Matthew 23

M. 1, 2 THEN spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, saying, The scribes and the 3 Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe 4 and do: but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not. For they bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they 5 themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of 6 their garments. Beware of the scribes, which love to walk in long robes, and love the 7 uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the 8 markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi. But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is 9 your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon 10 the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: 11 for one is your Master, even Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your

12 servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.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 14 entering to go in. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: therefore ye shall receive the 15 greater damnation. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he is made, ye make him twofold more 16 the child of hell than yourselves. Woe unto you, ye blind guides! which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of 17 the temple, he is a debtor. Ye fools, and blind! for whether is greater, the gold, or the 18 temple that sanctifieth the gold? And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; 19 but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty. Ye fools, and blind! 20 for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift? Whoso therefore 21 shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon. And whoso shall 22 swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him that dwelleth therein. And he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon. 23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and 24 faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind 25 guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within 26 they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is 27 within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all unclean- 28 ness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of 29 hypocrisy and iniquity. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because 30 ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them 31 in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore, ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are 32 the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your 33 fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? 34 Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes; and some of them ye shall kill and crucify, and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and 35 persecute them from city to city: that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel, unto the blood of Zacharias, son of 36 Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily, I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation. 37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen 38 gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left 39 unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

CHRIST’S voice, as heard on earth, was not always one of gentleness and love. Never were severer epithets employed, never more terrible denunciations uttered, than those heaped upon the heads of the Pharisees. Yet no mingling here of sinful human passion, no absence even of love. Lightning lurks amid the warm soft drops of the summer shower; a consuming fire may come out of the very heart of love. Christ is the world’s great Saviour; he is also the world’s great Judge. It was as our Saviour he came down to this earth, and gentle and still indeed was the voice in which that office was discharged. But lest we should misinterpret, and imagine that his spirit was too soft ever to kindle into wrath, once and again, as here, he assumes the office of the Judge and speaks with a startling sternness. Compare for contrast Christ’s farewell to his friends, and his farewell to his enemies: the one composed of words of comfort, closing in that sublime intercessory prayer which he left behind him as a type of his advocacy for us in the heavenly places; the other composed throughout of terrible denunciations, types and preludes of those awful judgments which he shall pronounce and execute upon the finally impenitent. And what does all this teach us but that the religion of Jesus Christ has a twofold aspect? If here it speaks peace, there it speaks terror; if to some it has nothing but words of tenderness and encouragement, to others it has nothing but words of warning and of woe.

And yet it is not in tones of wrath that the last accents of this farewell of our Lord to his enemies fall upon our ear. The fire of righteous indignation that burns within him cannot but go forth. But under that fire the inner heart of Jesus at last dissolves into tenderness. Pity, infinite pity, pours her quenching tears upon it, and with another look and in altered tone, in which the compassion of the God-head reveals itself, he exclaims, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, and ye would not!” The willingness is all with him, the unwillingness with us. May the very thought of this take our unwillingness away; that at the last our house be not left desolate, that it be no other than the home that he hath prepared for all who love him. H.

HERE we read our Lord’s final outpouring of just indignation on the false and profligate teachers who had long led on the people, like the blind leading the blind, to the ruin they were soon to consummate. The woes denounced on the “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” by the voice of God’s own Son in his holy temple, in the character of a judge, and as a foretaste of the last judgment, stand in a striking contrast to the blessings uttered on humble disciples from the mount, just as the crimes that called them down were the very opposite to the virtues there inculcated: saying and not doing—binding grievous burdens for other men’s shoulders, while they would not so much as touch them—loving all marks of outward honor, even in the house where God only should be honored, and displaying all forms of ostentatious devotion, while their lives were full of rapacity and vice; converting proselytes to the law, only to make them twofold more the children of hell than themselves—frittering away the most solemn obligations, and at the same time extenuating the greatest crimes, by their false casuistry—cleansing the outside of cup and dish, which reeked within with abomination that they swallowed as their daily food—their hypocrisy could find no fitter image than the whited sepulchres, which they were so fond of garnishing without, while the mass of corruption was still festering within. At last the utterance of wrath dies away in tones of the greatest pity, as he repeats his lamentation over Jerusalem, and her doom of desolation till his coming. S.

5. Phylacteries.** These had their origin from the law, Deut. 6: 8. “Thou shalt bind them (the divine precepts) for a sign upon thine hands, and as frontlets between thine eyes.” This precept, which enjoined a constant remembrance of God’s law, the Jews in later times interpreted literally. Hence they fastened to their foreheads, and on their left arms, portions of the law written upon parchment, scrolls, and called them in their own language prayers. But in Greek they were named phylacteries or watch-posts, from their use, which was to put them in mind to keep the divine precepts. M.—The Jews bound them on the forehead and on the left arm, or the left side near the heart, to remind them that the law should be in the heart and in the head. The Pharisees made these broad for ostentation. J. P. T.—The borders. The fringes which the Jews were commanded to wear (Num. 15: 38) as a mark and memorial of their being God’s peculiar people, to be distinguished from other nations. These too the Pharisees enlarged for purposes of vanity and ostentation. Hammond.

5-7. The Pharisees were more than a sect. They were emphatically the popular party, which had the ear of the Jewish public. It was a matter both of principle and policy to multiply the external signs by which they were distinguished. Tassels on their dress; scrolls and small leather boxes fastened on their forehead, head, and neck, inscribed with texts of the law; long prayers offered as they stood in public places; rigorous abstinence; constant immersions: these were the sacramental badges by which they hedged themselves around. A. P. S.—The salutations in the market-place, the reverential kiss offered by the scholars to their master, or by rabbis to each other, the greeting of Abba, father, the long robes with the broad, blue fringe, all these go to make up the picture of a scribe’s life. Drawing to themselves, as they did, nearly all the energy and thought of Judaism, the close hereditary caste of the priesthood was powerless to compete with them. Unless the priest became a scribe also, he remained in obscurity. The order, as such, became contemptible and base. For the scribes there were the best places at feasts, the chief seats in synagogues. S. (Section 180.)

8. One is your Master.** Or Teacher. Probably not Christ, as supplied here, but the Holy Spirit. If this be so, we have God, in his Tri-unity, here declared to us as the only Father, Master, and Teacher of Christians; the only one, in all these relations, on whom they can rest or depend. They are all brethren: all substantially equal; none by office or precedence nearer to God than another; none standing between his brother and God. A.—9. The prohibition, Call no man your father, forbids the exercise of spiritual authority over the conscience, and equally forbids the disciples of Christ from submitting to such authority. It condemns both the ambition which seeks authority over the conscience, and the spiritual indolence which yields to such claims in order to avoid the necessity of personal search for the truth. This prohibition is interpreted by such passages as Rom. 14 : 4, 10, 12; 1 Pet. 5 : 3; Gal. 2 : 5; 2 Cor. 10 : 1. L. A.

One is your Father. In all the labors of his life, in his teaching and in his cross, one grand design was to reveal to men what God really was, that they might be constrained to return to him. The question, therefore, is inexpressibly momentous. What does Jesus say concerning God, how does he represent the relation in which he stands to intelligent beings? Only one reply can be given to this question, Jesus reveals God as the Father of souls. The human spirit is the offspring, the immediate and direct offspring, of the Ever-living Spirit. It is capable of bearing and does bear, and it is the only thing that bears or is capable of bearing, a resemblance to God. When we have said that God created the heavens, the earth, and all material things, we have exhausted all of which the subject admits. But it is not simply true that he created minds also, He is the Father of minds and of nothing else. Y.

11. Your servant.** It may serve to show how little the letter of a precept has to do with its true observance, if we reflect that he, who of all heads of sects has most notably violated this whole command, calls himself, “Servus servorum Dei”—Servant of the servants of God! A.

