Jesus is about to deliver a series of rebukes on the scribes and Pharisees–they’re getting condemned by God Himself. “Sit on Moses” is like “standing on their shoulders” in that they’re perching themselves onto an authority figure to teach from authority themselves. The problem obviously being they’ve taught wrong in the name of a man God enjoys the personal company of and they don’t even practice what they preach. To say one thing and do another makes one a hypocrite, Jesus’s most frequently used condemnation. They’ve made a million new rules, some of them even contradict each other, as Jesus has previously demonstrated, and thrust them upon the people of Israel. While the original intent for these extra practices may have been to help the people and guide them, over time they kept multiplying and worse, they were never willing to reflect on the value of the rules compared to the difficulty hike that adhering to the faith experienced. The role of teacher is not merely scolding the student for failure, it’s lifting them up, and they’ve ignored the need to do that in favor of their legalistic web of rules.

The actions they prioritize are all performative and status-seeking. Less about earnest faith and love of God and more about who can turn themselves into the most pious spectacle. A phylactery is a black box with a piece of scripture inside that’s worn on the forehead as a sort of strange literal adherence to Deuteronomy 11:18. Fringes are like tassels and they were attached to a Jewish person’s clothes in obedience to Numbers. When Jesus addresses this, He’s not saying that to do these things is wrong for its own sake, He’s saying the MANNER in which they do it is wrong. We can wear a cross necklace as a reminder to ourselves or signal to others. But He was saying that these objects were deliberately large and attention-grabbing. They wanted to be seen and recognized for how religious they are. Our credit does not come from other men but from God. These leaders were benefitting from places of honor and prestige seating in synagogues and these displays were part of how they battles for these positions. Seeking status is the opposite of seeking humility, which is what Jesus actually wants from us. The faith isn’t meant to be turned into a battlefield for our personal glory and you’re completely distracted from God if that’s what you’re getting up to.

Jesus isn’t thrilled with earthly titles either. In a vacuum they’re not bad, but too often the moment one man has a title and another doesn’t, the dynamic between them is damaged. Envy and resentment grow in one, pride and superiority in another. The command to not be called rabbi is delivered to the apostles because they are all brothers and the only teacher among them is Jesus Himself. The apostles previously tried to rank each other and He shut that down and He doesn’t want them trying that again once He’s gone to Heaven. He applies this to “father” as well, which Jesus wants reserved for God the Father. This would’ve been applied back then as it is today with “Founding Fathers” and “Church Fathers”. “But Catholics call their priest father” yeah I had to look into that. So what I found is that the specific use Jesus was referring to would confer some kind of otherworldly reverence to the person. Like how a “guru” is thought to have some extra special mystic ability. The Catholic use is an honorific, like how Japanese add -san or -chan to names to indicate status. “Father” is used in a similar sense as “sir” rather than elevating the target to a position of near-worship. Paul, Peter, and John refer to people under their care as their children, so you’re left to ask “what does that make them then”. “Father” in reference to seniority, knowledge, and experience is acceptable provided we never treat them as anything more than a mortal man with a mundane mortal superior role over us. Again, how the heart handles a title is of much greater importance to Jesus than the existence of the title itself. Jesus even adds “instructor” to the list and says the greatest among you shall be your servant. Taken as a whole, it’s clear that Jesus is EXTREMELY concerned with this lovable band of very human apostles going haywire the moment He isn’t around to rebuke them and REALLY needs to drive it home that the generations of Jewish status chasing ends now. He’s making it absolutely clear that to follow Him and be the best among them is to have humility such that a glorious title isn’t even desirable. Humility over exaltation–we are NOT falling into the traps that the previous generations did, fellas.

Alright. Back to hammering the Pharisees. This is completely my own imagining of the situation, please do not take this as Biblical instruction, but the way the chapter is structed is He’s laying into the Pharisees, suddenly remembers the kind of people He’s leaving in charge, and whips around to make CERTAIN they know the score before going back to wailing on the Pharisees. I found it amusing. The phrase “woe to you” is used 7 times and is a callback to the Old Testament prophets announcing God’s judgement. It will not be lost on them. Hypocrites! They shut the kingdom of God in people’s faces. The exact opposite of their purpose here. A teacher is supposed to guide a student to success, not construct so many obstacles that success is impossible. They travel across the land and see to make new converts but their teaching is so overburdened with error that their spirit is in no better shape than when they were a nonbeliever. This is not a condemnation of mission work or extreme efforts to seek/make converts, but if you can imagine spending $500k to fly to a country and tell them that Jesus was a tapdancing frog, you’ve wasted all your resources just to keep these people in Hell. You’ve not only failed but you went to enormous lengths and expense to do so. Swearing by temple and gold was weird to me. Back in the day, swearing oaths was more common and you would swear the oath on something/someone. The more powerful or sacred the thing you swear your oath on, the more binding the oath was. “Swear on my mother’s life” and whatnot. Israelites weren’t permitted to swear to God, so they’d do the next best thing and swear to holy objects like the temple. Pharisees, establishing some fun stereotypes early on, had set up a system in which some objects could be sworn on for deceptive oaths that the oath maker wouldn’t have to uphold. So if they swore on the temple, they could slither out of it with 50 layers of technicalities they had invented but if they swore on the gold inside the temple, they actually had to do it. But why do Jews hold the money as more valuable than the temple? If it’s the money because it has earthly value, they’re defying God. If the gold is valuable because it’s blessed by the temple, than the temple itself is the more valuable thing. In either case, Jesus already condemned swearing oaths back in Matthew 5. Let your yes be yes. He says their loopholes are pointless anyway because to swear on the temple is to swear by it AND God, who lives in it. So not only have they managed to defeat their own loopholes, but they’ve done a huge blasphemy by treating an oath sworn to God as worthless.

