“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses, and as a pretense you make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation.
“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for you don’t enter in yourselves, neither do you allow those who are entering in to enter. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel around by sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves.
“Woe to you, you blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obligated.’ You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifies the gold? ‘Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obligated?’ You blind fools! For which is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift? He therefore who swears by the altar, swears by it, and by everything on it. He who swears by the temple, swears by it, and by him who has been living in it. He who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God, and by him who sits on it.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. But you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone. You blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel!
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and unrighteousness. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the platter, that its outside may become clean also.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitened tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and decorate the tombs of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we wouldn’t have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Therefore you testify to yourselves that you are children of those who killed the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you offspring of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna?
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 25, 29, 32, 33 Hypocrites can abide none to be better than themselves.
Hypocrites can abide none to be better than themselves.
Christ when he reproveth any man sharply, uses this word, to give us to understand that there is nothing more detestable than hypocrisy and falsehood in religion.
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Which are even at the door.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv13–33 13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!…
13 But 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.
Ver. 13. Woe unto you, Scribes, &c.] By these eight dreadful woes, as by so many links of an adamantine chain, our Saviour draws these hypocrites down to hell, their place, and there leaves them to be reserved unto judgment. St Jerome was called Fulmen Ecclesiasticum, the Church’s thunderbolt. How much more might this be attributed to Christ? How terribly doth he here thunderstrike these stupid Pharisees, though he saw well (saith Father Latimer) that whosoever will be busy with vae vobis woe to you, shall shortly after come coram nobis before men to us.
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Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven] By hiding heavenly truths, teaching damnable errors, excommunicating the well affected, or corrupting them by evil counsel and example; and all this, εμπροσθεν coram et in os, before men, and to their faces, making fools of them, even while they look on, casting a mist before their eyes, as those Egyptian magicians did, Exo 7:11-13; Exo 7:19-22, and keeping from them that collyrium {a} that should cure and clear up their eye-sight, Rev 3:18. Thus did Arandel, Archbishop of Canterbury, who bound up the word of God that it might not be preached in his time (as the historian’s words are), {b} and was therefore (according to this woe here denounced) so smitten in his tongue that he could neither swallow nor speak for certain days before he died. Stephen Gardiner was plagued in like manner, for like reason. And generally the Popish clergy are vexed with that grievous and noisome sore of devilish spite against the Reformation, Rev 16:2, which they therefore oppose with might and main till wrath come upon them to the utmost. And albeit many of them escape the visible vengeance of God, yet this terrible woe, as a moth, doth secretly eat them up like a garment, and as a worm, eateth them up like wood, Isa 51:8, as it did these Pharisees; on whose outside nothing could be discerned, all was as before, but their souls were blasted, seared, and sealed up to destruction. He that hath drunk poison falls not down dead presently in the place, but he hath his death about him, as we say. Saul lived and reigned long after he was cast off by God; and the very devils are respited in regard to their full torment, but the more is behind.
{a} A topical remedy for disorders of the eyes; an eye-salve or eye-wash. ŒD
{b} Quod verbum Dei alligasset, ne tempore suo praedicaretur. Tho. Gascon, in Dictionary of Theology.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31 Our Saviour now cometh to denounce eight woes against…
Our Saviour now cometh to denounce eight woes against the teachers of those times, the scribes and Pharisees. Luke saith, Luk 11:52, Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye enter not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered. It was written of old, that the priest’s lips should preserve knowledge: God hath committed the key of knowledge to the ministers and guides of his church, not that they should take it away, but that the people might seek the law at their mouths, because they are the messengers of the Lord of hosts, Mal 2:7. Now saith our Saviour, you have taken it away: this Matthew calls a shutting up the kingdom of heaven against men; doing what in them lay to keep men from the knowledge of the mind and will of God, neither themselves teaching them the knowledge of God, which yet was their office and duty, nor suffering others to do it who would. You will neither go in yourselves, neither will you suffer them that are entering to go in. Yourselves are too proud or lazy, to preach the gospel, which is the way to the kingdom of heaven, and when others would, you suffer them not; nor yet will you suffer the people, who have a heart to it, to hear it. For this he calls them hypocrites seven times in this chapter, they pretending to be teachers and openers of the door to the kingdom of heaven, when indeed they did shut it; and denounces a woe to them, comprehending that ruin which soon after came upon them and their city by the Roman armies, and that eternal damnation which slept not, and was due to them. There are no worse men in the world than hypocrites, men pretending highly to God, yet neither themselves doing their duty in embracing the gospel, nor suffering others to do it, but doing what in them lie to hinder people from the means by which they might come to the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 25, 27, 29 From the thirteenth verse to the thirtieth, the Pharisees…
From the thirteenth verse to the thirtieth, the Pharisees have eight several woes denounced against them by our Saviour; the first is, for perverting the scriptures, and keeping the true sense and knowledge of them from the people. This St. Matthew calls the shutting up of the kingdom of heaven against men. St. Luke calls it, A taking away the key of knowledge from men, which is an allusion to a known custom among the Jews in admission of their doctors; for those that had authority given them to interpret the law and the Prophets, were solemnly admitted into that office, by delivering to them a key and a table-book. So that by the key of knowledge, is meant the interpretation and understanding of the scriptures; and by taking away the key of knowledge is signified, first, that they arrogated to themselves alone the understanding of the scriptures.
Secondly, That they kept the true knowledge of the scriptures from the people, especially the prophecies which concerned the Messias, and so they hindered men from embracing our Saviour’s doctrine, who were otherwise well enough disposed for it.
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Learn, hence, 1. That the knowledge of the holy scriptures is absolutely and indispensibly necessary in order to salvation. This our Saviour calls the key, which lets men into the kingdom of heaven.
Learn, 2. That great is the guilt, and inexcusable the fault, of those who deprive the people of the knowledge of the scriptures. They shut the kingdom of heaven against men, and do what in them lies to hinder their eternal salvation. Men may miscarry with their knowledge, but they are sure to perish for want of knowledge.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv13–33 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,.... The same…
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,.... The same character is given as before, and the same woe denounced, and a fresh reason given of it:
for ye devour widows' houses; that is, the goods in the houses of such as were left with fatherless children, and but little to support them; who being left alone, and none to advise them, and being weak, and prone to superstition; these greedy dogs, as Isaiah calls them, who could never have enough, easily imposed upon them, wormed them out of all their substance, stripped them bare of the necessaries of life, prevailed on them to sell their houses and goods, and bestow them on them; or got their little estates into their hands, pretending to take care, and dispose of them for them, to their advantage:
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and for a pretence make long prayers: as if they were very holy, good men; or pretended that the substance of these widows, which they got into their hands, was for their long prayers for them; or they made long prayers for them in return for their substance. Maimonides (x) says, that
"the ancient saints, or good men, used to stay an hour before prayer, and an hour after prayer, and "prolonged", or "held an hour in prayer":''
and this being three times a day, nine hours every day, as is observed in the Talmud (y), were spent in this manner; and on this account they got the character of very devout and religious men, and hereby covered all their avarice, rapine, and oppression of the poor: but God will not be mocked;
therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation; both on account of their plundering and distressing the poor, the widows, and the fatherless; and also because of their hypocrisy in doing this under the cover of religion and holiness. Hence it appears, that there are degrees of punishment in hell, and that hypocrites, and all such who oppress the poor, under the mask of godliness, supposing gain to be that, will be partakers of the greatest degree of it. In Munster's Hebrew Gospel it is called , "a long judgment", or "damnation", in allusion to their long prayers: and is the very reverse of what they expect on account of them: they say (z).
"three things prolong a man's days and years, "he that is long in his prayer"''
is the first mentioned; and he that is long at his prayer, it is an excellency, they say; but instead of a long and happy life, he shall have a long damnation. This verse is left out in some copies, and in others it stands before the former; in which order it is read in the Syriac, Arabic, Persic, and Ethiopic versions.
(x) Hilch. Tephillah, c. 4. sect. 16. (y) T. Bab. Beracot, fol. 32. 2. (z) Ib. fol. 54. 2.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 16, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33 Woe to you - Our Lord pronounced eight blessings…
Woe to you - Our Lord pronounced eight blessings upon the mount: he pronounces eight woes here; not as imprecations, but solemn, compassionate declarations of the misery, which these stubborn sinners were bringing upon themselves. Ye go not in - For ye are not poor in spirit; and ye hinder those that would be so.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 Verse 13. - 14. Wo unto you, scribes] I…
Verse 13. - 14. Wo unto you, scribes] I think the fourteenth and thirteenth verses should be transposed. This transposition is authorized by some of the best MSS., versions, and fathers. The fourteenth is wanting in the BDL., and in many others of inferior note, as well as in several of the versions. Griesbach has left it out of the text, in his first edition; I hesitated, and left it in, thus transposed. I am happy to find that a more extensive collation of MSS., c., afforded proof to that eminent critic that it should be restored to its place. In the second edition, he has transposed the two, just as I had done. The fifteenth reads best after the thirteenth.
-Verse 13. Ye shut up the kingdom] As a key by opening a lock gives entrance into a house, c., so knowledge of the sacred testimonies, manifested in expounding them to the people, may be said to open the way into the kingdom of heaven. But where men who are termed teachers are destitute of this knowledge themselves, they may be said to shut this kingdom because they occupy the place of those who should teach, and thus prevent the people from acquiring heavenly knowledge.
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In ancient times the rabbins carried a key, which was the symbol or emblem of knowledge. Hence it is written in Semachoth, chap. 8.," When Rab. Samuel the little died, his key and his tablets were hung on his tomb, because he died childless." See Schoettgen.
The kingdom of heaven here means the Gospel of Christ the Pharisees would not receive it themselves, and hindered the common people as far as they could.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv13, 16, 23, 25, 27, 32 Mat 23:13-15. But wo to you, scribes, &c. —…
Mat 23:13-15. But wo to you, scribes, &c. — Our Lord pronounced eight blessings upon the mount, he pronounces eight woes here, not as imprecations, but solemn, compassionate declarations of the misery which these stubborn sinners were bringing upon themselves. The reasons of his denouncing these woes are set forth in this and the subsequent verses. The first is here given: For you shut the kingdom of heaven against men — Namely, by the prejudices you are so zealous to propagate among the people, and by taking away, as it is expressed Luk 11:52, the key of knowledge, or the right interpretation of the ancient prophecies concerning the Messiah, by your example and authority; for they both rejected Jesus themselves and excommunicated those who received him. In short, they did all they could to hinder the people from repenting of their sins, and believing in the gospel. Wo unto you, for ye devour widows’ houses, &c. — Here we have the second reason of these woes. They were covetous, rapacious, and committed the grossest iniquities under a cloak of religion; making long prayers in order to hide their villany. Ye compass sea and land — In these words we have the reason of the third wo. They manifested the greatest zeal imaginable in making proselytes, compassing sea and land, that is, making long journeys and voyages, and leaving no means untried to accomplish that end, while their intention in all this was not the glory of God and the salvation of men’s souls, but their own honour and profit; that they might have the credit of making men proselytes, and the advantage of making a prey of them when they were made. Ye make him two-fold more the child of hell — In the heathen countries these interested, worldly- minded zealots accommodated religion to the humours of men, placing it, not in the eternal and immutable rules of righteousness, but in ceremonial observances; the effect of which was, either that their proselytes became more superstitious, more immoral, and more presumptuous than their teachers; or that, taking them for impostors, they relapsed again into their old state of heathenism; and in both cases became two-fold more the children of hell than even the Pharisees themselves, that is, more openly and unlimitedly wicked than they.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 Woe unto you - You are guilty, and punishment…
Woe unto you - You are guilty, and punishment will come upon you. Jesus proceeds to state wherein they were guilty. This most eloquent, most appalling, and most terrible of all discourses ever delivered to mortals was pronounced in the temple, in the presence of multitudes. Never was there more faithful dealing, more terrible reproof, more profound knowledge of the workings of hypocrisy, or more skill in detecting the concealments of sin. This was the last of the Saviour’s public discourses; and it is a most impressive summary of all that he had ever said, or that he had to say, of a wicked and hypocritical generation.
Scribes and Pharisees - See the notes at Mat 3:7.
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Hypocrites - Note, Mat 6:2.
Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven - Note, Mat 3:2. They shut it up by teaching false doctrines respecting the Messiah; by binding the people to an observance of their traditions; by opposing Jesus, and attempting to convince the people that he was an impostor, thus preventing many from becoming his followers. Many were ready to embrace him as the Messiah, and were about entering into the kingdom of heaven - that is, the church - but they prevented it. Luke says Luk 11:52 they had taken away the key of knowledge, and thus prevented their entering in - that is, they had taken away the right interpretation of the ancient prophecies respecting the Messiah, and thus had done all that they could to prevent the people from receiving Jesus as their Redeemer.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32 You shut the kingdom of heaven. This is here…
You shut the kingdom of heaven. This is here taken for eternal happiness, which can be obtained only by faith in Christ, since he calls himself the gate. (St. John chap. x) --- Now the Pharisees, by refusing to believe in him, and conspiring against him, deterred those, who would otherwise have believed in Christ, from professing his name and following his doctrines, and thus shut the gate of heaven against them. (Nicholas de Lyra.) --- In all these reprehensions, it is to be noted, for the honour of the priesthood, Jesus Christ never reprehendeth priests by that name. (S. Cyprian, ep. lxv.)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 33 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for…
But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men--Here they are charged with shutting heaven against men: in Luk 11:52 they are charged with what was worse, taking away the key--"the key of knowledge"--which means, not the key to open knowledge, but knowledge as the only key to open heaven. A right knowledge of God's revealed word is eternal life, as our Lord says (Joh 17:3; Joh 5:39); but this they took away from the people, substituting for it their wretched traditions.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33 EIGHT WOES UPON THE EXISTING POLITICO-RELIGIOUS DESPOTISM, Mat_23:13-33.
EIGHT WOES UPON THE EXISTING POLITICO-RELIGIOUS DESPOTISM, Mat_23:13-33.
13. Woe — This is a word of solemn denunciation of punishment. As here uttered, it implies that calamities of the most awful nature are impending over its guilty objects from the divine justice. It is the proclamation of a retributive destiny for years and ages of sin. Jesus apostrophises the scribes and Pharisees as if present.
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Shut up the kingdom of heaven — They closed the doors of the Gospel by their false interpretations and by their wicked influence, and prevented the Jewish nation from receiving its Messiah. They will neither be saved themselves, nor allow others to be so. For this he pronounces the FIRST WOE.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33 13. ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against…
13. ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men] In allusion to the symbolic “key of knowledge” given to the Scribe on admission to the order. They use their keys to shut rather than to open the doors of the Kingdom.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 (13) Woe unto you.—We enter in these verses on…
(13) Woe unto you.—We enter in these verses on the sternest words of condemnation that ever came from our Lord’s lips; but it may be questioned whether our English “Woe unto you” does not exclude too entirely the element of sorrow, as well as indignation, of which the Greek interjection (as in Mar_13:17) is at least capable. Woe for you is, perhaps, a better rendering.
