The Woes End in Tears

The seat, and the shoulders beneath it (23:1–12)

Matthew 23 is the last thing Jesus says in public in this Gospel. He has spent Tuesday of Passion Week in the temple courts in Jerusalem being questioned by the men who run the place, and by the end of chapter 22 nobody will ask him anything else. So he stops answering and starts speaking — to the crowds and to his disciples, with the authorities standing right there — and what comes out is the hardest language he ever used. Then he walks out past the buildings his disciples want him to admire, and the last of his five great discourses begins on the Mount of Olives.

The point of the chapter in two lines: a man who has just been attacked all day turns and describes the religion of the people most certain they are safe — teaching kept, obedience visible, nothing inside — and then, having said the harshest words in the Gospels, breaks down over the city he is describing.

Two things have to be said before a word of it is read.

The first is where the words come from. This is a Jewish prophet in the Jewish temple, grieving over the leaders of his own people the way Amos and Micah and Jeremiah did. Lifted out of that setting and turned into a Christian verdict on Jews, this chapter has done real damage in history. Left where Matthew put it, it does what prophecy always does: it goes for the people who are sure it is about somebody else.

The second is what kind of speech it is. D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is the modern voice most often at our elbow in this Gospel, answers the common complaint that the chapter cannot be squared with the Sermon on the Mount's command to love our enemies. Fools, hypocrites, blind guides, son of hell — that is not the language of irritation at a rival. It is "the language of divine warning" and condemnation, spoken by the one the Sermon itself presents as the final Judge.^* The same mouth says both, and means both.

Jesus opens by apparently conceding something. "The scribes and the Pharisees sat on Moses' seat… all things therefore whatever they tell you to observe, observe and do." There was such a seat — a stone chair, examples of which have been dug out of ancient synagogue floors, where the teacher of the law sat.^*

And that sentence is very hard to hold beside the rest of this Gospel, where the same Jesus overrules Pharisaic rulings to their faces (15:3–9) and tells his disciples to beware of their teaching (16:12).

The old tradition takes the concession as real but limited. Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, puts the weight on the content rather than the men: "For they speak not their own words, but God's, what He appointed for laws by Moses" — and then adds the limit himself, that when you hear all, "do not understand all the law." John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, reads it the same way: the people are to regulate their lives by the law they hear from the scribes' mouths, so he "enjoins believers to attend to their words" while refusing their example.

Carson thinks that will not stand, and his reasons are worth hearing. The concession as Matthew words it is not qualified at all — it is as strong as it could possibly be, which makes the flat contradiction with the rest of the Gospel too sharp to smooth over. So he follows Joachim Jeremias and R. T. France, another New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is a standard work, and reads verses 2 and 3a as "an instance of biting irony bordering" on sarcasm, with the verb in verse 2 carrying its plain past force: the Jewish religious leaders have "presumed" to sit in Moses' seat.^* They seated themselves. On that reading the sentence is a chiasm — two ironic lines, then two straight ones — and the straight lines are the point.

We will not pretend to settle it, and each reading costs something. Taking the concession straight keeps a true thing in view — that the Scriptures in those hands were still the Scriptures — but it has to supply a limit the verse does not state. Taking it as irony explains why verse 4 complains about their teaching and not only their lives, but it puts a sarcasm in Jesus' mouth that most readers have never heard there.

Either way the indictment turns concrete, and the first image is a load. Verse 4: they bind heavy burdens that are grievous to be borne and lay them on people's shoulders, and will not lift a finger to help. Phortia barea — freight, cargo, the weight a beast carries. And notice exactly what the charge is. It is not that they dodged their own rules. It is that "they refused to help those who collapsed under their rules."^* They were not lazy. They were unhelpful.

Chapter 11 is still in the room. "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest… for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Two teachers, two loads. One stacks the freight on and steps back to watch us stagger. The other stoops under it himself.

