Matthew 23:1-39

Words in the Temple (23:1-39).

a Exhortation to His disciples and the crowds not to be like the Scribes and Pharisees, but to be doers and not hearers only. In contrast to the Scribes and Pharisees they are to be humble, treating each other as being as good as themselves, acting as servants and not masters (Matthew 23:1).

b Seven woes/alases (compare Matthew 23:37) directed at the Scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23:13).

b A promise to send to the Scribes and Pharisees witnesses, whom they will maltreat and put to death, bringing on themselves inevitable judgment within their generation (Matthew 23:34).

a A wail over what was to happen to Jerusalem with, however, a promise of hope for those who respond (Matthew 23:37).

This is followed by:

Words in the Temple: Exhortation to His Disciples And Indictment of The Scribes and Pharisees (23:1-39).

It is an open question as to whether chapter 23 should be seen as part of the ‘fifth dissertation' made up of Chapter s 23-25 (see introduction), or whether it should be seen as a connecting passage between 19-22 and 24-25 made up of secondary dissertations on their own (compare chapter 11; Matthew 16:17 for similar dissertations). The fact that it forms a separate chiasmus on its own might be seen as favouring the latter view. But if so that demonstrates that it does stand on its own, for it is not included in the previous Section chiasmus. Yet its importance cannot be doubted for it contains Jesus' final verdict on the failure of the Scribes and Pharisees to acknowledge Him, and His indictment of them which explains why they are judged and found wanting. It is an explanation to those who will hear Him as to why the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees is not sufficient (compare Matthew 5:20).

But why should He select out the Scribes and Pharisees? It is because they pre-eminently were looked up to by the people as their Teachers and guides, a task in which they had failed. From the point of view of religious teaching they were the heart of the nation. But by taking on themselves such a status they had therefore also taken on themselves a great responsibility, and the result was that when they went wrong, as they had, they carried the people with them.

Analysis of Chapter 23.

a Exhortation to His disciples and the crowds not to be like the Scribes and Pharisees, but to be doers and not hearers only, and rather to be humble and lowly, treating each other as being as good as themselves (Matthew 23:1).

b Seven woes/alases (compare Matthew 23:37) directed at the Scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23:13).

b A promise to send to the Scribes and Pharisees witnesses, whom they would maltreat and put to death, bringing on themselves inevitable judgment within their generation (Matthew 23:34).

a A wail over what was to happen to Jerusalem with, however, a promise of hope for those who respond (Matthew 23:37).

Note how in ‘a' He speaks to the disciples and the crowds, while in the parallel His final words are addressed to the whole people of Jerusalem. In ‘b' He declares woes/alases on the Scribes and Pharisees, and in the parallel He illustrates why the Scribes and Pharisees are deserving of them because they have and will be responsible for the persecution His messengers.

Many find Jesus' words here difficult because they do not fit in with their picture of Jesus. But there is actually nothing here that Jesus has not said previously. The reason that we are brought to a sudden halt when we read it is because it is all portrayed as spoken at the same time, and therefore seems overwhelming. But that is what it is intended to be. It is God's final break with the old nation.

We are used to His fiercest words coming in short bursts. But we should note in spite of that, that Jesus has in fact continually made clear throughout His teaching, in terms equally as fierce as this, the future that awaits the unbelieving and unresponsive, that is, ‘those who claim but do not do'. There is nothing ‘meek and mild' about His earlier descriptions of what is to come on those who refuse to believe in and respond to His teachings. He has stated that they are fit only to be cast out and trodden under the foot of men (Matthew 5:13); they are in danger of the Gehenna of fire (Matthew 5:22); they will be cast into prison without hope (Matthew 5:26); their whole body will be cast into Gehenna (Matthew 5:29); they are headed for Destruction (Matthew 7:13); they will be cast into the fire (Matthew 7:19); their fall will be great (Matthew 7:27); they will weep and gnash their teeth as they see what they have lost (Matthew 8:12); it will be less tolerable for them in the day of judgment than for even Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:15, compare Matthew 11:21); their souls and bodies will be destroyed in Gehenna (Matthew 10:28); they will remain unforgiven in the world to come (Matthew 12:32); they will be cast into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:42; Matthew 13:50); they will be cast into the eternal fire (Matthew 18:8), the Gehenna of fire (Matthew 18:9); they will be broken and scattered as dust (Matthew 21:44); they will be destroyed (Matthew 22:7). And it will be noted that these warnings are well distributed throughout His ministry and appear imbedded in every large discourse, being especially well represented in the Sermon on the Mount (seven references). It was just that now things were coming to a head.