Hypocrites.—See Note on Mat_6:2.
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Ye shut up the kingdom . . .—The words reproduce what had been said before as to “the key of knowledge” (Luk_11:52), the symbol which was given to each scribe on his admission to his office. Our Lord’s charge against them is that the only use they made of the key was to lock the door. They did not enter into the inner meaning of Law or Prophets; they excluded (with a possible reference to their putting out of the synagogue those who believed in Jesus, Joh_9:22; Joh_12:42) those who were so entering into the higher life and the higher teaching of the Kingdom. (Comp. Gal_4:17.)
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 Vers. 13-32. Eight woes pronounced on the Pharisees for…
Vers. 13-32. Eight woes pronounced on the Pharisees for their conduct and teaching. (Comp. Luk_11:42-52)
Some authorities transpose vers. 13 and 14 a variation attributable to the circumstance that the commencing clauses are the same. As Christ inaugurated his public teaching by pronouncing eight benedictions in the sermon on the mount, so here he closes his ministry by imprecating or prophesying eight woes on the perverse and unbelieving Pharisees. In Lange"s commentary there is proposed a scheme of antithesis between the benedictions and the woes, but it is not very successful, being often forced and unnatural; and it is better to regard the contrast in a general view, and not to attempt to press it in particulars. Jesus here pours forth his righteous anger on those whose obstinate infidelity was about to bring ruin on the Jewish city and nation. Woe unto you!. (Mat_11:21) These terrible "woes" are not only evoked by indignation, and pronounced as a solemn judgment, they are also expressive of the profoundest pity, and are prophetic of the future. They have, indeed, a twofold reference they refer first to temporal judgments and visitations, now ready to fall; and secondly to the retribution in the eternal world. That the meek and lowly Jesus should utter such awful denunciations shows how greatly he was moved how he left nothing untried to turn these hard hearts to introspection and repentance. Scribes and Pharisees (see on ver. 2), hypocrites. (Mat_6:2) Christ uses this word seven times in these denunciations. It is applied to the Pharisees as deceiving themselves and others, under the mask of godliness hiding polluted hearts, persuading themselves that formal externalism was real piety and devotion, and practically teaching this fatal delusion. Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; emprosyen twn anyrwpwn : before men; ante homines (Vulgate. This is the first woe against perverse obstructiveness. They prevent men from accepting Christ, and so entering God"s kingdom, by their false interpretation of Scripture, by not allowing that it testified of Christ, and by making the path impassable for the poor and ignorant. And this is done in the face of men," when they are, as it were, thronging round and wishing to enter. "Ye have taken away the key of knowledge," he says, in another place. (Luk_11:52) Neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. The kingdom of heaven is here metaphorically regarded as a banqueting hall, where are celebrated the espousals of Christ and his Church. The Pharisees watched the access thereto. They stood at the door to bar all entrance. If any showed signs of yielding to honest conviction, they sternly forbade them to proceed; they repelled them with violence, as by excommunication, (Joh_9:22, Joh_9:34) or by calumniating the Teacher. (Mat_9:34, etc.) There was many a time when 34, people were ready to acknowledge Christ and to follow him as Messiah. A word from their authorized leaders would have turned the scale in his favour; but that word was never spoken. The weight of authority was always placed on the opposite side, and naught but prejudice, animosity, and slander befell the cause of Jesus.
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Vers. 13-31. Condemnation of their hypocrisy.
I THE EIGHT WOES.
1. The first. The reiterated "Woe unto you!" is an expression of holy indignation. Christ, the righteous Judge, denounces the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. He knew the hardness, the impenitence of their hearts, and in his awful justice he pronounces their condemnation. Yet those very woes are also utterances of holy sorrow. The word is thrice rendered "alas!" in Re 18. (see also Mat_24:19) The Lord grieves over the sinners (see ver. 37) while he condemns them. The woe must come upon the impenitent; the Lord knew it in his Divine foreknowledge; he foretells it now. His words are stern, very terrible; but it is the sternness of holy love. He cared for the souls of those scribes and Pharisees; he had wept over them as he drew near to the city two days before; he closes this awful denunciation of the Divine wrath with the most touching outburst of grief. He spoke in tones of warning, if so be that even now these hard-hearted men might learn to know the terrors of the Lord, might repent and be saved. "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" The awful words come again and again, like the refrain of a dirge of intense sadness. It was this hypocrisy that was killing their souls. God requireth truth in the inward parts; he searcheth the hearts; he knoweth all things; he is the God of truth; he hateth falsehood. These men were acting a part; their whole life was a lie; they eared only for the appearance of piety; they had no wish to be really holy. They said their prayers; they did not wish to have the things for which they prayed; they did not even try to live as they prayed. They read their Bibles; they pretended to honour them and to believe in them; they had no real faith; they made no attempt at all to regulate their lives according to God"s Holy Word. Nothing is more hateful in God"s sight than hypocrisy; it is unbelief; the hypocrite does not really believe in God"s omniscience, that he readeth the hearts of men. Hypocrisy is an acted lie, and it is the devil who is the father of lies. God loveth truth. These hypocrites, the Lord said, shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. The kingdom of heaven was the Christian Church which the Lord had come to establish upon earth. There were multitudes willing to listen to the gospel of the kingdom, ready to enter in. But the Pharisees closed the way; they brought all their great influence to bear upon the work of obstruction. They would not enter into the kingdom themselves; they were like the guests first bidden in the parable of the marriage supper. And they hindered them that were entering in, who were on the point of becoming Christ"s disciples. When the people were amazed at his mighty works, and said, "Is not this the Son of David?" the Pharisees interfered with their envious and malicious suggestions, and dared to attribute the miracles of the blessed Saviour to the agency of Satan. They agreed that if any man did confess that he was the Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. So they shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. They set themselves in direct opposition to the gracious will of God, to the Saviour"s work of love, opposing him now, as afterwards they opposed his apostles us," says St. Paul, (1Th_2:16) "to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost." Upon those who fight against God, who hinder the work of his servants, who try to check the progress of the gospel, the woe must come, the heavy wrath of God must surely fall upon them.
2. The second woe. Ver. 14 has apparently been inserted here from Mar_12:40 and Luk_20:47, where it is certainly genuine. The scribes were like those false teachers described by St. Paul in 2Ti_3:6. They made a profit of their reputation for knowledge and sanctity, imposing upon weak women. They were not what the Lord bade his apostles to be, fishers of men"s souls, but they fished for their money. They made long prayers, but their prayers were mere acting; they were addressed in reality not to God, but to men, to those widows and others whose favour they sought for filthy lucre"s sake. Therefore, the Lord said, they should receive greater condemnation. They were not only hypocrites; they were covetous, dishonest. The condemnation of the hypocrite would fall upon them, and the condemnation of the thief. The affectation of piety for the sake of selfish gain is awful guilt in the sight of the all-holy Lord. We were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. That tremendous ransom ought to give depth, reality, zeal, to our religion. It is grievous sin to substitute earthly motives for that one only Christian motive, grateful love for our Redeemer.
3. The third woe. The Pharisees were not without zeal; they had zeal enough; they were fanatics; they would compass sea and land to make a single proselyte. But their zeal was party zeal. Party spirit had taken the place of religion in their hearts; they would work hard for their party; they would not deny themselves to please God. Their missionary zeal, such as it was, brought no glory to Almighty God, saved no souls. The proselyte, once made, became twofold more the child of hell than his teachers, more bigoted, more devoted to party, narrower and more exclusive, prouder of the privileges of Judaism than even those who had been born Jews. They should have been children of the kingdom; alas! they were children of hell; for there is no place in the kingdom of heaven for hypocrites, but only for the true worshippers, who worship God in spirit and in truth. The devil is the father of lies; those whose worship is a lie must have their place with him.
4. The fourth woe. They were blind guides, fools and blind. They professed to be teachers; they despised the untaught. "This people," they said, "who knoweth not the Law are cursed". (Joh_7:49) But they were ignorant themselves; they did not understand the very ritual which they prized so highly. Their teaching was full of puerile and false distinctions. An oath by the temple, they said, was not binding, neither an oath by the altar; but he was a debtor who swore by the gold of the temple or by the gift that lay upon the altar. They who taught such untruth, such folly, were fools and blind indeed. They did not understand the order of consecration; the gold was sacred only because it belonged to the temple, which was the house of God; the gift was sacred only because it was offered upon the altar, which was the table of the Lord. The gold derived its sacredness from the temple, the gift from the altar. The Lord recognizes the reverence which is due to consecrated things and places. We may find God everywhere; we may worship him everywhere, not only at Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim; but in the present limitations and conditions of our human nature it is necessary for us that special places should be dedicated to his service, and associated in our thoughts with his presence and his worship. The sacredness of things or places is derived entirely from that association with God"s presence and service. Then to swear by them by the altar, or by the temple, or by heaven his dwelling place, is to swear by him whose presence alone giveth consecration even to the heavens. Every oath is in reality an appeal to God; the omission of his name does not avoid the awfulness of reference to him. Then the Lord"s disciples may not swear, save under those solemn circumstances when an oath is required by the magistrate and sanctioned by Holy Scripture. No evasions, no pitiful distinctions, like those of the scribes, no substitution of less sacred words, can make the ordinary use of oaths lawful, or even harmless.
5. The fifth woe. Their religion consisted in small outward observances; it had no inner truth; they affected a scrupulous conscientiousness in things infinitely little, while they omitted the weightier matters of the Law. Scrupulous exactness in the payment of tithes and in Levitical purifications were the distinguishing characteristics of the Pharisaic fraternity. It was well enough to pay the insignificant tithe on common garden herbs; but ostentatious carefulness about this and such-like trifles, combined with carelessness about the great inner realities of personal religion, showed the hollow hypocrisy of their lives. They would strain out the gnat, the small ritual offence, and swallow the camel, the huge uncleanness of soul-defiling sin. Judgment, mercy, and faith were the weightier matters of the Law, unspeakably more important than the details of outward ordinances. To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God, were, the prophets said, better than thousands of burnt offerings. The Lord Jesus Christ enforces the teaching of the Law and of the prophets. Obedience in small things is right; obedience in great things is necessary for salvation. The exactest ritual and the strictest orthodoxy are of no value without justice and mercy and faith. "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ." This is the precious fruit the fruit of the Spirit; without this, the husk, the rind, are worthless.
6. The sixth woe. The Pharisees were especially scrupulous in avoiding all occasion of Levitical defilement; they heeded not the uncleanness of their hearts. It profits little to cleanse the outside of a cup or platter, if the inside is filthy and pollutes the food. A fair outside may hide the evil heart from the sight of men, but the eye of God sees through; to that all-seeing eye the wicked soul lies open in awful clearness. The Pharisees were blind. Be our prayer, "Lord, that I may receive my sight." We want to see the condition of our souls, to know the whole truth, the whole sad wretched truth. Then we shall begin with that which most needs cleansing the inside, the inner life of thought and feeling and motive. God desireth truth there. "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." If that is clean, made white in the blood of the Lamb, the outward life will be clean also. "Blessed are the pure in heart." But the outward show of purity without the inner truth is vain, worthless, contemptible.
7. The seventh woe. They were like the sepulchres around Jerusalem, which, according to Jewish custom, had been whitened a month ago, and still looked bright and clean in the sunlight; within they were full of all uncleanness; their very whiteness was a warning, that men might avoid defilement. So was it with the Pharisees; they made a great show of religion; but that outward show, like the whiteness of the sepulchres, spoke of inward corruption. The true man is humble in heart; he knows his own shortcomings; he makes no display of religion; he walks humbly with his God. Much talk, much show, is an evil sign; it is often an index of an unclean, unconverted heart.
8. The eighth woe. They built and garnished the tombs of the prophets and the righteous. The Lord may possibly have pointed to some of the conspicuous sepulchres which lay before him on the Mount of Olives. They condemned their fathers" crimes; but they owned that they were the children of them which killed the prophets. And, the Lord said, they were like their fathers, they had inherited their fathers" spirit. They would have slain the prophets, had they lived in their time, as now they were about to slay the Christ of God. They honoured the prophets in the distance; they would have hated them in the present. Stier quotes a striking passage from the Berlenberger Bibel: "Ask in Moses times, "Who are the good people?" They will be Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; but not Moses, he should be stoned. Ask in Samuel"s times, "Who are the good people?" They will be Moses and Joshua, but not Samuel. Ask in the times of Christ, and they will be all the former prophets with Samuel, but not Christ and his apostles." May the Lord save us from this spirit of unworthy jealousy, and teach us to honour goodness, not only in the remote distance, which is easy, but in immediate proximity to us, which is sometimes, alas for our miserable selfishness! very hard indeed. "Charity envieth not:" follow after charity.
LESSONS.
1. Christ is an awful Judge, as well as a most loving Saviour. Take we heed unto ourselves.
2. His wrath must fall on those who oppose his blessed work. Let us help it with all our might.
3. Christ hates hypocrisy. Seek above all things to be real.
4. Party spirit is a poor substitute for true religion. Seek to save souls.
5. Is your outward life blameless? It is well. But it is a small thing in comparison with the infinite preciousness of purity of heart.
The woe of the hypocrites.
A most important part of the work of Christ was to expose the utterly false and worthless character of the venerated religious leaders of his day. It was a thankless task, one that brought odium on the head of its Author. A weaker man would have shrunk from it, and a less sensitive man might have enjoyed the humiliation it inflicted on his enemies. But Jesus was neither cowardly nor censorious. Therefore he rebuked the venerated religionists, and yet we know the necessity of doing so must have been most repulsive to him.
I THE CHARACTER OF THE HYPOCRITES.
1. Speciously religious. There was an appearance of sanctity in the Pharisees and a pretence of orthodoxy in the scribes that won for both a reputation of religious superiority. The world has never been without persons of brilliant external appearances in religion, and these persons have always had "their reward". (Mat_6:2)
2. Inwardly false. Our Lord saw that the religion was unreal, that it was only worn as a garment for show. This is the characteristic of the hypocrite. He is more than a pretender; he is consciously false to his pretences; he is a living lie.
3. Acting a part. The hypocrite is an actor. He dresses his character and poses so as to win the admiration of other people. His very course in life is planned and carried out with a theatrical intention. This intention is the explanation of the glaring contradiction between the mask and the real countenance.
II THE WICKEDNESS OF THE HYPOCRITES. This is twofold.
1. The hindrance of others. The scribes and Pharisees prevented simpler people from entering the kingdom of heaven. This they did partly by confusing their minds with false notions, and partly by discouraging their efforts in setting before them vexatious precepts and needless, impossible requirements. It is a mark of hypocrisy to represent religion as a very difficult attainment, and to lay claim to superior sanctity by the easy method of setting up a high, or rather a false and unattainable, standard for other people.
2. Their own failure. These hypocrites behaved like the dog in the manger. Their harshness to other people did not help their own cause. No one enters the kingdom of heaven by keeping other people out of it. Religious selfishness is doomed to disappointment.
