Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets
whom your fathers killed.
Consequently, you bear witness and give consent
to the deeds of your ancestors,
for they killed them and you do the building.
Sometimes it is easier to honor saints of the past by statues, paintings, icons, or other kinds of memorials, than it is to do so by imitating their way of life. But even if we clutter our homes with such devotional art, what good will it do us if we are not devout? The only reason it is safe for an unrepentant person to have a statue of a saint is because that statue can't move or speak. Otherwise it would surely be telling them how they ought to prioritize getting closer to God. Having such a statue on the basis of its inability to influence us as almost the same as celebrating the fact that the saint is safely in the past where she can't bother us with the call to holiness, that is, celebrating the fact that they are dead. Devotional art can avail much, however, if we are open to reminders of the lives of the saints, if we desire their past to actually influence our present.
Woe to you, scholars of the law!
You have taken away the key of knowledge.
You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.
Scholars of the law were in a position to have access to the key of knowledge, and to use it to help others gain entry. But they were not so interested in the primary point of knowledge, just as they were not interested in the true purpose for honoring prophets of the past. They were interested in decorative memorials unable to influence their lives day to day. So too were they interested in decorative knowledge, unable to truly impact their lives. Their knowledge of God's word ought to have helped them draw near to God and to help others to do the same. But instead it seemed that they did not draw near to God and, by their bad example, made it more difficult rather than easier for others to draw near to him. Knowledge, as with memorials of saints, is not something which exercises its good influence automatically. They both require from us a willingness to be transformed.
What occasion is there then for boasting? It is ruled out.
It is not our competence in knowledge or devotional art that gives us any grounds on which to boast. We may have Scripture memorized from front to back and have the most elaborate home altar or prayer space on all of social media. It isn't our skill with these things that somehow gains us holiness points. It is the degree to which we surrender, through them, to the transforming influence of God. This means that even something like knowledge really only benefits us to the degree that we have faith. Is God the God or the highly intelligent or artistically gifted only? Or does he not belong to all, Jew, Gentile, rich, poor, male, female, to the particularly talented, and to the less obviously so? Yes, for God is one, and we all come to him on the basis of faith.
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