What did Jesus say about the Pharisees?

284 Afterwards (v. 13) the Lord denounces the scribes and the Pharisees, those religious doctors of the day, putting His finger on the different traits of iniquity which characterised them. They shut up the kingdom of heaven before men, and would neither enter nor let others enter; for religious doctors always oppose the entry of the truth into other hearts. Their life was a life of hypocrisy. They sought to profit through their religious character by the purse of those whose weakness exposed them to their artifices. They made long prayers. They would be proportionately severe. They shewed (v. 15) a prodigious zeal for their religion, but they made their proselytes morally worse than themselves. They proposed the subtleties of casuists and neglected the essential things of the law of God. Exact as to the minutiae of the tithes demanded by the law of Moses, they neglected justice, mercy, and faith, all that which was really important in the eyes of God. They washed the outside, and within they were full of rapine and unrighteousness. Hypocrites! they used to build the tombs of the prophets and were sure that, had they lived in the time of their fathers, they would not have imbrued their hands in the blood of those messengers of God. They testified thus to being sons of their fathers. Well! let them fill up the measure of their fathers.

But if man was silent, it was the Lord's place not merely to question but to pronounce; and in Matthew 23 most solemnly does the Lord utter His sentence upon Israel. It was an address both to the multitude and to the disciples, with woes for Scribes and Pharisees. The Lord fully sanctioned that kind of mingled address for the time, providing, it would appear, not merely for the disciples, but for the remnant in a future day who will have this ambiguous place; believers in Him, on the one hand, yet withal filled, on the other, with Jewish hopes and Jewish associations. This seems to me the reason why our Lord speaks in a manner so remarkably different from that which obtains ordinarily in Scripture. "The scribes," He says, "and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. All, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not. For they bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. But all their works they do to be seen of men." The principle fully applied then, as it will in the latter day; the Church scene coming in meanwhile as a parenthesis. The suitability of such instruction to this gospel of Matthew is also obvious, as indeed here only it is found. Then, again, our souls would shrink from the notion, that what our Lord taught could have merely a passing application. Not so; it has a permanent value for His followers; save only that the special privileges conferred on the Church, which is His body, modify the case, and, concurrently with this, the setting aside meanwhile of the Jewish people and state of things. But as these words applied literally then, so I conceive will it be at a future day. If this be so, it preserves the dignity of the Lord, as the great Prophet and Teacher, in its true place. In the last book of the New Testament we have a similar combination of features, when the Church will have disappeared from the earth; that is, the keeping the commandments of God and having the faith of Jesus. So here, the disciples of Jesus are exhorted to heed what was enjoined by those who sat in Moses' seat — to follow what they taught, not what they did. So far as they brought out God's commandments, it was obligatory. But their practice was to be a beacon, not a guide. Their objects were to be seen of men, pride of place, honour in public and private, high-sounding titles, in open contradiction of Christ and that oft-repeated word of His — "Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall bumble himself shall be exalted." Yet, of course, the disciples had the faith of Jesus.

Next the Lord* launches out woe after woe against the Scribes and Pharisees. They were hypocrites. They shut out the new light of God, while zealous beyond measure for their own thoughts; they undermined conscience by their casuistry, while insisting on the minutest alliteration in ceremonializing; they laboured after external cleanness, while full of rapine and intemperance; and if they could only seem righteously fair without, feared not within to be full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Finally, their monuments in honour of slain prophets and past worthies were rather a testimony to their own relationship, not to the righteous, but to those who murdered them. Their fathers killed the witnesses of God who, while living, condemned them; they, the sons, only built to their memory when there was no longer a present testimony to their conscience, and their sepulchral honours would cast a halo around themselves.

Nothing could exceed the solemnity of this denunciation. The number of woes reminding us of those pronounced in Isaiah 5 and 6, suggests the completeness and finality of the judgment they had brought upon themselves. In general, they declare the blindness, hypocrisy and implacable hatred of those who posed as the religious patterns and leaders of the people. Nothing could be more dreadful. The seven woes follow: First: For shutting up the Kingdom (ver. 13). Second: For false proselyting (ver. 15). Third: For unholy trickery about sacred things (vers. 16-22). Fourth: For punctiliousness about trifles, while regardless of the greatest matters (vers. 23, 24). Fifth: For inward uncleanness with outward scrupulosity (vers. 25, 26). Sixth: Whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones (vers. 27, 28). Seventh: For professed honors paid to martyred prophets while they are plotting further martyrdom of the Greatest of all, thus filling up the iniquity of their fathers and identifying themselves with the shedding of all righteous blood from Abel down. How could they, with such willing-hearted corruption,escape the judgment of hell? Divine love asks the question (vers. 29-36). *{Ver. 14 which occurs in Mark and Luke is omitted here by the editors on the authority of most of the ancient manuscripts.}

The disciples are left by the Lord in the relation with the Jewish chiefs in which they were then found and up to the judicial rejection of the people at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. The Saviour places them in the same category as the multitude. All were subjected to the authority of the scribes and the Pharisees. These were seated in Moses' seat; and one ought to hear them as to injunctions which they drew from the law given by his means. Nevertheless one must carefully guard against following their walk: they were hypocrites who spoke and did not act. They made the law very strict for others and very light for themselves; they loved to appear before men with the forms of piety to acquire a religious reputation; they sought the first places in the synagogues, salutations in the public places, and to be called Rabbi, making themselves esteemed in the eyes of the world by religion.

