Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You lock the Kingdom of heaven before men.
You do not enter yourselves,
nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.
Unlike Jesus himself, who was himself the gate for the sheep (see John 10:9), who himself possessed the keys to Kingdom and entrusted them to his Church, the Pharisees were actually roadblocks to entering the Kingdom. They could be zealous after a fashion, but that zeal didn't come from God. Their own hearts were closed to the Messiah, prevented from perceiving their need of a Messiah. And what was true of them became doubly true of their converts.
You traverse sea and land to make one convert,
and when that happens you make him a child of Gehenna
twice as much as yourselves.
It was really as though the Pharisees were converting others to themselves and to their way of thinking more than they were helping others turn to God. It was not the Torah as a living word that was at issue, but their supposed expertise and mastery over the Torah. But by not letting the Torah speak they ended up substituting their own ideas for the true meaning of the words that they analyzed and interpreted.
"Woe to you, blind guides, who say,
'If one swears by the temple, it means nothing,
but if one swears by the gold of the temple, one is obligated.'
Blind fools, which is greater, the gold,
or the temple that made the gold sacred?
The Pharisees wanted to understand the perfect hierarchy of everything in the law so that they could understand exactly what would be the obligation in each case. But again, their motive was not to hear the law. For the law would call them to conversion and point to their need for a savior. Their motive, although not necessarily conscious, was to find the wiggle room within the law were they could remain proud and unconverted. They could then swear oaths with nothing on the line. They could then, as well will see, fulfill their obligations to tithe in such a way that they themselves were still the chief beneficiaries.
Jesus had no patience for the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. He cared too much about the living word of the Torah for that, too much about the intention behind the text, to tolerate such misrepresentation. After all, he was himself in some sense the fullness of this intention incarnate, since he himself was the living Word of God. At another time Jesus said, "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me" (see John 5:39).
Why was Jesus so impatient this fault of the Pharisees? It was precisely because it was his desire for all, from north, south, east, and west, to enter the Kingdom, to be saved, and to come to knowledge of the truth. He hated the lies that the Pharisees believed that made it impossible for them to come to him for life, and felt even worse when others took them at their word about those lies because of their supposed expertise. It was the lies and not the Pharisees that he hated because he so desired that they all come to him to find life.
yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life (see John 5:40).
Oaths were not trivial because oaths invoked God himself to ensure a promise were an individual was too weak in himself to guarantee it. Treating them casually was therefore dismissive of God himself. It failed to acknowledge that oaths were designed to be part of a remedy for human weakness, not a work around to cover it up. The Sacraments themselves are oaths of a certain sort whereby we call on God to enable us to promise what we could never promise on our own. No wonder Jesus cared so much that the Pharisees not mislead people about things which would prove so important.
On our own we would have no recourse but to look for oaths that we could make with no risk when we failed. But with the help of the grace of God we become increasing able to promise to live out the faith we have been given, to fulfill every good purpose and every effort of faith.
We always pray for you,
that our God may make you worthy of his calling
and powerfully bring to fulfillment every good purpose
and every effort of faith,
that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you,
and you in him,
in accord with the grace of our God and Lord Jesus Christ.
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