Woe unto you

Despite the occasional hospitality shown to the Lord by individual Pharisees, and that not always from the best of motives, our Lord faced determined and harsh opposition from the body of Pharisees as a whole. They resented His popularity with the common people, His ease and authority in teaching, and His refusal to give them the respect to which they thought they were entitled. Our Lord, of course, saw the nefarious influence they had as teachers of the law, and He also saw their immense hypocrisy, and was not afraid to expose them publicly. This only deepened their hatred of Him.

In a series of ‘woes’ which He pronounced upon them, He showed them how well He could see through them. Men saw their public professions of purity and holiness; our Lord saw the inward decay of sinful thoughts and jealousies. As men clean the outside of a dish, but leave the inside dirty, and as men whitewash the outside of the grave, but leave the inside full of decay, so did the Pharisees: their public face of godliness being in huge contrast to their private state. They tithed the minutest of things (herbs, for instance), for this tithing was visible to all. Yet they did not care for the inward relationship of love to God. Moreover, said our Lord, in order to ensure absolute observance of the law of Moses, they added to the burdens of the common people. A man could not work on the Sabbath day, said the law; but to drag a chair through the dust and so make a groove in the earth, they said was to break the Sabbath rest, for you had ‘ploughed’. All these burdens were added to the people, but no attempt was ever made to make it easier for them to keep the law.

Hypocrisy was found everywhere with these Pharisees. According to our Lord, they made huge memorials to Jewish fathers of old, from Abel in the first book of the Jewish scriptures to Zacharias in the last, showing an outward regard for them and their ministry, yet they were just the same as previous generations, willing to kill today’s men of God who rattled their cages. The thrust of our Lord’s teaching is that what we are in private, before God, is what we really are. The public face is but a show. God ‘looks at the heart’, though men cannot.