“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you build the prophets tombs and adorn the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of the fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ So you witness against yourself that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers! You serpents, you brood of vipers! How are you to escape being sentenced to Gehenna?” (Matt. 23:29–33)
. . . This saying is . . . of great importance since it uncovers a mechanism of exculpation, by which true self-knowledge is prevented. Precisely those central historical events which should have enlightened Israel about itself and which should have brought home to them the necessity for conversion were used to camouflage them. With the erection of monuments and with the affirmation that they would have acted differently from their fathers, the Pharisees denied any solidarity between themselves and their fathers and put themselves—by their words—on the side of the prophets, yet without being able to give a credible explanation as to why they were better than their fathers. As all Israel’s writings show how the people failed again and again, one could conclude from them only the fundamental necessity for conversion and the awareness of a deeply rooted human tendency to self-deception. If the Pharisees distanced themselves from the long history of their own people, then (like most critics of the past) they thought themselves fundamentally superior to their fathers and claimed to be qualitatively better. If they were not at the same time able to show in a convincing and credible way why they were free from that self-deception which they established so clearly in their fathers, then their position became more than questionable. However, as they were now themselves about to persecute a preacher who spoke of the necessity for conversion, thus doing exactly the same as their fathers did, their claim to be fundamentally different from them became fully groundless and ambiguous. They made the victims of violence, who unambiguously revealed the nation’s failures, into an object of veneration and thereby neutralized the question about their own behavior. They put themselves arrogantly above their fathers and assumed without verifiable reason that they would have acted differently from them, although they were about to do exactly the same thing. It was in their claim, which arose from a totally false judgment about themselves, that their lay the deepest cause of the hypocrisy for which Jesus reproached them (Matt. 23:13, 15, 23, 25, 29), for he certainly did not primarily mean individual, conscious lies and distortions. His pronouncements of woe are something more fundamental, about the instinctive self-deception from which many individual wrong judgments necessarily arise.
Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp 60-61.
Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of two (so far) and husband of one.
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