Matthew 23

Today’s Passage: Matthew 23

Jesus has spent the day in the temple courts fielding one hostile question after another, and He has answered every one of them until no one dares ask Him anything more. Now He turns from His questioners to the crowds and to His disciples, and He does not lower His voice. What follows is the sharpest speech in this Gospel. He tells the people to do what the scribes and Pharisees teach from Moses’ seat but not to copy the way they live, because the teaching and the living have come apart. Then He lays out the evidence: burdens tied onto other people’s shoulders by men who will not lift a finger to move them, prayer boxes made wider and tassels made longer, the best place at the banquet, the front row in the synagogue, the deferential greeting in the market, the title that makes a man somebody. Against all of it He sets one rule for His own people. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Then come seven woes, and they fall in order on shut doors, on missionary zeal in the service of a hard religion, on clever oaths, on tithed herbs and neglected justice, on cups scrubbed outside and filthy within, on tombs whitewashed for the feast, on monuments built to dead prophets by the sons of the men who killed them. It rises to snakes and vipers and the blood of the righteous from the first murder in Genesis to the last one recorded in Israel’s Bible. And then, exactly where you expect the door to slam, the voice breaks. The Lord who has been thundering says how often He has longed to gather this city’s children as a hen gathers her chicks. Read the woes in the light of that ending, because that is the light they were spoken in.

As you read, hold this: The hardest words Jesus ever spoke are aimed at religion performed for an audience, and He speaks them as the One who has longed to gather the very city He is warning.

Matthew 23:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to His disciples: ² “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. ³ So practice and observe everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. ⁴ They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

Notice how carefully He begins, because it is not what most readers expect. He does not tell the crowd to walk out of the synagogue, or to despise the office, or to stop listening. He says the opposite: these men sit in Moses’ seat, so practice and observe everything they tell you. The seat is honored even where the man in it is not. That is a remarkable restraint from someone who is about to say what He is about to say, and it is worth holding onto, because the flesh loves to turn one bad shepherd into a reason to abandon the flock altogether. The trouble He names is not their reading of Moses. The trouble is the gap. They do not practice what they preach, and once that gap opens in a teacher, everything he says has to be received from a distance. Then He gives the first picture, and it is a picture of a pack animal being loaded by men standing on the ground. They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, and they will not lift a finger to move them. This is the sound of a religion that has become a system of rulings, hundreds of fences built around the Law to keep a man from ever coming near a violation, until the fences themselves were the weight. And the men who built them had grown expert at finding themselves a way around each one. It was other people’s shoulders that carried it. Set beside that the invitation this same Teacher had given only a few chapters earlier, and hear the difference between two religions:

"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”" Matthew 11:28–30 (BSB)

He also has a yoke. He does not pretend that following Him costs nothing. But He puts His own shoulder under it, and the rest He gives is real. Ask yourself, quietly, which of the two you tend to hand to the people nearest you. It is a fearfully easy thing to hold others to a standard you have quietly excused yourself from, and to call that seriousness about God.

Matthew 23:5–7 (BSB)

⁵ All their deeds are done for men to see. They broaden their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels. ⁶ They love the places of honor at banquets, the chief seats in the synagogues, ⁷ the greetings in the marketplaces, and the title of ‘Rabbi’ by which they are addressed.

Here is the diagnosis in six words: all their deeds are done for men to see. Everything else in the chapter grows out of that root. The Greek behind it is the language of the theatre, of being looked at, and once a life is arranged to be looked at, every good thing in it quietly changes owner. Watch the details, because they are exquisite. The little leather boxes were commanded, so a man could not be blamed for wearing them. But you can make them wider. The tassels were commanded, so no one could object to them. But you can let them out an inch. Nobody can accuse you of disobedience, and everybody can see how devout you are. That is the whole art of it. Then the seating: the places of honor at banquets, where a Mediterranean host arranged his guests by rank and every eye in the room knew who had been placed where. The chief seats in the synagogue, the bench at the front that faced the congregation, so that a man worshiped facing the people rather than with them. The greetings in the marketplaces, the public deference of ordinary folk to a scholar walking by. And the title, Rabbi, my great one, said aloud where others could hear it. None of these things is a sin in itself. A wide phylactery is not wickedness and a good seat is not a crime. The sin is the loving of them, and the arranging of a life around getting them. Do not read this at a safe distance. The modern equivalents are not hard to find, and they do not look religious from the outside. The prayer that gains a paragraph when someone else is listening. The Bible carried where it will be noticed. The service happily done and then mentioned twice. The quiet accounting we keep of who has recognized us. Every one of us knows the difference between doing a thing for God and doing it in front of people, and every one of us has blurred it.

