NOTES for Mat 23:13-39

The most terrible thing is that the higher a person's calling, the more tragic and painful his falling away, his unbelief, becomes. The Pharisees were religious teachers of God's people, guardians of tradition, law, and Scripture. Jerusalem is "the city of the great King," but it is precisely there that Christ dies. The Jews are the chosen people, "God's own," yet "He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him."

We Christians are also a people chosen by God, children of Abraham by faith, guardians of the Gospel Tradition. Therefore we too walk along the edge of the abyss; we too are in the risk group. At any moment our piety can turn into hypocrisy, conviction in faith into a sense of our own rightness, respect for traditions into legalism. How can we avoid "the leaven of the Pharisees" and still remain God's people? How can we preserve faithfulness to the Gospel without losing Christ?

One harsh statement after another falls with a steady rhythm, denouncing the scribes and Pharisees for hypocrisy, folly, and blindness. Those who had been entrusted with serving God and His supreme truth not only failed in their ministry, but were also tempted to use their position for selfish purposes. This is why they are held to a stricter account than “ordinary” sinners.

We would very much like to apply these words, addressed to the intellectual elite of ancient Israel, to them alone. But that will not work. The One who warned us to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, by uttering this denunciation through the centuries, also warned us about our responsibility for the results of our ministry.

The easiest thing in such a case is to begin recalling how one Christian or another acted in ways that match what Christ listed. Such a “debriefing” is necessary, but first of all everything said here must be understood as a warning to us ourselves. Let us therefore try to remember whether we too have ever cared more about outward propriety than about truly overcoming sinful inclinations.

Otherwise, we ourselves will become like whitewashed tombs that, in addition, search for impurity in others.

Today's bitter words of Christ about the scribes and Pharisees, who barricaded the entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven with their religious stereotypes, should be considered in parallel with the words of the Almighty, "You shall not make yourself an idol." Alas, the human being has a frightening ability to make idols out of everything. After all, everything that is so important to the scribes and Pharisees is objectively good. Prayer is vitally necessary, and so are preaching and preserving the temple... But all this can be forms in which love for God is expressed, or it can be a means of walling oneself off from God. The word "hypocrisy" in Greek means first of all pretense. Here is what matters to understand: we can pretend to love God, but we will manage to deceive only ourselves, not the All-Seeing One.

These words of Christ are given in the Gospel not only, and not so much, in order to condemn our hypocrisy. It is simply that since God sees us in truth, hypocrisy becomes meaningless, and therefore there is hope that He will help us be freed from it.

As we can see, Jesus' assessment of the Pharisees, with all their deeds and all their activity, was sometimes quite severe. What drew His strongest condemnation? At first glance, the things in question are quite varied. There is the violation of basic moral norms under cover of the law, oaths that were formally permitted but in fact violated the Torah, and the spread of one's religion which, according to the Savior, does not bring anyone closer to the Kingdom.

What do all these things have in common? In essence, only one thing: replacing content with form. Strictly speaking, the formalization of religious life is the main thing for which Jesus reproaches the Pharisees. Of course, every religion tends toward formalization, but if a religion is born on the basis of a revelation received from God, as was the case with Yahwism and the Judaism that grew within it, there is always a certain spiritual potential within it that allows such formalization to be resisted. It is another matter that using this potential is often troublesome; formal religiosity usually creates fewer outward problems, and not everyone decides to resist it. Jesus reproaches the Pharisees precisely because they did not do this.

Of course, the Kingdom that He brought into the world does not fit within any religious framework, even when the religiosity into whose framework people try to fit it is living and sincere. But in that case, the bearer of such religiosity still has the possibility of using it as a kind of spiritual springboard for a leap into the Kingdom. The same cannot be said of religiosity dominated by formalism: on the way to the Kingdom it can become only a brake. Meanwhile, as we can see, by Gospel times there was already more than enough religious formalism in the Pharisaic brotherhood: by then the brotherhood movement had existed for more than a century, and the tendency toward formalizing religious life within it, if it had not prevailed, was at any rate very visible.

And yet, even against this background, Jesus does not reject the whole Pharisaic tradition at once, but draws attention only to its quite specific forms and expressions that are in no way compatible with the Kingdom. For He knows that religious people, too, can enter the Kingdom. If, of course, they do not put their religion ahead of the Kingdom.

