Matthew 23:23-33

The Voice

²³ So woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees. You hypocrites! You tithe from your luxuries and your spices, giving away a tenth of your mint, your dill, and your cumin. But you have ignored the essentials of the law: justice, mercy, faithfulness. It is practice of the latter that makes sense of the former. ²⁴ You hypocritical, blind leaders. You spoon a fly from your soup and swallow a camel.

²⁵ Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You remove fine layers of film and dust from the outside of a cup or bowl, but you leave the inside full of greed and covetousness and self-indulgence. ²⁶ You blind Pharisee—can’t you see that if you clean the inside of the cup, the outside will be clean too?

²⁷ Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like a grave that has been whitewashed. You look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside you are full of moldering bones and decaying rot. ²⁸ You appear, at first blush, to be righteous, selfless, and pure; but on the inside you are polluted, sunk in hypocrisy and confusion and lawlessness.

²⁹ Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build monuments to your dead, you mouth pieties over the bodies of prophets, you decorate the graves of your righteous ancestors. ³⁰ And you say, “If we had lived when our forefathers lived, we would have known better—we would not have joined them when they rose up against the prophets.” ³¹ Even when you are preening, you make plain that you descended from those who murdered our prophets. ³² So why don’t you finish what your forefathers started? ³³ You are children of vipers, you belly-dragging snakes. You won’t escape the judgment of hell.