MATTHEW 23:13-39
I PROMISE NOT TO USE C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia for all my introductions from here on out, but I am compelled to start this chapter with another Narnian dialogue. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Mr. and Mrs. Beaver tell the four children that Aslan (the Christ-figure) is a lion, Susan replies, “Ooh!... Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
"That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there is anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mrs. Beaver...’’Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
In those few lines Lewis hits on a theme that is sadly far from the Ecclesia’s thought today. We may believe in the goodness of Jesus—“He’s good” all the time! We may believe in the Lordship of Jesus—“He’s the king, I tell you.” But I’m not sure we have it in our heads (and hearts) that a good king doesn't always mean a safe king. Think—when is the last time you came before Jesus in private prayer or public praise with your knees knocking?
Well, if there is ever a text to get our knees knocking before the fearful but gentle presence of King Jesus it is 23:13-39. I say fearful for obvious reasons. A. T. Robertson called this sustained denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees "the rolling thunder of Christ’s wrath.” Alfred Plummer spoke of these seven woes as being “like thunder in their unanswerable severity, and like lightning in their unsparing exposure “They illuminate while they strike.” Here Jesus rolls like thunder and strikes like lightning. And yet the one and only image that he gives us of himself in this terrible text is not that of a storm or a lion, but rather that of a mother hen, an earthly feminine image for the heavenly Son.
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings... (v. 37)
Jesus is the Lion King. Jesus is the Mother Hen. Those two images— thundering judgment and gentle, patient (motherly) love—blend perfectly together in Jesus Christ. If we miss that mixture, we will misread and misapply this heart-pounding, knee-knocking, anything-but-safe passage.
A Right Reading
In Matthew 23 it is obvious that Jesus is judging the scribes and the Pharisees. At the time of Jesus, the Jewish religious authorities could be divided into four major groups: the priesthood (comprised of the priests, chief priests, and high priest), the religious parties (the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians), the scholars (the scribes), and the Councils (the local synagogue councils and the supreme council, called the Sanhedrin). In our study of Matthew we have already met many of these men; by the time we are done with Matthew, we will have met them all. Here Jesus singles out the two most influential groups upon the populace—the scribes (the expert Bible teachers) and the Pharisees (the super-spiritual Bible keepers). They are the “you” in verse 13 and throughout. Every “you” and “your” is about or includes them.
Because the “you” of our text is not directly you and me, this text has been abused by many self-professed “Christians” throughout Christian history. The “you” here has been over-applied and ill-applied against the Jews. For example, in Munich on April 12, 1922 Adolf Hitler said this in his speech:
My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them... In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the courage to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and of adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison!
God forbid that we read the Gospels with the poison of Nazi racism. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus was not against the Jews. He came to fulfill their law, not abolish it. He came for them and for their salvation. And like Paul, who was also a Jew through and through, Jesus’ “heart’s desire... for them” was that they would “be saved” (Romans 10:1). That’s what comes out clearly in verse 37 of our text. However, what also comes out is his judgment, judgment that is not based on their race but on their unbelief and violent rejection of God’s servants and God’s Son.
Needless to say, we won’t read Matthew’s Gospel like Hitler did. Rather, we will read these woes in an almost opposite way. We will read these woes self-critically. That is, we will examine ourselves in the light of the scribes and Pharisees’ hypocrisy. We will read this word to them as a “living and active” word to us (Hebrews 4:12). Think of it this way. Jesus is facing the scribes and Pharisees. We are standing behind Jesus. They are in front of Jesus. Behind them is a mirror. So we see the face of Jesus looking at them and beyond them, through the mirror, to us, his Ecclesia. Less visual but more simply, we will use Jesus’ woes to them as warnings to us.
There are four warnings I want us to see. If I’m allowed to have a subtitle for this chapter, it’s “Four Warnings to Every Believer from Jesus’ Seven Woes to the Jewish Religious Leaders.”
The First Warning
The first warning is against zeal without knowledge. In Romans 10:2, 3 Paul writes o his fellow Jews—those who have rejected Jesus, “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.” Paul goes on to say that righteousness comes through faith in Jesus as Christ and Lord.
In 23:13-15 Jesus starts with a similar assessment, adding a more severe judgment. In the Old Testament the phrase “woe to you” is almost always used of divine judgment. So here Jesus speaks not merely like the prophets of old—railing against Israel’s hypocrisy—but like God himself, pronouncing a judgment upon apostasy. Thus says the Son of God:
But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in... Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves, (vv. 13, 15)
With each woe Jesus paints a picture. (The language throughout is so vivid!) Envision a door. It is the door to the kingdom of heaven. The scribes and Pharisees stand at this door. They themselves won’t go through. What is worse, when people are about to walk through it, these self-appointed doormen close the door in people’s faces. They do these two evil actions because they think they are doing something good. They are protecting wandering souls from this would-be Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.
In Jesus’ second woe he further exposes their zeal without knowledge. Instead of entering into the kingdom and opening wider the door to the Kingdom for all the people to enter in, they “travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte,” and they make this one convert “twice as much a child of hell” as they are (v. 15). They shut the people out of the Kingdom. They open the trapdoor to the grave. And their followers fall further into their false teaching. Their followers double the zeal and thus double the lack of true knowledge. You see, the scribes and Pharisees are “not simply wrong but contagiously wrong.” They are like the English doctors during the early phase of the bubonic plague who told the sick to leave London for the fresh air of the countryside and who, in doing so, spread the disease throughout the nation.
In Hosea 4:6a the Lord says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Don’t underestimate the importance of right knowledge in the Ecclesia, and don’t underestimate the danger of uniformed enthusiasm. Matthew has made his Gospel clear on who Jesus is and what he has done. If we run to the mission field without first bowing before Jesus as Lord and without knowing what his commandments are that we are to teach others, we are in danger of falling into the same pit as the scribes and Pharisees did.
How zealous are Muslim jihadists? How zealous are Jehovah Witness missionaries? Religious zeal is not an indication of truth. Woe to us if we have zeal without knowledge. Woe also to us if we have knowledge without zeal. We need both. But one comes before the other—knowledge first; zeal second. We are to be light and heat—light (full of the right knowledge of God) and heat (full of high devotion for God).
The Second Warning
The second warning is against majoring in minors. This warning is found in verses 16-24. Jesus says:
Woe to you, blind guides, who say, “If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.” You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say, “If anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.” You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it. And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!
Four times in these nine verses Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees “blind.” Twice he calls them “blind guides.” While Jesus is making a very serious point here, this image of blind guides is the first of two (maybe three) humorous images in his three-image mosaic on majoring in minors. Think of it this way: if you went on a sightseeing tour of the Grand Canyon and you discovered your guide was blind, you might think that is strange and dangerous. Indeed! That’s what Jesus wants us to see. These blind guides are a strange sight. These blind guides are a dangerous sight. Don't follow them.
What these blind guides don’t see is our second image, that of a scale, the scale God uses to weigh our actions and hearts. The scale is called his Law. What God values the most (it’s heavy like gold) is “justice and mercy and faithfulness” (v. 23). What he still values, but less so (something light like the leaves from a small garden plant) is tithing and the swearing of oaths. Both the light and the heavy are found in his Law (i.e., on his scale) but one is “greater” (vv. 17, 19) than the other in his eyes.
As in the last chapter, their big mouths come into play. The word “swears” is used seven times here (Jesus is talking about their talking), and the word “say” is used twice. While they are so busy talking about which oaths are valid and invalid before God, they not only dis-value plain talk and true talk (let your yes be yes and your no be no, cp. 5:33-37), but they neglect doing what God most wants done—loving God and neighbor.
The third image of this not-so-funny mosaic is the funniest: “You blind guides,” Jesus says in verse 24 as he summarizes verses 16-23, “straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” Both a gnat (a small insect) and a camel (a large animal) were considered unclean (cp. Leviticus 11:4, 23, 24, 41). So, as William Barclay explains, “In order to avoid the risk of drinking anything unclean, wine was strained through muslin gauze so that any possible impurity might be strained out of it.” The picture then that Jesus gives is this: imagine these blind, unbalanced religious leaders one moment straining their wine through a thin cloth to avoid swallowing a microscopic bug and the next moment grabbing a camel and swallowing that big beast whole. It’s a picture of people who have “completely lost [their] sense of proportion.” It is a funny / not-so-funny picture of majoring in minors.