Matthew 23:8–12 (BSB)

⁸ But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. ⁹ And do not call anyone on earth your father, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. ¹⁰ Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Christ. ¹¹ The greatest among you shall be your servant. ¹² For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Now He turns from them to us, and the “you” becomes His own people. Do not read verses 8 through 10 as a rule about vocabulary. Jesus is not forbidding a child to say father, and He is not outlawing the word teacher, since the New Testament goes on cheerfully to speak of teachers in the church and Paul calls himself a father to the Corinthians without a flicker of guilt. What He is demolishing is the thing the titles were being used to build: a ladder of religious rank, with men on the upper rungs standing between other men and God. You have one Teacher. You have one Father. You have one Instructor, the Christ. Level ground, all the way across, and the reason given is the sweetest part of it: you are all brothers. The learned man and the illiterate man sit down at the same table because both of them are there by mercy. Then, in two short sentences, He gives the constitution of His kingdom. The greatest among you shall be your servant. That is not an exhortation to be nice; it is a definition. Greatness in the kingdom of heaven is not measured and then expressed in service, it simply is service, and any other greatness on offer is a counterfeit. And He seals it with a law as fixed as gravity: whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles (ταπεινόω) tapeinoō, pronounced tap-i-NO-oh. Strong's G5013, to humble, to bring low. In ordinary Greek, tapeinos and the verb tapeinoō were not compliments. They meant low, flattened, brought down, and they were used of a beaten enemy, a poor man, a slave, a person of no consequence. Greek moral writers listed many virtues, and humility was not among them; it was closer to a defect, the cringing of someone with nothing to be proud of. Then the Greek Old Testament took the word up and began to turn it, because the God of Israel keeps stooping to the low place: He looks on the tapeinos and lifts him, He fills the hungry and sends the rich away empty, and Mary sings about exactly that before her Son is born. And then the Son Himself walks into the word and empties it of shame forever, humbling Himself to death on a cross, so that the lowest place in the world becomes the place where God is found. That is why the passive matters here. The kingdom is not asking you to think poorly of yourself, which is only pride turned inside out and still busy with itself. It is asking you to stop managing your own elevation and leave it in the hands of the One who lifts. Praise God, He is very good at it. No one who has ever taken the low seat at His table has been left there. himself will be exalted. Both verbs are passive, and that is the point. You do not lift yourself, and in the end you do not lower yourself either. God does the weighing, God does the lifting, and He has never once been fooled about which of the two a man was actually doing.

Matthew 23:13–15 (BSB)

¹³ Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let in those who wish to enter. ¹⁵ Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You traverse land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.

(You will notice the BSB has no verse 14. A sentence about devouring widows’ houses appears there in some later manuscripts, drawn across from Mark and Luke, and because the earliest copies of Matthew do not have it, modern translations step from 13 to 15 and keep the number empty rather than renumber the chapter.)

