Today Jesus starts off by sending “woe” to the hypocritical religious leaders. To me, this saying always seems like a Jesus is sending a curse on them. According to Google and Bing woe means great sorrow, grief, misery, pain, deep distress or lamentation over unfortunate circumstances. It’s not a good thing if someone sends pain, distress and grief to you!
Jesus is trying to force the hypocritical religious leaders and folks of false piety to see the reality that they had built up by concentrating their lives on a ridged legal system, on the reduction of God’s living Word to a minimalistic compliance of legal norms. Rather than drawing their life from God’s will as expressed a new each day in the Word of God, they preferred to center their lives on their legalistic interpretation of a law outside of themselves. That law did not touch their heart and soul. It is so easy to make an external sacrifice or offer a few words of a prayer formula and not have to change our heart and soul.
This is the woe that hypocritical false piety creates: a pious pure looking exterior or façade while the inside continues with no change. A mask of holiness that hides an interior heart and soul full of things and values that separate us from God. The end result of being separated from God is woe – sorrow, grief, misery, pain and deep distress. That is what is inside their cup, inside their heart and soul. On top of all that, these hypocritical religious leaders and false pious folks used this system to promote their own importance and demean everyone else. Through the continuance of teaching that system, they were promoting woe in their followers. What a mess we make of our lives and those around us with that system!
What a joy for us that Jesus came to be with us and draw us out of our self-centered relationship with God that can only produce woe into a true relationship with God. Take time this week to look inside your own soul and heart. What is in there? Material things, false values, self-importance, hypocritical piety? Or a true deep relationship with the Father, freeing joy?
Cleanse first the inside of the cup,
so that the outside also may be clean.
Image: https://www.journeyintothewilderness.com/blog/2009/12/matthew-2325-26.html