NOTES for Mat 23:29-39

Today’s passage contains one of the most moving comparisons. The Lord is likened to a bird gathering its young beneath its wings. This comparison goes back to the Old Testament. At the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, when the Spirit of God is described as moving over the waters, a verb is used that describes a bird hovering over its nest. Or take Psalm 62, for example: “In the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice.” This is a metaphor for God’s love for human beings and for the human love for God that He awaits. But against what a terrible background it sounds in this passage: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to her!” People respond to God’s love with malice and murder.

How should one understand the Savior's words about the house that now remains empty? Judging by the context, He has in mind the events of AD 70, which He foresaw, when after the anti-Roman uprising organized first of all by the Zealots, the Romans, having suppressed it, would destroy Jerusalem and the Temple to the ground. In that case Christ's words can and must be understood first of all literally: the city and the Temple, or rather what will remain of them, and very little will remain, will indeed become empty after the terrible defeat.

There is, however, a second and deeper meaning in the Savior's words. He understands better than anyone else that the events of AD 70 will be the consequence of the spiritual choice that the people make during His earthly ministry. Of course, neither this choice itself nor the catastrophe that will follow from it gives Him joy, but He knows that nothing can be done here: the people as a whole, and each concrete person, is free in his choice, and no one can be forced into anything by force.

He brought into the world the Kingdom, which could have become the possession of the whole people, but only a smaller part of them paid attention to it; salvation in the nearest perspective for the Jewish people now inevitably turned out to be the lot not of the majority, but of the minority.

This is the tragedy of the Savior's earthly ministry: He could not even publicly name Himself the Messiah, which He truly is, not because people would not have believed Him, but because, on the contrary, they would have believed and immediately tried to place Him at the head of yet another messianic movement growing into an anti-Roman uprising.

They wanted to see Him not as the Messiah He really was, but as one who would satisfy the expectations of a crowd inflamed by religious and political slogans. And a crowd is always aggressive; it hates those who refuse to follow its slogans and meet its expectations, and it hates them all the more when the expectations connected with a potential leader had been greater. The Messiah is rejected, and in His place come those whom He Himself calls ravenous wolves, who are interested in the sheep solely as food.

And the house becomes empty: the Temple which, according to the prophets, was to meet the Messiah, instead of the rejected Messiah admits Roman soldiers, who will not leave one stone upon another. Such is the price of the Kingdom offered and rejected, the price of rejected salvation, equal to destruction.

The most terrible thing is that the higher a person's calling, the more tragic and painful his falling away, his unbelief, becomes. The Pharisees were religious teachers of God's people, guardians of tradition, law, and Scripture. Jerusalem is "the city of the great King," but it is precisely there that Christ dies. The Jews are the chosen people, "God's own," yet "He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him."

We Christians are also a people chosen by God, children of Abraham by faith, guardians of the Gospel Tradition. Therefore we too walk along the edge of the abyss; we too are in the risk group. At any moment our piety can turn into hypocrisy, conviction in faith into a sense of our own rightness, respect for traditions into legalism. How can we avoid "the leaven of the Pharisees" and still remain God's people? How can we preserve faithfulness to the Gospel without losing Christ?

"Religion is an ecological niche," "religion is a social game." This is how many thoughtful and serious people speak about religion. A game... That is exactly what Jesus calls the Pharisees: devout people who know and fulfill all religious prescriptions, who live solely by this and nothing else: "Actors!" It is not that He condemns acting as such; these people are simply playing at what must not be played at.

However much our life resembles theater, God cannot be part of a performance. That is why this social game is completely unacceptable for Jesus: God is too important and too near to Him for such playacting, first praying for show and then deceiving and humiliating, preaching and then forgetting about God, being honest before Him in the meticulous counting of a tithe from vegetables and then deceiving Him with one's whole life. Perhaps this is our human need: to portray someone, to present ourselves as someone... But the Heavenly Father does not play house. His love is real.