The offense that starts this confrontation looks almost trivial. Jesus sits down to eat without the ceremonial hand-washing his host expected. The Pharisee's astonishment shows how deeply the ritual had settled into what counted, in his world, as basic decency. Jesus goes straight to what the ritual accomplished and what it failed to accomplish. His answer: 39"inside you are full of greed and wickedness." A scrubbed cup can still be lifted by a hand attached to a heart that was never cleaned. 40"Did not he who made the outside make the inside also?" The God who cares about the surface of a dish cares more about what fills the person holding it.
Then come the woes, three for the Pharisees and three for the lawyers, and every one follows the same pattern, careful religious observance paired with a glaring failure at what it was meant to serve. 42"You tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God." Jesus does not fault the tithing. 42"These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others." The trouble was that precision about garden herbs had replaced any concern for justice and for God himself, the very things the law was meant to grow.
The hardest image comes next. 44"You are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it." Touching a grave made a Jew ceremonially unclean, and an unmarked one meant ordinary people could walk into contamination with no warning. Men so careful about outward purity had themselves become an invisible source of the defilement they said they guarded everyone else against.
A lawyer objects that Jesus is insulting them too, and Jesus presses on. He turns the same charge on them with three more woes. They 46"load people with burdens hard to bear," and never lift a finger to carry any of it. They build tombs for the prophets their ancestors killed, honoring the dead while revealing themselves as heirs of the same violence. And he charges this generation with the blood of every prophet 51"from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah," from the first murder in Genesis to the last one told in the Hebrew Bible, the killing of Zechariah in 2 Chronicles.
The final woe cuts deepest. 52"You have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering." Men trained to guard and teach the way to God had become the obstacle in its path, refusing the door themselves and standing in front of it besides.
The passage ends with a hunt. The scribes and Pharisees press him hard and lie in wait to catch him in something he says. A meal that started with an unwashed hand ends with religious leaders looking for a way to trap the man who has just told them the truth about themselves.
That pattern is available to anyone who has learned to scrub the cup and leave the heart alone. Ask which small matter of precision you guard carefully while justice and the love of God wait, and whether your way of following Jesus has made it easier or harder for someone else to find the door.
Prayer
Father, you made the inside as surely as the outside, and you are not fooled by which one we have cleaned more carefully. Search us for whatever mint and rue we have tithed while neglecting justice and the love of you. Keep us from becoming an obstacle between someone else and the door we are meant to hold open. Cleanse us from the inside first, and let the outside follow. In Jesus' name, amen.