Jesus Unloads His Seven Woes on the Pharisees and Us – Woe #1

Jesus Unloads His Seven Woes on the Pharisees and Us – Woe #1.

“Woe to you hypocrites and Torah-teachers and Pharisees!” (Matthew 23).

In Matthew 23, Jesus demonstrated the spiritual audacity of taking on the religious leaders of His day. To many of the listeners of His diatribe, His words must have been outrageous. But Jesus had the guts and the nerve to confront the religious establishment, even as He included name-calling and divine judgment onto the heads of all those leaders of the Temple. This indeed took some holy chutzpah. Jesus had what it took to display his tenacious pursuit of biblical righteousness.

“Woe unto you“: What sorrow awaits you; alas for you; distress is headed your way; you’re asking for trouble; grief is coming for you; how unfortunate you are; your destiny will involve nothing but suffering; you’re hopeless.

“Hypocrite“: Pretender; fraud; phony; imposter; play-actor; fake.

Scribe: ‘Men of Letters,’ since the Greek word for scribe is “gramma,” the source for our word “grammar;” religious scholar; teacher of religious law; lawyer; interpreter of Torah; member of Temple leadership; associated with the Pharisees because most of the scribes belonged to the Pharisee party.

Pharisees: A popular religious party operating in 1st century Israel. They were respected for their scholarly knowledge of Scripture and for their interpretation of the written word and oral law. They were highly influential in the local synagogues. They were laymen, not priests, and came from all classes of people. They believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead and eternal life, which was earned by good works according to Mosaic Law. They emphasized extreme detail regarding observance to the Jewish law, which made them separatists from anything non-Jewish. They were committed to righteousness and obeying all of God’s laws, but often found themselves following the letter of the law at the expense of the spirit of the law, blind to the law’s true intent.

The Seven Woes: This number signifies wholeness, perfection, completeness. It is St. Matthew’s favorite number, for example there are seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, forgiveness not 7 but 77 times, there is a natural division of his gospel into seven sections, and now there are seven woes placed upon the religious leaders from Jesus.

On Jesus as the Angry Prophet. With the seven woes in Matthew 23, Jesus was living into His OT prophetic style of communication. And He enjoyed the perfect backdrop for the Woes… the Temple. Isaiah was the best-known prophet in the Hebrew Bible who employed a “woe unto you” confrontation. In Isaiah’s case, he was calling the people of Judah to task for their exploiting of others, their drunkenness, their pride and arrogance, their confusing of moral standards, and their perverting of justice. Jesus used this “woeful” prophetic formula to critique not the people of Israel but the Temple leadership for their mean-spirited hypocrisy and their superficial, self-righteous ambition. There are actually eight woes technically in this Matthew passage, but one of them wasn’t in the original manuscripts, and so scholars say it was added to the gospel after first being written. So this eighth woe (“you devour widows’ houses“) is not considered an official woe of Jesus. He proclaimed seven woes, the perfect number, the complete number. This passage is Jesus’ most famous attack on the scribes and Pharisees, and has been called “the Grand Critique.” He didn’t mince words, He didn’t hold back in His stinging accusations of the Temple leadership. He basically excoriated them, and straightforwardly told them, I’ve had it with you! I’ve lost my patience with you! You are headed for disaster if you keep leading my people astray!

First Woe: (Matthew 23:13). Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites and frauds! Your whole religious system doesn’t open the door to God’s kingdom, but it shuts the door in people’s faces! Your faulty reasoning of the Law has actually ended up making it impossible to obey! Your legalistic view of the Faith keeps you from entering the Kingdom of Heaven, and you have kept others from entering as well. The end result of your religious program is that no one is able to enter the Kingdom, you or anyone else! Your religious system builds walls, not bridges, and you will be judged for this, you pretenders!

The Pharisee in Me… The First Woe:

… Is there any way I am a fraud, a religious pretender, by not following the very list of rules I expect of others?

… Do I mentally make a long list of rules not found in Scripture, for everyone who wants to be a part of God’s kingdom?

… Do I think that these rules must be obeyed if we want to follow Jesus?

… Do I give other believers the impression that they won’t make it to heaven if they fail to obey this long list?

… Do some believers simply give up trying after they attempt to follow this list?

… Am I blindly following the letter of the Law and not the Spirit of it, putting more credence on the literal wording instead of the spiritual intentions?