And now the woes (οὐαί) ouai, pronounced oo-AH-ee. Strong's G3759, woe, an outcry of grief and judgment. Ouai is barely a word at all. It is a sound, an interjection, the noise a person makes when something terrible comes into view, and the Greek Old Testament uses it hundreds of times on the lips of the prophets. English handles it badly. “Woe to you” arrives in our ears like a judge’s gavel, formal and cold, when the Greek is nearer to a cry than a sentence: Oh, you scribes and Pharisees. Grief is inside it as much as judgment, and both are real. That is why the same voice can pronounce seven of these and then, forty verses later, break into a lament over Jerusalem without changing character in the slightest. It is the same sound the whole way through. Jeremiah wept while he prophesied ruin, and no one thought him inconsistent. Hear it this way and the chapter stops being a tirade and becomes something far more searching: God, looking at religion that has gone wrong, is not indifferent and is not amused, and He does not sound like a man winning an argument. He sounds like a man watching a house burn with people inside it. And He was, in that very week, walking toward the fire Himself. begin, seven of them, hammered out with the same opening every time. The first is the heaviest charge that can be laid against any teacher of God. You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. Picture it exactly as He says it: someone is at the door, wanting in, and a man with the keys steps into the gap. They had the Scriptures. They had spent their lives on the very texts that point to the Messiah standing in front of them, and instead of opening the door they stood in it. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let in those who wish to enter. There are few sadder sentences in the Bible, and every one of us who teaches anyone anything about God should feel the draft from that open doorway. Then the second woe, and it is aimed at something we would normally applaud. They crossed land and sea for a single convert. That is real cost, real effort, real zeal, and Jesus does not commend one ounce of it, because zeal is only as good as what it is recruiting people into. A man converted to a hard religion becomes harder than his teachers, and the new disciple, wanting to prove himself, takes the rules further than the men who taught him ever did. Twice as much a son of hell, He says, using the Hebrew way of speaking about belonging: a son of Gehenna is one who belongs to Gehenna, the burning refuse valley outside the city wall whose name had become the name for the judgment to come. Do not soften that. He said it, and He meant it. But do not aim it outward either. Any church can build a system that produces converts more rigorous, more suspicious, and more joyless than the people who built it, and every generation of believers has to ask honestly what its converts are actually being converted into.

Matthew 23:16–19 (BSB)

¹⁶ Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ ¹⁷ You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes it sacred? ¹⁸ And you say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gift on it, he is bound by his oath.’ ¹⁹ You blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the altar that makes it sacred?

Blind guides is a devastating phrase, and it is not name-calling for its own sake. A blind man is not blamed for being blind. A blind man who hires himself out as a guide through mountain country is another matter entirely, and people fall. What they could not see was a matter of simple arithmetic about God. They had worked out a graded system of oaths, so that swearing by the temple left a man free while swearing by the gold of the temple bound him, and swearing by the altar left him free while swearing by the gift on the altar bound him. Read that again and see what it is for. It is machinery for making a promise that sounds binding to the person hearing it and is not binding to the person making it. It is a way of lying with an honest face. And the theology underneath it is upside down, which is what draws the sharpest word in the passage. Which is greater, the gold or the temple that makes it sacred? The gift or the altar that makes it sacred? Gold is gold anywhere in Jerusalem; it is holy only because of the house it sits in. A lamb is a lamb in the field; it becomes an offering on the altar. They had it exactly backwards, valuing the lesser thing because it was the thing they could handle and count, and slighting the greater thing because the greater thing was God’s. He had already settled all of this on a hillside in Galilee, telling His people to swear by nothing at all, but to let their yes be yes and their no be no. A follower of Jesus should not need a grading system for his promises. His plain word ought to be as good as his most solemn oath, and if it is not, no formula will fix it.

Matthew 23:20–22 (BSB)

²⁰ So then, he who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. ²¹ And he who swears by the temple swears by it and by the One who dwells in it. ²² And he who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the One who sits on it.

Then He follows their own logic all the way to the end, and it opens out into something magnificent. Swear by the altar and you have sworn by everything on it. Swear by the temple and you have sworn by the One who dwells in it. Swear by heaven and you have sworn by the throne of God and by the One who sits on that throne. There is no rung on this ladder that does not end at Him. You cannot find a witness anywhere in creation that is not finally God Himself, because there is no square foot of the universe He is not in and no object in it that is not His. The evasion was doomed from the start. Every careful little oath the scribes had devised had God standing silently behind it all along, listening. That should sober a person. It should also, if you belong to Him, be one of the most comforting facts you know. There is nowhere you can go where He is absent, no room where your words fall unheard, no promise made in the dark that He is not present to. The men in the temple courts had turned that truth into a technicality to be worked around. It is meant to be lived in.

