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CHAPTER XXIII.

CHRIST'S DENUNCIATION OF THE PHARISEES.

ACCORDING to Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount was the first public discourse of Jesus to the Jews, and this the last. There is, in some respects, a remarkable resemblance or contrast between the two. As that opened with seven beatitudes, so this closes with seven woes. Verse 14 is omitted by Tischendorf. The beatitudes offer themselves in sounds of perpetual gladness and welcome to those who will come; the woes stand out as sad and awful warnings to those who will not hear. It is remarkable that in enumerating the crimes which made a national existence no longer possible for the Jews, Jesus did not dwell on the vices of the people, but on the spiritual wickedness, the vainglory, hypocrisy, and religious insensibility of their spiritual teachers and guides.

3-12. As teachers of the law, holding the place and reading the precepts of Moses, the Scribes and Pharisees are to be respected; but beyond this, their example and their teachings are to be shunned. They, 4, profess much and do little, and what they do, 5–7, is in order to be seen of men. But do not ye, 8-11, seek these human distinctions, - these titles of honor, Rabbi, Teacher, Father. By Father is not meant the relation of parent to child, but some official title of respect which Jesus would not have his followers assume or apply,—as, e. g. the term Pope, Papa, Father, in the sense in which it is now assumed by the head of the Roman Catholic Church. The expression, "for one is your teacher, and all ye are brethren," strikes directly at the pretended supremacy of any one over the other disciples.

13-34. Some have thought the translation Woe unto you too severe, and have substituted for it, Alas for you. But the former expression comes more nearly to the meaning of the original in its union of severity and pity, and is more in accordance with the whole tone of our Saviour's discourse. Woe unto you, 13, because ye shut up the kingdom of Heaven, i. e. will not yourselves receive my religion, and as religious teachers and guides use your authority to prevent others from receiving it. Woe unto you, 14, because under the pretence of religious services and duties, ye contrive to appropriate the possessions of widows and devour as it were their houses. This verse is omitted by Tischendorf. Woe unto you, because without the vital religious faith through which alone a true convert can be gained, ye compass sea and land to bring one man over a proselyte to your hypocritical and wicked purposes. "A disciple," says Alford, "of hypocrisy merely, neither a sincere heathen nor a sincere Jew, doubly the child of hell, — condemned by the religion which he had left, condemned again by that which he had taken," sincere convert, but an apostate from the old religion, a hypocrite in regard to the new. Mr. Norton supposes that this may refer to Judas, whom the Pharisees had won over to their dark and murderous purposes. Woe unto you, 16– 31 (see also v. 33-36), because ye evade and profane the most sacred religious obligations by your unfounded and bewildering distinctions. Woe unto you, 23, 24, because while punctiliously scrupulous about the slightest observances -the tithing of unimportant herbs-ye omit the weightier matters of the law, viz. righteousness, mercy, and love. Allusion is probably made here to Micah vi. 8: "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love Woe unto mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" you, 25, 26, because ye regard only the outside of the cup and the platter, both in the literal and figurative sense of

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the expression, while within they are full of rapine and excess; yea, woe unto you, 27, because, being thus mindful of the outside alone, ye are like whited sepulchres, fair without, but within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. — Finally, woe unto you, 29-33, because, as the last consummate act of hypocrisy and crime, at the very time that ye are building and adorning the tombs of the prophets, and saying, "if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets," ye by your very words, and by actions which speak more powerfully than words, testify to yourselves that ye are the sons of them who slew the prophets. Go on then, if you will. Since there is no hope of amendment for you, and no room for the establishment of my kingdom except on the ruins of yours, Fill up speedily the measure of your fathers. Complete the work of cruelty and crime which they began, that, in the national overthrow and destruction which must ensue, the time of redemption to my followers from all your cruelties and oppressions may come. O ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, [no longer, as with John the Baptist, iii. 7, "Who hath warned ye to flee from the wrath to come? but] how can ye escape the damnation [or judgment] of hell? Wherefore, or, for this reason, 34, refers to this clause as well as to what goes before. It is as if Jesus had said, If there were any hope of your amendment and co-operation with me, any hope that you would cease to stand in the way of God's kingdom, and to persecute and oppress my disciples, I might even yet bear with you. But since there is no such hope, and no way in which my religion can be established on earth except by the consummation, on your part, of crimes which must soon end in the overthrow of your power and the destruction of your city and nation, therefore, as the only way of shortening those evil days, and hastening the coming of the Son of man, behold, I send unto you prophets and wise men

and scribes, whom ye shall persecute and scourge and murder, so that your measure of iniquity may soon be full, and on you may come every kind of blood-guiltiness that the world has known, all the righteous blood that has been shed from the blood of righteous Abel, unto the blood of the last righteous man, whom ye slew within the very precincts of the temple. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

THE CUMULATIVE GUILT OF A NATION.

We have here stated by Jesus, in its terrible results the slow but constantly progressive power of sin among a people who give themselves up to what is evil. The catalogue becomes constantly darker from generation to generation. Children grow up into the crimes of their parents, and add to them yet other crimes of their own. Partial judgments fall upon them from time to time, and check somewhat the progress of corruption. Prophets and holy men are raised up and sent among them that all who will may yet repent and be saved. But these messengers of God's mercy only aggravate the guilt of those who will not hear. So they, hardened alike by the judgments and mercies of heaven, add to the murderous spirit of their fathers a deeper hypocrisy of their own, and fill up whatever has been left wanting in the measure of crime by those who went before, till they have reached such a point of obduracy and wickedness, that national dissolution and death must ensue, and in that crisis, that day of national retribution, all the crimes which have been accumulating through so many ages, unfolding new depths of iniquity in each successive generation, as they are now consummated in their lives, so also are they fulfilled in the judgments which fall upon them. "The mills of the gods grind late, but they grind clean." justice requires that their reign of iniquity should be ended. When a people, through the slowly accumulating results of

Mercy not less than

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ages of infidelity and sin, are at length ripe for judgment, when the last terrible crisis, so long preparing, has come, and neither the warnings nor the promises of God will move them to turn from their iniquities and live, then mercy and justice alike require that the sorrowful retributions which have been gathering through the whole period of their history, from their earliest to their latest crime, shall fall in ruin on their sinful and devoted heads. The Jews were now reaching this period. They had had their opportunities. But now to them the end of the world, the end of their con or dispensation, was at hand. All that can be done has been done. One thing only waits, the cross of Christ. But except with the few who will hear, that will only deepen their guilt, and hasten the day of vengeance. All efforts in their behalf are in vain. only remains to pronounce their sentence, though it be with tears and with the yearning of an infinite tenderness towards them. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them who are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a bird gathereth her young under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." These were the words of Jesus as he went out of the temple for the last time. And when he departed its glory also departed, and it was left indeed naked and desolate to them. Then was the beginning of that desertion which Josephus in his Wars of the Jews, VI. 5. speaks of as among the omens which preceded the destruction of the temple. "Moreover," he says, "at that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner court of the temple, as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said, that in the first place they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise; and after that, they heard a sound as of a multitude saying, Let us depart hence."

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