Woe number 4 is up. The Pharisees are excellent at observing hyper specific details and rituals that come from man but completely oblivious to the heart of God and why He established any rules or even humanity to begin with. Without justice, mercy, and faithfulness, this is just hollow ritual for its own sake. “Straining a gnat” is extracting the tiniest little infraction, “swallowing a camel” is letting an enormous error slip past. You might also say “missing the forest for the trees”. The gnat/camel reference was to screens used to keep bugs out of your drinks. A gnat is a very small bug, so that would be an effective screen until you get a mouthful of camel. Woe 5 compares them to dirty dishes. If you cleaned the outside of a mug you left in your garage and immediately drank the contents, you’d regret it. That’s these guys. The outer, unimportant surface is sparkling clean, but the part carrying food (nourishment) is filthy. The law was a means of concealing inward sin with outward piety. Woe 6 takes it a step further to a deeply insulting comparison for the time. They are whitewashed tombs. Painted white to create a pleasant exterior that helps us forget that inside is a very unsettling rotting corpse. A dead body is among the most ceremonially unclean things a Jew could come in contact with and Jesus just told them that’s the content of their hearts. Woe 7 says they build monuments to the prophets their ancestors killed, proclaiming that they would’ve done it better, but admitting they are the sons of murderers. Christ then tells them to live up to their family history and continue to kill those God has sent–finish what your ancestors started.

Quick detour. So when reading scripture, there’s a huge tendency to say “If that had been me, I would’ve done it different”. I wouldn’t deny Christ 3 times. I wouldn’t have taken 30 pieces of silver. I wouldn’t kill the prophets (as the Pharisees are claiming they wouldn’t). I had a friend from the Evangelical church tell me “what a bunch of morons Adam and Eve were to eat the fruit. They had one rule and they broke it”. Bold. Very bold to suggest that YOU would be immune to the temptations of Satan. So, gently, I listed his glaring sins and outright heresies just from the last couple months and asked if it was better to break one rule or many. I make a big deal of Peter and his goofy missteps out of love. I see myself in Peter. You really really want to impress Jesus. Some of us are like children in our faith but not in the loving dependence way but in the “dad dad dad dad dad look, I can do a backflip!!” and then you break your neck kind of way. It’s endearing and speaks to the human nature. I WOULD lock up and say some stupid crap in front of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. I WOULD just blurt out “Jesus I love you but I have no idea what on earth you’re trying to tell me right now”. I would never suggest that I could do it right where our biblical ancestors messed it up. I would be optimistic I wouldn’t, but I wasn’t there. Who can say. Someone reading this study may have been Judas, if not for how late they entered the world. Be glad you were not tested when the consequences for failure were so grave. In matters of history, please extend forgiveness and understanding, even in the most shocking of cases to our ancestors; they did not have the benefit of hindsight and years of history aiding their decision.

We see brood of viper again and I remind the group that this is a condemnation of Pharisees and scribes that He’s tearing a new one in the temple, not a blanket rebuke of the entire Jewish people, which would include all 12 apostles, His mother, and Himself. If you have an issue with a 20th century ethnoreligious group, that’s your business, but the Bible isn’t going to aid that discussion any more than a can of soup will, so look elsewhere.

Lost on the Pharisees is that they stand before the Judge of who goes to hell, so this question is purely rhetorical. They’re done. So He will send more prophets and teachers to spread the new Christian faith, which these Pharisee types will also kill and torment. Jesus lists some other godly servants killed by ungodly men and says that the judgement of God is coming on this generation, which some say was partially fulfilled in 70 AD with the burning of the temple. If you’re inclined to think any of them escaped judgement, I remind you that everyone gets resurrected for judgement. It can be 4000 years from now and THAT generation will still be called to judgement on God’s timeline. You don’t escape justice from someone who lives outside time just because you died. Jerusalem, the town that kills the prophets is a deeply saddening title if you understand that this is GOD’S city full of GOD’S people and they murder everyone He sends them to lift them up. He wanted to protect them and love them but they repeatedly reject Him and invite wrath. A few decades later, Rome is fed up with Israel and the army is deployed into Jerusalem, slaughtering much of the population and tearing the temple down brick by brick.