Shutting the KIngdom

Matthew 23:4, 13-15

“They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. . . . But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Their complex legal systems lead them not only to devote their own lives to details which have nothing to do with the real purpose of the law, but also to make it impossible for serious seekers after truth, or after God, to find the way. And when they expend every effort to find non-Jews who express interest in their way of life, they impose such burdens on them that they are worse off than if they’d never heard of Judaism in the first place (103).

A. Orendorff

“You shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces.” What an unbelievably awful indictment. As easy as it is to make the Pharisees a punching-bag, the right question, of course, must be: In what way are we—even if, as Jesus says, we’re willing to travel “across sea and land to make a single convert”—doing the same? How are we adding “heavy burdens, hard to bear” to Jesus’ “easy yoke”?