Matthew 23

Matthew 23:1-39

Subdivision 5. (Matthew 23:1-39.)Judgment pronounced. They are silenced, but not won. The human heart is a citadel that can entrench itself against the clearest evidence; and the conscience can harden itself by repeated rejection of the truth, until light be as darkness. Thus it is now that He who would (how often!) have gathered the children of Jerusalem, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, is forced to give them up to the avenger soon to come. Israel is doomed, and the lips of divine love have to pronounce her doom, until she shall say in truth and penitence, “Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” But the terrible denunciation that follows is rather against the leaders that have misled her to her ruin; though the blind leaders and the led fall together into it. From the necessity of the case, the judgment pronounced is given in the most open manner in the presence of the multitude, preceded by that picture of the rule of the rabbi, which could not but appeal to the experience of all who heard it. Yet it left them under it, of their own choice.

1. (1) The scribes and Pharisees had set themselves down in Moses, seat. It was their own act, and yet could not be looked upon wholly as a usurpation. An earnest zeal for the law of God in opposition to prevailing laxity had put them originally in the place that they now occupied. Degeneration had come in, and they had fallen from the ancient spirit while retaining the place - a place in which the Lord evidently recognizes them here, while recognizing fully also the degeneracy. They were now mere barren professors, contradicting their profession with their lives; while the rule of the rabbi was a tyranny of the severest kind, binding upon men’s shoulders burdens grievous to be borne - a growing oppression; more and more intolerable, and never lightened. “Rabbinism placed the ordinances of tradition above those of the Law, and this by a necessity of the system, since they were professedly the authoritative exposition and the supplement of the written law. And although it was a general rule that no ordinance should be enjoined heavier than the congregation could bear, yet it was admitted that, whereas the words of the Law contained what ’lightened,’ and what ‘made heavy,’ the words of the scribes contained only what ‘made heavy.’ Again it was another principle that where an aggravation or increase of the burden had once been introduced, it must continue to be observed.”* Well might the Lord say, that they would not put forth even a finger to move the intolerable load.
   With the people all this, of course, increased their power; and power and place was what they were constantly seeking. Thus they made broad the ‘phylacteries’ or parchment strips in which they strove after their peculiar manner to have the law in the most literal way as “frontlets between the eyes” (Deuteronomy 6:8); while the actually enjoined tasselled “borders” (Numbers 15:38) they enlarged, to make them conspicuous, as the Lord reproaches them. Naturally with this there was the love of conspicuous places also, at feasts and in the synagogues, and of greetings in the markets in which they were to be accosted as Rabbi, with all due respect.
   (2) Such were the Jewish leaders: among the disciples Jesus enjoins them that such things were not to be. They were not to be called Rabbi, but to be all brethren; with Christ alone their real Teacher. There was to be no authority among them but His own; no claim of spiritual fatherhood but for the Heavenly Father; nor of leadership, again; for any but Christ. The “leader” here (kathegetes) is more than teacher: he is the teacher who may have many teachers under him. All this, as it plainly calls for most serious attention on the part of all who call Christ Lord in truth, so also it needs wisdom in the application: for all these terms, “teacher,” “father,” “leader,” are applied in Scripture itself to disciples, and cannot be meant, therefore, to be in an absolute way forbidden. But it was in Israel then; as it has come to be so largely in the Christian Church today, that those who should have been the servants of their brethren claimed to be masters, and stood between the consciences of men and Him who is alone the Lord of the conscience.

