Woe to You Lawyers
45 One of the lawyers answered him, “Teacher, in saying this you insult us also.” 46 He said, “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load men with burdens that are difficult to carry, and you yourselves won’t even lift one finger to help carry those burdens. 47 Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. 48 So you testify and consent to the works of your fathers. For they killed them, and you build their tombs. 49 Therefore also the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send to them prophets and apostles; and some of them they will kill and persecute, 50 that the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation, 51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary.’ Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. 52 Woe to you lawyers! For you took away the key of knowledge. You didn’t enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in, you hindered.” 53 As he said these things to them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to be terribly angry, and to draw many things out of him, 54 lying in wait for him, and seeking to catch him in something he might say, that they might accuse him.
A specialist points out that the criticism touches him too, and receives three woes of his own.
One of the lawyers answered him, “Teacher, in saying this you insult us also.”
The interruption is this account's own and it is beautifully placed. A man who has been listening to someone else being criticized realizes the argument has reached him, and objects to the manner rather than to the substance. What he says is this is insulting, which is not the same as this is untrue.
The lawyers are the experts in the law — scribes, the men who studied and ruled on the text. They were the intellectual class, and the three woes he gets are about what expertise does when it goes wrong.
He said, “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load men with burdens that are difficult to carry, and you yourselves won’t even lift one finger to help carry those burdens.
The first is about weight applied to other people. The charge is not strictness; it is asymmetry. Men whose learning gave them a hundred ways to manage the rules were placing the full load on people with no such resources, and the finger not lifted is the tell — not even token help.
47 Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. 48 So you testify and consent to the works of your fathers. For they killed them, and you build their tombs.
The second is the strangest, because what they are doing is admirable. They are honoring dead prophets with monuments, and the honoring is turned into evidence. The reasoning is that one party killed and the other tidied up afterward, and between them the job is finished: the prophets are safely commemorated and therefore safely silent. It is always easier to build a tomb for a prophet than to listen to one.
50 that the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation, 51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary.’ Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation.
The two names bracket the Hebrew Scriptures from the first murder Genesis 4:8 to a killing in the temple court recorded near their end 2 Chronicles 24:20–21 — the whole record, first page to last. The generation is not charged with crimes it did not commit but with joining them, and with doing it to the clearest case.
Woe to you lawyers! For you took away the key of knowledge. You didn’t enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in, you hindered.”
The third is the heaviest and it is the one that fits their office exactly. A key is not a door. They held the means of access — the Scriptures, and the training to read them — and the account says they took it away, so that a text meant to open something had been turned into an obstacle.
And the damage is double: they did not go in, and they stopped those who were going. The first is a private loss. The second is what makes it a woe.
53 As he said these things to them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to be terribly angry, and to draw many things out of him, 54 lying in wait for him, and seeking to catch him in something he might say, that they might accuse him.
He leaves a dinner party with a delegation following him, trying to get him to say something usable.
settled What this mark means