New Testament in a Year

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.

³⁴ That is why I am sending you prophets and wise men, teachers of breadth and depth and substance. You will kill some of them and crucify others. You will flog others in your synagogues. You will pursue them from town to town. ³⁵ And on your heads, stained through your hands and drenching your clothes, my friends, will be all the righteous blood ever shed on this earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berechiah whom you murdered in the house of the Lord between the sanctuary and the altar. ³⁶ I tell you: this generation will bear the blood of all that has gone before.

³⁷ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You kill the prophets whom God gives you; you stone those God sends you. I have longed to gather your children the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you refuse to be gathered. ³⁸ Surely you can see that God has already removed His blessing from the house of Israel. ³⁹ I tell you this: you will not see Me again until you say, with the psalmist, “Anyone who comes in the name of the Eternal One will be blessed.”^[a]