'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 uncleanness. 28. Even so ye also
outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are
full of hypocrisy and iniquity. 29. Woe unto you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the
tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of
the righteous, 30. And say, If we had been in the days
of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with
them in the blood of the prophets. 31. Wherefore ye be
witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of
them which killed the prophets. 32. Fill ye up then the
measure of your fathers. 33. 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 persecute them from city to city;
35. 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 Barachias, whom ye slew
between the temple and the altar. 36. 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 gathereth her chickens under her wings,
and ye would not! 38. Behold, your house is left unto
you desolate. 39. 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.'--MATT. xxiii. 27-39.
If, with the majority of authorities, we exclude verse 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 (vs. 29-36). 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 verses 31-33, 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 2 Chronicles xxiv. 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!