Matthew 23

The discourse opens with a careful, even-handed word. Jesus does not begin by attacking the scribes and Pharisees as persons; He begins by granting them their place: The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do (vv. 2-3). To sit in Moses' seat was to occupy the recognized office of teaching and interpreting the law of Moses to the people. Jesus tells the crowd to do what these teachers say when they faithfully pass on the law - the office itself is not the trouble. The trouble lands in the very next clause: but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not. Here is the wound at the center of the whole chapter, named in five plain words. The fault is not bad doctrine but a fatal gap - a life that contradicts the lips, teaching one thing and living another. It is a danger no office can shield a person from, and one to which every teacher of God's word, in every age, is exposed.³

Jesus presses the charge into something the crowd can feel: For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers (v. 4). The picture is of a packer loading a beast or a labourer past what it can carry - and then standing back, unwilling to ease the weight by so much as a fingertip. Their rules multiply on other people; their compassion does not. Then He names the engine driving it all: all their works they do for to be seen of men (v. 5). The whole performance is aimed at an audience. They make broad their phylacteries - the small leather cases holding Scripture, worn larger so the devotion would show - and enlarge the borders of their garments, lengthening the tassels meant to remind a person of God's commands. Even the marks of piety become props. The aim has quietly shifted from being godly to looking godly, and once that shift is made, every good thing can be bent to serve the watching eye.

The hunger to be seen reaches for its rewards: And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi (vv. 6-7). Notice how ordinary and how human this list is. It is not gross wickedness; it is the love of being important - the best place at the table, the front seat in the assembly, the deferential greeting in the public square, the honored title repeated. Jesus puts His finger on the appetite that hides inside respectable religion: the craving for status, for recognition, for a name. It is the same appetite that lives in every human heart, dressed here in religious clothes. And it is precisely against this appetite - not against the law, not against reverence, but against the love of being exalted - that He now sets a single, dismantling rule.

Jesus answers the whole craving for status with one rule, stated three ways: be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren… Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant (vv. 8-11). The point is not a wooden ban on every title - Scripture itself calls some men fathers and teachers. The point is the dismantling of a whole way of relating to one another. If there is one Master and one heavenly Father, then no follower stands above another as a little lord; all ye are brethren. The ladder everyone was climbing simply collapses. And then He inverts the entire economy of honor: he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted (vv. 11-12). In the kingdom, greatness is not measured by who is served but by who serves; the way up is down. It is the precise reversal of everything the scribes and Pharisees were chasing - and, as the chapter will show, it is the way of the One who spoke it.

The woes begin, and the first cuts deepest, because it names the worst possible damage a religious teacher can do: woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in (v. 13). The men entrusted with the keys of God's word have used them to lock the door. They will not enter the kingdom themselves, and - worse - they stand in the doorway and block those who were on their way in. This is the tragedy of teaching that obscures rather than reveals: people who came hungry for God are turned away by the very ones meant to bring them near. The word hypocrite tolls over this and every woe that follows - the actor's mask now fixed firmly in place - and it sets the key for the whole passage.¹ The charge is grave, and Jesus does not soften it; but its target is exact - this teaching, this blocking, this hollow performance - not the people standing in the doorway longing to get in.

The second and third woes expose what the religious performance costs the vulnerable. Woe unto you… for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation (v. 14). A widow in that world was among the most defenseless of people, with no husband to protect her property or her future. To devour her house was to consume the little she had - and to do it under cover of piety, with long prayer as the respectable front. Few things in the Gospels draw a sharper word from Jesus than religion that preys on the weak while looking holy. Then the third: ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves (v. 15). The zeal is real - they will cross sea and land for a single convert. But the thing they pass on is their own corruption, doubled. Energy and effort are not the issue; the issue is what is being reproduced. A counterfeit, eagerly multiplied, only spreads the counterfeit.

The fourth woe turns to a tangle the scribes had spun around the swearing of oaths: Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor! (v. 16). They had built an elaborate system sorting oaths into binding and non-binding - swear by the temple and you may wriggle out; swear by its gold and you are held. The practical effect was a machinery for evasion: a way to sound solemn while leaving yourself an escape. Jesus cuts straight through it with a child's logic: ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold? (v. 17). The gold is only holy because the temple makes it so; the gift only sacred because the altar consecrates it. And ultimately every oath reaches past the object to God Himself - he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon (v. 22). You cannot invoke the lesser thing to dodge the greater One who stands behind it. The whole scheme was an exercise in missing the point on purpose - which is exactly why He calls them blind guides: men leading others while unable to see what is plainly there.³

It is worth pausing on the phrase Jesus keeps reaching for: blind guides (v. 16), fools and blind (vv. 17, 19). A guide's one essential qualification is sight - he is trusted precisely because he can see the road others cannot. A blind guide is therefore a contradiction that endangers everyone who follows. The image gathers up the whole indictment of the chapter: these are not wicked outsiders but trusted leaders, and the catastrophe is that the people entrusted with sight have lost it - straining over the precise wording of an oath while blind to the God it invokes. Jesus had warned elsewhere that if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch (Matt. 15:14). The danger named here is not ignorance in the pew but blindness in the pulpit - confident teaching that leads confidently in the wrong direction. And the only remedy is the One who came so that they which see not might see (John 9:39): sight given by Him to guides and followers alike.

