Matthew 23:29 Commentary and Bible Study

Consistency is difficult for the hypocrite. It is not always possible for him to keep up his act in a realistic way. Christ points out that the scribes and Pharisees inadvertently let slip their true position without realising it. They started out right by seeming to honour the prophets. They repaired their tombs in recognition that they had suffered on account of their faithful witness to God’s truth, many being martyred and paying with their lives. The Pharisees knew this was the right attitude to have towards the righteous ones who had lived before them, and was what the people expected of them as those who claimed to sit in Moses’ seat. But the truth was that it was hypocrisy like theirs that the prophets had been sent to rebuke. They were just as guilty as those who had spilt the blood of the prophets. They were proud men, unclean men, deceitful men, cruel and greedy men. In their minds they created a fiction and imagined that they were quite other than they were. The hypocrite manages to deceive even himself. He gives himself too much credit for the few good things he does, and minimises the bad. But then they slipped up. They said, ‘If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ In their half-hearted effort to distance themselves from those who lived before them – the persecutors of the prophets – they called them ‘our fathers’. That was not just a term of respect towards those who lived before them; it was an identification with them. Respect has its limits, and for Israel there could be no respect for those who made themselves the persecutors of God’s messengers, because Israel was meant to be the people of God. The Pharisees had never repudiated these murderers because they followed in the same tradition. If they had been living at the same time as those prophets, they would have treated exactly as their ancestors did. Their fathers had murdered the prophets; they were soon to murder Christ. They had never seen what a true Israelites was – one who was circumcised in the heart and not just in the flesh. They did not understand what God was doing in making a covenant with nation, and so they regarded every Israelite in the flesh as a true child of God. They did not see that the national covenant did not save, that most in the nation had no real relationship with the Lord, and these murderers of the prophets were outcasts who would never enter heaven. They did not grasp that faith is an individual matter. They would have behaved differently, they believed. They were on God’s side; they were the ones he approved in their generation. This implied a mild criticism of those who persecuted the prophets, but only a very mild one. How different was the attitude of Christ in the verses that follow towards those persecutors.