III THE DOOM OF THE HYPOCRITES.
1. Its exposure. For a time these people live in honour, and their skilful arts of deception seem to secure them against any discovery of their hollow and unreal characters. But this calm security cannot last long. Even if it is maintained till the end of the present life, it must vanish like smoke in the great apocalypse of the future judgment. God knows all from the beginning, and if he does not at once reveal the wicked falsehood, it cannot be because this ever imposes upon him. In his own time he will unveil it.
2. Its punishment. God hates lies, and he is angry against those who put stumbling blocks in the way of children and humble persons. (Mat_18:6, Mat_18:7) The hypocrites who are guilty of both of these faults are doubly culpable in the sight of Heaven. Their condemnation is just. W.F.A.
Vers. 13-15. The credit of the Church.
The Church of God is a unity throughout the ages. It is more proper to speak of the Christian dispensation of the Church than of the Christian Church as opposed to the Jewish. This unity exists, not only through the ages, but also throughout the universe. While its headquarters are in heaven, there has ever been a visible representation upon the earth. This is sometimes called "the Church;" in the Gospels it is distinguished as "the kingdom of heaven." In this sense we now speak of it. Note, then
I THAT THE CHURCH IS TROUBLED BY THE INTRUSION OF HYPOCRITES.
1. They enter it for selfish ends.
(1) What care the hypocrites for God"s glory? They are simply stage players in religion.
(2) They affect the glory of human applause. They transfer to themselves what should be given to God.
(3) By pretending to extraordinary piety, they insinuate themselves into the confidence of unprotected and unsuspecting persons, to rob them of their property. (cf. 2Ti_3:6 Tit_1:11) The extreme of avarice is to devour the house of the widow, who should be specially spared. (cf. Exo_22:22, 23 Pro_15:25 Isa_10:1, Isa_10:2) "While they seemed to soar heavenward upon the wings of prayer, their eye, like the kite"s, was all the while upon their prey on the earth, some widow"s house" (Henry).
(4) Some think it probable that the scribes and Pharisees sold their "long prayers," as the Romish priests sell their Masses. Through sympathy for their deceased husbands, widows might fall easy victims to the avarice of those who "make merchandise of souls.
2. In it they are obstructive to good.
(1) The scribes and Pharisees would not enter the kingdom themselves. They did not use "the key of knowledge" to see what Scripture said about Messiah.
(a) In Jacob"s departing sceptre of Judah.
(b) In Moses" Prophet.
(c) In Daniel"s weeks. They shut their eyes.
(2) They hindered those who were entering. The people were on the point of entering into the privileges of the new dispensation preached by John Baptist and Jesus, but were hindered by the scribes and Pharisees.
(a) They were hindered by their example. (see Joh_7:48)
(b) By their doctrine, in cavilling against Christ. (see Mat_12:24 Joh_9:16)
(c) By their authority, in the threat of excommunication. (see Joh_9:22)
(d) Therefore only the violent could force an entrance into the kingdom. (see Mat_11:12 Luk_16:16)
3. They promoted evil.
(1) They were infernally zealous. They spared no pains to make proselytes, not, however, with a view to benefit them, but for sectarian ostentation. For the scribes and Pharisees made proselytes to the schools of particular rabbins.
(2) Their victims they made even more the sons of hell than themselves. Note:
(a) Hypocrisy is itself the offspring of hell, for it originates with the "father of lies.
(b) "Twofold more." The Hellenist Jews, who were mostly proselytes, were the bitterest enemies of the apostles. (see Act_13:45 Act_14:2, 19 17:5 18:6) Truth falsified is worse than simple falsity. Half-truths are the most vicious lies.
(c) The proselytes were trained by the Pharisees in wicked sophistry, which palliated vice and substituted ceremony for piety. They were also taught to practise evil with less remorse and greater subtlety than they had been accustomed to in their former condition.
II THAT IT IS UNFAIRLY CHARGED WITH THEIR VICES.
1. Unbelief seeks to fasten their scandal upon it.
(1) Sons of Belial are never weary of denouncing the hypocrisy of the Church. If they can find any rascality in a professor of religion, they cry exultingly, "There"s your Christianity!
(2) They delight in favourably contrasting themselves with the hypocrites of the Church. What is more common than for sons of Belial to say, "I don"t profess to be religious, but I am better than many of your Christians"?
2. But this is manifestly unfair.
(1) Christ does not recognize hypocrites as Christians. On the contrary, he repudiates them with the strongest abhorrence.
(2) They are only tolerated in the Church because of the difficulty of finding them out. For want of infallible judgment, the tares have to grow with the wheat until the harvest.
(3) Hypocrites are not Christians. The "hypocrisy of the Church" is a misnomer. There is a clear distinction between the true members of the Church and those hypocrites who intrude into its visible corporation. In all fairness this should be recognized.
(4) Instead of contrasting themselves with hypocrites, let them compare themselves with Christ, and see then where they stand in the judgment.
(5) Let them compare themselves with the Christ-like. These are the only true Christians, the only true Church members members approved by its laws, and permanently belonging to its corporation. Hypocrites are neither.
III GOD WILL VINDICATE THE CREDIT OF HIS CHURCH.
1. By separating the hypocrites from it.
(1) They fairly belong to the world. Their spirit is of the world.
(2) Their connection with the Church is unnatural. It is like themselves, a deception.
(3) Their connection with the Church is transient. Like the tares among the wheat, the bad fish among the good in the net, the goats among the sheep, in the final judgment.
2. By dooming them to perdition.
(1) Hypocrites will be found with worldlings in the damnation of hell. Let the sons of Belial, then, contrast themselves with their own if they will. They will scarcely call the hypocrites Christians in damnation.
(2) The greater damnation. Note:
(a) There are degrees of damnation
(b) Pretences of religion will aggravate the torments of the lost.
(c) The gospel curses are the sorer. (cf. Heb_10:29)
Who can entreat for him against whom the great Intercessor pleads? A "woe" from Christ has no remedy. No such wrath as that of the Lamb! Three woes are made to look very dreadful; (Rev_8:13; Rev_9:1-12) but here are eight woes, in opposition to the eight Beatitudes" (Mat_5:4) (Henry).
3. By rebuking their accomplices. The open sinner is an accomplice with the very hypocrite he affects to scorn, in rejecting and crucifying the Just One. All sinners will have "their portion with the hypocrites". J.A.M. (see Mat_24:51)
The woe of the hypocrite.
The word "woe" is repeated again and again in this chapter, and yet the reader of it fails to realize what the woe denounced precisely was. The suggestive word is left by Christ. It is enough to tell these men that they are surely heaping up woe for themselves in the latter day. Some hint of the coming woe may be given in the closing verses of the chapter, which indicate a time of sorest humiliation, of hopeless ruin. Jewish literature gives quite as bad a picture of them as Jesus did. "Fear not true Pharisees, but greatly fear painted Pharisees," said a Jewish ruler to his wife, when he was dying. "The supreme tribunal," said another, "will duly punish hypocrites who wrap their talliths around them to appear what they are not true Pharisees.
I WHAT THINGS WERE HEAPING UP WOE FOR THESE HYPOCRITES. Our Lord marks several things in which their hypocrisy was especially manifest.
1. Their professing to be spiritual teachers, yet keeping the people from receiving spiritual truth (ver. 13).
2. They joined devout prayers for desolate widows with a grasping covetousness that seized the widows" property and ruined them.
3. They made proselytes, so to say, to righteousness, but compelled them to be as bitter, base, and uncharitable as themselves.
4. They made foolish distinctions, which they took care did not hinder themselves.
5. They appeared to be most delicately scrupulous, but in their conduct they allowed the grossest and most abominable licence.
6. They were supremely anxious about the look of things; they were wickedly indifferent about the real condition of things.
7. They wanted men to admire them in public, but they dare not let any one see their private lives. It is easy enough to see that, for such men, a revealing day must come, and, when it came, it would prove humiliation and woe indeed. It is woe for such men to be found out. It was a beginning of woe for Jesus thus to show them up before the people, and make them objects of scorn and detestation.
II WHAT PERSONS SUFFERED WOE BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRITE. For the religious hypocrite is a woe-maker. And this point may be opened out with some treshness. Every religiously insincere man:
1. Makes woe for himself. He has no enemy like himself.
2. He makes woe for the religious community to which he belongs. He prays against their prayers; he brings disgrace on them when he is found out.
3. He makes woe for society, which learns, by his failure, the misery of mutual mistrust.
4. He even brings dishonour on the name and cause of God. R.T.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
John A. Broadus 1886 · Public Domain On v13 Mat 23:13-39.
Mat 23:13-39.
Woes Denounced Upon The Scribes And Pharisees
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This is given by Matthew only. Luke records several similar woes, (Luk 11:37-54) which appear to have been pronounced some months earlier, compare above on Mat 22:1 and on Mat 19:1. Our Lord now ceases to address his disciples and the people in general, (Mat 23:1) and turns back to the Scribes and Pharisees, pronouncing upon them a series of mournful woes, Mat 19:13, Mat 19:15, Mat 19:16-22, Mat 19:23 f., 25 f., 27 f., 29-36, closing with an apostrophe to Jerusalem, 37-39. In each case some special form of wickedness is made the ground of this stern denunciation, and the solemnly repeated address at the opening of the successive paragraphs gives them a rhythmical character, like strophes in an ode. Keim : "In the seven woes, the first place is given (first and second woes) to the judgment against the foes of the kingdom of God, whose proselyting zeal for their lost cause stands in sharp contrast to the hindrances to the progress of the kingdom of heaven. The third and fourth woes denounce their false teaching of the law; the fifth and sixth, the slovenly efforts after purity by the ’pure’; the seventh definitely reverts to the attitude of the Pharisees towards the prophets—the announcers and forerunners of Jesus—whose graves they build, and in doing so prove themselves to be the sons of those that murdered the prophets."
I. Mat 23:13. [1] They Shut The Kingdom
Woe is a solemn warning and also an expression of pity—alas for you. (Mat 18:7) With these eight ’woes’ (the eighth given by Mark and Luke), compare six ’woes’ in Isaiah 5, and five in Hab 2:6 ff. Scribes, see on "Mat 2:4"; Pharisees, see on "Mat 3:7"; hypocrites, see on "Mat 6:2"; kingdom of heaven, see on "Mat 3:2". Our Lord implies that the Messianic reign has already ’begun, as he did even in Mat 11:12. Ye shut. These religious teachers ought to have set men in general the example of promptly and joyfully entering the Messianic kingdom, but they actually prevented others from entering. Against men, literally before men (Rev. Ver. margin), and so all English versions before K. James. The image is of the people at large as moving towards the open gate of the kingdom, and on the point of entering; but their religious leaders, heading the procession, refuse to enter themselves, and practically shut the gate in the people’s face. (Compare on Mat 16:19.) They do this by denying that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and striving to turn the popular mind away from the rising persuasion that Jesus is the Messiah, (Mat 21:9, Mat 21:15, Mat 21:44 f.) and from entering the Messianic kingdom through penitent faith. They paraded themselves as leaders of the people, while really (Weiss) they were misleaders.
[1] Westcott Hort, and also Stephens’ third ed., which in England is called the Textus Receptus, put this as Mat 23:14. The spurious verse follows Mat 23:12 in most of the documents which contain it. The early English versions probably followed the Vulgate in giving the other order.
Mat 23:14. This verse of Com. Ver. is here spurious,[2] but genuine in Mar 12:40, and Luk 20:47, so that it was actually spoken on this occasion, though not included in Matthew’s report. Widows, being without a male representative in business, have always been in Asia specially exposed to fraud and other wrong. (Compare Luk 18:3 Act 6:1 Jas 1:27) To seize their property, even their homes, is in other parts of the world also a common practice of men who commend themselves by "making long prayers" (compare Mat 6:7) as extraordinarily devout, and therefore trustworthy. The expression, "shall receive greater condemnation," suggests degrees in future punishment, a subject of very great practical importance. See the Commentaries on Mark and Luke.
[1] It is wanting in the earliest and best Greek manuscripts, and several early versions, is evidently unknown here to Origen, and Eusebius and Jerome, and was obviously brought in from Mark and Luke. Being written on the margin of Matthew by some student, and known by subsequent copyists to be a real saying of Jesus, it readily crept into the text, being placed in many copies after Mat 23:12, but in some after Mat 23:13. Such introduction of an addition at two different points in different copies is not infrequent, and sheds light on the treatment of parallel passages by students and copyists.
II. Mat 23:15. They Proselyte With Wrong Aims
This saying is not elsewhere recorded. Woe unto you, etc., see on "Mat 23:13". Hypocrites, because they pretend to be zealous for the promotion of the true religion and for the religious benefit of men, when they are really aiming only to multiply partisans, and are making them not better, but worse. Ye compass sea and land, literally, the dry (land), as so often in Old Testament The hyperbolical expression shows how zealous and active they were in order that even a single Gentile might become a Jew. An interesting example of proselyting even beyond the Tigris, a few years after our Lord said this, may be seen in Josephus ’Ant’, 20,2,2 ff. The same false zeal appeared afterwards in the Judaizers who followed Paul, Gal 6:13. The notion of Chrys. and others that Jesus reproaches the Pharisees with the small results of their immense activity, is quite foreign to the connection. He is speaking not of small results, but of bad results. To make one proselyte. This word is found elsewhere in New Testament only in Act 2:10, Act 6:5, Act 13:43, but very often in Septuagint It signified originally an immigrant, a foreigner who had ’come to’ a community for the purpose of dwelling there; this is its common use in Sept., English ’stranger.’ By an easy transition it denoted a Gentile who became a Jew, which is its use in New Testament What is involved in ’make’ one proselyte? To convince him that Jehovah the God of Israel is the only true God (Deu 6:4 f.), and induce him to be circumcised and set out to keep the law of Moses. (Exo 12:48) Those who were convinced, but unwilling to submit to this unpopular rite (Josephus "Ant.," 20, 2, 4), were called "proselytes of the gate," as if not fully entering the city and becoming citizens, but merely sitting in the gate; the others were called "proselytes of righteousness," righteous proselytes, who did their whole duty. After the ceremony of circumcision, the proselyte must of course give himself a thorough purification, as he would after any other thorough defilement, before approaching the altar with a sacrifice. In later times, after the destruction of the temple by Titus, and the consequent cessation of sacrifices, this purification of the proselyte was the final act, and came to be then regarded as a special rite, which by modern writers is called "proselyte baptism," see on "Mat 3:6". Tyndale and Gen. have here ’to bring one into your belief,’ which is not a bad paraphrase. A picture of a real proselyte to the true faith is given in 1Pe 4:2-4. Talmud Bah. says that a heathen inclined to become a proselyte should be told that "the Israelites are now enfeebled, persecuted, and distressed." But this by no means proves, as Wun; and others argue, that the Jews were never much given to proselyting. The attempt in later centuries to check the influx of proselytes by speaking of the then depressed condition of Israel, implies a previous contrary course. Tacitus ("Hist.,"Mat 23:5) says that the Jews grew because all the worst men left their national religions and became Jews. See Juvenal, "Sat.," 14, 96-106, and other statements to the same effect in Wet., and compare Edersh. And when he is made, Rev. Ver., he is become so, or ’is become’ (a proselyte), as in Mat 4:13, Mat 13:32, Mat 18:3; ’made’ was here a bad rendering of the Greek word, as it confounds this term with the term ’make’ that precedes and follows; it was an imitation of the Vulgate. The child, a son (Wyclif) is the exact translation, as in Mat 5:9 Rev. Ver. and Mat 8:12, etc. Hell is here Gehenna, the place of torment, see on "Mat 5:22". ’A son of hell’ would be one having a hellish character, as a child is apt to resemble the parent (compare on Mat 8:12), and so suited to dwell in hell. This, then, was the ground of the woe; not that they zealously made proselytes, which was entirely proper if rightly done, but that they made them bad men like themselves, yea, doubly as bad. These proselytes retained the essential faults of the heathen, and took on the faults of the Pharisees. So some of our "civilized" Indians are still savages, with the vices of civilization, and compare the heathen converts made by some Jesuit missionaries. In these proselytes the good was more superficial than in the Pharisees—who often retained some roots of old convictions—while the hypocrisy was not less deep. Pupils in error and vice frequently surpass their teachers. Very likely also some became proselytes for the sake of gain. Yet not all the proselytes of the tithe came under the condemnation here uttered, for some of them were among the early converts of the apostles. (Act 2:10, Act 6:5, Act 10:2; Act 13:43, Act 13:50, Act 16:14, Act 17:4, Act 17:17, Act 18:7) Other proselytes would naturally be very bitter against Christianity; and Justin Martyr, after quoting this passage, says to Trypho (ch. 122), "But the proselytes not only do not believe, but twofold more than you they blaspheme against his name." Proselytes are often mentioned in the Talmud with suspicion or contempt. Plump.: "The popular Jewish feeling about them was like the popular Christian feeling about a converted Jew. Proselytes were regarded as the leprosy of Israel, hindering the coming of the Messiah. It became a proverb that no one should trust a proselyte, even the twenty-fourth generation."
