NOTES for Mat 23:29-39

With each new word, the denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees becomes harsher, and now Christ reproaches them not only for hypocrisy and sinfulness; He accuses the religious leaders of the people of resisting God. Every sin leads away from God, but here sin is made worse by an unwillingness to repent, and enmity with God becomes conscious resistance to His will.

An unwillingness to repent can be covered by pseudo-pious self-deception, when a person does not want not only to admit his own sins but even to see them, while at the same time very much wanting to look respectable. If that is so, then denunciation of other people's sins and outward reverence for righteous people of former years become a very convenient way to show off one's imagined righteousness.

But Christ sees more deeply and directly shows us that both the long-ago crimes themselves and today's loud condemnation of them can be links in one and the same chain. How often His words about the tombs of the prophets and the monuments of the righteous have been remembered in recent years, when the names of the tortured were invoked in vain and their memory was exploited. If there is no true repentance, but only a replacement of it with outward forms, then there is always the danger that, when circumstances change, new Pharisees will again be ready to become persecutors.

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 are we to understand the Savior's words about the house that is now left empty? Judging by the context, He means the events of AD 70, which He foresaw: after the anti-Roman uprising organized primarily by the Zealots, the Romans would suppress it and destroy Jerusalem and the Temple to their foundations. In that case, Christ's words can and must be understood first of all literally: after the terrible devastation, the city and the Temple—or rather, what remained of them, and very little would remain—would indeed be deserted.

There is, however, a second and deeper meaning in the Savior's words. He understands better than anyone that the events of AD 70 would be the consequence of the spiritual choice the people were making during His earthly ministry. He is naturally pleased neither by this choice itself nor by the catastrophe that would follow from it, but He knows that nothing can be done: both the people as a whole and every individual person are free in their choice, and no one can be forced into anything here. He brought into the world the Kingdom, which could have become the possession of the whole people, but only a minority paid attention to it. In the immediate future, salvation for the Jewish people was now inevitably to become the lot not of the majority but of the minority.

Here lies the tragedy of the Savior's earthly ministry. He could not even proclaim publicly that He was the Messiah He truly was—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 that would grow into an anti-Roman uprising. They wanted to see not the Messiah He actually was, but one who would satisfy the expectations of a crowd inflamed by religious and political slogans. A crowd is always aggressive; it hates those who refuse to follow its slogans and meet its expectations, and its hatred is all the greater when its expectations of a potential leader had been greater. The Messiah is rejected, and His place is taken by those whom He Himself calls ravenous wolves, for whom sheep are of interest solely as food.

And the house becomes empty. The Temple, which according to the prophets was meant to receive the Messiah, admits Roman soldiers in place of the rejected Messiah, and they will not leave one stone upon another. Such is the price of the Kingdom offered and rejected, the price of salvation rejected: a price 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.