13-29. And then, solemnly and terribly, he uttered his eightfold “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” scathing them in utterance after utterance with a flame which at once revealed and scorched. And does not Jewish literature itself most amply support the charge brought against the Pharisees by Jesus? “Fear not true Pharisees, but greatly fear painted Pharisees,” said Alexander Jannæus to his wife on his death-bed. “The supreme tribunal,” says R. Nachaman, “will duly punish hypocrites who wrap their talliths around them to apappear, which they are not, true Pharisees.” Nay, the Talmud itself, with unwonted keenness and severity of sarcasm, has pictured to us the seven classes of Pharisees, out of which siz are characterized by a mixture of haughtiness and imposture. F.—It is not alone the hypocrisy of Jerusalem which is denounced. In this marvellous picture, every line of which is drawn in ineffaceable colors, the Pharisaism of every age sees its own image. Wherever are found formal worship, false devotion, proud scorn of the small ones of the world, inordinate self-estimation—wherever virtue is only a fiction, the holy imprecations of Christ resound with their solemn severity. It is not offended holiness only which speaks, it is also love—the true charity which cannot suffer that which kills the soul. —De P. These terrible denunciations were not uttered against gross and scandalous sins, but against hypocrisy, which in his view was the most grievous of all sins. In the whole course of his ministry he had been opposed, hindered, denounced, threatened, by the men who professed to be their religious guides. Under the veil of piety they were covetous, exacting, tyrannical, extortionate. J. P. T.

15. To make one proselyte.** Proselytes were, in the time of our Lord, a numerous body. Some were proselytes of the gate only (as they were called); and had simply pledged themselves to renounce all idolatry, and to worship the true God. This class had all heard of the coming of Messiah, and had generally little sympathy with Jewish prejudice. Others were proselytes of righteousness. These took upon themselves all the obligations of the Mosaic law, and joined in offering sacrifice in the outer court of the temple to the God of Israel. The Pharisees took great pains to make these proselytes, and were aided by the fading authority of the old religions, and the reverence in which the God of the Jews was held even by the heathen. As these teachers had no true idea of their religion, they could impart none. Their converts, therefore, only changed their superstition, and became twofold more the children of hell than before. They were ever among the bitterest enemies of the Christian faith. J. A.

23,24. Ye pay tithe.** Ye are superstitiously scrupulous and precise in things of smaller moment; but matters of great and eternal obligation, justice and equity, mercy and charity, faithfulness and truth toward God and men, ye wholly slight and neglect. S. C.—Strain at a gnat. Better rendered in the old English translation, “strain out a gnat.” The custom prevailed all over the East of passing wine through a strainer, that no gnats or flies might get into the cup. Pearce.—Camel. The largest animal known to the Jews, as opposed to the gnat, the smallest insect—both alike unclean.

B.—They worshipped the letter, but misconceived the essence of Scripture: treated morality as a trifle, and trifles as the only religion. In trifles the most exact minuteness was required, but in greater matters the principles of morality were boldly undermined or surrendered. The tithing of mint, dill, and cummin—mere garden-herbs—was vital, but grave questions of right and wrong were treated with indifference. This moral prudery, which strained the wine before drinking it, lest a fly might have fallen into it and made it unclean, but made no trouble of swallowing a camel, was the hypocritical righteousness against which Jesus directed his bitterest words. G.

27,28. Whited sepulchres.** As an occupied tomb was regarded as unclean, it was the custom to whiten the sepulchres, both for appearance’ sake, and as a ready warning against the defilement that would come by touching them. So these characters of fair and polished outward sanctity should rather be shunned than admired; for they harbored nothing but death and corruption within. J. P. T.—The hierarchy of Judaism had become, in fact, what Jesus openly declared them—whitewashed sepulchres—pure to the eye, but with only death and corruption within. They had proved that they were so, by rejecting him, because he demanded moral and religious reform. Wedded to the false and immoral, they rather killed him than let him lead them back to God. G.—29-32. Against what are his terrible denunciations pointed? Not against either skepticism or infidelity. Not against those sins, to which one or other of the passions prompt when allowed unbridled sway. It is among those making the largest professions of piety, priding themselves on their position and the respectability of their lives, that Jesus discovers the materials for the severest denunciations that ever came from his lips. 33-36. Christ’s feet are upon the pavement of the earthly temple, but he speaks as from the throne of heaven. A vision of judgment is to be revealed. As he reveals it, he almost unconsciously realizes his own position as Judge. H.