III. Mat 23:16-22. By Foolish Distinctions They Excuse The Violation Of Oaths
This is found in Matt. only. As to the general subject of oaths, compare on Mat 5:33-37. Here the Saviour confines himself to one point, viz., that the Scribes and Pharisees wickedly encourage the people to violate oaths, by making untenable and silly distinctions between certain oaths as binding and certain others as not binding. Woe unto you, as in Mat 5:13. Ye blind guides, see on "Mat 15:14". A religious teacher who gives misleading instruction is strikingly represented by a blind guide. Our Lord does not in this case call them hypocrites, as in the other woes. The temple is here the naos, the sacred house, see on "Mat 4:5".
The oath by the temple would naturally be often used, and so would be often violated, until men did not feel very solemnly bound by it to speak the truth or keep an engagement. Then a new oath was invented, by the gold of the temple, and this as being new was felt to be more binding. This gold would mean the gold plates with which much of the temple was covered (Josephus "War," 5, 5, 8-6), and the golden vessels of the temple (6, 8, 8); probably also the coin from contributions. Josephus states ("Ant.," 14, 7, 1) that Crassus took from the temple eight thousand talents of gold, say ten million dollars. It is nothing. The Mishna on Vows (Nedarim, 1, 8) speaks of vowing, "This shall be to me as the lamb, as the wood, as the fire, as the altar, as the temple, as Jerusalem;" and adds "Rabbi Jehuda says, If one says ’Jerusalem’ (i. e., not ’as Jerusalem’), he has said nothing." (Compare Wun.) The Scribes and Pharisees had conformed to popular custom and feeling by actually teaching that the old and common oath by the temple was not binding, but only the new-fashioned oath by the gold. The Saviour shows this to be an absurd distinction, since it was the temple that gave to this gold such Sacredness as to make it the natural subject matter of an oath.
So as to the old oath by the altar, and the new oath by the gift that is upon it. It was only the altar that made the gift a holy thing, so as to render it natural that men should swear by the gift. He adds (Mat 23:20) that to swear by the altar included swearing by the gift, for the former suggested and involved the latter. In like manner, the old and slighted oath ’by the temple’ really involved swearing by him that dwelleth therein, who gives to the temple its sacredness. The Jews would avoid literally taking in vain any name of Jehovah their God, and when swearing only by things associated with him, as the temple, heaven, etc., they imagined that they would not break the third commandment in violating such an oath. The Mishas on Oaths (Shebuoth, 4, 18) says if one adjures others by heaven and by earth, they are not bound; but they are bound if he adjures them by a d, representing Adonai (Lord), or by j, h, representing Jehovah, or by Sabaoth (Jehovah of hosts), or by any divine attribute or divine name. The Gemara on this passage of the Mishna explains (Wun.) that this is because these terms must mean the divine being, while heaven and earth can be conceived of as mere objects, without reference to the Creator. This is exactly the notion that our Lord here condemns. Heaven and earth, when used in oaths, do suggest the Creator. So the Mohammedans will take many oaths without pretending to act accordingly, but an oath by the Koran they must keep. The Bohemian in "Quentin Durward" glibly utters many profuse oaths, but when required to swear "by the three kings of Cologne," and that with his face turned towards the east, he feels bound. Compare above, "Hom. and Pract.", see on "Mat 5:37". He is a debtor (Mat 23:16) means that he owes what he has thus solemnly declared or promised, and must pay it—he is bound by his oath (Rev. Ver. margin). The same Greek word is used in Mat 5:18, but Com. Ver., as so often, must needs vary the translation, and give he is guilty. That hath sanctified, is in Mat 5:17 the correct Greek text; in Mat 5:19 it is that sanctifieth. The assimilation of the former to the latter was a characteristic act of copyists.[1] So with the addition of ’fools’ in Mat 5:19 from Mat 5:17.
[1] He that sweareth’ in Mat 23:20-21, Mat 23:22 is the aorist participle, of which Meyer here gives a hopelessly artificial explanation, and which none of the grammars treat satisfactorily. It presents the simple notion of the action without any such idea of continuance or repetition or custom as the present participle would give. In general, the aorist tense ("second aorist") is the original root of the verb, presenting the unmodified action. As various tense forms were devised, the present system, the perfect system, etc., to express particular modifications, the aorist continued to be used whenever no one of these others was distinctly wanted. This history appears to explain the use of the aorist in the subj., opt., imperative, infinitive, and participle; the aorist is in all these employed as a matter of course, unless the distinctive sense of the present or perfect tense be specially desired—because the aorist is the original verb. When the so-called "first aorist" form was subsequently invented, it came to be used in the same sense as the old aorist. Apparent exceptions to this theory of the aorist are believed to be only apparent. If the aorist subjunctive is sometimes naturally translated by the Latin future perfect (as some would do in Mat 23:16, Mat 23:18), this is merely suggested by the nature of the ease, Just as when the aorist indicative is translated by the pluperfect. So when the aorist participle denotes an action antecedent to the time of the principal verb, this is only through a suggested contrast to the present participle, which would of necessity give an action contemporaneous with that of the principal verb; and In a case like that before us the suggestion of such a contrast is excluded by the nature of the case. Compare on Mat 21:18. In the indicative mood the aorist bears the same relation to the imperfect that it bears in the other moods to the present. If these views of the aorist be correct, there is no occasion for the various artificial definitions of that tense which are given by many grammarians and commentators.—In Mat 21:21 the aorist participle for ’dwelleth,’ given by many documents and editors, is probably an alteration of the copyists to make it correspond outwardly to the tense of ’sweareth.’
IV. Mat 23:23 f. Scrupulous As To Minor Matters, But Neglecting Great Moral Duties.
Woe unto you, etc., see on Mat 23:18. The law required the Israelites to pay tithes of agricultural products, including fruits (Lev 27:30; Deu 14:22 ff.); and these punctilious Pharisees took pains to tithe every product that was edible and could be preserved. (Talmud.) Our Lord mentions as specimens, mint and anise and cummin; on the former occasion he gave ’mint and rue and every herb.’ (Luk 11:42, R. V.) Compare the boast "I give tithes of all that I get." (Luk 18:12, R.V.) Some even gave tithes of what they purchased for use. (Hansrath.) The Greek word here used for mint means ’sweet-smelling,’ though the Greek also had the word mintha; our words anise and cummin are borrowed from the Greek. The leaves of mint and the seeds of anise (or dill) were used both for flavouring food and as valuable carminative medicines; the seeds of cummin were used for the former purpose. Judgment, mercy, and faith, i. e., good faith, fidelity, (Rom 3:3) the common classical sense of the term. In Luke, it is ’judgment and the love of God.’ Compare Mic 6:8. The American Revisers properly urge that not ’judgment,’ but ’justice,’ is the correct translation here and in Luke, though the Greek word is correctly rendered ’judgment’ in Mat 23:33, and so rendered elsewhere. To render a Greek term everywhere by the same word is very desirable, but not always practicable. The weightier matters of the law. We have seen (on Mat 22:36) that the Rabbis called some commandments of the law weighty and others right. Jesus recognizes that such a distinction is legitimate, but draws the line very differently from their teachings, for he makes the fundamental, ethical, and spiritual duties (compare Luke) the weightier matters. Compare ’one of these least commandments.’ (Luk 5:19) As to the superiority of the ethical to the ceremonial, compare on Luk 9:11 and Luk 12:7. And not to leave the other undone. The old English plural use of ’other’ here creates momentary difficulty, as if referring to a singular, and there is no propriety in retaining it. Our Lord beautifully adapts his two expressions. They were strict as to the slightest externals, and left undone the ethical; he says that the ethical duties ought to be done, and the others not to be neglected. So Luk 11:42, and compare above on Luk 12:7. He does not forbid the tithing of herbs, but sets in strong contrast with this scrupulosity their neglect of great moral duties. Ye blind guides, as in Luk 12:16, leading the people utterly astray by false teaching and bad example. The image in Luk 12:24 expresses the same thing as Luk 12:23. The Talmud speaks (Wet.) of straining wine in order to remove minute unclean creatures. (Lev 11:41-43) The Buddhists in Ceylon strain their wine for a similar reason. Gnats sip at wine, and so may fall into it. Trench (on Rev.) tells of a soldier in Morocco who always placed the end of his turban over the vessel from which he drank water, avowedly for the purpose of straining out the gnats, "whose larvae swarm in the water of that country." The gnat and the camel are put in contrast as extremes in regard to size; the latter is obviously a strong hyperbole, for the camel was the largest animal familiarly known to the Jews. (Compare on Mat 19:24) Observe that it also was "unclean." (Lev 11:4) Thus these persons carefully strain out the smallest creature, and swallow the largest; they are very scrupulous about the minutest matters of ceremonial observance, and then neglect the highest ethical duties enjoined by the law. The translation strain at is generally supposed to have been a mere misprint, in the original edition of K. James’ version, for ’strain out,’ which had been given by Tyn., Cran., and Gen. The Greek means ’thoroughly filter,’ thoroughly strain, applied to wine in Amo 6:6, and here to that which is removed by filtering wine. Alford thinks that the K. J. revisers purposely gave ’strain at,’ meaning ’strain (the wine) at (the occurrence of) a gnat,’ but this is highly improbable.
V. Mat 23:25 f. Caring For Outward Purification Rather Than For True Morality.
Compare what Luke gives, (Luk 11:38) as spoken some time earlier. Woe unto you, etc., see on "Mat 23:13". Of all the requirements of the law, purification was that on which the Pharisees seem to have laid most stress; compare on Mat 15:2. There is here a regular progression, oaths, tithes, purifications. They were careful about not only the actual cleaning, but the ceremonial cleaning of the cup and the platter, Mar 7:4. ’Platter’ is in the Greek a rare word, denoting a side dish, some delicacy set on the side-table, and only handed to the guests, and derivatively the dish used for such dainties. Full of from (Rev. Ver.) extortion and excess, or ’intemperance,’ in the original sense of that term. The contents of the cup and dish, namely the wine and food, are the product of extortion, and the cup and dish are filled in consequence of desire for excess in eating and drinking. The image seems to change slightly, the full cup and platter being due in one sense to extortion, and in another to excess.[1] Thou blind Pharisee, not now reproached as blindly leading others astray (Mat 23:16, Mat 23:24), but as blindly going astray himself. Cleanse first that which is within. Let the contents of the cup and dish be the fruit of honest industry and not of extortion, and be used temperately and not in excess; then your ceremonial cleansing of the vessels themselves, will be real, and acceptable to God. Compare on Mat 6:8. May be clean; Rev. Ver. may become clean is the exact meaning of the Greek and suits the connection.
[1] This was not understood, and many manuscripts have ’extortion and iniquity,’ and several leading early versions have ’extortion and uncleanness’; both are obviously changes to remove the difficulty, and, for once, the simplification did not pass into the Textus Receptus. So, also, some documents omit the preposition rendered ’from,’ because it was not understood, and the early English versions fail to translate it, giving simply ’full of,’ which is correct in Luk 11:39, and below in Luk 11:27.
VI. Mat 23:27 f. They Are Whited Sepulchres.
Compare Luk 11:44. The transition from outward and inward purity of vessels to outward and inward personal purity, is natural and immediate. Woe unto you, etc., see on "Mat 23:13". Whited sepulchres. Tombs of the better class about Jerusalem were caves, or artificial chambers cut in the limestone rock. (Mat 27:60) The exterior of these was whitewashed, mainly to prevent persons from touching them unawares and thus becoming unclean, (Num 19:16) but also for agreeable appearance and perhaps for sanitary reasons. The Mishna states (Shekalim 1, 1) that on the 15 of Adar (roughly answering to our March, when the rains are over) people repair the roads, and public baths and other public works, and whitewash the tombs. The Jerusalem Gemara (tr. of Schwab) explains that this is because the rain may have washed off the lime. The Talmud also represents (Lightf.) that sometimes they whitened the whole tomb, in other cases made on it the figure of a bone or bones, and adds that as the leper said, "Unclean, unclean", (Lev 13:45) so here "uncleanness cries out to you and says, ’Come not near.’ " Our Lord is speaking at the Passover, when the recent whitening would be very noticeable. Which appear beautiful outward, not simply through the whitewashing, but architectural ornament, as seen in tombs still remaining. In Act 23:3 Paul calls a hypocrite a ’whited wall.’ And of all uncleanness is a delicate reference to the other products of the gradual decay besides the bones. These products according to the Mosaic law and Jewish feeling produced the highest degree of ceremonial uncleanness. In Luk 11:44, Rev. Ver., as spoken on a former occasion, the image is somewhat different, ’ye are as the tombs which appear not, and the men that walk over them know it not.’ It is likely that the masses of the people buried in the ground, as we commonly do, and as is done with most of the Jews now dying at Jerusalem; while the sepulchres in the rocks would correspond to our vaults and tombs above ground, though much oftener employed. The different Greek terms in Matthew and Luke do not suggest any practical distinction, for that of Luke is the same as the second term below in Luk 11:29, and as in Joh 11:28. In Joh 11:28, iniquity is more exactly lawlessness, anomia, violation of law, as in Mat 7:28, Mat 13:41, Mat 24:12. This word is not used by the other Gospels, but was a natural term for a gospel addressed especially to Jews and for Paul, while John particularly needs it in 1Jn 3:4., ’iniquity,’ or’ injustice,’ is not used by Matthew, but several times by Luke, Paul, and others, and Matthew has its adjective in Mat 5:45, and its verb in Mat 20:13. Are full here represents a different word from that of Mat 20:25 and Mat 20:27, but our language cannot conveniently express the difference, and it has no practical importance.
VII. Mat 23:29-36. They Resemble Their Wicked Ancestors, Who Slew The Prophets
Compare Luk 11:47-51, probably spoken some months earlier, see on "Mat 23:1". Woe unto you, etc., see on "Mat 23:13". There is no practically important difference between the sepulchres and the tombs. The word rendered garnish, means literally, adorn, ’ornament,’ as in Mat 12:44; compare Mat 25:7. The prophets,... the righteous. (Compare Mat 10:41, Mat 10:13-17) In 1Ma 13:27-30, is described a grand tomb which Simon the Maccabee built for his father and brothers. Josephus tells us ("Ant.," 16, 17, 1) how Herod built a marble monument over the tombs of David and Solomon, to atone for his attempt to plunder them. It is very doubtful whether the elaborate structures on the lower slope of Olivet, southeast of the city, which are now called "tombs of the prophets," have any proper claim to that name; but they appear to date from the time of the Herods (Robinson, Thomson), and may thus give an idea of the tombs referred to. One of them is now called the tomb of Zechariah, with evident reference to 1Ma 13:35. A little later than our Lord’s time, we have account in Josephus of several grand tombs, as that of Annas, the High Priest ("War," 5, 12, 2), of Philip, the Tetrarch ("Ant., "18, 4, 6), and of Queen Helena, of Adiabene, and her son-with three pyramids ("Ant.," 20, 4, 3).
Mat 23:31. Wherefore, or more exactly so that. Ye be witnesses unto, or, witness to yourselves, i. e., in this case (Winer) ’against yourselves,’ it being a testimony to their hurt. (Compare Jas 5:3) In the very self-excuse of Mat 23:30, they acknowledge themselves the children of those who slew the prophets, and our Lord intimates that here, as is usual, the offspring resemble the parents, (Mat 5:45 Joh 8:41, Joh 8:44) though they pretend the contrary in their case. The rulers are already plotting to murder Jesus (Mat 21:46) They are minded to do as their fathers did in this very matter, and piously pretending to be altogether different. (Compare Luk 11:48) "Ye are witnesses and consent unto the works of your fathers." (Compare above on Mat 21:39 ff., and see Act 7:51 f., and 1Th 2:14-15)
Mat 23:32. Fill ye up then, or literally, and do ye fill up, the ’ye’ being expressed in Greek, and thus emphatic, viz., ’ye,’ as set over against your fathers. The expression is gravely ironical (Winer),[1] a thing natural in so impassioned and pointedly personal a discourse, which has kept growing in earnestness. This generation ought to turn from their fathers’ sins, but instead of that they were adding like sins, and the new divine warnings did not stop them. So with mournful irony he bids them go on and fill the measure full. (Gen 15:16)
[1] The ironical imperative was not understood, and by the change of one letter might be converted into a future, ’ye will fill up,’ which is read in B and a very few other documents. Westcott Hort cling to B, and place it in their margin, though plainly a correction.
Mat 23:33. Ye serpents, ye generation (offspring) of vipers, see on "Mat 3:7"; see on "Mat 12:34". This corresponds to Mat 12:31; they are like their ancestors—they are serpents and the offspring of serpents. How can ye escape, or ’how are you to escape’, implying that it is impossible to see any way. As they resemble their ancestors, and are busily filling up the measure of their ancestors’ sins, it is not possible that they should escape. (Compare Mat 11:22 Joh 3:19) The damnation (judgment) of hell, i. e., the judgment which condemns to punishment in hell, is a phrase also used several times in the Talmud (Wun.). ’Judgment’ is the correct translation of; it is that signifies condemnation, the idea formerly expressed in English by ’damnation.’ This last word now denotes in English the eternal penalty resulting from judgment or condemnation, and while often necessarily suggested, this is not what the Greek terms themselves express. Accordingly, the words ’damn’ and ’damnation’ must now give way to ’judge,’ ’condemn,’ etc., leaving the punishment to be suggested, as it is in the Greek. (See Mar 3:29, Mar 12:40, Mar 16:16 Luk 20:47 Joh 5:29 Rom 3:8, Rom 13:2, Rom 14:23, 1Co 11:29, 2Th 2:12; also (Greek meaning ’perdition’) 2Pe 2:1, 2Pe 2:3) The changes thus made in the Revised Version do not at all proceed from any change in exegetical views or in theological opinion, but are simply required by the altered meaning of an English word. (Compare as to ’hell,’ on Mat 16:18 ) ’Hell’ is here (Gehenna), the place of torment, as in Mat 12:15, see on "Mat 5:22".
Mat 23:34-36, Wherefore, behold, I send unto you. The ’I’ is expressed in Greek, and so is emphatic. Jesus speaks as the divine representative, (Joh 3:2) as having plenary authority in the whole matter of human salvation; (Mat 28:18) he utters the divine decree, which in the similar passage of Luke (Luk 11:49) is referred to ’the wisdom of God.’ ’Send in the present tense, because the mission is arranged and on the point of beginning. Wherefore, or therefore, because they are like their fathers, and will treat God’s messengers as their fathers did, he sends them messengers to be persecuted; it will thus become manifestly right that they should be held guilty for their ancestors’ sin and their own. (Mat 23:35.) God of course does not wish men to sin, but he tests them, so as to show to themselves and others their real character, and vindicate the justice of their punishment. Wise men, and scribes are Jewish terms, used because of what precedes (Mat 23:29 and Mat 23:2, Mat 23:7), ’wise men’ being a common appellation of the Rabbis. But they may be fulfilled in apostles and evangelists also. (compare Mat 13:52) The distinction between them should not here be insisted on. The decree to send, and their treatment of the persons sent, may include all the divine messengers to that generation, from John the Baptist to the destruction of Jerusalem. (Mat 23:36, Mat 24:34) Jesus intimates his knowledge that they will not only kill him, (Mat 21:38) but also kill or maltreat his messengers hereafter sent. (compare 1Th 2:15) And crucify, see on "Mat 27:35". This may include the ease of Jesus himself. It is a tradition that Peter was crucified, and Simeon, a brother of Jesus. Some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, as he had already foretold to his followers. (Mat 10:17) And persecute them from city to city, compare Mat 10:23 Act 9:2, Act 13:50 f.; Act 14:6; Act 17:10 ff. That upon you may come is the divine purpose, not that of the Jews. (Compare Mat 2:23, and see on "Mat 1:22".) There here comes before us what recent philosophical writers are fond of calling "the solidarity of the race." Plump.: "Men make the guilt of past ages their own, reproduce its atrocities, identify themselves with it; and so, what seems at first an arbitrary decree, visiting on the children the sins of the fathers, becomes in such cases a righteous judgment. If they repent, they cut off the terrible entail of sin and punishment; but if they harden themselves in their evil, they inherit the delayed punishment of their father’s sins as well as of their own." The Jewish multitude afterward voluntarily took upon themselves and their children the blood of Jesus. (Mat 27:25) Notice here the solemn threefold repetition of ’blood.’ Shed is present tense; the totality of the righteous blood is conceived as in the process of being shed, the whole past and present thrown together.
Zacharias, the son of Barachias. There is here a well-known difficulty, which various theories have attempted to remove. (1) Some think that the prophet Zechariah is meant, who was son of Berechiah (Zec 1:1 ;) but we have no account of his being slain. (2) Some Fathers supposed Zachariah the father of John the Baptist to be meant, and had traditional stories of his being killed for asserting the perpetual virginity of the mother of Jesus; but all this is without historical foundation, excessively improbable, and very likely suggested by the present allusion. (3) Aug. and some others have supposed that our Lord is predicting the death of Zachariah son of Baruch, killed in the temple during the subsequent siege of Jerusalem, as described by Josephus. ("War," 4, 5, 4.) But the temple is there only, which means the general enclosure, Baruch is quite a different name from Barachiah, and our Lord is evidently speaking of things already past (’ye slew’), while this event was forty years later. (4) In 2Ch 24:20-22, we read that a priest named Zechariah was stoned "in the court of the house of Jehovah." His dying words are quite in accordance with the reference our Lord here makes, "Jehovah look upon it and require it," and correspond to the other ease of Abel’s blood. (Gen 4:10) In the ancient Hebrew grouping of the books, as in Hebrew Bibles now, the Chronicles seem to have stood at the end; so that from Abel to this Zachariah would include all the cases from beginning to end of the sacred books. All these circumstances fit exactly. Both the Jerusalem and the Babylon Talmud, as also some Midrashim (Lightf., Wun.), contain wild legends about the blood of this Zachariah as continuing to bubble for more than two centuries until the captivity—which go to show that his murder in the court of the priests was regarded as a notable event. But this Zachariah is expressly described as son of Jehoiada, the priest, whose kindness King Joash was thus ill requiting. Some make haste to say that Matt. has fallen into the error of confounding this Zechariah with the prophet who was son of Berechiah, while Luke gives no name of his father. (Luk 11:51) But we ought certainly to be very slow to remove difficulties by a supposition so improbable in the case of an inspired writer.
There are several possible ways of explaining the matter. Zachariah’s father, Jehoiada, may have had the surname of Berechiah, ’blessed of Jehovah,’ a name borne by six or seven persons in the history, and which might have been given to the great priest for saving his country. Or, Jehoiada, who had just died at the age of one hundred and thirty, (2Ch 24:15) may have been the grandfather of Zechariah, and his father a Berechiah, not otherwise mentioned. So the prophet is in Zec 1:1, called "Zechariah, the son of Betschiah, the son of Iddo," while in Ezr 6:14, he is called "Zechariah, the son of Iddo." Or it may be (Luketter.) that there was some other murder near to the time of Jesus, and known to his hearers. All these are unsupported hypotheses, but they are certainly possible, and so it is by no means necessary to suppose that Matt. fell into an error. Not a few cases that long appeared as difficult as this have been cleared up by the progress of knowledge within the present half century.[1] (Compare on Mat 20:29.) Whom ye slew, viz., through your fathers. They are held guilty of their father’ conduct because they have imitated it. The temple is here, the sacred house, as in Ezr 6:17, see on "Mat 4:5"; the altar is the great altar of burnt offering, which stood in the Court of the Priests in front of the sacred house. ’Between the temple and the altar’ would be a natural expansion of the statement in Chron., where Zechariah the priest stands "above the people, "in the Court of the Priests. Upon this generation compare Mat 11:16 , and see on "Mat 24:34"; the idea is kept up by Mat 24:38 f. These are our Lord’s farewell words to the Jews at large.
[1] The omission of Barachiah in à, and the change to Jehoiada, which Jerome found in the Gospel used by the Nazarenes, are obviously mere attempts to get rid of the discrepancy. Westcott Hort, say (App. p. 282), "it is difficult to believe that all the words as they stand have apostolic authority." But conjectural emendation to remove a patent difficulty, would of course be extremely precarious.
VIII. Mat 23:37-39. A Mournful Apostrophe To Jerusalem
Our Lord’s thoughts had been turning sadly toward Jerusalem for more than a half year, compare on Mat 16:21, Mat 20:18 f. Now the conclusion of the series of woes having pointed directly to dreadful and speedy judgments upon the persons addressed, which would be connected especially with the destruction of Jerusalem, he breaks into a grieved and compassionate apostrophe. That such feelings should have taken this form when speaking of Jerusalem at a distance, (Luk 19:41-44) again when coming in sight of the city during the triumphal entry, (Luk 19:41-44) and now again in closing his last address to the people, is in every respect natural; and there is not the slightest occasion for supposing that the saying has been displaced by one or the other Gospel. The doubled address, and the frequent changes of person, are also natural in the language of passionate emotion: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem—thou that killest... sent unto thee... thy children... your house... ye shall not see." Thou that killest the prophets gives the point of connection between this and the preceding paragraph. And stonest them. The Zechariah just before mentioned (according to the view preferred) was Stoned to death. How often implies frequent visits to Jerusalem during his ministry, and special efforts to save her people, and this agrees with the Gospel according to John. Others would suppose that he speaks of the frequent divine wish in past generations. As a hen gathereth her chickens. This beautiful comparison is the only passage of the Bible, except Mat 26:34, etc., in which barnyard fowls are expressly mentioned, but see probable allusion in Psa 17:8, Psa 91:4 Jer 48:40; compare Deu 32:11 Psa 36:7, etc. Wilkinson says they are not represented in the old Egyptian paintings. Yet they are now extremely common in both countries, and must have been so from early times. There was simply no occasion for more frequent reference to them. Proselytes are spoken of in the Talmud (Wun.) as taking shelter under the wings of the Shechinah. How often would I... and ye would not. ’I’ and ’ye’ are not separately expressed in the Greek, and so cannot be taken as emphatic. The reference here is to the divine wish and not to the divine purpose. God’s will of purpose is always carried out; his will of desire often fails, because the free will of men will not yield; compare on Mat 6:10. Your house is left, present tense, ’is now being left. ’The city’, which is the house or dwelling of the people, is now in process of being left desolate, causes are in operation that must have this result.[1] Some think that ’house’, means the temple rather than the city. For introduces the proof that this process of leaving them desolate is going on, viz., in the fact that the Messiah who has so often wished to gather and save, is now on the point of turning away. Ye shall not see me henceforth. After the resurrection he was not seen by the people at large, but only by chosen witnesses, Act 10:40 f. Till ye shall say, viz., at his second coming, of which he will presently speak fully to his disciples (ch. 24 and 25.) At the triumphal entry (ch. 24 and 25) some said this, but the people of Jerusalem in general did not. At the second coming all will sincerely, though some most unwillingly and sadly, recognize him as the Messiah, that cometh in the name of the Lord, Mat 24:30 f., compare Rev 1:7 Php 2:9-11. From Rom 11:25 ff. we may hope that among those who then joyfully recognize him will be many Jews.
[1] ’Desolate’ is omitted here by B, L, an Old Latin copy, and a quotation in Origen. In Luk 13:35 it is omitted by most documents, and its chief supports are there "Western." It seems pretty clear that the word is spurious in Luke and genuine in Matthew, as this supposition accounts for all the phenomena. W. H. omit it in Matthew also, placing it in the margin. But we have found various instances in which B, with some other documents, must be regarded as wrong.
Mat 23:14. Origen: "Two faults. (1) They do not themselves enter the kingdom. (2) They do not suffer those that are trying to enter. These two sins are naturally inseparable; he Who commits the one cannot refrain from committing the other; he who refrains from the one is sure to refrain from the other also."-What an evil thing it is by our teaching to shut the gate of salvation in men’s faces; what a blessed thing to open the gate, and lead men to enter.
Mat 23:15. False religious teaching is very apt to make the pupils worse than the teacher; (1) more extreme in opinion; (2) more sure they are right; (3) more unhesitating in action; (4) more uncharitable to those who think otherwise.—Origen: "To the son of Gehenna, Christ’s teaching gives the right to become the child of God." (Joh 1:12)
Mat 23:16-22. Discrimination is an indispensable element of sound judgment, in the sphere of thought or of action; but false distinctions are one of the commonest means of self-deception.—The fact that oaths wear out is not a reason for inventing new ones, but for refraining from oaths, Save when used on extraordinary occasions and in a reverent spirit; compare on Mat 5:34.
Mat 23:17. The Saviour calls these men ’fools,’ notwithstanding what he said in Mat 5:22. He infallibly knows them to be fools, and he says it with perfectly right aims and feelings.
Mat 23:28. The centre of gravity, even in the Mosaic system, lay in the ethical and not in the ceremonial, and still more is that the case with Christianity; but even apparently slight matters of external observance, if divinely enjoined, should by no means be neglected. Origen applies this to persons who neglect wholesome instruction, and care only for rhetorical ornament; compare 1Co 1:17.
Mat 23:24. Blind guides. Chrys.: "For if for a blind man not to think he needs a guide be extreme misery and wretchedness; when he wishes himself to guide others, see to what a gulf it leads."
Mat 23:25. Scrupulosity in religious ceremonial cannot atone for extortion in business or for indulgence of appetite to excess. Indeed, religious ceremonial is itself unacceptable to God when performed by the immoral 1Ti 2:8 Pro 15:8, Pro 21:27.
Mat 23:28. Rochefoucauld: "Hypocrisy is a sort of homage that vice pays to virtue." Pollok: "He was a man who stole the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in."
Mat 23:30 f. It is very easy to condemn severely the misconduct of others, while secretly guilty of essentially the same sin. But "God is not mocked," Gal 6:7. Henry: "The deceitfulness of sinners’ hearts appears very much in this, that while they go down the stream of the sins of their own day, they fancy they should have swum against the stream of the sins of former days; that if they had had other people’s opportunities, they would have improved them more faithfully; if they had been in other people’s temptations, they would have resisted them more vigorously; when yet they improve not the opportunities they have, nor resist the temptations they are in."
Mat 23:32. Filling up the measure. (1) In one sense men are accountable only for their own sins; "the soul that sinneth it shall die," Eze 18:4. (2) Yet all men suffer the consequences of the wrong doing of others—ancestors, present kindred, rulers, neighbours. (3) Human wickedness goes on increasing in lines of descent or of other relation till there comes a time of reckoning, till the full measure of guilt overflows in destruction. (4) The only escape is in really turning from the sin of wicked ancestors, so as to interrupt the transmission of wickedness and guilt; yea, in turning from all sin to the sin-hating and sin-pardoning God.
John A. Broadus, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (American Baptist Publication Society, 1886) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv13, 16, 23, 25, 29, 33 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.
Mat_23:13-15
But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.
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The sins of the scribes and Pharisees
I. That they shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. Neither suffer ye them that are entering in.
1. They did this by their extraordinary strictness and outward purity. By such austerities they made religion repulsive. This accusation has often been preferred against the pure ministers of a pure religion. Compare this text with the parallel passage in Luk_11:52. They shut the kingdom of heaven against themselves and others by taking away the key of knowledge. The same sin is committed by any church that imposes the traditions of men in that province in which only the commandment of God is of authority. The kingdom of heaven is opened by knowledge. It is important to recognize this. Ministers of the Church have in a certain sense the power of shutting up the kingdom of heaven against men.
(1) Let us learn to read the Bible and listen to its truths, in the assurance that our eternal destiny depends upon the knowledge of them.
(2) Let ministers learn their proper vocation as porters to the kingdom of heaven, and let them beware of handling the Word of God deceitfully.
2. The second charge against the scribes and Pharisees. They devoured the houses of widows. They were robbers of the defenceless. Those who lie under this woe are:
(1) Those ministers who enter upon and continue in their office for a piece of bread.
3. The third charge against the scribes and Pharisees-Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte. The apostles of deceit and falsehood have often manifested a zeal in the propagation of their principles which is fitted to minister a severe reproof to those who know and believe the truth. It is not the fact of making proselytes against which the woe is directed; this is the duty of the Church. But they did not care to make their councils holier.
(1) They made proselytes by reviling and scorn;
(2) by misrepresentation and calumny;
(3) by force. (W. Wilson.)
In the description of the scribes and Pharisees in this chapter we have a full-length portrait of the hypocrite
I. They shut up the kingdom of heaven against others (verse 13).
II. They committed the grossest iniquity under a cloak of religion (verse 14).
III. They showed great zeal in making proselytes, yet did it only for gain, and made them more wicked (verse 15).
IV. They taught false doctrine, artful contrivances to destroy the force of oaths, and shut out the Creator from their view (verses 16-22).
V. They were superstitious (verse 23).
VI. They were openly hypocritical (verses 25-28).
VII. They professed great veneration for the memory of the pious dead, while at the same time they were conscious that they really approved the conduct of those who killed them (verses 29-31). Never, perhaps, was there a combination of more wicked feelings and hypocritical actions than among them; and never was there more profound knowledge of the human heart and more faithfulness than in Him who tore off the mask, and showed them what they were. (A. Barnes, D. D.)
The woes
I. Spiritual ambition; petitioners changed into beggars. The long prayers of the hypocrites, and the long sentence of judgment.
II. Those who shut the kingdom of heaven.
III. Proselytism. Soul-winners and soul-ruiners.
IV. The work of man up, the work of God down; the inward nothing, the outward everything. The true oath always by the living and true God. The blindest ignorance connected with a conceit of keenest insight into the laws of the kingdom of God.
V. Legality in little things; lawlessness in great.
VI. The outside and the inside of the cup and the platter, or the feast of the religious and moral hypocrite.
1. In the outward form, consecrated or adorned.
2. In the inner character, abominable and reprobate.
VII. The whited sepulchres: like pleasant abodes outwardly; caves of bones, diffusing death, within-spiritual death, in the guise of spiritual bloom.
VIII. The murderers of the prophets. To persecute Christ in His saints is to persecute Christ himself. (J. P. Lange, D. D.)
Folly of hypocrisy
If the devil ever laughs, it must be at hypocrites; they are the greatest dupes he has. They serve him better than any others, and receive no wages; nay, what is still more extraordinary, they submit to greater mortifications to go to hell, than the sincerest Christian to go to heaven. (Colton.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33 13. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees. Eight woes…
13. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees. Eight woes are given. They have been contrasted with the nine Beatitudes of chapter 5. Hypocrites. Literally, an actor. Shut the kingdom of heaven. By false teaching that prevents men from accepting Christ. Both their example and false teaching shut the door.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv13, 16, 29 Mat_23:13. Woe.—There is indignation in the word, and just…
CRITICAL NOTES
Mat_23:13. Woe.—There is indignation in the word, and just denunciation; but, as Vatable long ago remarked, there is “deploration” too. There is wailing in it. It is rendered “alas!” in Rev_18:10; Rev_18:16; Rev_18:19 (Morison). Hypocrites.—See note on Mat_6:2. Shut up the kingdom of heaven.—“Up” omitted in R.V. In allusion to the symbolic “key of knowledge” given to the scribe on admission to the order. They use their keys to shut rather than to open the doors of the kingdom (Carr).
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Mat_23:14. Wanting in many MSS., including the Vatican and Sinaitic. Omitted in R.V. Seems to have been transferred from Mar_12:40 and Luk_20:47, in both of which places it is genuine.
Mat_23:15. Twofold more the child of hell.—Lit. “a son of Gehenna,” or, as Sir John Cheke has it, in most expressive slang, “a hell-imp,” i.e. one who derives his peculiarity of character from beneath (Morison). Out of bad heathens they were made worse Jews (Erasmus).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Mat_23:13-15
The results of hypocrisy.—After the misled, the misleaders—after the too-confiding followers, the faithless guides—are admonished. And that, of course, as with greater cause, so with more manifest force. In the two verses before us now—for we follow the R.V. and other leading authorities in regarding Mat_23:14 as not really part of the text—this is done in two principal ways. These self-deceivers are denounced, first, as being great preventers of good; secondly, as being great aggravaters of evil.
I. Preventers of good.—Hypocrisy prevents men of all classes from learning the truth. As it were, it shuts the door of truth—the very way of access thereto—the beginning of that way—in their faces (Mat_23:13). This is true, first, of such self-deceivers themselves. How can any one who begins with deception finish with truth? He is wrong from the first. This seems to be why the Saviour said before (Mat_5:20) “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Such “righteousness” being really unrighteousness, can only effect what unrighteousness does. It cannot help a man to find the way in. Rather, it is like shooting the bolt of a door the wrong way; a thing which necessarily, instead of opening, fastens it up. Hypocrisy also prevents other men from learning the truth. Even so far as such self-deceivers do point to the right door—and that this is true of them to some extent seems implied in Mat_23:3—they do so in such a way as to deter those who look on. For what is it that such inquirers behold when they do? They see the manifest inconsistencies of these professed dealers in truth—how they “say and do not” (Mat_23:3-4). They see also the real motives by which such men are moved (Mat_23:5-7). And they judge of truth, therefore, by these professors of it, and feel equal objection to both. In the case of men not really desirous of learning the truth, the process is swift and direct. Even the semblance of an obstacle is quite sufficient to keep such reluctant ones off. In other cases, if more roundabout, it is none the less sure. Those who desire the truth are repelled by seeing the manifest untruthfulness of such teachers. Consequently they are led to reject the truth, even when it does fall from their lips. The other set never see the door, and so never go in. These men do see it indeed, but do not know what it is; and so are prevented just as effectually from availing themselves of its good.
II. Aggravaters of evil.—Hypocrisy leads to this, first, by means of the great efforts which it induces men to put forth. Those who follow such self-deceiving ways must sometimes surely have some misgivings about them. To gain others over to the same ways is a sort of testimony in their favour—sufficiently like it, in any case, to pass muster with such, and make them crave it with eagerness. On the other hand, to secure such gains is to gain also what such persons so especially value, namely, distinction and praise (Mat_23:5, etc.). To such truly “sectarian” victors, at all sectarian “feasts,” the very “uppermost rooms” (Mat_23:6) are assigned. Any one such conquest, therefore, is thought worthy of any amount of exertion, by those whose innermost hearts are set on such small glories as these (Mat_23:15). Secondly, by means of the especially evil effects which result from such efforts. See, e.g., what such “proselytes” are brought to! To the same level, of course, as is occupied by those by whom they are brought. To the same hypocrisy, therefore, and self-deception; the same grievous errors both in doctrine and life; the same wilful darkness and guilt. See, on the other hand, from what they are brought. From a condition, at any rate, in which they were not committed to wrong; where they were at least open to influences for good; where the sunshine could reach them, if it happened to shine; where their moral constitution had not been damaged by the experience of a “fall.” These were the things which gave “twofold” (Mat_23:15) seriousness to their condition and case; and which caused such perverts to go even beyond those who perverted them in wrong-doing. Thus using one’s liberty to turn it into bondage is bondage indeed! What abuse of it can be worse?
These considerations help to account for the peculiar severity of the language before us. Nothing was nearer the Saviour’s heart than the salvation of sinners. He came into the world—He gave His whole life—He submitted to death—He endured the cross—for this end. How grievous to Him, therefore, to see this work of His heart thus doubly opposed! To see those inquiring for saving truth either denied it entirely, or else taught deadly error instead! And to see this done, also, by the very hands which were commissioned, in their way, to do the very reverse! Can we wonder at His denouncing such conduct when He thought of those whom it ruined? Can we be surprised at the very depth of His mercy making Him severe on such hands? “Woe is me,” said the Apostle, “if I preach not the gospel.” Why so? Partly because of the disobedience involved in such a refusal. Partly, also, because of the exceeding cruelty involved in such silence. Something the same as would have been true of him in that case was true of the men described here. In their way, they were the pests of their day. Had He spoken of them otherwise, He would have been as cruel and as false as themselves.
HOMILIES ON THE VERSES
Mat_23:13. Our power to help or harm religion.—We cannot get the full force of these words of Jesus unless we remember that they were spoken to those who called themselves, and who, in some true sense were, religious men. They were hindering His work, not merely as any man might have hindered it, but also in a special way in which none but religious men, none but recognised religious teachers, could have hindered it. They were shutting Him out, not merely as any part of the wall might shut a man out, by mere passive obstinacy and hardness, but as only a door can shut a man out by a bolt, deliberately drawn across the leaves. The words of Christ suggest one truth which evidently lies at the root of the whole subject, which is that every hindrance which any Christian puts in the way of other men’s becoming Christians is associated with an imperfection in his own Christian life. “Ye neither go in yourselves,” etc.
I. I mention the look of unreasonableness which much of the way in which Christians deal with Christianity gives to their faith in the eyes of their fellow-men. Christian faith is made by many Christians to seem fantastic and unreasonable, something wholly distinct and apart from, and even contradictory to, the ordinary laws of thought and life, something that cannot be understood except by a special initiation and the use of wholly different faculties besides those which men use on other things.
II. The lack of connection that there often is between our faith and the facts and duties of our daily life. The facts and duties of life are hard but precious tests of the unseen life of character which lies behind them.
III. The lack of sympathy with the life and activity of men into which some Christians seem to be thrown by their Christian faith. If that new life of yours is really life, it ought to quicken a hundredfold your interest in all the forms of life which are to be found in all the struggling degrees of living men.
IV. Another of the dangers of Christians is lest they lose the essential loftiness of the Christian life, and make it seem to other men a sordid and unworthy thing. Have you never been tempted to value the service of Christ for the merely temporal advantages which it might bring you? Have you never made your religion a mere insurance against future punishment? etc.
V. I hesitate to speak of the doctrinal obstacle which many Christian people put in the way of other men becoming Christians, lest I may seem to fall in with the vulgar and thoughtless denial of the importance of religious dogma which we hear on every side. But one may value doctrine very highly indeed, and yet insist that the making of Christianity to be a system of doctrine is very false to the first intention of Jesus, and very harmful to men’s souls.
VI. The effort to be Christians in silence, without making any profession of faith.—Phillips Brooks, D.D.
Mat_23:15. The blind zeal of the Pharisees.—
1. Seducers will be more busy to draw others to their err or than teachers of the truth are for drawing others to the truth.
2. The more pains in false zeal, and the more speed a man cometh in perverting others, the more measure of vengeance abideth on him.
