Today I preached a sermon on Jesus’ Woes against the Pharisees and Lawyers (Luke 11:39–52). This is not an easy text to preach from,. We don’t often know what to do with passages like this in the Gospels. We like the positive stories that focus on God’s love or mercy or grace. We like to think of ourselves as receiving that same love or mercy or grace. But when there are negative stories, filled with rebuke, we read through them quickly and think, “Those people must have been really bad.”
In fact through much of Christian history, we have assumed that the Pharisees were legalistic, hypocritical, self-centered people with a holier-than-thou attitude … nothing like us. But if you actually study the Pharisees, you’ll find that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. We know of several first-century Pharisees like the great Rabbi Hillel who taught God’s people that the Torah could be summed up in the instruction to not do to others what you hate. Or like Rabbi Gamaliel that we read about in Acts who convinces the Sandhedrin not to persecute Christians. Or the Apostle Paul who still identifies himself as a Pharisee at the end of his life (Acts 23:6; 26:5; cf. Philippians 3:5). No one in the early church would have heard the word “Pharisee” and thought it meant legalistic, hypocritical, self-centered people with a holier-than-thou attitude. People would have assumed Jesus was talking about a group of Jews who loved God, loved neighbor, and were committed to the Bible and to living a righteous life.
This is why we have stories like the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9–14). The whole point is that even the worst of the worst, a traitorous tax collector, could be justified by God if he sincerely repents, and even the best of the best, a righteous Pharisee, could miss out on God’s justification if he looks down on others. If you come in with the assumption that Pharisees are legalistic people, very different from us, you just hear this passage as saying legalistic people won’t be justified but we will. We tend to associate ourselves with the good guys in stories and associate people we don’t like with the people we don’t like in stories. And it makes us bad readers of the Bible. But Jesus told this story knowing that his original audience would have viewed the Pharisees more positively and would have taken this as a warning.
And the same is true of the Woes against the Pharisees. If we have in mind these awful people, different from us, then we won’t get much of this passage. On the contrary, if the Pharisees of Jesus’ day were those who were committed to the Bible, to honoring God, to loving others, and to living a righteous life, then might this passage have something to say to those of us today who are committed to the Bible, to honoring God, to loving others, and to living a righteous life? If Jesus had warnings for the leaders of God’s people in his day, might he have warnings for those of us who lead God’s people in our day? If the Pharisees and lawyers needed to repent in the time of Jesus, might we need to repent today?
In this post I want to walk through the passage verse-by-verse and think about how God might want to challenge us.
The Setting: Jesus and Purity (11:37–41)
While he was speaking, a Pharisee invited him to dine with him; so he went in and took his place at the table. The Pharisee was amazed to see that he did not first wash before dinner. (Luke 11:37–38, NRSV)
Our story picks up after Jesus has been teaching in public. A Pharisee hears Jesus teaching about the kingdom being present and about our need to be filled with light rather than darkness, and the Pharisee does what any good person would do – he invites Jesus to dinner. The first thing the Pharisee notices is that Jesus doesn’t do what other people who are passionate about God do. Leviticus had given laws about how to be pure, and most the laws were not about morality but about what you’ve touched and about what you eat. His immediate question is going to be, “Wait, does Jesus really care about purity? Why isn’t he doing what we all do to honor God.” He doesn’t ask the question. He just thinks it, and Jesus addresses him.
Then the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? So give for alms those things that are within; and see, everything will be clean for you.” (11:39–41)
Jesus’ point is that often the things we do to honor God are external things, but God is after something deeper. We might go to church. We might raise our hands in worship. We might pray prayers or sing songs or talk to other Christians or even share the gospel, but these are actions that can be cleaned up easily. What’s on the inside? Is there greed? Is there wickedness? Is there lust for power or for control? Is there anger or envy or deception? Jesus says give all these things away, and then you will be truly pure from the inside out (cf. Mark 7:18–23).
