There once was a group who looked like the most blessed of men. God’s favor seemed to rest upon them. They were respected. They were religious. Some of them were rich. Had Bible décor been around in their day, the wall art in their homes may well have framed how they felt and appeared: “Blessed.”
One man, however, looked at this group and saw something different:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! (Matthew 23:13)
Woe. The very tone of the word betrays its meaning. It speaks of sorrow and loss, destruction and undoing, weeping and gnashing of teeth. Jesus began his public ministry in Matthew pronouncing blessings upon his followers (Matthew 5:3–12). Now, near the end, Jesus’s eight Beatitudes find their photonegative in his seven searing Woes (Matthew 23:13–36).
If the Beatitudes sketch a picture of the blessed life, then the Woes do the same for the unblessed life. Woe after woe, Jesus pushes past the surface of worldly comfort and religious respectability to show us the most unblessed of men. As he does so, he pushes past the surface of our own souls as well, asking if our vision of blessedness looks more like the kingdom of heaven or more like this Christless world.
To help us examine ourselves, let’s consider the matter inversely, looking through the lens of Jesus’s woes. If someone wanted to live the unblessed life, what would he do?
1. Cultivate your image.
The scribes and Pharisees paid a great deal of attention to other people’s attention. They lived a curated lifestyle long before social media, patiently cultivating their public image. Nearly everything about them was designed to say something wonderful about them.
Look at their clothing, and you would notice how they made “their phylacteries broad and their fringes long” (Matthew 23:5). These adornments were intended to remind the wearer of God’s law (Numbers 15:38–39; Deuteronomy 11:18). “Look at God,” they said in effect. But the scribes and Pharisees, in making their phylacteries and fringes unmistakably large, said instead, “Look at me looking at God.”
Listen to their conversation, and you would hear the delight they take in “being called rabbi by others” (Matthew 23:7). “Simon” would be an insult, and “Mr. Simon” hardly better. But “Rabbi Simon”? That would be different, distinct, a reason to hold your head high among men.
Pay attention to their conduct, and you would discern how “they do all their deeds to be seen by others” (Matthew 23:5). Their prayer closet is the street corner (Matthew 6:5); their favorite synagogue seat is the first one (Matthew 23:6); their financial gifts are rarely secret (Matthew 6:2). They “outwardly appear righteous to others” (Matthew 23:28), and they love to have it so.
Jesus’s woes against this lifestyle press two questions upon us.
First, how much of your spirituality stays private? A genuine Christian can’t help but let his light shine before others (Matthew 5:16), but that public light radiates from a richly private source. “True religion disposes persons to be much alone in solitary places, for holy meditation and prayer,” Jonathan Edwards writes (Religious Affections, 374). The truly blessed love to follow their Lord into the quiet where no eye sees and no ear hears except their Father’s (Matthew 6:1). They love their secret life with God.
Second, how honest is your public image? The truly poor in spirit do not mind looking so (Matthew 5:3). They do not scruple to publicly plead for mercy or approach Jesus as a lowly little child (Matthew 18:4; 20:30). If only the lost are found, if only the sick are healed, if only the sinners are saved, then they will own just how lost and sick and sinful they are without Christ.
Such people want Jesus to shine as their life’s hero, not them. So, though they know how to receive encouragements and honor, they labor to keep others from thinking more highly of them than they ought.
2. Neglect your soul.
For all the attention the scribes and Pharisees gave to their image, they paid fearfully little attention to their inner self. They adorned their mortal bodies but ignored their immortal souls. They became experts in their reputation but strangers to themselves. And so a widening gulf appeared between their outward life and their inward life. As Jesus puts it, “You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27).
Despite their public religion, the scribes and Pharisees apparently neglected the earnest prayer of David:
Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting! (Psalm 139:23–24)
What might they have seen if they had sincerely prayed like this? Perhaps they would have seen how much they loved the praise of man (Matthew 23:6). Or maybe they would have noticed how they neglected “justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). Or they may have spotted the signs of “greed and self-indulgence” (Matthew 23:25). Or perhaps, even as others called them “rabbi,” they would have heard their conscience call them “hypocrite” (Matthew 23:13).
Again, Jesus’s woes present us with two soul-searching questions.
First, how bothered are you by the sin that dwells within you? How much does your inner twistedness disquiet you, burden you, and send you groaning to the throne of grace? The scribes and Pharisees, it seems, were far more bothered by others’ offenses against them than by their offenses against God. But the blessed feel the opposite. To them, as John Owen writes, indwelling sin is their “greatest burden, sorrow, and trouble” — and mercy is their sweet delight (Works of John Owen, 7:333).
Second, when you think of the worst sinners you know, how readily do you see yourself as fundamentally, terribly like them apart from God’s grace? When the scribes and Pharisees remembered their prophet-slaying ancestors, they lamented, “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets” (Matthew 23:30). But they would have — and in just a few more days, they did.
True believers don’t pretend to know themselves fully, but they see enough to know that only grace keeps them from grievous sin.
Back to the Beatitudes
Just before Jesus issues his first woe, he lays down a principle that distinguishes true blessedness from false: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12). If we embrace the Beatitudes’ poverty of spirit and meekness, purity of heart and mercy, then God will exalt us in the end. But if we reject such lowliness and lift ourselves up now, then a woeful humbling is coming.
With this principle in mind, we might ask what, at bottom, makes the difference between a self-humbling and self-exalting person. Most deeply, what moves us from the Woes to the Beatitudes, from the unblessed life to the blessed one? Nothing less than the reality of God in Christ weighing heavily on our hearts.
If God’s nearness and glory rest lightly upon us, if his presence and approval are negligible factors in our lives, then we will walk the path of the unblessed life. Instead of loving him with all our heart, soul, and mind (Matthew 22:37), we will “love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues” — or whatever particular approval we most crave (Matthew 23:6). We will cultivate our image and neglect our soul.
But if God is our morning sun and evening moon and the air of every hour, then what he promises — both to give to us and be for us — matters more than anything self-exaltation can offer. We will humble ourselves in a hundred ways, both privately and publicly, because we have heard him say (Matthew 5:3–10),
I will comfort you. I will give you all the earth. I will satisfy you. I will lavish mercy upon you. I will show you my glory. I will call you my son. And I will welcome you into my kingdom forever.
So, even if we look like the most unblessed people in the world, a sign will hang on the wall of our hearts, written by the finger of God: “Blessed.”
Desiring God