What follows is a portrait of piety turned outward. The phylacteries and the tassels were both commanded (Deuteronomy 6:8; Numbers 15:38) — Jesus wore tassels himself (9:20). This is not a complaint about ceremony; the complaint is that the props of obedience have been resized for an audience. Carson's phrase for it is exact: Jesus accuses them "of being time servers and applause seekers." Calvin names the mechanism, and it is the sentence to underline in this whole section: see "how ingenious men are in mixing up vain deception, in order to conceal their vices under some pretext and cloak of virtues."

Then the seats, the greetings, the title said twice: "Rabbi, Rabbi." Be honest about how small this is. None of it is scandalous. It is the ordinary hunger to be thought well of, wearing devotion's clothes, which is exactly why it is invisible from the inside. Matthew Henry, the English Puritan whose commentary has been read in kitchens for three hundred years, names what God is actually offended by here: hypocrisy is a crime no human court can try, since we judge by appearances, and "nothing is more displeasing to him, for he desireth truth." Chrysostom, who was a bishop and knew what he was describing, would not let his congregation file it under trivia: "For these things, although one may think them small, yet are they a cause of great evils. These things have overthrown both cities and churches."

The remedy Jesus gives is not modesty about titles but the collapse of the ladder. "One is your teacher… one is your Father… one is your master, the Christ. And all of you are brothers." He is not legislating vocabulary — Paul will call himself a father to the Corinthians without blushing. He is saying that in the kingdom of heaven there is exactly one storey above the ground floor, and it is occupied.

And here is where the chapter first hands us Christ, in a way that is easy to walk past. Carson sees it in the move from Rabbi to Father to Teacher: after the authorities have just failed to answer the simplest question about the Messiah (22:41–46), Jesus declares that "he himself is the only one qualified to sit in Moses' seat."^* The woes are not a rival's complaint. They are the verdict of the one true Teacher on the men occupying his chair.

Two things keep that from being comfortable for us. Carson says the first plainly: the risen Christ is as displeased with those in his church "who demand unquestioning submission to themselves" and confuse showy piety with surrender to him as he ever was with any Pharisee. And verse 12 states the law of the house: whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. What is commended, as Carson puts it, "is humility, not humbug; service, not servility." Chrysostom, who noticed how often Jesus returns to this one virtue, said flatly that "nothing is equal to the practice of modesty."

Seven woes, and what a woe is (23:13–28)

Then the woes begin, and the first thing to get right is the tone. Ouai is not a curse spat at an enemy. It can be a compassionate "alas", and here it is judicial: not vindictive, not spiteful, but sentence pronounced.^* There is heat in it. By verse 37 the heat will have dissolved entirely into tears, which tells us what it was made of all along.

The count is seven. The King James tradition carries an eighth — the woe about devouring widows' houses — but the earliest manuscripts of Matthew do not have it, and the manuscripts that do include it cannot agree whether to put it before or after verse 13, which is the signature of a line that has migrated in from Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47.^* Nothing in it is untrue. It simply belongs to another paragraph. Seven is Matthew's number for fullness, and the seven are arranged as a chiasm with the fourth woe at the center, so the chapter's real charge is the one in the middle: a failure to read Scripture for what it is mainly about.

The first woe is the most severe thing said in the chapter: "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." Kleiete — you lock it. The men entrusted with the key have become the deadbolt.

It is usually explained as their casuistry, the rules piled so high that ordinary people could not keep them. Carson argues that misses it, and the text supports him: conduct is not mentioned in this verse at all, only entrance. The real failure is the one the previous chapter exposed — "the teachers of the law and the Pharisees do not enter the kingdom because they refuse to recognize who Jesus is." They are not standing in the door with a rulebook. They are standing in it with their backs to the Messiah. Calvin notices who the severity is actually for: Jesus "breaks out into still stronger language of condemnation, and he does so not so much on their account, as for the purpose of withdrawing the common people and simple-minded men from their sect."