Specifically Jesus is concerned that we might have greed on the inside – you know, the very basis of the American Dream; the very attitude we cultivate in American culture. This is what Jesus warns is on the inside of those who look good on the outside. If Jesus had some things to say about this to the Pharisees, he has a lot more to say to us today. He calls for a true almsgiving – one that includes not only money for the poor but giving all of ourselves to the poor. If we struggle in this area, he has some woes to speak to us.
The First Three Woes (11:42–44)
“But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God; it is these you ought to have practiced, without neglecting the others.” (11:42)
God doesn’t care as much about whether we tithe as about what we do for the poor. Are we agents of justice in the world? Are we agents of God’s love? Often in the church today we are so focused on external things like tithes and building projects and programs, and God wants us to go deeper. The things that Jesus is passionate about in the gospels are often not the things we are passionate about in the church today. Jesus continues:
“Woe to you Pharisees! For you love to have the seat of honor in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces” (11:43).
How many of you feel good about your involvement in church? That is what Jesus is criticizing here. This isn’t criticism of these super elitists out there somewhere. This is a criticism of us who love to do things in the church, who love the praise we get from others for our church involvement. Jesus is hitting where it hurts! If most of what we do for the church is done inside these walls and is done to get us recognition, then woe to us!
“Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without realizing it.” (11:44)
The passage started with the Pharisee thinking Jesus might not be concerned enough about purity. Now Jesus reveals that there is a deeper purity that the Pharisee hasn’t even thought about. Unmarked graves were a problem because the Bible teaches that you become impure if you have touched something that is dead, but it is hard to be sure you are honoring God if you don’t even know where the things are that dishonor God. But Jesus makes the point that if you have greed and wickedness inside you rather than love and justice, you are the thing that causes uncleanness.
People see what it looks like when you follow God, and they think the life you are living is OK, so they do the same and think they are OK. But honoring God goes much deeper than your church involvement and your worship. It must be rooted in an inner disposition to love your enemies and to care for those in need.
The Woes Insult Us Too! (11:45)
At this point a lawyer speaks up, and notice his words:
One of the lawyers answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us too.” (11:45)
Notice how introspective this lawyer is. He doesn’t say, “Thank God I’m not a Pharisee.” He doesn’t say, “Yeah, I guess Simon here is kind of hypocritical.” He says, “Wait, doesn’t this apply to me too?”
Lately I have been thinking about how bad of Bible readers we are. We always compare ourselves with the people who are commended in the story and never with the people who are being criticized. We read this passage and think, “Man, those Pharisees were pretty awful people.” Maybe we even think about people we don’t like and conclude they are the Pharisees of today. Our response is far more arrogant and less humble than the response the lawyer offers.
A friend recently told me that he went to a Bible study on the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. In the parable, the Pharisee thanks God for not making him like the wicked tax collector, and the tax collector simply asks for mercy. Jesus say the tax collector goes home justified rather than the Pharisee. My friend said after the study, the leader prayed and basically thanked God that we’re not like the Pharisees. He missed the message of the passage.
If we read the woes against the Pharisees and feel better about ourselves afterwards, we are misreading them! We should respond to the Woes against the Pharisees as the lawyer does: “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us too.”
Insulting us is exactly what Jesus wants to do. Sometimes we need to be shaken into deeper levels of obedience. So Jesus continues!
Heavy Burdens Hard to Bear (11:46)
And he said, “Woe also to you lawyers! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them.” (11:46)
What is Jesus talking about here? The lawyers were the Bible teachers. They were the ones who would tell the people (who were illiterate), “Here is how the Bible says you should live.” And this process involves a whole lot of interpretation.
The Bible says to wash yourselves or items that have been touched by a bodily discharge or a dead animal, but what if we don’t know what all has touched a person or an item? The lawyers wanted to keep the people safe and so they instructed them to wash in all situations.
The Bible says not to do work on the Sabbath, but what is God going to consider work? The lawyers interpreted that for the people.
And sometimes the Bible says what to do in a specific situation that the lawyers had to determine whether and how to apply in a different situation. They did their best to interpret those things.