37. O Jerusalem, etc.** It is the very heart of God pouring itself forth through human flesh and speech. It is this incarnation of the innermost life and love of Deity, pleading with men, bleeding for them, and ascending only to open his arms to them and win them back by the power of this story of matchless love, that has conquered the world, that will yet “draw all men unto him,” and beautify and ennoble humanity itself! As a hen her chickens. Was ever imagery so homely invested with such grace and sublimity as this, at our Lord’s touch? And yet how exquisite the figure itself—of protection, rest, warmth, and all manner of conscious well-being in those defenceless, dependent little creatures, as they creep under and feel themselves overshadowed by the capacious and kindly wing of the mother-bird! How significant all this of what Jesus is and does for men! Under his great mediatorial wing would he have “gathered” Israel. B.

In all the superhuman beauty of the character of Jesus, nothing is more affecting and impressive than the profound melancholy with which he foretells the future desolation of the city, which before two days were passed was to reek with his own blood. In fact, there was an intimate moral connection between the murder of Jesus and the doom of the Jewish city. It was the characteristic disposition of the people that now morally disqualified them “from knowing the things which belonged to their peace,” which forty years afterward committed them in their deadly and ruinous struggle with the masters of the world. Christianity alone could have subdued or mitigated that stubborn fanaticism, which drove them at length to their desperate collision with the arms of Rome. As Christians, the Jewish people might have subsided into peaceful subjects of the universal empire. They might have lived, as the Christians did, with the high and inalienable consolations of faith and hope under the heaviest oppressions; and calmly awaited the time when their holier and more beneficent ambition might be gratified by the submission of their rulers to the religious dominion founded by Christ and his apostles. They would have slowly won that victory by the patient heroism of martyrdom, and the steady perseverance in the dissemination of their faith, which it was madness to hope that they could ever obtain by force of arms. But the same vision of worldly dominion, the same obstinate expectation of a temporal deliverer, which made them unable to comprehend the nature of Christ’s redemption and kingdom, continued to the end to mingle with their wild and frantic resistance. H. M.

38. Your house is left desolate.** When Christ had risen, the temple, though still retaining to the eyes of the Jews its old glory, had lost it to the spiritual and instructed disciples. Its sacrifices were unmeaning after the great oblation of Golgotha. Its veil was rent at the crucifixion, and its holy place made common. In prospect of this event Christ disowned it: “Your house is left unto you desolate.” It was still rich in marble, and purple, and gold; but its Great Inhabitant was gone, and it was a temple no more. J. A.—The day of his earthly life and of his ministry was about to close: dark night was already casting its gloom over the temple, the city, the nation, the world. Thus Jesus departed from the temple, never to return. The holy and beautiful house was left desolate. Z. E.—And has not that denunciation been fearfully fulfilled? Never was a narrative more full of horrors, frenzies, unspeakable degradations, and overwhelming miseries, than is the history of the siege of Jerusalem. (Section 185.) Never was any prophecy more closely, more terribly, more overwhelmingly fulfilled than this of Christ. The men going about in the disguise of women with swords concealed under their gay robes; the rival outrages and infamies of John and Simon; the priests struck by darts from the upper court of the temple, and falling slain by their own sacrifices; “the blood of all sorts of dead carcasses—priests, strangers, profane—standing in lakes in the holy courts;” the corpses themselves lying in piles and mounds on the very altar slopes; the fires feeding luxuriously on cedar-work overlaid with gold; friend and foe trampled to death on the gleaming mosaics in promiscuous carnage; priests, swollen with hunger, leaping madly into the devouring flames, till at last those flames had done their work, and what had been the Temple of Jerusalem, the beautiful and holy house of God, was a heap of ghastly ruin, where the burning embers were half slaked in pools of gore. And did not all the righteous blood shed upon the earth since the days of Abel come upon that generation? Did not many of that generation survive to witness and feel the unutterable horrors which Josephus tells? F.

Section 128.—The Widow’s Gift. Greeks seek Jesus. Voice from Heaven.

The Temple. Tuesday.