If you don’t know me, my name is Ryan Ferguson. I’m one of the pastors here. I’m also a recovering hypocrite. I’m doing my best. I go to HA meetings (Hypocrites Anonymous). HA is not as well known as its cousins AA and NA, but recovery from hypocrisy is as difficult and important as escape from drugs and alcohol.
I say I’m in recovery because sometimes I have relapses. I relapse into hypocrisy. Hypocrisy relapses are when my external actions (what I’m doing) don’t match my internal identity. On the inside, I’m a follower of Jesus. I know I am. That’s who I am, but sometimes that internal identity isn’t always fueling my external living, so for me, relapses can look like this:
I use my communication skills to win arguments even if I know I’m wrong. I fake my way to being right. I can use my personality as an excuse for selfishness and anger that I excuse rather than owning wrong. I craft stories and anecdotes so that I’m the funny and helpful hero. I want people to think of me better than I actually am. I can actually give good counsel and advice to people sitting in front of me while simultaneously knowing I should be taking my own advice. I speak, but I don’t always do. Hi, I’m Ryan, and I’m a recovering hypocrite.
Now, it’s one thing to be in recovery, in the sense that I can admit my propensities and my hypocrisies to God. Because God, in his kindness, reveals those things to me, I can confess them, and he will forgive them. In that confession, he will make me more and more like Jesus. That’s his promise to me so that, as I continue to grow through those confessions, my external actions more and more match and are fueled by my internal identity.
What’s really scary, though, is the reverse hypocrite: the one whose external actions are all wonderfully religious (everything that measures up), but on the inside there’s actually no connection to Jesus at all. They’re an unaware religious hypocrite, maybe the most dangerous hypocrite of them all. So let’s listen to Jesus’s critique of unaware religious hypocrites.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous bloodshed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation” (Matthew 23:27-36).
The scribes and Pharisees are these unaware, religious hypocrites. They’re the religious and social leaders of the day, ruling over the temple and much of the life of the Jewish people.
They were committed, disciplined readers, studiers, and memorizers of God’s Word. They’re not some stereotypical mindless villain. They’re real people with real beliefs. They are seriously committed and seriously unaware. They believe themselves to be right based on their outward actions, but on the inside they have nothing to fuel it or make it authentic.
They’re unaware religious hypocrites, and Jesus gives them a warning: Woe to you! If we consider last week and this week, this is the sixth and seventh time Jesus looks at this group of people and says, “Woe to you.”
We have no simple, singular English word for “woe.” I use a Bible study software that helps me understand ancient languages. One of the things it does is it pronounces words for me. The word “woe,” when Jesus said it, would sound like this in Greek: oooweh. It’s not a noun or a verb. It’s an interjection. It’s like us saying, “Woe! Woe, stop.”
Contained within those two little syllables is all of this thought: alas, how terrible, grief awaits, judgment is near, warning. “Woe” is also a lament. When it’s used, it’s pleading with someone to change, lamenting a condition in front of you. Again, when Jesus says it, he wants them to change direction, to take off the mask of hypocrisy.
The warning that Jesus gives here is not cold or unemotional. This is Jesus at his highest level of emotional language probably recorded in the scriptures, maybe next to his cries on the cross. This is an emotionally invested, intense invitation to these people, and only in one word: woe.
After Jesus warns them, Jesus is going to make an argument against them. He does that by — Jesus will make a claim, provide evidence, draw conclusions, and issue a response. That’s what he does in the text. He’s going to make a claim, provide evidence for his claim, draw conclusions, and then issue a response.
Jesus’s claim is simply what we’ve been talking about: Your external displays don’t match your internal identity. You’re not who you think you are. Your external displays don’t match your internal identity. You’re not who you think you are. You guys are like whitewashed tombs. Your “outward” and “inward” clash.
Where does Jesus get this whitewashed tomb thing? Where does he pull that out of? A little bit of history that I hope will help you: First, I want us to remember what season we’re in in the middle of this story. We’re in the middle of Passover, the biggest and most important holiday in the Jewish calendar.
Research reveals that in Jerusalem, where Jesus is, it normally would be occupied by 30-60,000 people. But during Passover, that number could swell by an additional 100-250,000 people. There were a lot of people flowing into Jerusalem to worship.