Christ's fiery, scourging sermon is addressed to the scribes and Pharisees. Having practically monopolized the interpretation of Scripture, these people turned the living word of God into a rigid set of rules that they themselves did not keep. Moreover, behind this fence of what Jesus calls “command upon command,” the fundamental commandments given to Moses become almost invisible—the commandments in which God revealed His love and care for the people of God. Thus those raised in the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees were denied access to what matters most: the loving and merciful God, and the gates of the Kingdom proved closed to them. It is no accident that Jesus warned His disciples so strongly against the leaven of the Pharisees. But can we say that we are entirely free of it? Do we hear Christ's voice crying, “Woe to you!”?

We should understand the denunciations of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law more as road signs warning that there is a cliff beyond this turn or that ice may be found here. In other words, they should serve us more as a warning of danger to our spiritual life than as an occasion to share the Savior's anger by condemning one group of people or another. In Russian, the word “Pharisee” has lost every positive connotation and retained only negative ones. Yet these were highly educated people, many of whom were disciples of Jesus. We must not forget this.

In this passage Christ speaks of those for whom the temple is more important than God. And how often this happens among us. How often people endowed through their upbringing with the most refined aesthetic sense nourish their church life only on the beauty of ritual. And how often people go to church only for companionship that saves them from the loneliness of the metropolis, or indeed from any loneliness, forgetting that God is what matters most in the Church.

Speaking about the religiosity of the Pharisees, Jesus points them to the main thing in the Torah that they had forgotten: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. It is not hard to see that, by mentioning mercy and faithfulness, Jesus is turning to the prophetic tradition: the phrase "mercy and faithfulness" first appears in the preaching of the pre-exilic prophet Hosea; in the Synodal translation the expression used is "mercy and truth." Hosea considered mercy and faithfulness to be the very foundation of all human relations with God, and Jesus, as we can see, supports him.

What is this about? By mercy, with the corresponding Hebrew word in mind, the authors of the biblical books always meant the readiness to do more for another person than that person deserves, and more than one is obliged to do by, for example, law or contract. It is no surprise that Hosea connects the possibility of any future at all for the people of God only with God's mercy: by the time of his life and preaching, Israel had already managed to violate every clause of the covenant made at Sinai, and now all that remained was to hope that God would still give His people a new chance, one they deserved by no law at all. And hope for such a turn of events could be given only by faithfulness: both God's faithfulness to the covenant once made, which He will not betray no matter what, and the people's faithfulness to God, unconditional and absolute, the kind in which calculations and references to any rights whatsoever are out of place. And if this was true in the history of the people of God, then all that Hosea said was even more true with regard to the Kingdom, which no one deserved and which no one could earn by any power of their own.

The justice of which Jesus speaks was connected with the very purpose for which the Torah was given to the people: to distinguish good from evil, to understand what is pleasing to God and what is repugnant to Him. Meanwhile, religious formalism often led to the Torah being used to condemn the sinner rather than to evaluate the sinful act he had committed. And in doing this people also forgot mercy and faithfulness, for the relationships defined by them are distinguished precisely by the fact that they cannot be formalized; it is impossible to calculate exactly who owes whom and how much. And only in this way, strictly speaking, could one count on the Kingdom: any one of us will be able to receive it only if the One who brought it into the world gives us a generous gift. So generous that by no earthly measure could we count on anything like it.

Exposing the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees, the Lord Jesus states several principles of spiritual life that all of us need very much.

First, in the law, to whose fulfillment the lion's share of the spiritual efforts of most people who take responsibility for their life, destiny, and actions is devoted, in this law, which is very large, there is something most important: justice, mercy, and faith.

Second, the Lord most categorically applies the concept of uncleanness, which is very significant in the Old Testament, first of all to the inner world of the human being. Judging by His words, which the evangelists have conveyed to us, without inner purity the outward fulfillment of the provisions of the law loses all meaning. And third, what may be hardest of all for us: not "either-or" but "both-and" - not either the tithe or mercy, not either outward purity or inward purity, but "these you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone." At the same time, 50 percent outward purity and 50 percent inward purity do not add up to 100 percent purity. How are we to cope with this? Let us remember: "all things are possible for God."

Jesus continues His denunciation of the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees, and in doing so expresses several principles that all of us greatly need. First, within the law, vast as it is, there are weightier matters: justice, mercy, and faith. Second, the concept of uncleanness, which is very important in the Old Testament, must be applied above all to a person's inner life. And third, what may be hardest for us: not “either-or,” but “both-and”; not either tithing or mercy, not either outward or inward purity, but “these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” After all, 50 percent outward purity and 50 percent inward purity do not add up to 100 percent purity. How are we to manage this? Let us remember that “all things are possible with God.”

This passage speaks quite definitely about what in Russian came to be associated with the term "Pharisaism": showy piety on the outside and complete decay within, in the essence. "You are like whitewashed tombs..." Such a thing can happen only to a person who does not know God, the God who sees not only the outward together with people, but also the inward, inaccessible to human sight. Christ's severe words have not lost their relevance over the past two thousand years. Moreover, today it is clear to us that Pharisaism is not the property of a particular religion and era; it arises again and again, even in Christianity itself. Therefore the causes of this phenomenon should rather be connected with traits of character and features of people's religious psychology. For this reason what Christ says is addressed for all times to this outward, showy form of relations with God in which, in essence, there is precisely no place for relations at all.

With each new word, the denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees becomes harsher, and now Christ reproaches them not only for hypocrisy and sinfulness; He accuses the religious leaders of the people of resisting God. Every sin leads away from God, but here sin is made worse by an unwillingness to repent, and enmity with God becomes conscious resistance to His will.

An unwillingness to repent can be covered by pseudo-pious self-deception, when a person does not want not only to admit his own sins but even to see them, while at the same time very much wanting to look respectable. If that is so, then denunciation of other people's sins and outward reverence for righteous people of former years become a very convenient way to show off one's imagined righteousness.

But Christ sees more deeply and directly shows us that both the long-ago crimes themselves and today's loud condemnation of them can be links in one and the same chain. How often His words about the tombs of the prophets and the monuments of the righteous have been remembered in recent years, when the names of the tortured were invoked in vain and their memory was exploited. If there is no true repentance, but only a replacement of it with outward forms, then there is always the danger that, when circumstances change, new Pharisees will again be ready to become persecutors.

Today’s passage contains one of the most moving comparisons. The Lord is likened to a bird gathering its young beneath its wings. This comparison goes back to the Old Testament. At the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, when the Spirit of God is described as moving over the waters, a verb is used that describes a bird hovering over its nest. Or take Psalm 62, for example: “In the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice.” This is a metaphor for God’s love for human beings and for the human love for God that He awaits. But against what a terrible background it sounds in this passage: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to her!” People respond to God’s love with malice and murder.

How should one understand the Savior's words about the house that now remains empty? Judging by the context, He has in mind the events of AD 70, which He foresaw, when after the anti-Roman uprising organized first of all by the Zealots, the Romans, having suppressed it, would destroy Jerusalem and the Temple to the ground. In that case Christ's words can and must be understood first of all literally: the city and the Temple, or rather what will remain of them, and very little will remain, will indeed become empty after the terrible defeat.

There is, however, a second and deeper meaning in the Savior's words. He understands better than anyone else that the events of AD 70 will be the consequence of the spiritual choice that the people make during His earthly ministry. Of course, neither this choice itself nor the catastrophe that will follow from it gives Him joy, but He knows that nothing can be done here: the people as a whole, and each concrete person, is free in his choice, and no one can be forced into anything by force.

He brought into the world the Kingdom, which could have become the possession of the whole people, but only a smaller part of them paid attention to it; salvation in the nearest perspective for the Jewish people now inevitably turned out to be the lot not of the majority, but of the minority.

This is the tragedy of the Savior's earthly ministry: He could not even publicly name Himself the Messiah, which He truly is, not because people would not have believed Him, but because, on the contrary, they would have believed and immediately tried to place Him at the head of yet another messianic movement growing into an anti-Roman uprising.

They wanted to see Him not as the Messiah He really was, but as one who would satisfy the expectations of a crowd inflamed by religious and political slogans. And a crowd is always aggressive; it hates those who refuse to follow its slogans and meet its expectations, and it hates them all the more when the expectations connected with a potential leader had been greater. The Messiah is rejected, and in His place come those whom He Himself calls ravenous wolves, who are interested in the sheep solely as food.

And the house becomes empty: the Temple which, according to the prophets, was to meet the Messiah, instead of the rejected Messiah admits Roman soldiers, who will not leave one stone upon another. Such is the price of the Kingdom offered and rejected, the price of rejected salvation, equal to destruction.