This woe states the whole problem with a precision worth dwelling on: ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith (v. 23). They were scrupulous to the last leaf - tithing even the tiny garden herbs, the mint and dill and cumin from the kitchen plot. That zeal for detail is not what Jesus condemns. What He condemns is what the detail crowded out: the weightier matters of the law - judgment, mercy, and faith. Justice for the wronged, mercy for the hurting, faithfulness toward God - the great load-bearing beams of the law - had been quietly dropped while the herb-tithes were counted leaf by leaf. And notice how carefully Jesus speaks: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. He does not sneer at the small obediences; He says do them - but not at the cost of the great ones. The fault is a sense of proportion gone catastrophically wrong: meticulous about the trivial, careless about the things that matter most to God.

Jesus crystallizes the whole distortion in one unforgettable image: Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel (v. 24). The picture is deliberately absurd, and meant to make the hearer laugh and wince at once. A scrupulous person would filter his drink through a cloth to avoid swallowing a tiny unclean insect - the gnat - and in the same gulp swallow a camel, the largest unclean animal he knew, and the funniest thing imaginable to choke down. That is what misplaced religious zeal looks like from the outside: enormous care spent screening out the microscopic, total blindness to the monstrous going down whole. The diagnosis is not that they cared too much but that they cared about the wrong sizes of thing. It is a mercy that Jesus draws it as comedy, because the temptation is so easy to fall into and so hard to see from inside. We are all capable of filtering gnats while camels slide past - agonizing over a small scruple while a great injustice or a hard heart goes unnoticed.

Two images now drive the charge home, and both work the same way - a fair surface over a foul interior. First the cup: ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess (v. 25). A dish scrubbed bright on the outside and filthy within is worse than useless; whatever you pour into it is defiled. Then the tomb: ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness (v. 27). Tombs were whitewashed so that no one would brush against them unawares and be defiled by contact with death - the whitewash was a warning sign. Jesus turns the image inside out: their gleaming exterior is a whitewashed warning that there is death inside. He says it plainly: outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity (v. 28). This is the actor's mask in its starkest form - a beautiful face painted over a grave. The whole burden of the chapter gathers here: God looks not on the gleaming outside but on what is within, and a clean surface over a corrupt heart is not piety but its most dangerous counterfeit.

The last woe is the most searching, because it exposes a self-deception the men could not see in themselves: ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets (vv. 29-30). They honor the dead prophets with fine monuments and assure themselves they would never have joined the killing. But Jesus turns their own words into testimony against them: Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets (v. 31). By calling the murderers their fathers, they confess whose line they are in - and they are about to do to the greatest Prophet what their fathers did to the rest. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers (v. 32) - a grave, prophetic word, for within days they would. Then the sharpest language in the chapter: Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? (v. 33). It is the language of a prophet confronting deadly self-deception - not the casual dismissal of a people, but a last, alarming attempt to break through to men persuaded of their own righteousness while heading toward the very sin they condemned. Even here, the door is not slammed; the question how can ye escape still hangs in the air, as if pleading for an answer.

Before the lament, one more solemn word about the long story Jerusalem keeps repeating: Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city (v. 34). God will keep sending messengers; the pattern is that they keep being rejected, and worse. Then Jesus reaches back across the whole sweep of Scripture: from the blood of righteous Abel - the first murder, in Genesis - unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar (v. 35). From the first righteous man slain to the last martyr named in the Hebrew Scriptures, the long account of rejected messengers is being summed up. All these things shall come upon this generation (v. 36). It is the gravest of warnings - but read it carefully, for it is a charge against a pattern of violence toward God's messengers, a refusal that runs from Cain onward, not a verdict against a people for being who they are. The very next breath will reveal what is actually in the heart of the One pronouncing it.²

And now the thunder of the woes breaks into tears. The voice that has been pronouncing judgment suddenly aches: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! (v. 37). The repeated name - Jerusalem, Jerusalem - is the cry of grief, the way you say a name you love when your heart is breaking over it. And the image He reaches for is not a lion or a judge but a mother bird: a hen spreading her wings to gather her chicks beneath her, to cover them, to shelter them from every danger with her own body. That is what He says He longed to do, and not once but again and again - how often. Across all the generations of sent prophets, the heart behind the sending was this: a yearning to gather and protect. The grief here is genuine and personal; the One who wept is days from giving His life for this very city. What meets the longing is the refusal - and ye would not - and the chapter does not rush past it or explain it away. It lets both stand: His real desire to gather, their real refusal to come. The wings are spread; the chicks run from the only shelter that could save them.¹

Out of that refusal comes a heavy consequence: Behold, your house is left unto you desolate (v. 38). Your house - the temple, the very dwelling where God had set His name - is now spoken of as yours, no longer my Father's house, and it is left… desolate, abandoned, emptied of the Presence. There is something terrible in the plainness of it: where the gathering wings are refused, only desolation is left. And yet - and this is the astonishing turn - even this is not the last word. The chapter that began with the harshest language in the Gospels does not end with a slammed door. It ends with a horizon and a promise: Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord (v. 39). The word till is everything. There is an end appointed to the not-seeing. A day is coming when the cry the crowds had raised at His entry into the city - Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord - will be raised again, and this time in welcome. The One they would not receive will yet be greeted so. Even the desolation is bounded by a hope.