Think of it this way: like children on Christmas Eve who are on their best behavior. Everybody coming to Passover would be very careful of the law so that, once they got there, they could have access to Passover and to worship. One rule that connects to what Jesus is saying from the law is found in Numbers 19:16. It says this:
“Whoever in the open field touches someone who was killed with a sword or who died naturally, or touches a human bone or a grave, shall be unclean seven days” (Numbers 19:16).
If you were coming to Passover, you didn’t want to accidentally touch a grave. Otherwise, you were denied access to the temple and worship for seven days. To prevent that from happening, they would whitewash the tombs all around Jerusalem to prevent accidental touching and becoming unclean.
Jesus is standing there, there are whitewashed tombs around them, and he’s saying, “You guys are like that. On the outside, you look great.” There is an awkward beauty to white graves. Even in our culture today, look at a picture of Arlington: perfect white crosses, perfectly aligned. It is horribly beautiful.
You think you’re beautiful, but on the inside, it’s terrible. On the outside, you dress right, appear right, you even speak right. But on the inside, you’re full of hypocrisy and lawlessness, which is a very profound word that Jesus issues against the law leaders, the law experts:
You are lawless. You have no law on the interior, only on the outside. You outwardly proclaim the law with authority, but on the inside you disregard the law and the point of the law. You appear like this spiritually elite, but you’re actually the spiritually fake.
On a higher level, what appears to look like the ones who have access to God, the temple, and worship are actually the ones forbidden access to God, the temple, and worship. Your external displays do not match your inward identity.
Jesus provides evidence for his claim, and it’s kind of like this: Even the good things you do are ultimately selfish. Jesus cites a particular behavior of the scribes and Pharisees. He says this:
“For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets’” (Matthew 23:29b).
As I read this, it took me a little bit to figure out what’s going on. Because at first glance, it’s like, what’s the big deal? They’re doing a good thing. They’re decorating monuments that exist of good people. Or, if someone had died and didn’t have a tomb yet, they were building one for them. That’s great. That’s a good thing. Maybe they really thought of themselves, “Maybe we would have made better choices.” So how is this evidence for Jesus’s claim about “inward” and “outward” not matching?
I’d like you to think of it this way: I want you to imagine that the elders of North Hills Church got together and chose to fund the creation of a sculpture that we were going to place on the outside of our building. Right here, right out on that front sidewalk. That sculpture was going to be of Martin Luther King Jr., and we called a press conference, and we invited all of you here. So the news is here and you’re here as we unveil this statue.
As the chairman of the board of elders, I got up in front of everybody and said, “Listen, we built this because we want to honor a man who did a lot of good during a season of racial upheaval. We also want you to know that the present elders of North Hills Church wouldn’t have acted like any of the elders of churches back then at all. We would have been different. We would’ve done it right.”
How would that go over? Not super well. That’s Jesus’s indictment here.
They’re not building and decorating out of honor for the person. They’re building and decorating so that they can be seen and speak. They’re creating for themselves their own platform, as we might say today. They are managing their image, controlling the narrative by doing a good thing so they can talk about themselves and be seen as really good people.
Remember Jesus’s claim all the way back at the beginning in verse 5:
“They do all their deeds to be seen by others.” (Matthew 23:5a).
They build and decorate so they can be seen and talk about themselves. Jesus is saying, it doesn’t match up. That’s not why you do good things. Your internal and external don’t match. Woe to you. Woe to you!
Jesus claims: Your external displays don’t match your internal identity. He provides evidence: You build and decorate to declare your own moral superiority. Then Jesus draws some really hard conclusions.
Conclusion #1: like fathers, like sons. Like fathers, like sons.
“Thus you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets” (Matthew 23:31).
He just quoted them as saying, “Hey, we’re not like our fathers.” Jesus plays on that and goes, “Because you said that, you’re actually giving us evidence that you’re just like those people.” You’re admitting who you really are. Like fathers, like sons.
Conclusion #2: Jesus says, keep up the family business.
Keep up the family business. This is Jesus, and this is the best way I can describe it (I hope this can be received rightly): It is his most sarcastically holy language.
