Matthew 23:13 – 15

The Sorrow of Hypocritical Actions

13 “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.

14 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation.

15 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.

Up to now Jesus has been talking to His disciples, part of the conversation was regarding the scribes and Pharisees. For the rest of the chapter He will be speaking directly to the scribes and Pharisees.

From our studies we know hypocrites are individuals who act like they are something they know they aren't. These Jews knew there pretensions were false and their evasive conversations made this evident.

They refused to accept the teaching of Jesus and John the Baptist, so they in effect shut the doors of the kingdom(church) to others because their actions and teachings kept others from accepting Jesus as their Messiah.

Because of their hypocrisy Jesus pronounces woe upon these scribes and Pharisees eight times in this chapter. Woe means a term of grief or dismay. When spoken by Jesus it means great calamity is in store for those hypocrites.

Devour the homes of widows means to forcibly appropriate the homes or properties of these poor widows who had no means of defending themselves against these powerful rulers of the Jews. After taking advantage of these poor women they would appear in public and pretend to be holy by saying extravagantly long prayers. Even though there is only one Hell, these individuals were worse in the eyes of the judge than many others.

These individuals made great declarations about the importance of converting people of other nations to Judaism. But by pushing their traditions upon the converts they confused them and made their conditions worse than their hypocritical spiritual leaders. So they became worse in condition than if they had ignored the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees.