Lord, we are blind to the actual condition of our own hearts. We are powerless to change them as we discover that condition, but we believe, like David did that, you can create in us clean hearts and we believe, like so many before us have believed, that you do so when your spirit works through your word. So we present our hearts to you afresh, asking that you would do a miracle. And we pray this in your son Jesus's name. Amen.
It is our tradition when we begin lent, which we did on Ash Wednesday, to engage with Psalm 51. We prayed it on Wednesday night. It's a Psalm of David. In verse 10, David prays the following, he prays, "Create in me a clean heart, Oh God." King David had the power to command the armies of Israel, but he did not have the power to command or change his own heart. Heart change, the King learned, required an act of God. Our whole sermon series this winter could be seen as a commentary on David's prayer. We too are admitting that our hearts need to be made clean and we're admitting that we can't do that on our own. So we're spending this winter putting our small and wiry and recalcitrant hearts before God's tireless great and immovable heart. We're asking that by seeing his heart, that somehow he would then graciously begin to heal and reshape our own.
So far, we've gazed at a few vistas or we've seen a few aspects of our Lord's heart. Two weeks ago, we looked and we saw that his heart is gentle and lowly. It's not brash and proud. Then, last week when we looked at it again, we saw that it comforts. It's a heart that doesn't remain cold or indifferent, but it moves to comfort, gentle, meek, humble, lowly comforting, surely. This is a heart you would want to run to. Today, however, we turn to yet another vista of Jesus's heart are it's a vista that's revealed like bolts of lightning all across Matthew 23. It's a vista that at first may confuse us. Today, we need to look at the anger within Jesus's heart.
Turn to Matthew 23. Here, Jesus rebukes the Scribes and Pharisees seven times. Therefore, this passage is known by many as the seven woes, for he begins each rebuke with, "Woe to you." He ends these seven rebukes, or he comes to his climax with this condemnatory sentence, "You serpents, you brood of vipers, how're you to escape being sentenced to hell?" When we watch Jesus across the span of his ministry, we see that he gets angry. We see everything from slight irritation to outright indignation. So does this create a problem for us? Is it a contradiction to say that he's gentle and he's lowly and he comforts, and at the same time turned to him, condemning the Pharisees to a sentence that surely he means hell? Can a heartbeat gentle and humble, and also be angry?
Several years ago, I was part of a large dinner of graduate students. We were from different countries, we had diverse backgrounds and we were studying very different things. The conversation turned upon religion and then got specifically onto the subject of Christianity. A sharp, young woman spoke up and shared that she loved the parts of the Bible that spoke of Jesus's love, but she found those parts of the Bible that spoke of anger to be an anathema. She found that the expressions of anger from a God were vestiges of a pre-modern violent era and had no business in modern religion. She saw an irreconcilable contradiction between a loving God and an angry God. Perhaps, she raises questions that lurk in your own hearts and minds. How do we reconcile his gentle and comforting heart with what we see in Matthew 23?
If we were to reconcile Jesus' love with his anger, well, then a number of other questions arise for us: what good does looking at his angry heart do for you? Does gazing at God's angry heart instruct, guide, or heal us? How does his angry heart heal and reshape our own? It is with these questions in mind that we have to look more closely at Matthew 23. When we look at this passage, we need to try to draw out what Jesus's anger reveals more deeply about his heart, about who he is, and then ask how this is meant to affect us deeply and personally.
So the first observation I want to make is simply this: anger is not Jesus's nature, but it arises naturally from his love. Anger is not our Lord's nature, but it arises naturally and properly from his love. There are two pitfalls on either side of a proper use of anger. Pitfall one is what you might call the inherently angry man. This is a man who's always mad, irritable, and upset. He's always on edge, easily provoked and one often wonders if this person even knows why they're angry, they just are. This type of person is dangerous to be around. They will hurt you. But on the other end of the spectrum, it's the person who's not inherently angry, but who's indifferent to anger altogether. This is the person that remains unmoved when they should be outraged. They're either blind to moral standards or they're too cowardly to speak up. This person is dangerous to be around as well because while they won't hurt you by what they say or do, they will let you down by what they don't say or don't do.