“Fill up then the measure of your fathers” (Matthew 23:32).
Hey, if you’re the sons of those people that murdered prophets, keep up the family business. If there’s an imaginary quota for religious hypocrites who kill God’s messengers, you guys are it. Keep going, you’re doing great. Fill up the measure of what they didn’t do when they were still alive. There are still more prophets for you to kill.
Jesus, the greatest prophet of them all, is declaring that to them within days of those very people killing yet another of God’s messengers.
Conclusion #3: You are hell-bound serpents.
“You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?” (Matthew 23:33).
I think it’s good for me to repeat something that Peter said last week so that we see Jesus for all he is in Matthew. Last week, Peter mentioned that it’s often the case, it seems, in culture that we want to describe Jesus as “he doesn’t really draw hard lines,” “he’s loving,” “he’s super kind,” like he has a tie-dye T-shirt with a peace sign on it. That’s Jesus. Then you read, “If you are who you are, how are you going to escape going to hell?” Jesus draws some pretty hard lines.
This description, this serpent/snake language, is actually an echo of John the Baptist all the way back at the beginning of Matthew. About two years ago, we started studying this part where John says this about this very group of leaders (the Pharisees and scribes). John says to them,
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’” (Matthew 3:7-9).
“Brood of vipers,” you snakes. As I read through this, I had an odd thought about how often we as people use animals to name-call or give traits to people. So let’s see if you know them:
If you run like a turtle, you’re what? Slow. If you’re like a cow, you are fat. (Thank you to whoever said that. I hope that wasn’t name-calling. That would hurt.) If you act like a weasel… Yeah, shady, sneaky. If you’re like a peacock, you’re proud. If you are like a pig… Dirty. Stink, somebody said, yeah. How about a dove? If you’re like a dove, you’re peaceful. I had somebody in first service over here who was a hunter who said, “Yummy.” Not really what I was looking for. That’s very, very specific.
So when Jesus looks at these guys and says, “You serpents, you brood of vipers,” what’s the fill-in-the-blank for us? What is he saying by righteously name-calling using an animal?
Serpents are rarely positive in the Bible. The first mention of a serpent is not one of the positive snake moments. The serpent in Genesis is the one who tempted Adam and Eve to believe differently than what God said. The serpent was not faithful to God’s people with God’s words. The serpent was not faithful to God’s people with God’s words.
By calling them snakes, brood of vipers, Jesus literally is saying—as Morris writes—that the phrase is actually
“you snakes, you sons of snakes.”
You’re the sons of snakes. Your lineage isn’t what you think it is. You want to be from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but Jesus is saying, that’s not your father. The way you’re acting is from a different line. The serpent, the deceiver, the Satan— that’s where you’re coming from, you sons of snake. You’re not who you think you are. Wake up.
They’re just like their great-great-great-great-grandfathers who killed God’s messengers. They’re no different. Because of that, Jesus says, “You are hell bound.” Your ultimate destination is not what you think. Your destination is not what you think it is. You’re not who you think you are, and you’re not going where you think you’re going.
How will you escape the sentence of separation from God if you’re an unaware religious hypocrite?
This isn’t the first time Jesus has challenged the Pharisees about their place in God’s future kingdom. He’s actually done it twice before. In Matthew 21, Jesus tells two parables, and the conclusion of both parables has to do with the Pharisees’ place in God’s forever kingdom. In the first one, Jesus says this:
“Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matthew 21:31b).
Pharisees, you think you’re the first in line when it comes to God’s forever future kingdom, but I want to let you in on something: The people you think are the worst, they’re in front of you in line because their external actions and their internal identity match.
In the second parable, Jesus says the same thing:
“Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits” (Matthew 21:43).
There’s another echo of John the Baptist: Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. So Jesus is saying to them, “Listen, entering the kingdom is a fruit issue.” The authentic fruit that comes from an internal identity — that’s who gets the kingdom. It’s not people who just look the best and don’t care about the inside. It’s when those two things match.
Jesus goes as far as to say to these religious leaders, who are the caretakers of the law and God’s words, “The kingdom is actually going to be ripped away from you and given to anyone, Jewish or not, whose external actions match their internal identity. It’s going to be ripped away from you. Your ultimate destination is not what you think it is.”
It’s in this moment that we have to admit that many of us have been coming to this church and other churches for a very long time. We are religious people, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that. That’s okay. But we have to look at Jesus here and recognize he gives a brutal indictment to religious hypocrisy. There is no rougher indictment than “how are you going to escape a sentence to hell?” So as religious people, we must beware.
Jesus then gives us his response. With all of this in mind, here’s his response:
Accountability is coming.
Accountability is coming. Jesus says this:
“Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous bloodshed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation” (Matthew 23:34-36).
This is an odd section. There’s a lot going on, so I just want us to notice a couple of things.
One, notice Jesus takes the place of God. In the original language, that “I” is emphatic. It’s kind of like this: Jesus is looking at them and saying, “We’ve been talking about God sending messengers. I’m sending you messengers and wise men and prophets.” That’s a big authoritative statement there. That’s offensive to the religious leaders.
“I’m now the one who’s going to send messengers. I’ll send prophets, those who speak accurately with the authority of God’s words. I’ll send you wise men, those who pursue the understanding of God’s words. I’ll send you scribes, those who will continue to preserve and read God’s word.” More messengers are coming, and Jesus is sending them.
Second, Jesus prophesied the response of the Pharisees and scribes to his new messengers:
“…some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town” (Matthew 23:34b).
Because of hindsight, we can ask Jesus, almost, did that come true? Did his prediction actually come true? When Jesus looks at them and says, “kill and crucify”— I love being in the story of the narrative. I want to know— I’d like to ask Jesus, did you pause after you said “crucify,” and just let it hang there for a second? Here’s why: I discovered in studying this— I didn’t know this. Again, a guy named Morris helped me here. He says this:
“The Jews did not themselves crucify people at this period, but…they may have brought about crucifixions by getting the Romans to perform the deed.”
So Jesus, to Jewish leaders, predicts the manner of his death, and it’s a manner that the Jews didn’t even take part in. They will kill and crucify. The greatest prophet in the history of the world will be dead within days, hanging on a Roman cross at the request of these religious leaders.
But it didn’t stop when Jesus died. The killings, floggings, and persecutions continued after Jesus. We have a record of it in the scriptures. In Acts 6, we discover the murder of a sent wise man. His name was Stephen. Here’s his story:
“Now when [the religious leaders] heard these things they were enraged, and they ground their teeth at [Stephen]. But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’” (Acts 7:54-56).
At that point, did the religious leaders stop and—with any amount of curiosity—ask Stephen, “What do you mean? You see the Son of Man, you see into heaven. Tell us more about that vision. What do we need to do with it?” Did they have any curiosity to figure out what God might be doing? None.
“But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. [Remember that name.] And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And falling to his knees he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ And when he had said this, he fell asleep” (Acts 7:57-60).
“And Saul approved of his execution. And there arose that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem…But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (8:1, 3).
So the persecutions and killings continued, and—in great, ironic grace—Saul the Pharisee (renamed Paul the missionary) actually became one of the sent messengers of God who was flogged in the temple. He wrote this in 2 Corinthians 11:24,
“Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one” (2 Corinthians 11:24).
Five times he was flogged, just like Jesus predicted would happen to people by those leaders. Paul actually became one of those who was persecuted from town to town, just like he said. He will recount it in that very manner in 2 Timothy, talking to his protege, Timothy. He says to Timothy,
“You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra” (2 Timothy 3:10-12).
Jesus’s prediction will come true within this very generation. Jesus will send and the leaders will kill, crucify, and persecute so that accountability accumulates. “So that on you,” Jesus says, “may come all the righteous bloodshed on earth.” Not so that on you may come what you did. You’re going to kill these messengers. Why? For all the righteous blood shed on earth. Not just prophets anymore. It’s accumulating all the murders that have happened. They’re going to fall. What murders?
“…from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation” (Matthew 23:35-36).
I send, you kill, so that on you may come all of these things.
