GOSPEL REFLECTION, WEDNESDAY, 21ST WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME, 26 AUGUST 2026

Matthew 23:27-32.  Jesus’ denunciation of the Scribes and Pharisees reaches a peak in this chapter of Matthew.  They are the religious leaders of the time; the Scribes are the religious lawyers, and the Pharisees are the leading religious teachers.  Jesus denounces them in two ways in our reading today.  They are ‘hypocrites,” a term often applied to those who opposed Jesus’ teaching and concentrated in this chapter of the gospel.  They are double-minded, professing one thing but doing another, truly ‘blind guides.’  He denounces them for paying far too much emphasis on the externals of religious practice but little attention to the inner spiritual life both of themselves and of the people they lead.  Jesus’ words are startling!  They are like ‘whitewashed tombs,’ ornamented to look good on the outside but dead and decayed within!  They are ‘hypocrites,’ ‘play actors’ as the word meant in Jesus’ time!  They are ‘snakes, a brood of vipers,’ toxic, poisonous, death-dealing!  Strong words!  We must be clear here; Jesus denounces the religious leaders and teachers of the time, not the ordinary citizens of the people of Israel, and he does so to correct and warn them.  We need to say this, because this chapter of Matthew has been used in the past to feed virulent anti-Semitic hatred of Jewish people in general.

The particular way Jesus uses to denounce the Scribes and Pharisees (‘woe to you…’) is the reverse of the blessings so richly given in the Sermon on the Mount earlier in the gospel (‘blessed are those who…’).  In the Old Testament, the prophets used words to denounce the powerful leaders or those in any kind of religious authority.  Amos uses it twice, Micah once, but Isaiah, in particular, pronounces this denunciation more than twenty times, sometimes at length, throughout his prophetic scripture.  Now here, Jesus, the Prophet of all Prophets, denounces the Scribes and Pharisees in the same way.  The ancestors of the Scribes and Pharisees had prophets killed for doing so, just as they had decided to kill Jesus. 

Jesus’ ‘woe to you’ warnings serve as a reminder for all in leadership within Church or synagogue that over-emphasis on the externals of faith combined with little attention to the inner life of the spirit are denounced by Jesus himself.  Excessive hair-splitting about external religious practice and their over-emphasis exist at the cost of inner spiritual life can occur in any religious community whatever, and so we must all be aware of what Jesus meant by the words of today’s reading.