As the Ecclesia, we are to major in the majors, without neglecting the minors. Tithing matters. Truth-talking matters. What you do with your money and your mouth matters. But what matters even more is “the weightier matters of the law”—what Jesus lived out and calls his followers to embody—“justice and mercy and faithfulness” (v. 23; cp. Micah 6:8; Zechariah 7:9). The love of neighbor: be fair and merciful toward all. The love of God: be faithful to him and his commandments. The world will not know we are Believers by the color of the church carpeting, the height of the steeple, or the glorious sound of the choir, but by our love. They will know we are Believers—Christ- followers—by our love.
The Third Warning
The third warning is against outward appearances. In verses 25-28 Jesus again thunders and strikes.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.
You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs [i.e., clean-looking], which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness, (vv. 25-28)
The word “hypocrites” is used only fourteen times in the New Testament, twelve of those times in Matthew, six of those times in our text, two of those times in verses 25-28 (notice also “hypocrisy” in v. 28). These verses show the height of hypocrisy. A hypocrite is someone who “puts on a false face” (a mask) and pretends to be what he or she is not. In Matthew’s teaching this hypocrisy especially plays its way out in someone who wants the applause of the crowd more than the approval of God.
Here, as it was in the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord shows the awful dichotomy between outward appearance and inward reality—outward cleanness but inward “uncleanness” (v. 27), outward allegiance to the Law but inward “lawlessness” (v. 28, the last word in this section). Again Jesus is into images. Two images of their outward “righteousness” (cp. v. 28a) but inward rot are given.
The first image is their spotless outer dinnerware. On the outside they eat only from clean cups and plates, or better visually “bowls and mugs.” These religious fanatics are meticulous in keeping the ritual purity laws. But they neglect ever cleaning up what’s inside these vessels. For example, they spend half the afternoon cleaning the outside of their soup bowl, and then they sit down for dinner and spoon out a fresh spoonful of soup that has been sitting atop month-old minestrone. Again it is a humorous and grotesque picture. We might laugh for the moment, but soon we should feel sick to our stomach.
What is also sick to the stomach is the second image Jesus gives. They are “like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness” (v. 27). In the springtime before the Passover, it was the custom to whitewash the roadside tombstones so no pilgrim to Jerusalem would mistakenly touch a tomb and thus be rendered unclean for the seven days of the feast (Numbers 19:16). The scribes and Pharisees looked like those tombs. Outwardly they looked so beautifully clean. Inwardly they were unclean—dead, decaying, putrid.
The point of both images is obvious. As Jesus summarizes in verse 28, they “outwardly appear righteous to others, but within [they] are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” They put on a fabulous facade!
The warning to us should be as obvious as the images: watch out for keeping up outward appearances and yet neglecting inward holiness. It’s not that our outward appearance doesn’t matter; it’s that it matters less than inward holiness. I’ll put it this way: may your Sunday best be your Monday best! Believers are to be Believers 24/7. Believers are to be Believers when only God knows what they’re up to. We are to be outwardly and inwardly righteous, holy, pure.
The Fourth Warning
The fourth warning is against the inexcusable excuse of unbelief. In verses 29-36 we come to the final woe for them, which is also a warning for us. I have included verses 37-39 because it gives a fuller picture of Jesus’ final judgment. Before we read verses 29-39, I want you to notice that this is the seventh woe. The numerology might be intentional, as the number seven does symbolize completeness or fullness, and it often appears in judgment texts—think of Genesis 4:24, Leviticus 26:18, Proverbs 6:31, and the book of Revelation (with its seven seals, seven plagues, seven golden bowls). Certainly the picture here is the pot of God’s patience boiling over. It’s more than complete or full.
The other detail to notice here before you read the text is the judicial language. I will highlight it at the start. Starting in verse 29, Jesus announces:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying [here is part of their defense], “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.” Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered [a crime!] the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.