When I hear this part of Jesus’s words — It is, in a way, a silly image, but it’s the way my brain works: The way Jesus is talking is like in a cartoon where you have a snowball start at the top of a mountain. Then somebody pushes it, and it rolls and rolls down the mountain and keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it’s massive at the bottom of the mountain. That’s what Jesus is doing here. It’s accumulating. It’s cumulative.
“We’re now going to talk about all the righteous blood shed on earth. All of it’s going to be handled. I’m going to deal with every one of those murders.” Jesus’s example here, those two guys he mentions, is even cumulative.
If we were to read the Old Testament in the order that the Jews would have read it, we would read in Genesis (the first book) of the murder of Abel. But in their version of the Old Testament, Chronicles comes last, and the last murder in Chronicles is the murder of Zechariah.
Jesus, to these brilliant law teachers, uses even the form of the law to say, “I’m going to handle every murder that’s ever been. Accountability is coming.” Jesus’s “you” here is cumulative. “You and all the people that you represent, all of your fathers and those coming after you who are going to kill my messengers. There will be accountability.”
Jesus warns and laments. Jesus claims the Pharisees and scribes’ external actions don’t match their internal identity. Jesus provides evidence of that: They build and decorate to be seen and speak. Jesus concludes, “You guys are just like your fathers, your sons are snakes, and you have very little chance of escaping a sentence to hell. Accountability is coming.”
Now for us in this room, some couple thousand years later, with no one in this room claiming to be a Pharisee or scribe: What do we do with this story? I want to start with what we don’t do. Just one thing. Here’s what we do not do:
We don’t judge the Pharisees and scribes in the story.
Do you see how awkward that would be? “At least we’re not like them.” Are you tracking with me? If we walk away feeling a little bit better about ourselves because we look at the Pharisees and scribes, when in the actual text itself, Jesus speaks to them about saying, “We’re better than they were,” that’s not the point. Yeah, they’re an example, but again, they were real people. Sincerely committed, sincerely wrong. So what do we do?
I want us to return to Jesus’s original statement at the beginning of the chapter:
“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you” (Matthew 23:2-3a).
That’s crazy in one way. Jesus is admitting, “Hey, as they speak the law, technically, as they give the law, follow along, but not the works they do. Don’t live out the way they live this out.” In Jesus’s words,
“they preach, but do not practice… They do all their deeds to be seen by others” (Matthew 23:3b, 5).
When it comes to the temple and God’s law, listen to what they say. Don’t do what they do. The message being: Jesus really, really wants our preaching and practice to match. That’s the sweet spot. That’s authentic, that’s sincere, that’s pure, that’s good.
How can we figure out if we’re in the sweet spot? I want to offer to you—from, again, a recovering hypocrite—a way to do a personal hypocrisy check. It’s our first response. We’re all going to do a personal hypocrisy check. We’re going to look at ourselves and ask ourselves questions about actions and internal life.
I’m going to offer you the ones that I wrote for myself. You’re different than me. You might have your own questions or observations about hypocrisy. Great. Maybe these will get us started. Maybe one of these will resonate with you.
1. You might be a hypocrite if you easily identify the wrong in others, but can’t remember the last time you identified wrong within yourself. I’m great at this. It’s so easy to say, “That’s wrong.” “Well, that’s wrong.” “Well, that is wrong.” “That’s wrong.” Purchase a mirror, look in it, ask, “What have I done wrong?”
2. You might be a hypocrite if you regularly put yourself in a position to be seen doing good rather than doing good in a place you may not be seen. Just do good somewhere. The audience doesn’t matter.
3. You might be a hypocrite if you do wrong to enforce right. Over the years, if you’ve been around here a bit, more than once in my teaching, I’ve mentioned that my wiring is skewed towards justice (which is often my definition of justice). But even when it’s in a healthy place, to set something right feels so good to me that, to set something right, I can just plow through people. “We have to get this done! It’s right.” It’s hypocritical to move towards enforcing right by doing wrong.
4. You might be a hypocrite if your spiritual success is measured by the spiritual failure of others. Like, “I’m not as bad as they are. Look at what they did. Look at what those people are like. Look at what that group of Christians is like. Look at what they do. I’m not like that.”
5. You might be a hypocrite if yours is the loudest voice testifying to your own spiritual maturity. If I am my best witness about the sincerity of my following Jesus and living righteously, I might need to do a check.
