Wednesday in the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time, August 28, 2024

Matthew 23, 27-32

Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth. Even so, on the outside you appear righteous, but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You build the tombs of the Prophets and adorn the memorials of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have joined them in shedding the Prophets’ blood.’ Thus you bear witness against yourselves that you are the children of those who murdered the Prophets; now fill up what your ancestors measured out!”

Today’s Gospel Reading continues the Lord’s condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees of which we first read on Monday.  St. Matthew gives a thorough account of it, and this would have consoled the Galilean Christians for whom he wrote and who were suffering bitter persecution at their hands.  It is also profitable for us today to be reminded of the reality and severity of the Lord’s wrath against those who turn God’s word against those who believe in it.  We might find such people today in leadership positions in the Church, but unbelievers who try to quote Scripture (usually out of context) in order to harass Christians also fill the ranks of today’s scribes and Pharisees.

“You hypocrites.”  That is, You godless ones.  The Greek Septuagint translates the Hebrew word kha-nef — “godless” — as ὑποκριτής, which we render in English as “hypocrite” (for example, in Job 34, 30).  The Pharisees, who preferred the Septuagint to the Hebrew edition of the Scriptures, knew very well what the Lord meant by calling them that.  They were “godless” inasmuch as the love and worship of God had nothing to do with their enforcement of the Law as they saw it.  Indeed, this is what they worshipped, not Almighty God.

“You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.”  In the rather antiseptic culture in the West today, the horror the Lord describes barely registers, but in Israel and many other places at the time and for centuries afterwards it was not at all uncommon to some across unburied corpses decaying on the roadside or in the fields or hanging on trees or crosses, with carrion tearing at it and clouds of insects buzzing at it.  Nothing more vile or sickening can be imagined, and the Lord describes the hearts of the scribes and Pharisees to this loathsomeness.  Such is the reality of those who lead God’s people astray.

“If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have joined them in shedding the Prophets’ blood.”  In order to understand why the Lord reacts as he does to these words we must note that the scribes and Pharisees do not condemn the crimes of their ancestors.  In fact, by not cutting themselves off from their ancestors (in the way a father might disinherit his child), they take on the crimes they committed, for, to the Hebrew mind, the ancestor lived on in his or her descendants in a very real way: a man was his father and grandfather, going back through the generations.  Thus, Jesus is the son of David.  And so without renouncing their ancestors, those who built the tombs of the Prophets whom they had killed act in solidarity with them, as their killers.  Truly, they “filled up” what their ancestors “measured out”.

The Lord does not speak with such vehemence against the Roman occupiers as he does against the Scribes and Pharisees of his own people.  It is a sign of how his wrath will blaze, one day, more against the God’s enemies who are within the Church than of those persecutors outside of it.