Matthew 23:29-39
This passage shows Jesus at his most ominous – laying down the line in the sand in idyllic prophetic fashion. Many times the prophetic role of the new covenant is misunderstood to be someone who is able to tell the future. Within the Judahite tradition, it is not so.
Prophetic vision is enabling – an opening of the eyes to the lattice of valid paths on earth. Within the superstructure of wisdom literature, one finds a rich tapestry of traditional dramas – movements – courses of action – paths, if you will. The prophet is one who sees these paths and knows them – and so when the prophet witness that you are on one of these paths and do not know where it goes, he tells you – plain and simple – precisely where that path leads. He or she does so as a warning – so that if you are wise you will re-examine your path, re-evaluate where you think it will lead and hopefully turn to the path of righteousness. The prophet speaks, so that illumined with the word of truth you will not stumble, but will follow your course to its due end.
Christ takes on this role as one who heard the voice of God declare his pleasing nature, who was pushed by the Spirit of the Lord into the depths of the desert for 40 days, only to return victorious as Lord over death.
Now he approaches the pharisees and brings up old salty wounds. It is significant here that he is not speaking with the Sadducees, for they would certainly walk around with their tail between their legs at mention of the ‘fathers.’ He speaks to the Pharisees, descendents of the Levites who took control once it had been determined that the Zadokite reinstitution of the temple order had not produced. They were not any purer than the Levites whom they condemned. They had taken foreign wives, disobeying their own standards. Following the prophecy of Malachi all order was restored to the previous hands – the Levites were rewarded for their diligence and liberated to serve as they were first called.
And now Christ repeals that blessing, saying that they should have known – warning them that the righteousness they fabricate still comes at the cost of human life. No doubt this is a subtle intrusion of the nuance that St. Paul sets up – paralleling the hard labor of the Hebrews under Pharaoh with the hard labors that the Pharisees place upon those who hear a voice of God – those whose mere existence threatens the stability of the Pharisaic belief in a single valid revelation of divine will to Moses.
Jesus warns them not to see themselves as having overcome the hard-hearted nature of their forefathers who were at odds with many of the prophets. This is the father’s guilt – the destruction of the prophet who hears the voice of God. Why is this the road to perdition?
For a person to kill a prophet, they first have to deny that they are filled with the spirit of God – they have to declare that a person who claims to be of God is not! This is the prototypical meaning of ‘blasphemy against the Spirit of the Lord’ – and it is older than Christ. Jeremiah faced this grievous sin in his own people when the Lord told him that they were to remain under Babylonian rule and build houses and marry – that the Lord would build them up there.
When Jeremiah approached the people with this contradictory message, they questioned his authority in the Lord – they questioned his spirit and his prophetic calling. His response? They would go to Egypt and they would be bitten by asps who would not be charmed – that is, their knowledge of the laws of Moses would not be enough to heal them of the wounds they would incur in Egypt. There would be no prophet like Moses to bargain with God.
Christ brings the same level of condemnation to the Pharisees, and indeed to Jerusalem. Jesus states that he will send the apostles and wise men in the law – and he knows they will do to them what they will do to him, and what they did to Zechariah.
Ultimately, this is not an anti-Jewish Christ. It is not an anti-Jerusalem Christ. This is a Christ who sees so much need in the world – so many scattered lives. He wants to pull people close to him, protect them and feed them. He feels his kingly duty calling him, but he knows they would rebel.
Because he cannot fulfill this kingly duty, and because the Pharisees are no better than the Sadducees before them, and because Herod is certainly no king, Christ laments – Your house is left to you desolate – without king, without priest, without protection.
Our appropriate response is to weep over the hardness of our human endeavors against the destiny that God wishes to provide.
We should weep over the Jerusalem that we have built, the prophets we have beaten, and the fathers who we believe we are so much better than – when in fact, despite all of our efforts, nothing has really changed.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny