Matthew 23:13-36 Woe, Woe, Whoa!

To the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek takes us through his series on the book of Matthew called, Not Your Average Savior. Let's listen in.

I'm Jason. And I'm Hope. We're so excited you're here. We have some announcements for you this morning before we get started. You should have found one of these at or near your chair when you came in.

This is a worship folder and it's a tool to help orient yourself to Recast. There's information about who we are as a church and announcements and upcoming events that we have going on here. So you can go ahead and take a look inside.

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We don't pass an offering plate here at Recast. So if you feel led to give, go ahead and drop this in the giving slot at the welcome table in the lobby. The Recast Marriage Retreat is coming up. It'll be March 19th and 20th on at Gold Lake Ministries.

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Thanks for watching. So grateful for those announcements. I really like that they put those together every week. So I'm Don Felsick. I'm the lead pastor here. And welcome to everybody that's here. I'm glad that you're here.

And I hope that by the end of the message, you're glad that you were here too. I say it tongue in cheek, because this passage that we're going to look at this morning is not one that I would naturally preach if it wasn't in the Bible.

If I was left up to my own agenda or my own comfort, I would not preach this message. That's one of the reasons that I preach through books of the Bible, that we take off like Matthew, the entire book, and then begin to take it passage by passage and verse by verse, is that way we get to hear all that God has to say to us versus the things that I want to say to us or my favorite themes or my favorite.

And we'd get tired of that. And plus, you wouldn't gain a whole lot if it was just my opinions or my thoughts anyways. So that's why we dig into God's word, is because how many of you know that sometimes God's word says things you're not comfortable with?

Did you know that? And sometimes it's in the very nature of us hearing from God things that rub us the wrong way, that are the very things that he wants to correct our thinking on. And so I need that.

I think you do too. And so hopefully you're able to grow as a result of listening to this. I give all that buildup because this is a passage that has the most stern words of Jesus Christ that are recorded for us in the Gospels.

In this passage, Jesus is going to take it straight to the religious leaders. He's going to issue seven woes in this passage. And a woe, you need to understand a little bit about what a woe is. We don't use that word a ton.

I mean, a word that might be more related to it that we would use more frequently, and still not often, is the word doom. A woe is a verdict expressed. One commentary that I read in one dictionary defined it as a verdict expressed in sorrow.

I want to point out that in the process of calling it a verdict, it is a judgment. Jesus Christ is indeed judging these religious leaders, and he finds them lacking in this text. But he's not happily judging them.

He's not angrily judging them. He's factually judging them. To issue a woe is to say, I know what you have done, and I know that without a change, a real bad end is coming for you. That's what a woe is.

That's a doom. There is a bad ending and a bad destination to those who act in this way, Jesus is saying. Now, we have a larger chunk of scripture to read this morning, so we're going to just jump in and read it.

So, if you turn to Matthew chapter 23, grab your device or your Bible, Matthew chapter 23, we're going to read verses 13 through 36. And as I read, you'll notice some exclamation points. I'm going to try to make those evident to us in my inflection.

It is a sorrowful judgment that Jesus is issuing, but it is also a stern judgment. This is not me leveling charges against you who have gathered here at the nine o 'clock service. This is the word of God addressing us.

And so, I want you to hear that, not through my voice and my inflection that I'm angry at you, but at the end of the day that God wants to say something to us, and He wants to get our attention in this text.

The Seven Woes in Matthew 23

Matthew chapter 23, verses 13 through 36. 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 the 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 yourself.

Woe to you, blind guides, who say, if anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath. You blind fools! For which is greater the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred?

And you say, if anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath. You blind men! For which is greater the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred?

So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it, and whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it, and whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others, you blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful but within are full of dead people's bones and uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.

Thus you witness against yourself that you are sons of those who murder the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your fathers, you serpents, you brood of vipers. How are you to escape being sentenced to hell?

Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify. Some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.

Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. Let's pray. Father, I thank you. I thank you for the sternness of your word. I confess that I can get caught up in myself in such a way that it takes stern words, it takes shock and awe to get my attention at times.

So Father, I pray that that would be a reality here today, that not a single one of us would squirm out from underneath the conviction and the rebuke of the words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that we would identify and see ourselves in these woes and then equally be moved.

Those who belong to you, that we know how we come out from underneath this doom and this woe, and it is only through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It is only through our faith and trust in him. We are no better than these religious leaders.

