Biblion Bible Commentary
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Woe to You, Blind Guides
Matthew 23:13-24
13 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses, and as a pretense you make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation. · WEB
The first woes: a door shut in people's faces, a convert made worse, oaths engineered to be broken, and tithed herbs.
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" Matthew 23:13.
The refrain runs through the chapter, and woe is not a curse. In the prophets it is the cry made over a disaster, closer to grief than to anger Isaiah 5:8, and the chapter ends in tears over the city.
"You devour widows' houses, and as a pretense you make long prayers" Matthew 23:13. The first charge pairs the most defenseless person in that society with the most respectable religious act, and the pairing is the accusation.
"You shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for you don't enter in yourselves, neither do you allow those who are entering in to enter" Matthew 23:14. This is the worst of them and it is why the keys were mentioned earlier Matthew 16:19. Men holding the door decline to go through and stand in it. Their own loss would be a private tragedy; what makes it a woe is everyone stopped behind them.
"You travel around by sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves" Matthew 23:15. The energy is not in doubt — crossing the sea for a single convert is real devotion. The result is a man twice as bad as his teachers, because a convert takes the system without the inherited restraints, and zeal is not self-correcting.
The fourth woe is the longest and the most technical, and it repays the patience Matthew 23:16–22. A system had grown up grading oaths: swearing by the temple did not bind, swearing by its gold did. The effect is a vocabulary of promises with escape clauses built in, and everyone in the trade knew which was which.
"Which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?" Matthew 23:17. The reasoning is exact. Whatever holiness the gold has, it has from the building; the gift is holy because the altar is. The grading has been run backward — the derived thing rated above the source — and the reason is not hard to find, since gold is the part you can carry. And every oath ends in the same place anyway: he who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who has been living in it Matthew 23:21.
"You tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith" Matthew 23:23. Counting out seed from a kitchen garden is scrupulous beyond anything required, and it is not mocked — you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone. Both stand. What is condemned is a scale of values that can measure a herb and not notice justice.
"You blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel!" Matthew 23:24. The picture is a man filtering his drink through cloth so as not to swallow an insect, and getting a camel down without noticing. The smallest unclean creature and the largest, in one sentence, and it is funny in the way that only exact things are.
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