The second woe follows the same energy overseas: a convert crossed sea and land for, and then formed into twice the son of Gehenna his teachers were. Zeal is not the problem; zeal never is. Carson's gloss is both funny and awful — the converts absorbed the system so completely that they "out-Phariseed" the Pharisees, and were left in a frame with no room in it for Jesus.^*

The third woe (16–22) sounds like arcane rabbinics, and it is, deliberately. The oath system had become a machine for calculating which promises were escapable. Jesus shows first that the values are backwards — the temple sanctifies the gold, not the reverse. Then he pulls the floor out: to swear by the temple is to swear by the One who lives in it, and to swear by heaven is to swear by the throne and the One on it. There is no corner of creation God is not standing in, so there is no oath he is not party to. It is the Sermon on the Mount again (5:33–37), and Carson notes that these verses supply its reason: rather than sorting oaths into binding and non-binding, "Jesus cut through these complexities by insisting that men must tell the truth." Calvin saw who gains from such machinery: "As ambition is almost always connected with hypocrisy, so the superstitions of the people are usually encouraged by the covetousness and rapacity of pastors."

The fourth woe — the center of the seven — gives us the chapter's most quoted line and its most misused. They tithe mint and dill and cumin, Jesus says, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith.

Two cautions here, both from Carson. The first is about the adjective: the weightier matters are the more central ones, not the more difficult ones. The second is about a popular use of the verse. To read it as love replacing the law at its center "goes much too far"; what Jesus weighs is the relative importance of things inside Scripture, and he retires none of it.^* Notice too the clause we skip: "you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone." He does not abolish the small obedience; he refuses to let it stand in for the large one.

Then he draws a cartoon: straining a gnat out of the wine and swallowing a camel — both unclean, the smallest and the largest, one gulped down whole and hairy. In Aramaic the two words sound nearly alike, so it was probably a pun as well as a joke. It has teeth, because meticulous care about small things is one of the most respectable hiding places on earth. Chrysostom puts the relation between the small and the great the right way round: "For indeed the one were enacted for the sake of the other, I mean of mercy and judgment."^*

The last two woes go inside. The cup scrubbed on the outside while the inside holds greed. "First clean the inside," he says — and Carson guards the sentence from the use we usually make of it. "Inside" here "does not here encourage privatized pietism but total moral renewal" measured by justice, mercy and faithfulness. It is not a call to tend our feelings. It is a call to be changed where change is expensive. Henry says it as a pastor: "first cleanse that which is within; we then make sure work, when this is our first work." And he gives the reason in a line worth keeping: "If the heart be well kept, all is well, for out of it are the issues of life; the eruptions will vanish of course."^*

And then the tombs — where this chapter's most popular illustration needs correcting. The usual version is that graves were whitewashed each spring before Passover to warn pilgrims away from them (Numbers 19:16), and that Jesus turns that public kindness into an accusation. Henry mentions the custom too. But Carson points out the problem: if whitewash was a warning sign, then "whitewashed tombs would not have been objects of beauty" — they were things to be shunned, and the text says these look beautiful. The likelier reading is that "the graves were beautiful because of their structure," the monuments themselves, and that the whitewash does different work: it is aimed at men preoccupied with avoiding corpse-defilement, and it says that "the scribes and Pharisees are sources of uncleanness just as much as the whitewashed graves are." That is worse than hypocrisy as we usually define it. They are not merely hiding death. They are spreading it. Chrysostom had already heard the second half: "And He did not merely call them whited sepulchers, but said, that they were full of uncleanness and hypocrisy."

Timothy Keller, the Manhattan pastor, preaching on the Sermon on the Mount rather than on this chapter, put the diagnosis in one domestic question: "Why do you help a little lady across the street? It's not about her, it's about you." That is the inside of the cup. In another sermon he named the alternative in a sentence: "what really matters is who I am to Jesus and who I'm in my heart and not whether I look great."

The blood of the prophets (23:29–36)

The seventh woe turns to monuments. They build the prophets' tombs 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." It is the sentence of every generation looking back at an atrocity it did not have to be present for.