We are not above this, and it's so easy to point fingers and think, oh well at least I'm not like them. Father, I pray that you would not allow that to settle on our hearts, but rather let the weight of these woes hit us, demonstrate to us the depth of our depravity, the depth of our brokenness, so that we can now rejoice all the more in the salvation that is given to us.

If it was up to us, we would be doomed. If it was up to us, the woes would land firmly on our shoulders. And so Father, I pray that you would allow there to be both rebuke and correction in our hearts, as well as hope because of the cross of Jesus Christ.

I ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Well, I encourage you to keep your Bibles open to Matthew 23, 13 through 36, and get as comfortable as possible as we walk through a passage that is meant to make us uncomfortable.

So if you need to get up and get more, I know this is a nine o 'clock service and it might be that some of you are still waking up, so don't hesitate to get more caffeine or more donuts back there. But before we dive into the seven woes, let me remind you of the context.

What's going on here? Why in the world is Jesus like shouting, and there's exclamation points in the text, and why is he upset? Well, Jesus is just a couple of days out from being crucified. He's going to literally be killed by some of these very people here, put up, and they're going to be shouting, crucify him, crucify him.

And of course, the way that he tackles this and the way he takes them head on, you can understand why they would be upset as well. But the pompous and arrogant religious leaders have been challenging his authority.

They're the ones who came to him and said, on the basis of what authority are you doing these things? And the fact of the matter is, Jesus hasn't been willing to submit to their authority. And I would suggest to you that nothing can make an illegitimate leader more angry than one who will not submit to them.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Someone who doesn't have the authority, but if you won't submit to them, well, they're angry. And so, Jesus was addressing the crowds and his disciples in our text last week, and he was talking to the crowds in general, but the Pharisees and the scribes were standing there.

They have already challenged him, and he turned his attention to the crowds. Now, he turns and levels his blazing eyes directly at the scribes and Pharisees who came to challenge his authority. And he lets loose like waves battering a sandcastle on the shore, wave after wave after wave, woe after woe after woe, doom after doom after doom.

And you maybe felt that cadence as I was reading the text. Each woe follows a pattern. He pronounces the word woe, doom, and then addresses them by name and calls them hypocrites. And every single one of the woes ends with him shouting the word hypocrites.

The word hypocrite, of course, because it occurs so much in the text, requires a little bit of definition. Remember that it means actor. It literally came right out of the theater, of the Greek theater.

He's accusing these religious leaders of wearing a mask. They're playing a part. They're acting a certain way in public and doing other things in private. And further, it has to do with their heart. They are doing things outwardly, while their hearts are not really in the right place with God at all.

And here's what you need to understand. These religious leaders, they don't really love God. And furthermore, they don't really love the people. Who do they love most? Themselves. They love themselves.

And a quick word to clarify hypocrisy, because how many of you heard that word thrown around a little bit? Maybe you've heard it mentioned recently in politics. You've heard it mentioned religiously about religious people.

How many of you have ever just heard that churches are just full of hypocrites? Any of you have a friend or a relative or a family member, somebody that has said that to you before? Go ahead and raise your hand if you've heard that before.

Churches are just full of hypocrites. Well, I want to clarify that, because at the end of the day, that implies something that I don't think is exactly accurate. It gets thrown around, but it's as if people think the church is full of hypocrisy because it's full of sinners.

But that's not necessarily the case. That misses the point. The church, hear me carefully recast, the church is only full of hypocrites inasmuch as it's full of sinners who say they're not sinners. If you're a sinner and you say you're not a sinner, then you're a hypocrite.

But if you're a sinner and you say you're a sinner, you're not a hypocrite. You're just a sinner. Do you get what I'm saying by that? And so that misunderstands some fundamental explanation to or definition of the word.

If we admit we are sinners saved and forgiven by grace and that God is still working on us, then it's not hypocrisy when we stumble and get back up again. Do you see what I'm saying? So the fact of the matter is, hypocrisy is not leveled well against you if you're honest, if you're truthful.

I'm not a perfect person. I'm not Christ himself. I am a fallen human made out of the same stuff as you, and so therefore we stumble and we get back up again and we stumble and we get back up again, and that's the nature of our relationship with God.

But these religious leaders were very satisfied to pretend. Here's where the level of hypocrisy is right, where Jesus is right to call them hypocrites. They were satisfied to pretend that they were better than they were, and furthermore, they were pretty confident they were better than everybody else.

And so Jesus is humbling these men who were exalting themselves, and you can actually see a little bit of him applying what he said last week. He said, those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and then he gives us a case study this week.

See, like this. These who have elevated themselves, I am going to humble them in your midst. So we find the first woe in verse 13, and we're going to see seven woes here. The first woe in verse 13, and here it is, doom on you actors because you bar the gates of God's kingdom.

You shut the gates of God's kingdom in people's faces. You see, the way into the kingdom of heaven, there's only one way into the kingdom of heaven, and that's to come to the throne room of the king and ask for forgiveness, to ask for clemency, a nice kingly word.

Come into his presence, bow the knee, and say, please, please let me off the hook. Please give me clemency. Please give me forgiveness. Ask, come to his presence, ask for grace, ask for forgiveness, and pledge your loyalty to the king, and you are now a citizen of his kingdom.

And he will welcome you, welcome anyone who would come to him in that way, into his glorious kingdom with humility, saying, I need your forgiveness. But Jesus, hear me carefully, Jesus himself is the king of this kingdom, and these religious leaders rejected the king, and in doing so, have also encouraged others to reject him as well.

And so in that sense, they have slammed the gates of the kingdom in the faces of the crowd, who really, at the end of the day, wanted access to Jesus, was curious about Jesus, wanted to know more about him, and they're saying, no, he's not, he's nothing.

He has no authority, he has no power, he has no, he's teaching falsely, all of this stuff. They are pretending to lead people to the kingdom of God, while they are guilty of rejecting the king. And with each of these dooms comes an inverse application.

How many of you understand, if these activities and attitudes of these religious leaders cause Jesus to pronounce woe and doom on them, then how many of you are with me in wanting to head the other direction?

Like, if these are the very behaviors and the very things that make him say, woe, doom, like destruction, damnation is coming for you, then I want to be over here, as far away from these things as I can get.

And so that's how we find our applications in this text. What do we want to do in the other way, the other direction, the far away from this first woe, is to enter the kingdom of heaven and bring others to?

A pretty simple application. If you're taking notes, write that down. Enter the kingdom of heaven and bring others to. Throw wide open the gates to the kingdom of heaven by making much of the king. Who is the king?

Jesus is the king. Accept Jesus as your king, as your ruler. Accept his clemency and his forgiveness, and then go out and live for him. Which, of course, a part of living for him means bringing others to the king as well.

The second doom is found in verse 15. Doom on you because you convert people to your own condemnation. You yourself are condemned, and then you're bringing others along with you. How many of you know that false teaching spreads?

It does. And it sometimes spreads with good intentions. I think these religious leaders actually thought, these scribes and pharisees, thought that they were right to reject Jesus, but sincerity does not equal truth.

And so they were winning proselytes. Proselyte's a big fancy word for converts. People were coming over to their faith, but what was their faith? A hypocritical religion of acting apart, of playing a part, of looking better than everybody else.

And so in this, Jesus accuses them of winning people for damnation. And isn't it true? Have you found this to be true in life? I have seen it. I've seen it in my own heart, as a matter of fact. It's often true that students take it further than their teacher.

You know what I'm talking about? Where the teacher goes only this far and doesn't say anything more, the students build on that and add to it. And that's where you get this twice as much a child of hell as you are.

I've met, to throw it into theological terms, I've met Calvinists who are more Calvinistic than John Calvin. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, that's just, they take it further. Take it further than the originator ever wanted it to go.

So what is the reverse of this second one? Well, it's just simply to continue to win people, win people and guide them to be twice as much a child of the king as you are. Not a child of hell, a child of the king.

Our hope is that we lead, that we, those we lead to Christ will go further into love and further into obedience of Jesus than we ever have. That's kind of my, that's my hope and prayer for my own offspring, my own kids, is that God would do a work in their heart that goes vastly far beyond anything I've been able to offer to them.

I pray that for them. Because if they only achieve what I've achieved, then they're just going to be, they're going to be a mess and a sinner too. And so my hope and prayer is that they'll just continue to grow and God will do things in their lives that I can't, I can't provide for them.

Of course, by the way, the application to this presupposes that we are telling others about Jesus and bringing others to forgiveness through his sacrifice on the cross for us. The third woe is long and confusing and is found in verses 16 through 22.

Even as I read it, it might have been a little bit confusing to you because we don't often think in terms and speak in terms of oaths and vows. But here's the doom that I'm summarizing these obviously each time that we cover them.

Doom on you because you play games with obedience to God. That's really the gist of what's going on in verses 16 through 22. They're playing games with obedience to God. In other words, they're looking for loopholes.