Furthermore in the light of the above descriptions of judgment He had already previously declared such a doom on the Scribes and Pharisees for His words in Matthew 5:20 can only be seen as themselves clearly guaranteeing their condemnation, unless of course they repented and sought a better righteousness, which they had on the whole shown no signs of doing. And He had even later warned them that they were in grave danger of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit because of their refusal to see the truth that lay behind His miracles, to say nothing of His having declared them to be a part of ‘an evil and adulterous generation' (Matthew 16:4). In fact when we turn to Luke's Gospel we learn from Luke that He had already proclaimed ‘ouai' (woe, alas) against such as these in his equivalent to the Sermon on the Mount (Luke 6:24). Here, therefore, we find Jesus' detailed justification for, and bringing together of, the meaning behind all these previous statements that He has uttered, and it is all the more emphatic in the light of the fact that these men are persuading many who sympathised with them not to listen to the truth as revealed in Jesus. Nothing would have grieved Him more than to see ‘almost disciples' being put off by the activities and words of the Scribes and Pharisees. No wonder that He felt that He had to totally expose them.

Furthermore had we not had what follows we may well have ended up feeling that the Scribes and Pharisees had been a little harshly treated in His previous descriptions of them (Matthew 21:33), for all that they had outwardly appeared to do on the surface was to subject His teaching to criticism. (Although compare how He has previously exposed them in Matthew 6:2; Matthew 6:5; Matthew 6:16; Matthew 7:6; Matthew 7:15; Matthew 15:3; Matthew 15:14).

We should also perhaps notice to who these words were spoken. They were spoken to those rather fanatical Scribes and Pharisees, some of whom were probably to some extent notorious even among the people, who were gathered there with the crowds, and were there with the sole purpose of bringing Jesus down. With the typical fervour of the Middle Easterner their eyes were filled with anger and hate, as they bristled with almost uncontainable fury, trying by every means to discredit Him (passions ran high in Palestine in that era and there would be much more to all this than we find written down in the Gospels). This in itself made it necessary for Him to discredit them, not for His own sake, but for the sake of those who heard them, for He was well aware that soon they would no longer have Him with them, and would themselves have to face up to and combat these same Scribes and Pharisees, for whom they had previously had such huge respect.

But while these Scribes and Pharisees no doubt to some extent represented the majority of their kind, who had after all almost certainly consented to their coming to oppose Jesus, we do know from elsewhere that there were some who were not like them at all. There was Nicodemus (see John 3:1) who was not there, and would not have agreed with their attitude, there was Gamaliel (see Acts 5:33) who was also not there, and of whom we can probably, without putting words on his lips, reasonably say the same, and there were certainly other Pharisees who had recently believed, who were also not there, unless as His followers and supporters (John 11:45). And there were no doubt others. But while these we have mentioned, of whom we only know because of brief references, represented the better type of Pharisee, they were not sufficient to buck the trend, and by their teaching they were still tending to buttress the wrong attitude of the Pharisaic ideas. They still placed too much emphasis on ritual observance. Jesus is not, however, to be seen here as condemning all Scribes and Pharisees without exception, but rather as condemning heir whole system and as especially condemning those who fitted in with His criteria, which sadly made up the large majority. In fact many of those who stood there would, in their bitter zeal for what they believed in, and in their heedlessness of what God really wanted, perish in the invasion of Palestine and the fall of Jerusalem, while others would come through it very much changed.