3. The more a man do profit in the school of error and superstition, the more he is the child of hell and Satan, for the original of errors is from hell, and Satan is the father of error, superstition, and heresy.
4. Young proselytes, who drink in superstition at the persuasion of learned seducers, are far more taken with the false opinions, and more addicted to these false superstitions, than their teachers are, conceiving them to be truth, when these old deceivers do but laugh to see the credulity of the deluded. “You make them twofold more the children of hell than yourselves,” to wit, in respect of believing these errors which you teach them, for in other respects the deceivers were the elder sons of Satan.—David Dickson.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On v13 Luk 20:47, Mar 12:40; Mat 23:13-39. “Woe unto you,…
WOES AGAINST THE SCRIBES AND PHARISEES
Luk 20:47, Mar 12:40; Mat 23:13-39. “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you devour the houses of widows, and through pretense make long prayers; therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.” You see He withers them awfully for oppressing the widows. You must not here understand a condemnation of long prayers. Jesus Himself sometimes prayed all night. The condemnation is on the hypocrisy, because through pretense they made long prayers. However, we should all take warning and condense our prayers, throwing away all forms and routines, introductories and conclusions, except the simple “Amen,” and by the help of the Spirit focalize and concentrate our prayers, making them multum in parvo; i.e., “much in little.”
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“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut up the kingdom of the heavens against the people: for you do not come in, neither do you permit those coming in to enter.” What awful preaching to the pastors of the Churches, ruling elders, and leading members, while looking them in the face! How terrible was the grip of Satan on them, that they did not heed the warning, but got violently mad, and killed Him for telling them the truth! Lord help us to walk in Thy footprints! There is a world of truth in this accusation. Those were the very men who would not enter the kingdom nor permit others. If they had repented under the preaching of John the Baptist, instead of getting mad at him for telling them the truth (Mat 3:7), and received their own Christ with open arms, thus passing exultantly from the Mosaic dispensation into the kingdom of heaven, the people would have followed them in solid columns, the whole Jewish nation receiving their own Christ, turning evangelist, preaching Him to all the Gentiles, and actually bringing on she millennium, far back in the early centuries of the Christian era, the Lord returning on the throne of His glory, as He said He would when the gospel was preached to all nations. The same sad phenomenon you may observe this day. If the leading preachers and Church officers throughout Christendom would receive the Holy Ghost and get sanctified wholly, as Jesus is now calling them, the Churches would follow in swelling multitudes, the revival tide of holiness to the Lord inundate the globe like a mighty swelling sea, and bring on the millennium in the present generation. The rank and file of people will follow their leaders. The climacteric trick of Satan in all ages has been to lead the leaders, and thus populate hell with the downward rush of millions lost.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you compass sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he may become, you make him twofold more the son of hell than yourselves.” This poor, deluded, heathen proselyte, not only retains his own sins, but takes on those of hypocrisy and formality peculiar to his Jewish leaders. The deader a Church is, the more proselytic, ready to do almost anything to get a member, especially if he has money. Misery loves company. When people have God with them, they are satisfied to walk alone. When they are without God, they seek comfort in all the company they can get, going for the popular Church.
“Woe unto you. blind guides, saying, Whosoever may swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever may swear by the gold of the temple, he is debtor. Ye foolish and blind: for which is the greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifies the gold? Whosoever may swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever may swear by the gift which is upon it, he is debtor. Ye blind, for which is the greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift? Therefore he that sweareth by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things which are on it; and he that sweareth by the temple, sweareth by it, and by Him that dwelleth in it; and he that sweareth by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by Him that sitteth upon it.” That our Savior is not here condemning judicial oaths,: we have abundant proof, as He Himself responded to Caiaphas when he administered to Him a solemn oath (Mat 26:63), and Paul administered a solemn oath to the Thessalonians that the epistle should be read to all the brethren. But Jesus is here speaking of profane swearing, condemning the use of bywords, which is incitive to profanity at least, and all superfluous language, as indicative of evil and conducive to sin, cutting down our phraseology to simple statements of fact. We have in this paragraph a very important specification, certifying that the altar sanctifies the gift, which has in all ages been a prominent battle-cry in God’s holiness movements. Consecration is man’s work, just as the Jew brought the sheep, with his own hands, and placed it on God’s altar, neither daring to take it off nor thinking of a doubt as to God’s acceptance of it, believing unhesitatingly and unwaveringly that everything on God’s altar was thereby sanctified and holy. Therefore consecration is man’s work, assisted by the Holy Ghost. When we make the clear, unequivocal, and eternal consecration, we should never doubt the sanctification, as we know God is infallible. He never fails to do His work, while doubt is grievous and dishonoring to Him. All we have to do is to keep all on the altar, consecrated for this world arid all other worlds, to live or to die. Then believe without a doubt that God accepts and sanctifies, going on undeviatingly in the line of joyful obedience, never again listening to the devil, who would destroy your experience by the injection of doubts. Once you move out on this line, and abide, your life will quickly become a constant sunshine, a sweet heaven in which to go to heaven, victory night and day brightening the escutcheon of your joyful experience, and proclaiming Satan’s signal and perpetual defeat.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites l because you tithe mint, anise, and cumin, and you pass by the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: it behooveth to do these, and not to leave those undone.” When preachers and Church members have no salvation, they are apt to be very particular about little things, and ready to criticize harshly all who do not conform to their little, silly notions punctiliously. Jesus does not object to their tithing everything, even these garden vegetables, giving one-tenth of all their produce to the Lord; but lie commends it. Meanwhile lie denounces them awfully for neglecting the great issues of the law; e.g., judgment — i. e., doing right by everybody, vindicating truth and righteousness, at home and abroad, with all classes indiscriminately, exhibiting to the world a life irreproachable from the standpoint of all rectitude. Mercy also must characterize all our deportment, reaching out to man and beast to friends and enemies, Jews and Gentiles, indiscriminately; full of kindness, pity, sympathy, and love for everything that hath feeling; and always holding up the banner of truth. in harmony with the blessed Word of God, enforcing it, not only by precept, but by example, in small matters as well as great, alway and everywhere on the side of truth and righteousness. While those preachers and Church officers were particular about little non-essentials, they were awfully delinquent in the grand and indispensable, item of true and genuine Holy Ghost religion. Our Savior: even charges these scribes and Pharisees with neglecting faith, which is the basis of all salvation, and without which it is impossible to please God. Now, these were the bon tons of the Jewish Church, both clerical and laical, claiming to be paragons of faith, the boasted children of faithful Abraham. But you see they really had no faith. They had plenty of intellectual and doctrinal faith, but were destitute of spirituality. “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” (Rom 10:10) None but spiritual faith has any availability, or even possesses the essence of faith, in the Divine estimation.
“Ye blind guides, who are straining out the gnat, but swallowing down the camel.” As the gnat was unclean, and condemned by the Levitical law, they were very careful to strain their wine and milk lest a gnat might happen to be in it; thus straining it out, and not straining at it as in E. V., The camel is an unclean animal, and the largest in that country. Now, what is meant by straining out the gnat and swallowing down the camel? Be sure you understand it. This is a logical conclusion from the preceding verse, in which, calling them hypocrites, He denounces them for tithing mint, anise, and cumin, garden herbs, and at the same time neglecting judgment, mercy, and faith, these grand, cardinal, spiritual graces. If I had the wings: of an angel and the trump of an archangel, I would fly from ocean to ocean, and warn the blind guides in pulpits and Amen-corners who are this clay straining out gnats — i. e., very punctilious about all sorts of Church finances and duties harmonical with the popular shibboleth of Church loyalty — and at the same time deplorably delinquent with reference to the momentous relations to the Divine government, and the immeasurable obligations arising out of the same; and the poor widows, orphans, and. slumites in the neighborhood, are ready witnesses to their deplorable deficiency of that sweet grace denominated mercy; and as to the faith inspired by the Holy Ghost, the only medium through which we can possibly receive anything from God, and without which all are doomed and lost, it has actually become a dead-letter in their Creed. Those Church bon tons, to whom Jesus did this awful preaching, rejected it as an insult, and killed Him for what they regarded as insolence, and even blasphemy. O how the clergy and ruling elders are this day straining out gnats and swallowing down camels I If you are all right on the gnat question — i. e., little Church duties — you can be an acceptable member or preacher though you have a devil in you as big as a camel. You see. here the gnat represents the little items of practical obedience to the moral and ritual law, like tithing everything, Small as well as great; while the camel represents your delinquency in the great and momentous graces of the Spirit; i. e., like justice, mercy, and faith. While our Savior says we should do all the former, so as not to swallow gnats, as they are unclean, you see how your deficiency in, the graces of the Spirit is illustrated by swallowing do the great camel, which is unclean as well as the gnat, and a thousand million times larger. Good Lord, help us to see this truth, and preach it fearlessly, like Jesus!
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites because you cleanse the exterior of the cup and the plate, but within they are full of extortion and impurity. Ye blind Pharisee, first purify that which is within the cup, in order that its exterior may also be pure.” The holiness movement is everywhere shouting the battle-cry of a clean heart. You see that is precisely what Jesus is here preaching; i.e., inward purity. O this is the crying need of the Churches — heart holiness. They all want their members to be externally obedient, prompt, faithful, and dutiful in every ramification of Church work, interest, and enterprise. This is all right; the outside of a cup ought to be clean. But Jesus charged the Church leaders in His day with neglecting heart purity. When the people want inward purity, you can not preach entire sanctification too forcefully to suit them. Here the Savior commands them to purify the interior, assuring them that in that case the outside would also be clean. The interior is your immortal spirit, the eternal self, that must live with God in heaven forever or with demons in the regions of woe. Hence, when the immortal spirit is clean, the exterior always falls in line, and everything is right.
“Woe unto you. scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites because you are like whited sepulchers, which indeed appear fair without, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all impurity.” It is still customary in that country of whitewash the sepulchers. You can see them a fire at way off, because they are white as snow. What a vivid illustration of a fair external profession and inward rottenness! If the leading preachers of the Jewish Church were in that awful condition, and so blind that they were utterly unconscious of it, should we not all fall on our knees before God, and ask Him for the light needed to see our heads as God sees them? I am witness that the sepulchers in that country, externally, appear most beautiful and fair, while within they are full of putrefying bodies.
“Thus you also indeed appear righteous unto the people; but within, you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” What awful preaching to the pastors and leading members of the popular Churches while looking them in the face. “Yes; but the Churches at the present day are more spiritual than those to whom Jesus preached.” I hope that is so; yet there is no doubt but multitudes of preachers, Church officers, and leading members, this day, stand precisely where those did. The only remedy for this awful state of things is experimental holiness; i.e., entire sanctification. The very fact that preachers and members kick against the plain truth when preached in its purity, is demonstrative proof that they. are not right.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you build the tombs of the prophets, and ornament the sepulchers of the righteous; and you say, If we were in the days of our fathers, we were not their comrades in the blood of the prophets. So you witness to yourselves, that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets.” Here Jesus turns on them the homogeneity argument; i.e., the very fact that they build the tombs, shows them up as carrying forward the work which their predecessors began, though they aim it to signify the very opposite. Multitudes of preachers and members who now honor John Wesley, close the doors against the men who preach precisely what Wesley did. The same is true of all the great Protestant Churches. John Bunyan among the Baptists, and John Knox among the Presbyterians, would this day meet a very cold reception.
“You fill up the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, generations of vipers, how can you escape from the damnation of hell?” If the loving Jesus could look people in the face and thus preach, we need not be afraid of using language too strong, if we are sure we are telling the truth. Of course, we can not read their hearts as He did; but the Holy Ghost can, and He will apply the truth Where it belongs.
“Therefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, wise men, and scribes; some of them you will slay and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city.” This awful prophecy was literally verified. Soon afterward those same people murdered Stephen and many others in the bloody persecution which followed, doing their utmost to exterminate the Nazarenes in blood. “In order that all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, the son of the blessed, may come upon you.” The very fact that those people, who, in less than forty-eight hours after that awful sermon, actually killed Him, and subsequently put Stephen and many others to death, showed them up in the same line with their bloody predecessors, and consequently particeps criminis.
“But Jehoiada waxed old, and was full of days when he died; a hundred and thirty years old was he when he died. And they buried him in the city of David among the kings, because he had done good in Israel, both toward God and toward his house. Now, after the death of Jehoiada came the princes of Judah, and made obeisance to the king. Then the king hearkened unto them. And they left the house of the Lord God of their fathers, and served groves and idols: and wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem for this their trespass. Yet he sent prophets to them, to bring them again unto the Lord; and they testified against them but they would not give ear. And the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada the priest, who stood before the people, and said unto them, Thus saith God, Why transgress ye the commandments of the Lord, that ye can not prosper? Because ye have forsaken the Lord, He hath also forsaken you. And they conspired against him, and stoned him with stones at the commandment of the king in the court of the house of the Lord. Thus Joash the king remembered not the kindness which Jehoiada his father had done to him, but slew his son. And when he died, he said, The Lord look upon it,. and require it.” (2Ch 24:15-21)
King Joash was only seven years old when he began to reign, his life having been preserved from the cruel Athaliah, who had murdered all of his brothers; and through the kindness of Jehoiada the priest, he reigned and did well during the lifetime of Jehoiada, his foster-father. But, as you see, after the death of Jehoiada, he was led into idolatry by the princes of Judah, and when God put the spirit of prophecy on Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, so that he boldly told them the truth, the king encouraged an evil conspiracy against him, and they stoned him to death, as Jesus here says, “between the temple and the altar;” i. e., the brazen altar for burnt offerings, which stood outside of the temple. While this prophet of God was dying, he said, “The Lord look upon it, and require it;” i.e., he turned over the case to the Lord. “Barachias,” in E. V., a proper name, is evidently a mistake, as Zacharias was not the son of a man by that name, but the son of Jehoiada the priest. The plain solution of the matter is, Barachias is a Hebrew word, and simply means “the blessed.” Therefore I translate it, “Zacharias, the son of the blessed,” — an epithet of Jehoiada. That bloody scene took place right there on the spot where they were standing when Jesus referred to it.
“Truly I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation;” i.e., the awful Divine retribution for the martyrdoms of God’s prophets and saints, from Abel down, was coming on that generation, because God had sent them all to prepare the people for His Son; and now that He has come, they are rejecting Him, and going to kill Him, thus climaxing all the murders of their predecessors.
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v27 Mat 23:27 - Mat 23:39.
Matthew
THE KING’S FAREWELL
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Mat 23:27 - Mat 23:39.
If, with the majority of authorities, we exclude Mat 23:14 from the text, there are, in this chapter, seven woes, like seven thunders, launched against the rulers. They are scathing exposures, but, as the very word implies, full of sorrow as well as severity. They are not denunciations, but prophecies warning that the end of such tempers must be mournful. The wailing of an infinite compassion, rather than the accents of anger, sounds in them; and it alone is heard in the outburst of lamenting in which Christ’s heart runs over, as in a passion of tears, at the close. The blending of sternness and pity, each perfect, is the characteristic of this wonderful climax of our Lord’s appeals to His nation. Could such tones of love and righteous anger joined have been sent echoing through the ages in this Gospel, if they had not been heard?
