Luke 11:39 Commentary and Bible Study

Jesus says this calmly perhaps, but it is devastating language. How would you like a guest to say this before the meal began? ‘Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.’ You have invited a guest, and you assume that your invitation has earned you a certain amount of respect. Normal etiquette does not allow a guest to speak in this way to their host. But the Lord cared only for truth, not for etiquette. We can be sure that Christ who reads every heart would not have spoken in this way to one who had genuine good will towards him. In fact, it is very likely that the Pharisee started off with a hostile and fault-finding attitude even before he noticed that Christ did not wash his hands. The Lord saw the spirit in which this man invited him. Surely there was a pretence of friendship, while really seeking an opportunity to trap him. That is then matched by the strength of Jesus’ response. He had probably invited Christ to his house with the intention of catching him out or trapping him in his words in some way, but he thought his intentions remained hidden, and he could hide behind the mask of his hospitality. The self-righteous man, the hypocrite, convinces himself that his strategy of focusing on externals and hiding what lies within his heart has been entirely successful. This man was sure that the Lord did not detect his true attitude. But that is exactly what he did detect, and the inner antagonism and cunning that he saw within the man justified this very strong response. As the Lord speaks, he makes a generalisation: ‘Now do ye Pharisees …’. The man is acting as one of a kind in what he does, and though there were exceptions such as Nicodemus, the generalisation was true, and generalisations are perfectly valid and may well be used by God’s people. You ‘make clean the outside of the cup and the platter’: you focus on the part that others can see. There is a blindness associated with self-righteousness that manages to get the relative importance of things completely the wrong way around. Christ, by not washing his hands has mocked this attention to the outside, when the inside which matter so much more is ignored. By not washing, he has said, this is what I count as significant, and the other counts for very little.‘But your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.’ The words are very strong; this was an outright attack on the character of the Pharisees. It reflected on the character of his host. It will be terrible indeed to hear words such as these on the Day of Judgment, because they will be a true assessment of our innermost being, and we will know we can do nothing to change what we are. To hear this judgment now from Christ is an act of mercy, for it tells us the truth about ourselves and there is still time for us to seek the Lord and have him rebuild our lives. Only let us take the Lord’s words very seriously however critical they are. What he says is designed to bring us to repentance.