In that which is now before us disciples are addressed, in view of such a condition of things as what has gone before implies. The multitudes are crowding after Him, so that they tread one upon another, and it was at just such times that the Lord's warning voice was almost certain to be heard, to break the spell of that seductive influence which apparent popularity was so apt to exert over the minds of His real followers. The multitudes were under the sway of the Pharisees, as we know, and their pretentious religiousness helped to maintain them in this place. The Lord warns them against "the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy," and puts them in the light of that coming day when all disguise will be stripped off, and what may have been spoken in privacy in the chamber will be proclaimed openly as on the house-tops.

The scribes and Pharisees had found fault with the disciples for eating bread with unwashen hands, complaining that they did not walk according to the tradition of the elders. (vv. 2 - 5.) To this the Lord gave a threefold answer: first, He charged the Pharisees with hypocrisy, inasmuch as they were satisfied with honouring God with their lips, while their hearts were far from Him; secondly, He declared that worship which was regulated by man's commandments was vain; and thirdly, He told them that they had rejected the commandments of God in order to maintain their own tradition. As an illustration of the last point He cites a special case, and it is in connection with this that the word "Corban" occurs. First, then, the Lord adduces the law of Moses, the word of God - "Honour thy father and thy mother." This command plainly made it obligatory upon the Jews to maintain their parents, if necessary. (See Proverbs 3:9, for a similar use of the word "honour.") But they desired to escape this responsibility, and they devised a pious pretext for doing so. They taught that, if a man devoted his property to God for His service, they were released from the duty of honouring their parents; and consequently they said, "It is Corban" - that is, a gift, or a thing devoted to sacred uses - to excuse themselves from their responsibility. They thus set aside the word of God, through their own tradition, and made the word of God of no effect. Truly, in every age, it is necessary to proclaim that to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams; and that no greater dishonour can be done to God than by the substitution of man's teachings in the place of His commandments.

(Vv. 6-13). In His reply to these men, the Lord exposes the emptiness of their religion that consists in mere outward forms. First, it leaves men mere hypocrites, as proved by Scripture, for Isaiah said of such, "This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." Hypocrisy is pretending to be what we are not. By their religious acts they professed great piety before men, and by their words they professed to reverence God; actually their hearts were far from God. (Isa. 29:13: Ezek. 33:31).

It was, then, part of our Lord's Jewish mission to say that "the scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do" (vers. 2, 3). But there was the careful warning against making the scribes and Pharisees in anywise personal standards of good and evil. "Do not ye after their works; for they say, and do not." They were in themselves beacons, patterns of wrong, not of right (vers. 3-7). Still, not only were the disciples classed with the multitude, but in the very strongest denunciations of these religious guides they were bound as yet by the Lord to acknowledge those who sat in Moses' seat. There they were in fact, and the Lord maintains, instead of dissolving, the obligation to own them and whatever they set forth, not of their own traditions, but from the law. This was to honour God Himself, spite of the hypocrites who only sought man's honour for themselves, and it affords no warrant for false apostles or their self-deceived successors now. For the apostles had no seats like that of Moses; and Christianity is not a system of ordinance or formal observance like the law, but, where real, is the fruit of the Spirit through life in Christ, which is formed and fed by the word of God.

And in spite of their attention to their religious duties they failed to carry out the elementary moral duties. Leaders they were, but, failing to see that “out of the heart” (not from without) proceed evil thoughts and every other evil thing, they became blind leaders of the blind: they easily gave a religious sanction to an act of filial impiety, and made the commandment of God of none effect by their tradition (Matt. 15). They dwelt on relative trifles, devoting themselves more and more to the elaboration of detail, and forgetting the large principles of right without which nothing can be pleasing to God. “Ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy and faith” (Matt. 23:23 ). “If ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless” (Matt. 12:7). Indeed, the Lord rebuked them on the ground of plain common sense and common kindness. “What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out? How much then is a man better than a sheep?” (Matt. 12:11-12).

Even this reviewer owns that the "law was developed to a marvellously and perhaps oppressively minute pitch," though he is bold enough to say "only as a regulation of outward actions." What will the christian reader think when he next hears that "the 'faith of the heart' — the dogma prominently dwelt upon by Paul — was a thing which stood much higher with the Pharisees than this outward law?" Was Paul then in error? or the Lord Jesus? Is the Christian who reads Matthew 3, 9, 12, 15, 23, to believe these scriptures? or should he take the reviewer's word that the wholesale denunciations of scribes and Pharisees have been greatly misunderstood? "There can be absolutely no question on this point, that there were among the genuine Pharisees the most patriotic, the most noble-minded, the most advanced leaders of the party of progress." It would have been more to the point if he could have affirmed with truth that they bowed to God in a just estimate of their sinfulness and fled for refuge to that only name given under heaven whereby we must be saved. Christianity does not deny many and excellent qualities in Pharisees. Mark 10 lets us know how Jesus beheld with love the rich young ruler who had a good conscience as to the law, but turned away in sorrow from Jesus who claimed a self-renunciation and a following of Himself in His path of suffering and shame, which nothing but the mighty power of God's grace can give any soul to take and keep. Does the reviewer believe the Lord's declaration that the tax-gatherers and harlots go into the kingdom of God before those most patriotic, noble-minded, advanced leaders he admires? What is the good of a "party of progress" which deceives the soul in this world and turns you into a deadlier rebel against God's kingdom than the most despised of men and dissolute of women?