They find them, they create them, they look for loopholes, and they jump through them. Jesus uses here a really common thing in their day and age, which is a really uncommon thing in our day and age, as a running commentary on the problem of them looking for loopholes.

What we need to understand about this long passage is there's a lot of detail about vows and oaths that we just don't get. But vows and oaths were common practice in the religious life of the Jews during this time.

They had complex rules, even an entire book that surrounded the rules about when a vow was and wasn't binding. And they loved to take public vows and public oaths, and the religious leaders liked to use those rules to their advantage.

Now that's probably not super helpful to just leave it in generic terms, so let me illustrate it for you. A Jewish leader during this time could take a public vow, literally standing in the temple courtyards, and grab attention of people and say, hey, there's a vow going on.

And people would gather around, and he would say something like, I swear by this very temple that I will give my whole salary this next year to the poor. A vow publicly taken, publicly binding, right?

And they would look really good, but through convoluted technicalities, they would say that the vow wasn't binding because they didn't swear by God. I never mentioned God in that vow, and therefore he's not the one who is the keeper of that vow, and therefore I'm not going to get punished if I don't.

And so this was a big show, but it was deeply hypocritical because they would utter these public vows with no intention of following through. So what does it do? It makes them look like they are being generous while they do not really intend to or plan to be generous.

So Jesus calls out this kind of game playing, and instead of diving deep into the nuances of what Jews did and didn't believe about various vows, which is exactly what Jesus does here, he takes it where they're at.

The thing about it not being where we're at is that it's informative to us to see how the Jews process these different vows, you know, given to heaven or by the gold of the altar, by the sacrifice on the altar, the gold of the temple, or all of that stuff.

It's not very helpful for us to get down into the nuances of what was and wasn't a legitimate vow. It would be better to draw your attention to the definitive passage where Jesus tackles how we in this new covenant era of grace, the era that we live in, how do we deal with vows.

And in Matthew 5, I encourage you to jot this down, you can read it later, Matthew chapter 5 verses 35 through 37. I've already preached on that before, but Jesus says that his followers should not need many vows or oaths, you know, you don't need vows.

Those who are followers of Jesus don't need them. Instead of playing games and looking for loopholes, what are we supposed to be about? We should seek to obey God and let our word be true. If we say yes, then we are those who go do it, and if we say no, we are those who don't.

Followers of Christ should not need the drama of formal oaths, especially about things that are routine obedience. We don't need oaths to be generous, we just go out and be generous. Do you get it? And that's really what Jesus taught us about vows, we don't need all that drama.

And by the way, I don't know about you, some of you in the room have taken some formal sacred oaths as well. I've only taken one my entire life that I know of. There's only been one oath in my entire life, and my wife knows that after 25 years that I have every intention of seeing it through.

We've had fun years and we've had not so fun years, and this thing between us is only ending when God takes one of us home. And so that's the nature of a formal vow, a formal oath. You let your yes be your yes and your no be your no, and we said yes.

And I'd encourage you to think about that in terms of when you hear vows and oaths. My hunch is that very few of you have taken very many vows at all, but those that you do, take them seriously, especially when you stand before God.

The fourth woe is found in verses 23 through 24. Doom on you, speaking to those religious leaders, but also we, there's no, it's not by chance by the way that we're reading these. These settle on us too.

Doom on you for majoring on minor things while neglecting the major things. You major on the minor things. These religious leaders, it says, tied on the small things like their spice rack. They gave 10 of the harvest from their little window box spices in their kitchen while they neglected obedience in the huge categories.

Huge, massive, sweeping things like justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Nah, that's not so important, but here's a little bit of dill. Interestingly, Jesus is not accusing them, by the way, of being petty in tithing on their spices.

He's not disagreeing with that. He's not saying they did wrong, they're so stupid, look at them, they're just so trivial and chintzy, and they're just doing these little things. No, he says you should be doing the big and the little things.

He instead is critical, most importantly, of what they have neglected. We ought to be generous to God, but we ought to also value fair treatment of others, mercy and kindness to all, faithfulness, that is, having integrity in our work, in our community, in our relationships.

And Jesus uses a humorous word picture here. In verse 24, they strain their cup of tea to make sure that they don't swallow anything unclean, like a gnat that might be hiding in there. But they ignore the camel swimming in their cup of tea, and then they swallow.