Matthew 23:23–24 (BSB)

²³ Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint, dill, and cumin. But you have disregarded the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. ²⁴ You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

This is the woe most likely to have your name on it, and it is the one He handles with the most balance. The Law required a tithe of grain, new wine, and oil. Mint, dill, and cumin are kitchen-garden herbs, a few plants by the back door, and there is a real question whether the Law required anything of them at all. These men counted out the tenth leaf. Now watch what Jesus does, because a careless reader will get it exactly wrong. He does not sneer at the herbs. He says they should have practiced justice and mercy and faithfulness without neglecting the former. The small obedience was not the problem. Scrupulous care about little things is a good instinct, and God notices the widow’s two coins. The problem was a man on his knees among the mint who had no idea that his neighbor was being crushed in court. Weightier does not mean the rest is optional; it means these three carry more weight when the scales are set. Justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Israel had been told this in one breathtaking sentence seven hundred years before:

"He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" Micah 6:8 (BSB)

Nothing new is being introduced here. Jesus is holding up a mirror that has been hanging on the wall since Micah. Then He makes a joke, and it is a good one, and it is not gentle. They strained their wine through cloth to catch a gnat, because a gnat was ceremonially unclean and no scrupulous man wanted to swallow one. And meanwhile they were swallowing a camel whole, the largest unclean animal in the country, humps and hooves and all. Picture the man, straining his cup with enormous care, camel legs sticking out of his mouth. That is what it looks like from heaven when small precision covers large neglect. And it looks exactly the same today. A believer can be exacting about a translation preference, a schedule, a style of music, a doctrinal fine point that no one at home has ever heard him apply, and not have spoken a kind word under his own roof in a month. Do not use that sentence on somebody else. Sit with it yourself for a while, as the writer of this page has had to.

Matthew 23:25–28 (BSB)

²⁵ Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. ²⁶ Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, so that the outside may become clean as well. ²⁷ Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of impurity. ²⁸ In the same way, on the outside you appear to be righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

The fifth and sixth woes belong together, because they say the same thing twice and the second one says it worse. First the cup. The rabbis debated in fine detail how a vessel became unclean and how it was to be washed, and here is a man polishing the outside of a cup whose inside is filthy with greed and self-indulgence, which is to say that the contents were got by grasping and spent on himself. Jesus gives the order of operations, and it is the whole gospel in miniature: clean the inside first, and the outside will come clean as well. That is not a rule of hygiene. It is a statement that God works from the heart outward and never the other way, and that no amount of scrubbing on the visible surface of a life will ever reach the place where the trouble is. Then the tombs, and remember it is Passover week. Before the feast, the graves around Jerusalem were whitewashed so that pilgrims coming up to the city would see them and not step on one and be defiled. So His hearers had walked past them that very morning, gleaming in the spring sunshine, freshly painted, beautiful. And full of bones. He says it and then, in case anyone thinks he can escape into the imagery, He interprets it plainly in verse 28: on the outside you appear righteous, and on the inside you are full of hypocrisy (ὑποκριτής) hypokritēs, pronounced hoo-pok-ree-TASE. Strong's G5273, hypocrite, actor, one who plays a part. Hypokritēs began life in the theatre. It meant an actor, the one who answered from behind the mask on the Greek stage, and there was a fine Roman theatre a few miles from Nazareth where anyone could have watched the thing being done. Over time it came to mean what we mean by it, a person who says one thing and is another. But the older sense is the one that makes this chapter ache. A hypokritēs is not first of all a liar; he is a performer, a man whose public life is a role, delivering the lines with the mask in place because the face behind it will not do. And here is why that is worth sitting with rather than merely deploring. Playing a part is exhausting. The mask has to be held up every hour of every day, and no one wearing it can ever be loved, because it is not him they are looking at. That is the misery underneath all seven of these woes, and it is a misery, not merely a crime. Which is why the answer Jesus gives is not “act better.” It is “clean the inside first,” and He is the only one who can do it. God sees straight past the whitewash, all the way to the bones, and He came anyway, and He died to make the inside of a man new. There is no need to keep the mask up in front of Him. He knew everything before you started. and wickedness. There is no wriggling out of that. And the God who says it is the God who has always said it, right back to the day He chose a shepherd boy nobody had bothered to call in from the field:

"But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or height, for I have rejected him; the LORD does not see as man does. For man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart.”" 1 Samuel 16:7 (BSB)

Matthew 23:29–33 (BSB)

²⁹ Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous. ³⁰ And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ ³¹ So you testify against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets. ³² Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your fathers. ³³ You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape the sentence of hell?