Again, I think our first response is to do a personal hypocrisy check. Where are you on your outward and inward clashing or being in sync? If they clash, what do we do? We check on that inward identity.
If I am a follower of Jesus and I become aware of my hypocrisies, I want to remind us all, it’s God’s kindness that leads us to repentance. So I can look at my own hypocrisies and go, “Lord, I do not want to live that way (again). Please help me. Forgive me for that. Empower me to live with your grace in a different way.” I know I can be forgiven. And with each one of those admissions and confessions, I’m actually being conformed to the image of Jesus. I’m becoming more and more sincere each time God works in my heart and pulls out those hypocrisies.
But maybe you actually question your internal. Like, “Is my confidence in Jesus? Am I actually a Jesus follower? Do I have a sense of who Jesus is that’s giving me power to live rightly on the outside?” If that’s you and you’re like, “I’m sure what I think about Jesus,” then I have a couple of invitations:
One: There are Bibles around here. Take one, go to the index, and find Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They’re four recordings of the life of Jesus, and just read about him. Read through there and just be able to answer, “Who do these people say Jesus is? What’s he like? What does he claim? What kind of guy is he? Do I want to follow somebody like this?” Figure out who he is. That’s one invitation.
Two, if you want to talk to somebody, I’m up here. Come up and find me afterwards, or nudge somebody around that you don’t know and say, “Hey, do you know how I can figure out my internal identity as following Jesus?” If they don’t know the answer, we can find somebody. But read and study and learn who Jesus is and engage with somebody else.
The second thing I want us to do: Jesus’s words also help us do a personal visibility check. This is a big point. “They do all their deeds to be seen by others.” Jesus’s primary critique of the Pharisees and their hypocrisy in this section isn’t the actual things they’re doing. It’s because you want to be seen. So if we go through a section on hypocrisy and don’t wrestle with our version of wanting to be seen, then I think we’ve missed Jesus’s point. Yes, we want to be sincere outward and inward. But part of that is asking, “How much do I live/think about being seen?”
I want to apply this in a very specific way, in a way, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man. But I’m 53 and getting older, and I can be a grumpy old man. So here’s my question, this visibility check:
What would the Pharisees and scribes have done with social media? Man, they would have loved it. Think about them building and decorating tombs, and they all have their Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, all their accounts. They’re building and decorating the monuments. They’re up there building and decorating. Another guy is out there with his cell phone. As they lay the wreath, they all look, smile. “We’re righteous, thank you.” They take that, throw it onto their social media. They write a beautiful paragraph underneath about how much they love and serve Jesus by decorating monuments. Then they hit post. Send.
If Jesus warns us about doing things to be seen— And let me be clear: I’m not saying social media is inherently evil. I’m saying I’m pretty sure that if Jesus was walking among us today and there was a way where I could cultivate a character and person literally in front of hundreds, thousands or more people, I think Jesus might look at everybody and go, “Hey! Just think through why you’re doing that.” That’s all I’m saying, especially when it comes to righteousness.
Doing what we do out of a love for Jesus and throwing it in front to be seen and to be liked and to be shared is an unbelievably scary thing, given Jesus’s indictment of doing righteousness to be seen. I just want to offer that for us to ask ourselves a question. Ask ourselves about hypocrisy, and then ask ourselves, “How much do I live to be seen?”
Then let’s live out Jesus’s own words as the antidote. Jesus actually taught this all the way back in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7. We studied this a long time ago. I just have to simply read Jesus’s words to sum up today.
“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. ‘Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:1-4).
May we be a true, sincere people whose external actions and internal identity match. May we live that out in the real world, not to be seen, but simply out of a love for Jesus, the Great Prophet who died for us. Let’s pray.
Father, this morning in first service, I talked to you about this: It is an odd thing to preach on hypocrisy. It’s so scary. So I pray that your words here would infect me, and that by your kindness you could use a recovering hypocrite to warn and encourage a body of your people. Make us sincere, true, pure, good followers of you, that even in our failings we are quick to run to you in confession and faith because of your great love for us, displayed in the Great Prophet Jesus dying on the cross. We pray this in your name, amen.
