25 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.” (Matthew 23:25–26 (ESV)
In the context of Matthew 23:13-36, Jesus heralded seven woes against the scribes and the Pharisees. Luke 11:37-54 records an earlier lamentation of six woes. Rather than an oracle from a prophet of God, these woes are an oracle from the God of the prophets; Jesus Christ.
How good are you at keeping up appearances? Keeping up appearances is an idiom or phrase meaning to hide something bad by pretending nothing is wrong. In other words, it means to put on an outward display of behavior in disharmony with one’s true character or personality. In today’s text, Jesus condemned the scribes and Pharisees for such actions.
The Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ day were scrupulous when it came to outward behavior. For example, Jesus said they cleaned the outside of the cup and the plate. What did the Lord mean by this expression?
“Ritual purity was important to the Pharisees, so they washed their vessels as well as themselves in ritual baths. The school of Shammai—the Pharisaic majority in this period—said that the outside of a cup could be clean even if the inside were not; the minority view of Hillel’s followers was that the inside of the cup must be cleansed first. Jesus sides with the school of Hillel on this point, but does this so that he can make a figurative statement about the inside of the heart,” explains commentator Craig Keener.
Jesus’ point was that while the scribes and Pharisees were scrupulous about outside ritual purity, their inner hearts were spiritually filthy. They were full of greed and self-indulgence. Greed (ἁρπαγῆς; harpages) means to rob, plunder and seize another individual’s property. Self-indulgence (ἀκρασίας; akrasias) refers to a lack of self-control.
“These men were harpies, as the Greek original clearly indicates. They were rapacious, greedy and grasping. Jesus undoubtedly has reference to something very definite when he said this, though it is not easy to determine just what it was. Luke 16:14 may be of some help. It shows that the accused were not philanthropists, “lovers of men” but (pardon the word) philargurists, “lovers of money.” They were the kind of people who “devoured widows’ houses” (Mark 12:40; Luke 20:47),” states Dr. William Hendriksen.
“They were guilty of intemperance. They were probably not as conspicuous in this trait as were those coarse materialists, the Sadducees. After all, one can expect scribes and Pharisees to be refined! Yet, even among the scribes and the Pharisees there must have been a generous sprinkling of guzzlers.”
Jesus did not just condemn these hypocrites, but also commanded them to do what was right. The Lord was not teaching a moralistic, therapeutic religion of self-reformation. Rather, He was proclaiming repentance and faith in the One, True God of heaven and earth; Himself. Only through monergistic regeneration by the Holy Spirit can anyone be truly cleansed (John 3:1-8; Titus 3:1-5).
Are you in the habit of keep up religious appearances? For example, do you attend church worship services, read your Bible and serve in some capacity? However, is your heart a heart of stone (Ezekiel 36)?
Have you been born again? Have you received Jesus Christ’s imputed righteousness and been converted by grace alone, through faith alone, and in the person and work of Jesus Christ alone (John 1:12-13; Romans 3:21-26; Ephesians 2:1-10; Philippians 3:1-9)? Only then will you experience truly cleansing; not just on the outside but also on the inside of your soul.
Soli deo Gloria!
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