Then we read in verses 37—39:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your [not his or his Father’s house anymore, 21:13] house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
Due to this judicial language, I think the best and easiest way to remember this final woe and warning is with the image of a courtroom. The scene is this: Jesus is the divine judge. I say divine because Jesus speaks here only as God would speak in the Old Testament. The four “I” statements show his hand. “Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes...” (v. 34). “Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation” (v. 36). “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings...” (v. 37). “For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’” (v. 39).
The scribes and Pharisees are the defendants. They are on trial for the crimes of unbelief and murder. They did not come to Jesus for life (v. 37; cp. John 5:40); instead they put him to death, along with the prophets before him and the servants sent after them. Their actions are inexcusable. Thus Judge Jesus readers his sentence (guilty as charged) and punishment (a razed city [Jerusalem] and ever-rising flames [the grave]). That’s the sad, scary scene.
I don’t have space to go into how they could be guilty for killing everyone from Abel (the first “martyr” in the Bible) to Zechariah (the last martyr in the Hebrew canon). I also won’t tackle the nature of the punishment—(a) that Jesus predicts the temporal punishment of the destruction of the temple in AD 70 (vv. 36, 38), as well as (b) the eternal punishment of the grave (v. 33, cp. v. 13). I will simply focus on the serious nature of the crime of unbelief, for that is the most pertinent warning to us.
Three days before I preached on this text, my agnostic neighbor shouted from his front porch, “Come over. I have a Bible question.” This man is an investment banker. Two of his wealthiest clients are Baptists. From time to time those good Baptists send him an e-mail with a Bible verse attached. One of those verses was James 2:14: “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” My neighbor’s question from James’s rhetorical question was, “So can I just be a good person and not believe in Jesus (I don't like the believing in Jesus stuff) and still get into Heaven? Is that what James is saying?” I said, “No.” I then explained to him that James is not against faith in Jesus; he is against faith without works. I also explained that I don’t think faith in Jesus matters because I think it matters, but rather because Jesus says it matters.
I am a Believer. If Jesus Christ said that he is “the way, and the truth, and the life” and that “no one comes to the Father [God] except through” belief in him (John 14:6), I hold that statement to be true. I also hold it to be self-evident. I know by faith that Jesus alone satisfies the inquiring mind and heart because he alone—as the dominant theme of all revelation, the key to all of world history, the ultimate interpreter of God to men, and the final judge of the living and the dead—is the only remedy to the tragedy of sin and death. How is it that even in the harshest twenty-seven verses in the Bible (23:13-39) I find Jesus so compelling?
“The genius of the Gospels,” Merrill Tenney writes in his book by that title, lies not in their rhetorical or philosophical qualities, but lies rather in their presentation of Christ who is unparalleled in all other literature. His supernatural origin, His sinless life. His penetrative teaching, His triumphant death and resurrection might seem to belong to fiction; and if the Gospels were fiction, they would rank among the world’s greatest stories. They are, however, sober history, and are consequently all the greater. The Gospels did not make Jesus; He made them. Because of Him they are distinctive, and through their individual emphases and peculiarities He bids the successive generations of men to come to Him.
The world around us hates the exclusive claims of Christ and the Ecclesia. Some say, “A good God should let everyone into Heaven whether or not they believe in Jesus." Others say, “A just God will at least let good religious people into Heaven.” But tell me, who exactly is Jesus judging here? He is judging men who regularly attended worship services, were overseas missionaries, made religious vows, tithed their income, meticulously tried every hour of every day to observe God’s Law, and even built magnificent monuments to the heroes of the faith. Surely such people get into the kingdom of heaven. Jesus says, no. they don’t. Why? The answer is their crime of hypocrisy. The answer is their murder of the Messiah. The answer is their rejection of Jesus as Christ—“you were not willing” (v. 37). They would not come to Christ. They would not believe in Jesus. They would not bow to this Lord as the Lord.
Matthew didn't include chapter 23 in his Gospel so we would be appalled at how un-Christian Christ acts. He wrote it so the Ecclesia would listen afresh to her Lord’s woes as warnings, and so we might see Jesus for who he really is.
Is he safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you. He’s the good King who lovingly accepts and protects all who come under his wings for refuge.
(R. Kent Hughes. and Douglas Sean O'Donnell., 2013; edited Carl Hinton., 2020)