The seventh woe is the cleverest and the most terrible. They were building fine tombs for the prophets and gilding the monuments of the righteous dead, which looked like piety and cost real money, and they said the sentence that gives them away: if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would never have joined in shedding the blood of the prophets. Hear the self-congratulation in it. We are not like them. And Jesus takes their own sentence and turns it over. By saying “our fathers,” you have testified against yourselves that you are the sons of the men who did the killing, and in a few days you will prove the resemblance is more than a family tree. Understand the pattern, because it repeats in every century and it is the easiest sin in the world to fall into. It costs nothing to honor a dead prophet. Dead prophets do not interrupt. It is the living one, standing in the temple courts this Tuesday morning saying things you do not want to hear, who gets handed over. Every generation of the church admires the reformers of the last age and resists the word of God in this one, and builds handsome monuments to the very kind of person it would not tolerate at its own table. Then “fill up the measure of the sin of your fathers,” which is prophetic speech and not a command to go and sin. It is the language of a cup filling to the brim, of a long patience reaching its end, and He is telling them soberly what the next few days are going to accomplish. And then, the hardest line in the chapter. You snakes, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell. Do not soften it and do not enjoy it, and notice two things about it. First, it is exactly what John the Baptist called the same men at the beginning of this Gospel, so the ministry ends where it began and nobody can claim they were not told. Second, it is a question, not a sentence passed. How will you escape? You do not ask a man that question if you have finished with him. A warning is only ever spoken to someone who might still hear it, and there is a door standing open in the shape of that question, though it will take four more verses before you see it clearly.

Matthew 23:34–36 (BSB)

³⁴ Because of this, I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify, and others you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town. ³⁵ And so upon you will come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. ³⁶ Truly I tell you, all these things will come upon this generation.

Do not hurry past the first three words of verse 34. I am sending you prophets. In the Old Testament, sending the prophets is what the LORD does, over and over, rising early and sending them. Jesus takes that on His own lips without a word of explanation, as naturally as breathing, and any honest reader has to reckon with who is talking. He knows what it will cost the ones He sends, too. Killed, crucified, flogged in the synagogues, chased from town to town, and every item on that list happened, some of it to men listening to Him that morning. Then He sweeps the whole history of the world into a single sentence. From the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, murdered between the temple and the altar. Abel is the first murder in Genesis. Zechariah, stoned in the temple court at the king’s order for telling the truth, is the last martyrdom recorded in Chronicles, which stands last in the Hebrew Bible. So the phrase means what “from Genesis to Revelation” would mean to us: the whole span of the book, first page to last. It should be said honestly that the Chronicles account names that Zechariah as the son of Jehoiada, while the prophet Zechariah was son of Berechiah. Faithful scholars have explained the difference in several ways, including a grandfather’s name, a scribal note, or a deliberate joining of the two figures, and no one can be certain. It does not touch the meaning of the sentence. And now the sober part. “All these things will come upon this generation” is not a curse hung over a people through the centuries, whatever cruel men have made of it. It is a warning to the generation standing in front of Him, the leadership that was at that very hour refusing its Messiah, and it fell inside a single lifetime. Within forty years the temple whose gold they had sworn by was a field of rubble. He was telling them the truth, and He was telling it to their faces while there was still time.

Matthew 23:37–39 (BSB)

³⁷ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those sent to her, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling! ³⁸ Look, your house is left to you desolate. ³⁹ For I tell you that you will not see Me again until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

And here the chapter breaks, and everything you have read has to be read again in this light.

Listen to the voice first. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. When a name is doubled in Scripture it is never the voice of an enemy. Abraham, Abraham, on the mountain with the knife. Moses, Moses, at the bush. Samuel, Samuel, in the dark. Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you. Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me. It is the voice of intimacy, and usually the voice of grief, and it belongs to someone who is very close and is being torn. He does not withdraw a word of the charge in the same breath: this is the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her. Both things are true at once and neither cancels the other. The woes are exactly as sharp as they sound, and the One who spoke them is weeping.

Then the sentence that unlocks the whole chapter. How often I have longed to gather your children together. How often. Not once, at the end of a short and disappointing acquaintance. How often, which reaches back over centuries of sending prophets and pleading and waiting, and which no mere Galilean teacher could possibly say about a city he had visited a handful of times. The longing is old. And the word He uses for that longing to gather (ἐπισυνάγω) episynagō, pronounced ep-ee-soo-NAG-oh. Strong's G1996, to gather together, to bring in from scattering. Episynagō is a piled-up word, a verb with two prepositions bolted onto the front of it, and the effect is to gather together and to one place. It is the word for a shepherd bringing in strays, for a town crowding to one door, for a farmer getting the scattered flock in before the weather turns. Matthew uses it again only a chapter later, when the Son of Man sends out His angels to gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other, and the noun formed from it is the word the letter to the Hebrews uses for the meeting together of the church, and the word Paul uses for our being gathered to Him at His coming. Hold those together and see what the lament is really saying. The longing in verse 37 is not a passing mood on a hard Tuesday. Gathering is what He does. It is the shape of His whole work, from the first straggler brought home to the last of the elect swept in from the ends of the earth, and the tragedy of Jerusalem is a refusal to be gathered by the very One who is gathering a people out of every nation and will not lose one of them. He was refused here. He was not stopped. Sit under those wings while they are spread, and give thanks that they were spread on a cross first. is a homely one, the sort of word you would use for bringing scattered things in from the field before dark, and He sets it beside an image so ordinary that it must have startled everyone standing there. Not the eagle of Deuteronomy, stirring the nest and bearing its young on its pinions. Not the lion of Judah. A hen. A farmyard bird with a dozen chicks in the dust, the most common sight in the ancient world and the most defenseless. Think about what a hen can actually do. She cannot fight a hawk. She cannot outrun a fire or a fox. Her whole defense is to spread her wings and call, and then to take into her own body whatever comes, so that the ones underneath her live. There is no image in the Bible of protection that is more helpless, or more costly, and it is the image the Lord Jesus chose for Himself three days before His arms were spread wide on a Roman cross and everything that was coming fell on Him instead of on us. He is not describing a wish He never acted on. He is describing what He came to do, and He was days away from doing it.

And then four words that ought to be read very slowly. But you were unwilling. Not “I could not.” Not “it was not to be.” He does not explain how a longing like His and a refusal like theirs can stand in the same sentence, and neither will we, because Scripture holds both without embarrassment and so should we. What the verse will not let anyone do is picture a God who was reluctant. The longing is His and it is stated first, and the refusal is real and it is stated plainly, and the tears in the middle are His as well.

Now go back and read the seven woes again, and read them backwards from verse 37. That severity is not the severity of contempt. It is the severity of a love that has been refused, and there is no fiercer thing in the world. A stranger does not raise his voice about your ruin. Nobody speaks that sharply about a house they do not love. If the woes had come from a heart that had written these people off, they would have been colder and shorter, and there would have been no lament at the end of them. Instead the same voice does both, in one speech, without changing character for a moment, and that is what God is like.

Then verse 38, and the desolation. “Look, your house is left to you desolate.” The house is the temple, and hear what has happened to the pronoun. Two days earlier He had cleared those same courts and called it My house. Now it is your house, left to you, and in the very next verse of chapter 24 He walks out of it. The glory departing was not a new thing in Israel’s story; Ezekiel had watched it go before. The tragedy is not that God is harsh with a building. It is that a house is only ever a home because Someone is in it, and He is leaving.

But the last word of this whole terrible chapter is not desolation, and you must not let anyone tell you it is. “You will not see Me again until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.’” Until is not never. He does not say the door is shut. He names the words by which He will be greeted the next time He is seen, and they are words of welcome, taken straight out of the pilgrim psalm the crowds had been shouting on Sunday as He came down the Mount of Olives:

"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD. From the house of the LORD we bless you." Psalm 118:26 (BSB)

Believers have read the timing and scope of that “until” in more than one way for a long time, and this page will not settle it for you. What is beyond dispute is the shape of the sentence. It is not a slammed door with a bolt drawn across it. It is a promise with a welcome written into it, spoken by the same lips that had just been pronouncing woes, by a Man on His way to a cross for the people He was warning. The One who longed to gather is still longing at the end of the chapter.