Jesus says seven times in this chapter "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees." Six of the seven times he adds the word hypocrites, a word that first described a stage actor playing a part. He begins with a warning to the crowds and the disciples about teachers who 3"preach, but do not practice." Before the woes he tells his own disciples that they have one teacher, and that 11"The greatest among you shall be your servant." The warning has a mirror for everyone listening.
The first woes name the damage done to others. These teachers lock the kingdom's door against people, and they make a convert twice the child of hell they are themselves. The next woes name a loss of proportion. They tithe mint and dill and cumin and neglect 23"justice and mercy and faithfulness." Jesus does not say the tithing was wrong: 23"These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others." The failure is one of priority, 24"straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel."
The next woes go for the heart. They clean the outside of the cup and the plate while the inside is full of greed and self-indulgence. They are 27"like whitewashed tombs." A whitewashed tomb looks clean from the road, and the inside holds death. Jesus is describing what religion becomes when its outward form stops being the honest expression of an inward life and starts standing in for one.
The final woe reaches back across the Scriptures. Jesus names the blood of righteous Abel through the blood of Zechariah (Matthew 23:35). Abel's murder is recorded in Genesis 4, and a Zechariah is killed in the temple court in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22, in the Hebrew Bible's first book and in its last. Jesus spans the whole canon and names the men in front of him as heirs to every drop of righteous blood. Within days they will hand over their own Messiah.
Then the voice that has just called these men serpents breaks into lament. Jesus says Jerusalem, Jerusalem, and he compares himself to a hen gathering her brood under her wings. A hen calling her chicks in from danger is one of the tenderest pictures in Scripture, and he gives it to himself in the same breath as judgment. The same love speaks the woes and the lament. One warns, and one weeps.
The lament ends with a verdict and a promise: 38"your house is left to you desolate," and they will not see him again until they say 39"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." The crowds had shouted those same words over him days earlier as he entered the city (Matthew 21:9). The chapter that exposes religion without transformation points past every whitewashed tomb to the one who comes in the Lord's name.
Read the woes as a test of your own cup. Ask the Lord to show where the outside has been cleaned and the inside left alone, and let him begin with the inside.
Prayer
Father, we know the temptation to keep the outside of the cup clean while the inside goes untouched. Search us, and show us where performance has taken the place of transformation. Thank you that Jesus wept over a city that would not come. Gather us under your wings, and let us say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.