NOTES for Mat 11:21-22
Jesus' comparison of the cities where He preached with ancient cities known for their looseness and immorality may at first glance seem excessively harsh. But it seems so only at first glance.
It would seem that one cannot compare people who, even if they reject the Messiah, are nevertheless religious and, in their own way within that religiosity, pious, with the immoral, for whom God's commandments are an empty sound. But things are not so simple. Indeed, every sinner who sins openly knows who he is and what he is doing. He may not think he is doing something sinful; he may not understand at all what sin and righteousness are. But he has no doubts or delusions about the essence of what he is doing. If such a person, under the influence of some internal or external factors, decides that what he is doing is sin, he has every chance to change the situation, because he does not mistake sin for righteousness.
That is why, as we can see, Jesus says that if the residents of cities known for their looseness and depravity had seen what the people surrounding Jesus saw, they would have repented of everything and turned back. They were not deceived about themselves. But those who heard Jesus and saw the miracles He performed were being crafty and deceiving themselves. Many of the Pharisees, for example, tried to assure not only themselves but others too that they rejected Jesus and His witness for purely principled reasons, and not at all from a desire to protect their own religious and theological tradition, which was dearer and more important to them than the Messiah and the Kingdom.
Such self-deception became a spiritual dead end. There was no reason to count on quick repentance and conversion here if sinners considered themselves righteous people and defenders of orthodoxy. Hidden sin is always more frightening than obvious sin. It is no accident that Jesus thanks the Father for revealing this to infants: the wise and understanding are too dependent on their tradition, while the "infants" are not burdened by it and perceive everything more simply and clearly.
As we can see, every tradition is spiritually ambivalent: it can help a person on the path into the Kingdom, and it can also hinder him on that path. And if one must choose, it is better to have no tradition at all than to have one that hinders, because no tradition, even the most ancient and profound, is worth more than the Kingdom.