The same is true of us. We read the 613 laws of the Old Testament and have to determine what applies in the new covenant and how. What should Christians today do with laws about the Sabbath, about not bearing false witness against your neighbor, about ceremonial washings or Jewish holidays, about sexual purity, about theft or coveting. Some of these we say are to be applied strictly in any situation. Others we say are not.
This is what the lawyers did in Jesus’ day. The rabbis referred to this as binding and loosing. Those who were designated lawyers had the authority to make a decision regarding whether a certain act was permitted or not permitted, whether a person was bound by the law in a certain case or not bound by the law, and the belief was that as lawyers made these declarations on earth, the heavenly council would back up their decisions and make them so. This is what Jesus promises that the disciples will be able to do when he says, “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 18:18, NRSV). Jesus is giving the disciples the authority of lawyers. This passage is about how we determine that the law applies in a modern context.
This doesn’t mean we can go against what the Bible says. It means that the church has a responsibility to determine how the Bible rightly applies in a new context. And we do this all the time. Most Christians today think that we are not bound today by Paul’s instruction that women should not pray or prophesy without a head covering or by his statement that it would be better not to marry. We also tend to be pretty lenient about Jesus’ instructions about wealth or the Old Testament teachings on gluttony. But then we are pretty strict about other issues related to sex and gender, foul language, drinking, political beliefs, work ethic, physical appearances and other things depending on what church we belong to.
In all of this, we as the church are binding and loosing. How are we doing? Would Jesus say to us today, “Woe also to you Christians! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them”?
I think there are a few ways we can tell if this is the case. First, are we sending the message that Jesus’ burden is heavy or light? People are leaving the church in droves right now and even speaking of how they have been hurt by the church. That is a bad sign. Second, are our interpretations loosing the bonds of injustice? Jesus could see a disparity between the rich and the poor that he repeatedly challenges in the Gospel of Luke, including in our passage where he notes that the problem with many of the Bible teachers is that they are filled with greed and wickedness. Is this true of our teachers today? Third, do many of the things we are strict about have to do more with external appearances than with justice and the love of God? Fourth, do our interpretations place ourselves in the seat of honor? Are we stricter on issues we ourselves don’t struggle with and more lenient on the issues we do?
I have a confession to make. Twenty years ago the church where I was now preaching had a female pastor and I told her that I don’t think what she was doing was biblical. I followed the strictest interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul tells Timothy that he does not permit a woman to teach, and I ignored Galatians 3:28, where Paul says there is no male or female in Christ Jesus, or Romans 16:1 where Paul commends a deaconess to the Romans who will be ministering to them on his behalf, or Romans 16:7, where Paul refers to a female apostle. I remember the dinner I had with her and her husband where I loaded them down with a burden hard to bear and did not lift a finger to ease it.
I have another confession to make. A few years later I was the associate pastor of a church in Columbus, and I was asked to come up with a membership curriculum for the church. I decided that if people want to be members of this church, they had to commit to a few things: reading the Bible devotionally every day, attending services every week when possible, and giving 10% of their income to the church. I also added a statement about living a holy life, but I never spelled out what that was, and I did not consider that some of the people in my church lived paycheck to paycheck and could not possibly give 10% of their income to the church. The 10% standard was given to a different people in a different time – a people who weren’t paying taxes in addition to tithes and who lived off the land rather than in a modern monetary system. Some of us today are wealthy enough that we can afford to give far more than 10% and some of us would struggle to put food on the table if we gave 10% of our income. These situations call for us in leadership to lift our finger to reduce the burden on the poor, but I did not do that.
I have a third confession to make. A few years ago I was an associate pastor at another church and someone asked if she could be a member in the church. Someone in leadership raised a concern: this woman lived with a man she was not married to. This person felt that the woman was not committed to holiness and therefore could not become a member of the church. I pointed out that (1) the man was not a Christian himself and did not care what rules we put on her, (2) he was absolutely opposed to getting married, and (3) he was the father of this woman’s child. We had a heated discussion about this situation and eventually it was decided that she could not become a member of the church. We as a church would rather break up the father and mother of a young child or tell the mother she cannot become a member of our church than lift a finger to ease this woman’s burdens. This woman now no longer attends church.
Have I loaded people with burdens hard to bear and not lifted a finger to ease them? Have I “lock[ed] people out of the kingdom of heaven” (to use Matthew’s wording of the final woe that we’ll talk about in a minute)? This passage is not about some hypocritical group of people who lived in a different time and place. This passage is about you and me, and we need to repent!
Building the Tombs of the Prophets (11:47–51)
“Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your ancestors killed. So you are witnesses and approve of the deeds of your ancestors; for they killed them, and you build their tombs.” (11:47–48)
Matthew gives us a little more of what Jesus said here than Luke does. Matthew 23:30–31 (NRSV) says, “You say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets.”
In other words, there have always been two groups within God’s people: those who speak prophetically … and those who oppose that speech. The claim that the lawyers make – that they would not have shed the blood of the prophets like their fathers did – shows that they are sons not of the prophets, but of those who killed the prophets. But Jesus isn’t just being cute with his words here. There is a subtext to this: those who are building the tombs of the prophets are about to kill the greatest prophet of all, showing whose sons they truly are. So Jesus says:
“Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,’ so that this generation may be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation.” (Luke 11:49–51, NRSV)
But these acts of shedding the blood of prophets have continued throughout history. In the 15th century, great Christian thinkers like Jan Hus and Joan of Arc were executed for heresy. In the 16th century, around a thousand people were killed by church leaders for challenging the corrupt church of their day. In the 17th century many Quakers in America were put to death, and in Europe Galileo was put on house arrest until he got sick and died. Even in the 20th century some of the greatest modern prophets like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King were killed by people who didn’t like their message. We might not be burning people at the stake anymore, but how many people have committed suicide because of pressure to conform that was placed on them by the church, and many Christians have become convinced that they are fighting in holy war against people who have a different message about God than they do.
If we are going to repent, we have to lay down our desire to control others. If we are going to speak against people, it needs to be against ourselves and against those who are in power, not against outsiders. We have a tendency as Christians today to judge those that we think we are holier than. Paul calls out the tendency to judge others in Romans 2: “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” (Romans 2:1–2, NRSV)
Or Jesus calls this out in Matthew 7: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:1–3 , NRSV)
Jesus calls out even our anger as consisting of murderous thoughts: “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Matthew 5:21–22, NRSV)
Do you think when Jesus calls out those who would murder the prophets in his day that he doesn’t insult us also? We have to be careful to do what Peter says: “Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.” (1 Peter 2:1, NRSV)
The Key of Knowledge (11:52)
And then we come to the final verse:
“Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.” (11:52)
When we abuse our power as messengers of the gospel, we take away the key of knowledge, and we hinder people from entering.
I am struck by another woe that Matthew records that is not in Luke: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matthew 23:15, NRSV). God forbid that this could be said about us.
The only way we enter the kingdom of God is if we love like God loves. As Jesus said, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14–15, NRSV).
If we ignore Jesus’s teachings about anger and judgment, then woe to us. If we read passages like the Woes against the Pharisees and Lawyers and don’t take the message to heart or if we think it’s about someone else, then woe to us.
The Good News
But there is good news in all this. First John says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8–9, NRSV). In other words, we have two choices before us: we can be like the Pharisee in Luke 18 who voids all his righteousness by looking down on the tax collector, or we can be like the tax collector who beats his breasts and cries, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13, NRSV).
I bring this passage to our attention to call us to beg God for mercy and to change our ways. If we have been focused on externals, let’s ask God to change what’s inside our hearts (Luke 11:39–41). If we have given to the church but not stood up for justice, let’s ask God to help us fight for justice and the love of God (Luke 11:42). If we have focused on the recognition we get in church, let’s ask God to help us do things without recognition (Luke 11:43). If we have caused people to turn away from the kingdom, let’s repentant and ask God to teach us to love like Jesus loves (Luke 11:44, 46–52). This is a lifelong battle. I am still trying to figure out what this looks like. I don’t think I focus on the condition of my heart enough or stand up for justice enough. But God is faithful. If we repent and ask him to do these things in our heart, he will!
