Matthew 23:29-36

Matthew 23:29-36

Woe to you all, scribes and Pharisees – pretenders – for you all build the tombs of prophets and you decorate the graves of the righteous.  And you say, “If we were in the day of our fathers, we were not being in their community of the blood of the prophets.  Therefore you testify for yourselves that you are sons of the ones who murdered the prophets.  You also make full the measure of your fathers.  Snakes!  Offspring of poisonous serpents!  How shall you all flee from the judgment of Hell?  Because of this, behold!  I send to you all prophets and wise ones and scribes.  Out of them, you will kill and you will crucify.  And out of them you all will flog in your synagogues and pursue from city into city so that all righteous blood – while being violently poured out upon the earth from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you all murdered between the temple and the altar – should come upon you all.  Amen I say to you all, all these things will come upon this generation.

Thoughts for Today

First Thought:

One of Jesus’ favorite exclamations against the religious elite was to call them a “brood of vipers” – or more generically the offspring of poisonous serpents.  Of course, we know who the serpent represents in theological terms: Satan.  Once more in this section of woes we hear Jesus speak about the religious elite as being in league with Satan.  There can hardly be any more scathing of a critique than this.  Of course, this is only fair, for the religious leaders accused Jesus of being in league with Satan, too.  For reference, remember Matthew 12:22-24.  In any case, Jesus is not being polite at all to the religious leaders.  He is calling their character and their motivation into question.

Do you think about Jesus in these terms very often?  Are you shocked to hear Jesus give such a scathing critique of the religious elite?  Why might this be shocking to hear for the people who lived at the time of Jesus?

Second Thought:

Once more, let’s compare this woe to another beatitude.  We know that those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness belong to the kingdom of heaven.  But you will notice something here.  God’s people are persecuted, not persecutors.  That’s the whole point of Jesus’ speech regarding the prophets and those who killed them.  Human beings are natural persecutors.  We persecute the people around us by default.  We laugh at them, make fun of them, yell at them, yell about them, talk about them behind their backs, and many worse things.  We also shouldn’t forget just how much humanity persecuted Jesus, too.  The kingdom of this world is full of persecutors.  The people of the kingdom of God don’t persecute the people around them.

Where do you persecute people around you?  Have you ever been persecuted for the sake of the kingdom?

Third Thought:

 There is a very important undercurrent in this passage.  What Jesus is trying to teach the people around Him is that we all have this ability within us.  As I said above, we are all capable of persecuting people.  But the deep undercurrent is what we do with that information.  Do we own it, admit to it, and struggle against it?  Do we recognize our ability to persecute the people around us?  Or do we deny it and get angry at those who would insinuate that we have a dark side?  Jesus wants us to see our human flaw so that we can be different.  He wants us to see the nature of the world in us so that we will desire inside to be people of the kingdom of God.

Do you recognize your flaws within you?  Are you willing to see your dark side and fight against it?

Passage for Tomorrow: Matthew 23:37-39