Neither the Church as a whole nor any class of men in it can claim aright authoritative place for their teaching, which Scripture alone (as the word of the Lord) has; and yet this is what, with many modifications, is continually being done, and the people of God also are on their side not merely allowing but prompting the claim. In this way the word of God loses irreparably; it is made plastic in the hands of men; and, dethroned from its place of authority, it becomes subject to the reproach which attaches to all human handiwork: infidelity finds its own in this degradation. The louder and more authoritative the Church’s voice, the more that of God through His word becomes silenced and unheard.
But how different is the “ministry” which is really that, which seeks no lordship for itself, and no authority, but, like the Baptist of old, points only to that Other, in whose presence it stands self-emptied, because filled, satisfied, glorified with the light, unseen of the world, into which it has entered! True, it will not lead men universally to faith, which Christ’s own presence in it was not able to do; yet the faith to which it brings men will be how different! But it is not of this the Lord speaks here. He carries us back instead to that glimpse of an open heaven, which He so lately Himself has opened to them, and again He repeats: “The greater of you shall be your servant.” In service - in the ability to serve - true greatness is. And if the spirit of service be love, and love be the spirit of heaven, then it must be - there can be no avoidance of so plain a fact -that “whosoever shall exalt himself among you shall be humbled; and whosoever shall humble himself shall be exalted.” 2. The Lord turns now and addresses personally the leaders of the people, smiting them with a sevenfold perfect “woe,” because of their condition which He reveals in successive flashes of awful wrath. Yet no mere outburst of passionate emotion is it that manifests itself in these burning words. They are measured utterances in which the truth of divine judgment is as plain as its reality. And even in form, as they are sealed with the number of perfection; which is at the same time the stamp of an oath,* so this seven is in its structure, like that of the creative days, a 3. 3. 1, beginning indeed with the “light,” which is in these “blind guides” but darkness, in the first three woes; in the second three, stigmatizing their duplicity - their double life; while the final one, which has the characters of both preceding sections, brands them as the true children of those who slew the prophets, however much (now that these were dead) they might build their sepulchres.
a. (1) The first “woe” deals with their opposition to the Kingdom of heaven; which they shut up in the face of men, themselves neither entering in; nor (as far as lay in them) suffering others to enter. As it is put in Luke, they had “taken away the key of knowledge.” With their legal and traditional teachings they had barred man’s approach to the only place of blessing in subjection to the glorious King in whom the Kingdom was presented to them, so that the outcasts of Israel, the “tax-gatherers and harlots,” went into it more easily than they. Thus they had not the light, and had refused the light: for if “light had come into the world,” it is necessarily self-manifesting, as well as that which manifests other things; and men who refuse it do so, not because of insufficient evidence, but because they “love darkness rather than light.” And such were the leaders of Israel: here is their condition written upon their forehead. (2) But while they had taken away the key of real knowledge, it was in perfect accord with this that they should be zealots of their own false knowledge, and eager to gain proselytes to it. Perfectly accordant, too, it was that they should, in the condition in which they were, have proselytes that would go beyond themselves. Calling the light darkness they naturally called the darkness light, and as light would propagate it. The second woe, therefore, follows the first in easily intelligible order.*
(3) The third woe again shows how the light in them was darkened by their inversion of true proportion as to the holy things. With them the gold of the temple was more highly estimated than the temple itself, and the gift than the altar that sanctified it. And then this casuistry was used to teach men how they could swear vain oaths and be excused responsibility - a responsibility which the Lord affirms in every case. b. (1) The three following woes are plainly different from the preceding ones. They show us the double life of these Jewish leaders. In the first case, the profession of absolute integrity could hardly be more complete than in paying tithes of the very mint and anise and cummin, the least product of their fields; yet on another side there was an absolute deficiency in that which should have been rendered. The moral elements, the weightier matters of the law, were just with them the things that had no weight. They strained carefully out the gnat in such things, but they swallowed easily the camel! (2) Then the cup and dish they cleansed on the outside; within they could keep them full of rapine and indulgence. With a correct outside the lusts within were retained and sanctioned. (3) The third woe speaks of spiritual death within; with a good looking exterior only, like a whitened sepulchre. This is the most inward aspect of the evil, but it presents the same duplicity as those preceding it. c. In the next and last case, there is a return to the beginning. The opposition to God with which this characterization began is here as real as there; yet it is covered with a veil which might hide it, not only from others but from themselves. The dead prophets they memorialized and honored - built sepulchres to the men their fathers killed. And this honor to the dead might well save them from all identification with the men that killed them, though these might unfortunately be their fathers. Alas, their present opposition to the Kingdom of God showed how much value was to be attached to such a profession of regard for men who lay quietly in their graves and never troubled them.

They were witnesses themselves that they were children of those who slew the prophets. Let them fill up then the measure of their fathers: fill it up and more they would, as already He had shown them, for these with whom He was now face to face would be His betrayers and murderers. And He would send them prophets and wise men and scribes, and the old history would be repeated. With the long record of ages before them, and that history of their forefathers preaching to them of God’s controversy with them for their sins, they would renew and consummate it in their own persons, making themselves heirs of all that long reign of unbelief and evil, of the blood-shedding crying out to God from Abel to Zechariah slain between the temple and the altar, in the very face of God Himself. If this were the Zechariah the prophet, of the returned remnant,* how the guilt of Israel is emphasized in this! and “which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted?” are Stephen’s words to them at a later time. Upon this generation was to come the recompense of that long wearing out of the saints of God.
3. But here the pent-up love in the heart of Christ breaks out in a lament over the city which had rejected Him. City as it was of murderous hatred against those sent to it of God, how often would He have gathered her children together, as the hen gathers her brood under her wings! but they would not. Now their house - which He could no longer call His Father’s - was left to them as they would have it; but to real desolation. Nor would they see Him henceforth, according to the blessing which those rejected prophets had prophesied should yet be theirs, until, with hearts disciplined with sorrow, and in judgment made to learn the righteousness which alone could be the preparation for it, they should be enabled from their heart to say, “Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord.”