Context No. 3573 of 4322 · Matthew

Matthew 23:13-22: in context

13“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses, and as a pretense you make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation. 14“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for you don’t enter in yourselves, neither do you allow those who are entering in to enter. 15Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel around by sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves. 16“Woe to you, you blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obligated.’ 17You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold? 18And, ‘Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obligated.’ 19You blind fools! For which is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift? 20He therefore who swears by the altar, swears by it and by everything on it. 21He who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who has been living in it. 22He who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by him who sits on it.

Jesus pronounces woes on religious leaders who are blind guides, and one folly he exposes is their twisted system of oaths. They taught that swearing by the temple meant nothing, but swearing by the gold of the temple was binding; swearing by the altar meant nothing, but by the gift on the altar was binding.

It was a scheme for wriggling out of promises, treating the lesser thing as more sacred than the greater. Jesus cuts straight through it: which is greater, the gold or the temple that makes the gold sacred? The altar or the gift on it? By exalting the gold and the gift over the temple and the altar, they had inverted holiness, valuing the money over the God who made it holy in the first place. It is a picture of a religion that has lost its way, splitting hairs over technicalities while missing the weightier truth that all these things are sacred only because of God. When we major on technicalities and minor on God himself, we have become blind guides.

Do I ever get lost in religious technicalities and clever distinctions while missing the greater reality, that everything is holy because it belongs to God?

Sources

Matthew 23:17: "You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?"
Matthew 23:19: "You blind fools! For which is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift?"
Matthew 23:24: "You blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel!"