Calvin is careful about what is being condemned here. It is not the honoring of the dead as such — the scribes had not yet reached the point of venerating relics, and he calls that reading "an unfounded opinion."^* The charge is subtler: they were buying the crowd's trust with a show of reverence for the men their fathers killed. Dead prophets are safe to honor. Living ones are a nuisance, and there is one standing in the temple.

"You serpents, you offspring of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna?" The phrase is John the Baptist's, from the riverbank in chapter 3. Matthew closes his own loop: the warning that opened the ministry now closes the public teaching, unheeded in between.

Then the reckoning is measured from Abel to "Zachariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the sanctuary and the altar." Most readers are told confidently that this is the Zechariah of 2 Chronicles 24, stoned in the temple court — which would make the span canonical rather than chronological, Genesis to Chronicles, the first book of the Hebrew Bible to the last. That is probably right, and the span is the point. But the patronymic does not match, and Carson, after laying out five candidates and a plausible fix involving a grandfather, says simply: "But we do not know."^* A commentary that hands a reader certainty here is handing them something it does not have.

What is certain is the verdict: the account comes due on "this generation." Within forty years the temple was rubble.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem (23:37–39)

And then the voice breaks.

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to her! How often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!"

Episynagō — to gather in, to bring together under. The Old Testament reaches for an eagle (Deuteronomy 32:11) and for the sheltering wings of God (Psalm 91:4). Jesus reaches for a hen: homely, unarmed, faintly ridiculous, and exactly right, because a hen has no defense to offer her chicks except her own body, and she does not move. Within the week he will do precisely that, with his arms out, on a hill outside this city.

These are the last public words he speaks to Israel in this Gospel, and Carson names what they do to everything before them: the lament "tinges all the preceding woes with compassion," and the grammar shifts from the city to her children, moving the whole speech "from the abstraction of the city to the concrete reality of people." The woes were never a loss of temper. Despite all of them, Jesus is like the Sovereign LORD of Ezekiel 18:32, who took "no pleasure in the death of anyone."^*

Notice also who is talking. Whoever says I would have gathered your children across the centuries of Israel's history is not applying for a prophet's job: that longing "can belong only to Israel's Savior, not to one of her prophets."

"And you would not." Three of the saddest words in Scripture. Henry diagnoses the refusal better than anyone: "They did not like the terms upon which Christ proposed to gather them; they loved their sins, and yet trusted to their righteousness." That is the whole chapter in a sentence, and it is not a Jewish failing. It is the standing human arrangement. And it is why this chapter should be read by the church before it is read at anybody else: Keller, speaking about why people leave religion altogether, described what they had seen in religious people — "a bigotry an arrogance of Phariseeism a self-righteousness a cruelty." Jesus said it first, and harder.

"Behold, your house is left to you desolate." Your house — two chapters ago he called it "my house" (21:13). The possessive has changed hands, the way the glory departed in Ezekiel's vision. Henry marks the moment with one word: "When Christ went, Ichabod, the glory departed."^*

And the last line is a door, though we should be careful how far we open it. "You will not see me from now on, until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!'" That is Psalm 118:26, the crowd's cry at the gate four days earlier. It is not never again; it is not until. It is tempting to read that as the terms of return being published, which is warmer than the text. Carson shows why: the phrase ap' arti, from now on, points to the consummation rather than to Easter, so verse 39 "looks, not to Jesus' resurrection appearances, but to his second coming" — and Psalm 118 leaves open whether he will then be greeted as welcomed King or met as consuming Judge.^* What the verse promises is that he will be seen again, and that the words said then will be the psalm's. Which way those words are meant it does not say.

Which leaves the chapter where it leaves us. There is exactly one person in Scripture qualified to say all of this without hypocrisy: one teacher who never said and did not do, whose inside and outside are the same all the way down. That he also carries the load he refused to pile on us is not something this chapter states; it is what the hen is for, and what the next three chapters do with her — the wings go out on Friday, over the very city that would not come. He pronounces the woes, and then he absorbs them. The hen spreads her wings. We are not asked to be the people who never wore the mask. We are asked to come out from behind it, into the open, where the gathering is.