I. The woe of the ‘whited sepulchres.’
The first four woes are directed mainly to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees; the last three to their characters. The two first of these fasten on the same sin, of hypocritical holiness. There is, however, a difference between the representation of hypocrites under the metaphor of the clean outside of the cup and platter, and that of the whited sepulchre. In the former, the hidden sin is ‘extortion and excess’; that is, sensual enjoyment wrongly procured, of which the emblems of cup and plate suggest that good eating and drinking are a chief part. In the latter, it is ‘iniquity’-a more general and darker name for sin. In the former, the Pharisee is ‘blind,’ self-deceived in part or altogether; in the latter, stress is rather laid on his ‘appearance unto men.’ The repetition of the same charge in the two woes teaches us Christ’s estimate of the gravity and frequency of the sin.
The whitened tombs of Mohammedan saints still gleam in the strong sunlight on many a knoll in Palestine. If the Talmudical practice is as old as our Lord’s time, the annual whitewashing was lately over. Its purpose was not to adorn the tombs, but to make them conspicuous, so that they might be avoided for fear of defilement. So He would say, with terrible irony, that the apparent holiness of the rulers was really a sign of corruption, and a warning to keep away from them. What a blow at their self-complacency! And how profoundly true it is that the more punctiliously white the hypocrite’s outside, the more foul is he within, and the wider berth will all discerning people give him! The terrible force of the figure needs no dwelling on. In Christ’s estimate, such a soul was the very dwelling-place of death; and foul odours and worms and corruption filled its sickening recesses. Terrible words to come from His lips into which grace was poured, and bold words to be flashed at listeners who held the life of the Speaker in their hands! There are two sorts of hypocrites, the conscious and the unconscious; and there are ten of the latter for one of the former, and each ten times more dangerous. Established religion breeds them, and they are specially likely to be found among those whose business is to study the documents in which it is embodied. These woes are not like thunder-peals rolling above our heads, while the lightning strikes the earth miles away. A religion which is mostly whitewash is as common among us as ever it was in Jerusalem; and its foul accompaniments of corruption becoming more rotten every year, as the whitewash is laid on thicker, may be smelt among us, and its fatal end is as sure.
II. The woe of the sepulchre builders {Mat 23:29 - Mat 23:36}.
In these verses we have, first, the specification of another form of hypocrisy, consisting in building the prophets’ tombs, and disavowing the fathers’ murder of them. Honouring dead prophets was right; but honouring dead ones and killing living ones was conscious or unconscious hypocrisy. The temper of mind which leads to glorifying the dead witnesses, also leads to supposing that all truth was given by them; and hence that the living teachers, who carry their message farther, are false prophets. A generation which was ready to kill Jesus in honour of Moses, would have killed Moses in honour of Abraham, and would not have had the faintest apprehension of the message of either.
It is a great deal easier to build tombs than to accept teachings, and a good deal of the posthumous honour paid to God’s messengers means, ‘It’s a good thing they are dead, and that we have nothing to do but to put up a monument.’ Bi-centenaries and ter-centenaries and jubilees do not always imply either the understanding or the acceptance of the principles supposed to be glorified thereby. But the magnifiers of the past are often quite unconscious of the hollowness of their admiration, and honest in their horror of their fathers’ acts; and we all need the probe of such words as Christ’s to pierce the skin of our lazy reverence for our fathers’ prophets, and let out the foul matter below-namely, our own blindness to God’s messengers of to-day.
The statement of the hypocrisy is followed, in Mat 23:31, with its unmasking and condemnation. The words glow with righteous wrath at white heat, and end in a burst of indignation, most unfamiliar to His lips. Three sentences, like triple lightning flash from His pained heart. With almost scornful subtlety He lays hold of the words which He puts into the Pharisees’ mouths, to convict them of kindred with those whose deeds they would disown. ‘Our fathers, say you? Then you do belong to the same family, after all. You confess that you have their blood in your veins; and, in the very act of denying sympathy with their conduct, you own kindred. And, for all your protestations, spiritual kindred goes with bodily descent.’ Christ here recognises that children probably ‘take after their parents,’ or, in modern scientific terms, that ‘heredity’ is the law, and that it works more surely in the transmission of evil than of good.
Then come the awful words bidding that generation ‘fill up the measure of the fathers.’ They are like the other command to Judas to do his work quickly. They are more than permission, they are command; but such a command as, by its laying bare of the true character of the deed in view, is love’s last effort at prevention. Mark the growing emotion of the language. Mark the conception of a nation’s sins as one through successive generations, and the other, of these as having a definite measure, which being filled, judgment can no longer tarry. Generation after generation pours its contributions into the vessel, and when the last black drop which it can hold has been added, then comes the catastrophe. Mark the fatal necessity by which inherited sin becomes darker sin. The fathers’ crimes are less than the sons’. This inheritance increases by each transmission. The cloak strikes one more at each revolution of the hands.
It is hard to recognise Christ in the terrible words that follow. We have heard part of them from John the Baptist; and it sounded natural for him to call men serpents and the children of serpents, but it is somewhat of a shock to hear Jesus hurling such names at even the most sinful. But let us remember that He who sees hearts, has a right to tell harsh truths, and that it is truest kindness to strip off masks which hide from men their own real character, and that the revelation of the divine love in Jesus would be a partial and impotent revelation if it did not show us the righteous love which is wrath. There is nothing so terrible as the anger of gentle compassion, and the fiercest and most destructive wrath is ‘the wrath of the Lamb.’ Seldom, indeed, did He show that side of His character; but it is there, and the other side would not be so blessed as it is, unless that were there too.
The woe ends with the double prophecy that that generation would repeat and surpass the fathers’ guilt, and that on it would fall the accumulated penalties of past bloodshed. Note that solemn ‘therefore,’ which looks back to the whole preceding context, and forward to the whole subsequent. Because the rulers professed abhorrence of their fathers’ deeds, and yet inherited their spirit, they too would have their prophets, and would slay them. God goes on sending His messengers, because we reject them; and the more deaf men are, the more does He peal His words into their ears. That is mercy and compassion, that all men may be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth; but it is judgment too, and its foreseen effect must be regarded as part of the divine purpose in it. Christ’s desire is one thing, His purpose another. His desire is that all should find in His gospel ‘the savour of life’; but His purpose is that, if it be not that to any, it shall be to them the savour of death. Mark, too, the authority with which He, in the face of these scowling Pharisees, assumes the distinct divine prerogative of sending forth inspired men, who, as His messengers, shall stand on a level with the prophets of old. Mark His silence as to His own fate, which is only obscurely hinted at in the command to fill up the measure of the fathers. Observe the detailed enumeration of His messengers’ gifts,-’prophets’ under direct inspiration, like those of old, which may especially refer to the apostles; ‘wise men,’ like a Stephen or an Apollos; ‘scribes,’ such as Mark and Luke and many a faithful servant since, whose pen has loved to write the name above every name. Note the detailed prophecy of their treatment, which begins with slaying and goes down to the less severe scourging, and thence to the milder persecution. Do the three punishments belong to the three classes of messengers, the severest falling to the lot of the most highly endowed, and even the quiet penman being hunted from city to city?
We need not wriggle and twist to try to avoid admitting that the calling of the martyred Zacharias, ‘the son of Barachias,’ is an error of some one who confused the author of the prophetic book with the person whose murder is narrated in 2Ch 24:1 - 2Ch 24:27 We do not know who made the mistake, or how it appears in our text, but it is not honest to try to slur it over. The punishment of long ages of sin, carried on from father to son, does in the course of that history of the world, which is a part of the judgment of the world, fall upon one generation. It takes long for the mass of heaped-up sin to become top-heavy; but when it is so, it buries one generation of those who have worked at piling it up, beneath its down-rushing avalanche.
‘The mills of God grind slowly,
But they grind exceeding small.’
The catastrophes of national histories are prepared for by continuous centuries. The generation that laid the first powder-hornful of the train is dead and buried, long before the explosion which sends constituted order and institutions sky-high. The misery is that often the generation which has to pay the penalty has begun to awake to the sin, and would be glad to mend it, if it could. England in the seventeenth century, France in the eighteenth, America in the nineteenth, had to reap harvests from sins sown long before. Such is the law of the judgment wrought out by God’s providence in history. But there is another judgment, begun here and perfected hereafter, in which fathers and sons shall each bear their own burden, and reap accurately the fruit of what they have sown. ‘The soul that sinneth, it shall die.’
III. The parting wail of rejected love.
The lightning flashes of the sevenfold woes end in a rain of pity and tears. His full heart overflows in that sad cry of lamentation over the long-continued foiling of the efforts of a love that would fain have fondled and defended. What intensity of feeling is in the redoubled naming of the city! How yearningly and wistfully He calls, as if He might still win the faithless one, and how lingeringly unwilling He is to give up hope! How mournfully, rather than accusingly, He reiterates the acts which had run through the whole history, using a form of the verbs which suggests continuance. Mark, too, the matter-of-course way in which Christ assumes that He sent all the prophets whom, through the generations, Jerusalem had stoned.
So the lament passes into the solemn final leave-taking, with which our Lord closes His ministry among the Jews, and departs from the temple. As, in the parable of the marriage-feast, the city was emphatically called ‘their city,’ so here the Temple, in whose courts He was standing, and which in a moment He was to quit for ever, is called ‘your house,’ because His departure is the withdrawing of the true Shechinah. It had been the house of God: now He casts it off, and leaves it to them to do as they will with it. The saddest punishment of long-continued rejection of His pleading love, is that it ceases at last to plead. The bitterest woe for those who refuse to render to Him the fruits of the vineyard, is to get the vineyard for their own, undisturbed. Christ’s utmost retribution for obstinate blindness is to withdraw from our sight. All the woes that were yet to fall, in long, dreary succession on that nation, so long continued in its sin, so long continued in its misery, were hidden in that solemn departure of Christ from the henceforward empty temple. Let us fear lest our unfaithfulness meet the like penalty! But even the departure does not end His yearnings, nor close the long story of the conflict between God’s beseeching love and their unbelief. The time shall come when the nation shall once more lift up, with deeper, truer adoration, the hosannas of the triumphal entry. And then a believing Israel shall see their King, and serve Him. Christ never takes final leave of any man in this world. It is ever possible that dumb lips may be opened to welcome Him, though long rejected; and His withdrawals are His efforts to bring about that opening. When it takes place, how gladly does He return to the heart which is now His temple, and unveil His beauty to the long-darkened eyes!
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv14, 15, 16, 28 The best MSS. omit Mat 23:14.
Woe
The best MSS. omit Mat 23:14.
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 25, 27, 29 The Woes upon the Hypocrisy of the Pharisees.
The Woes upon the Hypocrisy of the Pharisees.
The first woe:
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v. 13. But 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.
This passage of denunciations does not represent a mere opinion of Jesus, but it is the judgment of the Holy One of God upon people that were making all religion a mockery and a pretense. The "Woe!" signifies the eternal fire of hell; that will be their punishment, as Luther says. In their hypocrisy, their acting, they have reached a point where they are deceiving themselves as well as others. They pretend, with a great show of zeal, to be opening the doors of heaven to their fellow-men, by teaching them the way of self-righteousness, salvation by works. But in doing so, they actually shut the doors or gates of heaven in their faces. They thought that they were sure of heaven and had but to enter whenever they chose, but they only deceived themselves, and are now deceiving others and keeping them from entering.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv13, 16, 18, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29, 32 Connecting Statement:
Connecting Statement:
Jesus begins to rebuke the religious leaders because of their hypocrisy.
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General Information:
Jesus speaks of the kingdom of heaven as if it were a house, the door into which the Pharisees have shut from the outside so that neither they nor anyone else can enter the house. If you do not keep the metaphor of the house, be sure to change all instances of "shut" and "enter." Also, since the words "kingdom of heaven," which refer to God, who lives in heaven, occur only in Matthew, try to use your language's word for "heaven" in your translation. (See: Metaphor and Metonymy)
But woe to you
"How terrible it will be for you!" See how you translated this in Matthew 11:21.
You shut the kingdom of heaven against people ... you do not enter it ... neither do you allow those about to enter to do so
Jesus is speaking of the kingdom of heaven, which is God ruling over his people, as if it were a house, the door into which the Pharisees have shut from the outside so that neither they nor anyone else can enter the house. The phrase "kingdom of heaven" is found only in the book of Matthew. If possible, use your language's word for "heaven" in your translation. AT: "You make it impossible for people to enter the kingdom of heaven ... you do not enter it ... neither do you allow those about to enter to do so" or "You prevent people from accepting God, who lives in heaven, as king ... you do not accept him as king ... and you make it impossible for those about to accept him as king to do so" (See: Metaphor and Metonymy)
you go over sea and land
This is an idiom that means they go to distant places. AT: "you travel great distances" (See: Idiom)
to make one convert
"to make one person accept your religion"
son of hell
Here "son of" is an idiom that means "one belonging to." AT: "person who belongs in hell" or "person who should go to hell" (See: Idiom)
you devour widows' houses
See the footnote. The word "devour" is a metaphor that means to take by force. Possible meanings are 1) "houses" refers to their houses. AT: "you steal widows' homes from them" or 2) "houses" is synecdoche for all their possessions. AT: "you steal all the possessions of widows" (See: Metaphor and Synecdoche)
translationWords
woe
scribe
Pharisee
hypocrite
kingdom of God
devour
receive
son
hell
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv13, 15, 16, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 32 23:13-36 Matthew collected seven statements of what sorrow awaits…
23:13-36 Matthew collected seven statements of what sorrow awaits you (literally woe to you), drawing upon similar Old Testament listings (Isa 5:8-23; Hab 2:6-20), and he arranged them to climax in the murder of the prophets.
23:13 What sorrow awaits you: A stark warning of judgment from God. • Hypocrites! In English, hypocrisy describes a contradiction between reality and appearance. But in biblical usage, hypocrisy is misperceiving God’s will, leading people astray, and thus incurring God’s judgment. Coupled with this is often a desire for prestige and power (23:5-12), abuse of teaching authority, false teachings on doctrine or practice (23:13-22), and preoccupation with ethical minutiae (23:23-28). An accurate English term for this combination of factors is heresy. The Pharisees and teachers of religious law displayed all of these characteristics. As the Christian church began to grow, these characteristics continued to appear (e.g., 1 Tim 4:1-3; 2 Pet 2:1-22), so God’s children always need to guard against them (Jas 4:7-10; 1 Pet 2:1-3). • shut the door of the Kingdom: By their false teaching and opposition to Jesus (see Matt 9:32-34; 12:22-37; 15:12-14; 21:15; John 9:13-34), the teachers of religious law and Pharisees prevented others from hearing and believing the truth about the Messiah.
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