Jesus is neither are these. He is not inherently angry, nor is he indifferent to that which should make a sensible person mad. Jesus's anger rather is the natural movement of his heart when that which he loves is threatened. So this is how we're defining Jesus's anger. Jesus's anger is the natural movement of his heart when that which he loves is threatened. Like a gentle and doting lioness who suddenly reveals her fangs and growls when a hyena approaches her cubs, Jesus gets mad when what he loves is threatened. Now, let me show you this in our text because what this means is that beneath Jesus's anger, we should find a different type of disposition, the disposition that is loving, that is gentle, that is merciful. In other words, at his core, he is not hateful and wrathful.
Let me show you where we see this in our passage. So as I mentioned, Matthew 23 is a tour de force of a verbal assault on the Pharisees. Seven times, Jesus rebukes them. But when it ends, when things start to cool, in verse 37, Jesus takes in the larger scene and he says the following –and here we see something deeper going on, deeper than anger in his heart. Jesus says, "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it, how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings? And you are not willing." Jesus, who in one moment is bursting forth with rebukes steps back and says, "My anger is filled with pity because I long to gather you the way a hen gathers her chicks."
In a similar scene in Luke, we're actually told that Jesus weeps at this moment, "And when he drew near to the city and saw it, he wept over it saying, 'Would that you Jerusalem, even you had known on this day, the things that make for peace?'" So this is important that you feel this note of pity and remorse coming after the heat, after the rebukes. Jesus's heart is not, by nature, angry. Anger is not what pleases him. It is not his first and deepest reaction to you, rather anger naturally arises when what Jesus loves is threatened, whether that is his people, his father's purposes or his father's honor. When those things are threatened, he has a proper morally calibrated reaction we call anger.
Therefore, we can answer at least one of our questions. It is not correct to say that Jesus's anger is incompatible with his love. The two are not contradictions, but in fact, they rise and fall together. The more Jesus loves the world his father has created, the more he loves the people his father has created, and the more he loves his father, the greater his anger must be towards that, which threatens these loves. So that's the first point. Jesus is not, by nature, an angry man, but he in such a proper way that anger naturally arises when that which he loves is threatened. Now, we need to be careful at this point. We've essentially etched out a place where we can say that anger is okay. It's actually morally appropriate. But as you know and I know, anger is very easy to mishandle. So this does not mean that all anger is good, nor that most anger is good.
So we need to focus in at this point now and ask a second question, what exactly, what more specifically is making Jesus angry in this scene? What's causing it? You might think of anger as a smokestack, a big column of smoke rising in the sky that you see from miles away when you're driving down the highway. So you see this column of smoke and you wonder, is this a bad thing or a good thing? If it's simply smoke coming from a well-contained brush fire on a farm, it's perfectly fine. But if it's smoke coming from someone's home, going up in flames, it's a disaster. So if anger is a column of smoke, if the actual emotion you're seeing is a column of smoke, in order to ask or know if it's okay, you have to trace that smoke down to what it's coming from. We have to ask, what is burning when Jesus gets mad? So if we trace, if we go down the column of smoke, what is causing it in this passage? What specifically is Jesus mad about?
I was going to tell you the answer, but then I'm going to draw it out. He's mad at abuses of power. So just keep that in the back of your head, but I'm going to walk you to this answer. In Matthew 23, Jesus is not addressing everybody, but there's a lot of people around him. He's got crowds around him, he has his disciples with him and he's in the precincts of the temple. It's just a few days before Passover, so Jerusalem is packed. Since he's arrived in town in what we call the triumphal entry, he has been in a verbal duel with the Pharisees and it culminates, in Matthew 23, with seven unanswered rebukes. So Jesus is speaking to a specific audience, excuse me, he's speaking to a specific interlocutor, the Pharisees, and Scribes, with a large audience to listen in.
So in verse 23:13, we read, "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees." So we need to now ask, don't get ahead of me and read yet. We need to now ask, what exactly, who exactly are they Scribes and Pharisees? The Scribes and Pharisees are self-appointed leaders in Israel. They're the experts in the law. They were set up almost as an academic guild to teach the people how to apply the law of Moses in all the specific areas of their life. So they were people with authority, but they weren't just people with religious authority. In the ancient world, in particular, in the Judaism of Jesus's day, there was no separation between religion and economics and politics and private life. They all were wrapped together and they emanated from the revelation God had given to his people through Moses.
So the Temple would be like the White House, the US Capitol and the Supreme Court, combined into a single center of power. The scriptures these Scribes and Pharisees would have been handling would be akin to taking our Bible and the US constitution and combining them. So this is important because it lets us know that the Scribes and Pharisees were the cultural gatekeepers. They had great power and great authority, and therefore, they had greater responsibility. So this is who Jesus is addressing in Matthew 23. Now, I want to draw our attention to what he says to them. We can't look at all seven woes. I'm going to walk through three, and then I'm going to bring these into a simple theme. What is Jesus angry about when he's angry at the cultural leaders?
Number one in verses 13 and 15, you could summarize it as he's angry because they tout the keys of the kingdom, but they lock people out of it. So picking up at verse 13, "But woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourself nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourself."
By standing in this position, Jesus says earlier, sitting on the seat of Moses, these men effectively have the keys to the kingdom, which means they decide on Earth who's in with God and who's out. That's their job. And Jesus is saying, "Not only do you not open the kingdom for people, but you let them walk up to it and you shut it in their face." And this has to do, as we'll see, with the fact that they're blind guides and they're false teachers. So that's the first thing he rebukes them for. They should be opening heaven for people, and instead, they're shutting it in their faces.
The second thing, we see this in verses 23 and 24, could be summarized like this, he's angry because they emphasize rules, but totally missed the deeper meaning. So verse 23, "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you, tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy, and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others, you blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel." Jesus was good with rhetoric. I hope you notice that. That's a good line at the end, very vivid. So these men essentially, are experts in the law. They're very good with the minutia of applying it to the nitty-gritty of your life.
So here, they're talking about tithing and herbs: mint, dill, cumin. Now, the Old Testament, what they're working with, gave certain guidelines for tithing. However, most of these had to do with marketable farm crops. Here, they're into the weeds of counting out leaves and seeds. And essentially, what Jesus is saying is, "Your majoring on what you should minor in. And you're completely missing what you need to major in. You need to grasp the essence of what all these rituals point to, and it's the heart of God entering the heart of man so that he is someone who cares..." as Jesus said, "... about justice, mercy, and faithfulness." Those are things that emanate from the depth of one's being. To miss the very essence of faith while you are teaching faith is, in Jesus's words here in verse 24, to be a blind guide, which is a disaster. Rather than liberating people, you burden them. Rather than offering grace that releases people to good works, you bind them to a heartless legalism. This is the second thing Jesus is rebuking them for. They don't even know the faith that they bind people with.
Third, this is now moving into verse 27. The third thing he says, he's angry because they appear righteous without, but they're rotten within. Verse 27, "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within, are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness." Jesus uses the word, "hypocrisy," and, "hypocrites," more than any other in his invectives here. Hypocrite was a word that had originally been used before where Jesus's has time in the circles of the Greek theater. It referred to an actor. It was a compliment. A hypocrite was someone who could act a part that they weren't in real life. It's not a compliment when it's used for a religious leader.
These religious leaders love looking righteous. They love seats of honor and prestige, being invited to banquets. They love being called rabbi and teacher in the streets, but on the inside, they're unclean and rotten. It is a devastating thing when a person who is called to lead by example turns out to be nothing like who they say they are, and Jesus understands the cost of this. So he's rebuking them. "You are not only blind guides..." He says, ".... you're not only teachers who major on what you should minor in, but you're fake all the way through." This is a devastating problem and it's worthy of Jesus's anger. Now, let's pause and kind of collect all this into a driving theme that I alluded to earlier.