We must remember that most of what we know of the Pharisees at this period, apart from what is found in the Gospels, is from later external sources. It is found in the descriptions given of Pharisees by the later Rabbis, which were undoubtedly biased in their own favour. And yet even there a good majority of the Pharisees came under scathing criticism by the Scribes for their folly, and were at times described in similar terms to these used here by Jesus. The other source was the writings of Josephus, and he too tended to favour them because he had once considered becoming a Pharisee, and we must always remember when we read Josephus that he wrote in order to put Judaism in the best light in the eyes of his Roman master. Nor must we see the later Rabbis as necessarily being similar to these men, for the later Rabbis were inevitably humbled, at least for a time, by what had happened to Jerusalem, and had to rethink their position and strive to build up a new foundation for Judaism. That would undoubtedly have given them a new perspective and a new zeal, accompanied by a greater sense of responsibility. The acceptance of the people had suddenly become crucial. However, even then we must note that many of them would also evince a similar hatred towards Christians. Nevertheless, even so, to some extent their sufferings would have purged them of some of the worst qualities revealed here. And they had also learned very forcefully that their hopes of God's deliverance, resulting from their fanatical observance of the covenant, had not come to fruition. Clearly a new and more dedicated approach was necessary. (There is nothing like a disaster for forcing a rethink. Compare how the Reformation in Europe resulted in a rethink by the Catholic church resulting in the counter-Reformation and a considerable cleaning up of the worst excesses in the church, even if it was only partially satisfactory. And there is no doubt that most Catholics today who know of the mediaeval excesses of Alexander VI and Julius II would equally condemn their behaviour, even if they do make excuses for them and for dogmatic reasons do not reject them completely).

Nor would we be correct to see in Jesus' demeanour here an unrelenting condemnation of even these men. We must see Him as aware of the crisis that was about to come on Him, and on them, and as rather taking this last opportunity of making His final desperate plea to these hardened men, as He spoke to them with prophetic fervour. For ‘ouai' (woe, alas) can equally as well betoken words spoken from a broken heart, as from a remorseless one. Furthermore we must remember that people expected orators to speak forcefully to each other in those days, and certainly expected such forcefulness from a prophet. There is nothing here, however much His words shocked them, that would have caused a frown about the way in which He said them. They expected prophets to speak like this.

Nor must we judge His words by our own reactions. He spoke as the sinless One Who would one day judge all the world from His throne of glory (Matthew 25:31), not as a hurt sinner, upset and disoriented. And we can be sure that He Who would later calmly pray under even greater pressure, ‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing' (Luke 23:34), and would bend in mercy, even on the cross, towards a repentant evildoer who had previously cursed Him (Matthew 27:44; Mark 15:32, compared with Luke 23:42), would also have in His heart, even while He spoke these words, a yearning that some of even these might repent before it was too late. So all in all there are sound reasons for Jesus speaking as He did here.

A further question that does arise for us is as to whether we are to see chapter 23 as a finalising of the section from Matthew 21:1 onward (compare Matthew 21:9 with Matthew 23:39, and the portrayal of the failing Temple (Matthew 21:12), and the warning that followed (Matthew 21:18), with the picture of its final destruction in Matthew 23:37), or whether we are to see it as a part of the ‘final discourse' seen as consisting of 23-25, all of which consists of judgment one way or another. The chiastic structure suggests that it rather lies between them both as a kind of connecting link, leading from one to the other. It can both be seen as a final vivid comment on the attempts by the Jewish leaders to bring Him down revealed in Matthew 19:1 to Matthew 22:46, and why they had done it, and as a necessary explanation for the descriptions that will follow in 24-25. It can be seen as explaining what lies at the heart of the first, and what it is that will trigger the second. For there can be no question that without chapter 23 Chapter s 24-25 in Matthew would come as something of an unexpected shock. Mark on the other hand has prepared for it in Mark 11 by carefully indicating the connection between the withered fig tree and the condition of the Temple, resulting in the necessity for its final destruction. But Mark is mainly writing to Gentiles to whom the Temple was not precious. Matthew's Jewish Christian readers would be reeling at the thought of the Temple being destroyed and would require a much fuller explanation, and it is therefore given here in the revelation in Matthew 23:13 which reveals that the very men to whom the Jews looked as the cream of their religion were on the whole totally rotten within (like the fig tree).