You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men's bones and every kind of filth.
However beautiful a tomb may have been, what it concealed inside was always something dead and decaying. It wasn't something that could be solved by additional layers of paint. More vigorous grounds-keeping efforts would not render it a spot suitable for afternoon tea. In fact, for a tomb to look overly appealing was deceptive, making it more likely for a passerby to not exercise caution and be compromised by contagion. The scribes and the Pharisees actively worked to appear good in the sight of others, but made no effort to stem the tide of hypocrisy and evildoing that came from within. But this disparity was something that should have been increasingly difficult to ignore. One might start off acting hypocritically more or less by accident. But the more one became invested in hypocrisy and doubled down on it the more one would need to expend focused effort to create a mask specifically designed to conceal what was inside. An initial impulse to shield others from unpleasant realities could shift over time into a strategy specifically undertaken to allow one to preserve and accept the filth itself. The compassionate attitude toward a neighbor if one understood that he might cause his corruption would not be to conceal that fact and allow him to walk blindly into the danger zone, but rather, at least, to warn him. Yet we can easily understand how difficult it would be to do so. These scribes and Pharisees were invested in teaching what they claimed to be a path to life. The fact that their hearts were graves in need of a resurrection was not one they could afford to make public.
If we had lived in the days of our ancestors,
we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets' blood.
They had not actually made a sufficient break with the tendency of their ancestors to kill the prophets God sent to them. It was easy to adorn their memorials. But when a new voice actually came they behaved the same toward him as their ancestors had behaved in the past, which they revealed in their response to Jesus himself. It would be like Christians wearing a cross or crucifix even though the words of Jesus himself found no place in their hearts. What, then, could the cross mean to them, accept a wish for him to be permanently silenced? Just so, adorning the memorials of the righteous was a celebration that these prophets were relegated to the past, dead, and unable to speak.
How can we inoculate ourselves against the temptations toward the sort of double-life against which Jesus warned? We need to welcome a celebrate, not a word from the past, but one capable of speaking to us in the here and now, of challenging us, and calling us higher and deeper.
And for this reason we too give thanks to God unceasingly,
that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us,
you received it not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God,
which is now at work in you who believe.
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