What could we say if we had to boil it down to one sentence? What is Jesus angry about? He's angry at the abuse of power. He is angry that the powerful are abusing the weak. They are meant to lead the sheep, and yet they are a terror to them. Several times in the gospels, not several, maybe two or three, one is back in Matthew 9, we have this very tender scene where Jesus looks out on a large crowd and the text says he's filled with compassion, maybe you know what I'm going to say, because they are like sheep without a shepherd. So here's what I think Jesus is doing, or here's what I think we're learning from this by him focusing on the powerful who are abusing that power.
He's not saying that there aren't sinners in the crowd, right? He couldn't pull aside little Benjamin and find out he fibbed to his mom. He's not saying that. What he's saying is that he understands how people and cultures work. Most of us, most of the time follow the crowd. It's in our nature. It's too hard to swim against the stream and we're not bright enough to think our way around all this stuff coming from our leaders. Most of us are going to be most shaped by our culture, and our culture is going to shape bias leaders. Jesus knows this, and so he's taking them to task. So what do you think he would say if he spoke to our religious leaders, the religious leaders of our day? I count myself in this question.
Would he find that we say the kingdom of heaven is open to people, when in fact, we dumb the message down so much that we end up shutting it in their very face? Would he say that we spend all this time focusing on programs, perfect music, and polished preaching, but we neglect the weightier matters on God's heart, like seeking justice, showing mercifulness, and learning what it means and how hard it is to actually live a faithful life? I wonder what he would think if he could gather the Scribes and Pharisees, the clergy of our day into a room. What about the cultural priests? You see, remember, the Pharisees, aren't just religious leaders. They're over everything, and we have people like this. Our cultural priests walk the halls of our universities. They sit on our TV sets and tell us what to think about current events. They occupy positions of power in capitals all around our country. They walk the streets of Hollywood.
They're brilliant. They're powerful. They're beautiful. And they lead us. They shape how we should think. I wonder what he would say to them. Do they offer a vision of a kingdom to people? Do they claim this is the way to truth, while at the same time, mocking the word of God and closing in people's faces the uniqueness of Jesus Christ? Do they speak of justice and equality while knowing nothing about the justice of the cross? Do they speak of reconciliation while knowing nothing of the reconciliation that was purchased by the blood of God's own son? Do these leaders, do they present, and I include myself in this, do they present a righteousness, a goodness, and immersive fullness that they themselves don't live up to? They call others out while they're filled with dead men's bones.
I want you to hear what Jesus says in verses 29-31, and you can draw some things out from this. He goes on, this is his last woe, "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous saying, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.' Thus, you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets." If you want to be in a position of leadership and you are in some small way, you are in some relationship where you have a little bit of power before someone who doesn't have as much power if you want to be in that place, you need to feel what Jesus is doing here. To those who have authority and power, there is a greater responsibility. I could read you many passages from the Old Testament. I could read you from Ezekiel 22 where God furiously rebukes the false prophets, priests and princes of Israel who mislead the sheep.
Yes, Jesus is gentle and meek. Yes, but he is also fierce and mighty, and he does not take lightly sin and wickedness, especially when done by the powerful to the detriment of the weak. So we've seen two things so far. By nature, Jesus is not angry. He's loving, and that love has a proper expression of anger. Second, we've seen that, at least in this case, a lot of things make Jesus angry I'm sure, but in this case, we see that his anger is uniquely of focused on abuses of power. Now, I want to ask a final question and that is simply, what good does this do any of us? Remember, our goal is to put our hearts before God's heart. If you walk your heart into Matthew 23, are you a Scribe? Are you a Pharisee? Are you sitting in the crowd? Are you a disciple? What does it feel like? This is the final question. How does this heart affect us?
I remember very vividly one morning in high school when the entire school was gathered for an assembly in the auditorium, our assistant principal, who was a former athlete and a big, strong man stepped to the podium with great seriousness and he addressed a situation of bullying that was going on. We all knew what he was talking about. There was a young woman with severe challenges and she'd become the butt end of the jokes of a particular group of cool men. It was a particularly cruel expression of an all too common form of high school drama. The assistant principal, as he stood there, called out the situation before everyone. He referred to the boys, not by name, but he referred to them and their behavior and called it pathetic and cowardly. He assured everyone that this was going to stop.
In short, here, was a powerful man speaking of righteousness before unrighteousness and advocating for the weak before the strong. He did so with clear and appropriate flashes of anger. This scene, if you can picture yourself in this auditorium, this scene is a bit like how we should feel as we see Jesus unleashing on the Pharisees. I want to tell you a few movements of the heart, at least I have when I think back to that morning or putting myself in Matthew 23, and see if this helps you engage this part of God's heart. So first, feeling the righteous anger of a powerful one against injustice, the first thing it should do to your heart is reassure it. When injustice or sin or wickedness are going on around us, and we know it's unfair, for you, things are more reassuring than recognizing that a really good, really powerful person sees it, names it and decides to do something about it.
You need to know that in all the areas that you feel appropriate anger, anger about things in your own life, anger about things in your church, anger about things and the culture around you, that if it's appropriate anger, you can be sure that Jesus is madder than you are, and that Jesus stands up and he puts his hand up and says, "I see and I will do something about it. I will execute justice in my time and in my way," and he never takes his gaze off the problem. That should reassure you that God is not indifferent.
The second thing it does is cautions us. So my experience in the auditorium that morning was on the one hand, yeah, preach it, man. They're terrible people. Then I found myself thinking, "Sam, are you sure you never laughed at any of their jokes?" Because you see, I can be mean and cruel and sarcastic. I can. So I had to sit there and wonder, how well do I fare in front of this holy, strong man? So on a second level, we need to allow the anger of Jesus's heart to come to focus right on ours. If you want to have a relationship with God, you simply must use your whole heart and get to know his whole heart. This is part of his heart. You need to let it see your whole heart, and part of it burns with anger.
So at this point, you need to get at least a little bit nervous. What does Jesus see when he looks at me? Am I part of the problem? And this is where we see, I want to draw your attention to, and I'm going to close soon, a very, very surprising turn of events in our passage. Jesus ends the scene with the Pharisees by doing nothing. He walks away. And two days later, he's betrayed, he's on trial and the man who's hurling invectives with great rhetorical force from Matthew 21-23, that man is suddenly entirely silent. And, as Isaiah tells us, like a sheep led to the slaughter, he goes to the cross without a word. If you pay attention to the story, he goes to the Garden of Gethsemane and he prays, "Father, if you will, remove this cup from me." Now, what cup is that? It's the cup of the wrath of God, which Jesus drinks on the cross.
So he rebukes the Pharisees and then he goes to the cross and he drinks their punishment. We know this worked for at least two Pharisees: St. Paul and Nicodemus whose anger, God's anger towards them was moved on to Jesus. So here's our third thing, his anger reassures us. It cautions us, but if we follow the gospel, it comforts us because if you will put your faith in Jesus, I can say this with all assurance based on the gospel, God is not angry with you. He loves you. He wants to extend mercy and tenderness to you. He shows you his anger because he takes you seriously. He shows you his anger because he wants you to know he takes justice seriously, but he shows you his anger through his son because he wants you to know he offers you mercy. So with this, we need to conclude.
One of the most popular ways to talk about God's anger in the Bible is with the phrase, "slow to anger." Does that sound familiar? "The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." He says this because what he means is his ultimate desire is not to crush us, but to heal us. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they would turn from their ways and live. What this means, and I want you to take this away with you, is that the anger of this is anger in the hands of grace and that he would far rather heal and pardon and forgive then crush. So in your anger, never become so angry that you begrudge God of his divine right to show grace. It's who he is. It's his very nature.
Lord, we thank you that you burn hot at wickedness. We want you to be furious at injustice and wickedness, and then Lord, the mirror gets turned on us and we tremble. And then we see Jesus on the cross, drinking the cup of your wrath, and it's complicated and it's wonderful, Lord. So we just put ourselves now before your heart of righteous anger and we pray that it would truly reassure us, it would caution us and it would comfort us. Amen.