. 19:11-13). These woes were not really about food and tombs, they were about the state of the heart of the scribes and Pharisees. Their hearts were filled with garbage, but they were also filled with dead men’s bones, and such defilement could not be cleansed by any outward acts. Their hearts had to be completely transformed — the dead bones would have to be removed — if they were to be clean. Since they did not clean the mess under their linen lives, they remained unclean and their personal uncleanliness, due to their occupations, actually defiled the temple.

Repentance is always an option for the sinner, but these woes were a statement of final judgment upon the scribes and Pharisees. They had, like Pharoah, passed the point of no return; they hardened their hearts and were now vessels of wrath prepared for destruction (Rom. 9:22). But for those who have not passed the point of no return, these woes provide more reasons for asking the Father for his hand of protection against evil. We can easily fall into the sin of inverting our priorities, placing value on the things of this world, and avoiding God’s supremacy and unwavering truthfulness. We can be maliciously obedient and neglect justice and mercy. We can even try to clean up our own behavior so we look righteous to others but unless our sinful desires are purged and the evil within us removed, every word spoken and every sacrifice of time, money, and effort given for the kingdom defiles ourselves and the work of God being done through the church, the body of Christ. We would do well to heed the words spoken to Saul after he disobeyed God by keeping Agag alive and offering his own sacrifice on the altar. Samuel said,

Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
and to listen than the fat of rams.

I Samuel 15:22

God has always been concerned with the heart because a person’s words and behavior flow from the heart (Matt. 15:18-20). True faith produces good works, but if there is no true faith, like in the lives of the scribes and Pharisees, then no work is ever good in the eyes of God. The scribes and Pharisees chose to follow in the footsteps of the first king of Israel, Saul, instead of the footsteps of the second king, David. God rejected Saul because Saul rejected the word of the Lord (I Sam. 15:26), but God chose David, whose heart was loyal to God (I Sam. 13:14), to be the father of the Messiah. Like Saul and David and the scribes and Pharisees, we have the same choice before us today: we can either clean the outside and leave the inside filthy, or we can open ourselves up to the cleansing hand of the Father who will make both the inside and the outside clean. This is yet another reason why we must continually seek the Father’s deliverance from evil.

Jesus, however, was not finished; he had one final woe to pronounce upon the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus said,

29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, 30 saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. 33 You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? 34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, 35 so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. 36 Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

Matthew 28:29-36

Even though the scribes and Pharisees boasted of being followers of Moses, Jesus said their true heritage came from those who persecuted and killed the prophets. Not only had they ceased to bring God’s word to the people, but they also rejected Jesus, the living Word of God. In so doing, the scribes and Pharisees and the generation of their followers became guilty of all the blood of everyone who had ever been killed as a result of proclaiming God’s.

If we look back to Matthew 21 where this encounter with the scribes and Pharisees began, we will see that Jesus told them a parable about a vineyard which, as I suggested, was rooted in Isaiah 5:1-7, but Jesus was not yet done with Isaiah 5. Jesus’s woes upon the scribes and Pharisees mirror a series of woes Isaiah pronounces upon Israel regarding their behavior (Isa. 5:8-12, 18-23). Along with Isaiah’s woes upon the nation of Israel, there were warnings that Israel would end up in exile, in the grave, devoured, and invaded by distant nations (Isa. 5:13-17, 24-30). All of this would have been passing through the minds of the scribes and Pharisees as Jesus was pronouncing his woes upon them. The scribes and Pharisees knew Jesus was comparing them to the previous generation of Israel that had been forewarned of their imminent demise. It is also likely that they thought of another passage in Isaiah when Jesus said, “all these things will come upon this generation.” Isaiah wrote,

Behold, it is written before me:
“I will not keep silent, but I will repay;
I will indeed repay into their lap
Both your iniquities and your father’s iniquities together, says the Lord;
Because they made offerings on the mountains
And insulted me on the hills,
I will measure into their lap
Payment for their former deeds.”

Isaiah 65:6-7

The high places on the mountains where sacrifices were offered to foreign gods may not have existed at the time of the scribes and Pharisees, but they were still guilty of bowing down to a god of their own making. They may have been legalists when it came to guarding the Lord’s name, but they still insulted the name of God by rejecting his word and his Son. These evils from which the scribes and Pharisees were supposedly protecting Israel actually defined them, and they were about to be repaid by the hand of the Lord.

Before they could respond to Jesus, Jesus concluded his series of warnings with the following words,

37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 38 See, your house is left to you desolate. 39 For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

Matthew 28:37-39

I wrote earlier that the scribes and Pharisees had passed the point of no return, but such a point only exists in man’s heart; God is always willing to forgive. God was even willing to gather the scribes and Pharisees back under his wing of protection, but the scribes and Pharisees were unwilling to repent. God’s willingness to welcome back a repentant sinner should come as no surprise to us. In the book of Leviticus God stated that he would take back even the most hardened of sinners if they merely repent. God said,

“But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers in their treachery that they committed against me, and also in walking contrary to me, 41 so that I walked contrary to them and brought them into the land of their enemies—if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity, 42 then I will remember my covenant with Jacob, and I will remember my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.

Leviticus 26:40-42

Even with all the horrible, no good, very bad things the scribes and Pharisees had done, if they had repented and said, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” they would have been spared; God would have forgiven them. What was true during the time of Leviticus, Isaiah, and Jesus is still true today. Anyone rejecting God and harboring sin in their heart the way the scribes and Pharisees did, can be brought back into a right relationship with the Father if only they confess their sins and repent of their evil ways.

We may never know how history would have been different if Eve had not eaten the apple, if Israel had heeded the words of Isaiah, or if the scribes and Pharisees chose to repent, but there is one thing we can know: if anyone confesses their sin, repents of their behavior, bows their knees, and proclaims Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, they will be saved. It was evil of Saul to reject God’s commands, it was evil of Israel to reject God’s laws, it was evil of the scribes and Pharisees to reject God’s son, and it would be evil for any of us to do the same. It is for protection from these evils as well as protection from those who advocate such evils that we must continually pray, “deliver us from evil.”

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