They swallow that. They are so busy worrying about the small things that they miss the big things that they're lacking in their lives. So to correct this, we need to look at our justice. We need to look at our attitude towards mercy, towards others, and look and take a solid glance into our hearts at what does faithfulness look like in here.

You see, God forbid that we're known as people who are religiously detailed. Read my Bible every day, or do this at a certain time, or do this while being unkind, or socially corrupt, or prejudiced. Major on the overarching relational changes that God wants to work in you.

Things like love, and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Things like that. All relational things that His Spirit wants to work into the lives of His followers.

The fifth woe is found in verses 25 and 26. Doom on you for cleaning up the outside of the cup or the plate without attention to the inside. Now, this is differentiated from the sixth woe only in that this one is active.

It's about action. These religious leaders were actively, actively pursuing a cleaned up reputation. I think some of us have been there. How many of you might identify? There's seasons, and times, and situations, and scenarios in your life where you've tried to clean up, and I don't mean like dress up.

I mean like literally like tried to scrub your reputation. Anybody? How many of you want to look good? Well, that's another three of us. Are you serious? The rest of you are like, nah, I don't care. I don't care.

Hope everybody knows all my crud. No, I think all of us want to be clean on the outside. I know that the rest of you just didn't raise your hand because you're tired, or you weren't paying attention. This is about action.

They were, they were intentionally, intentionally. Do you hear that word? Because that's really important in this. They were intentionally working to make themselves look better to others while ignoring what was going on inside their own head and their own heart.

Inside, it says, Jesus knew their motivation. He's able to see and peer into their hearts, and he outright directly condemns them based on their, what he sees in them. They were motivated by greed and self-indulgence, and this led them, I believe, to try to be the best religious leader possible.

They're motivated. They're motivated by self-indulgence and greed, and they knew that their livelihood depended on what they looked like on the outside, and so they would scrub the outside more if it meant more money and more power and more ease.

We need to clean up the inside of the cup first, says Jesus, and this is done through a constant return to prayer and the Word. The only thing that I have found in my entire life that has any impact on the inside of me is the Word of God and dependent prayer, talking to God and hearing from him.

Now, I want to be clear. I'm pretty convinced I can make myself look better than all of you, and some of you would take up that challenge, but I cannot make myself better than you. I can make myself look better than you.

Do you hear the difference? But I cannot make this heart better than yours, but I know one who can. I know one who can come in and change us and radically transform us as a people, one heart at a time, and that's where the hope lies.

In this sense, I believe that Jesus is calling us all to lean, not on ourselves, but to lean more on him who can clean us from the inside out. The sixth woe is like the fifth, and it's found in verses 27 to 28.

Doom on you because you are satisfied with a superficial veneer, a thin coating of spirituality. These religious leaders were satisfied to go no deeper than just the millimeter thick of wood veneer, but underneath there's all kinds of rot and decay.

These religious leaders were full of hypocrisy and lawlessness, he says, even while commanding others to be lawful. They're full of lawlessness. They appeared really good on the outside, but the truth is they knew what was in their own hearts.

How many of you ever been faked to somebody and you really know that you're not that great? Do you know what I'm saying? I think we've all done that. You know what's going on in your own heart even as you try to play a part.

They knew the corruption that was beneath the surface in them, but in greed they were happy to stay on the surface, and the solution for us here then and the opposite is to dive deeper. Hear me, church, even if it hurts.

Dive deeper even if it hurts. Sometimes getting down into our hearts and taking a tour can be discouraging, and that's why we stay on the surface. Do you know what I'm talking about? Take a moment to introspect, and I've been hearing this increasingly that one of the most terrifying things to the American mind is time alone in silence with themselves.

Have you guys heard that? We're constantly turning the radio up. We're constantly tuning into a podcast or have the TV going in the background, or we were just always because we're afraid that if we turn that off in silence, we might have to deal with some things.

We might end up having a little bit of a monologue in here that's uncomfortable. So we're constantly, constantly filling ourselves with noise. But nobody who stays at that level of veneer is in a healthy place, and so what we want to do is sometimes it can be discouraging to get down to the deeper parts of ourselves, and so we just pretend to be good people, but Jesus wants us to be whole and healed people, and so His desire, He desires access to all of us if we would let go and let Him clean house inside.

Nobody who is satisfied to just whitewash the tomb is a healthy person. Let Jesus in to do the deeper cleaning in your soul. The last woe, the seventh woe, stretches from verse 29 through 36, and it wraps up the text.

Doom on you for pretending to celebrate God's messengers while seeking to kill His messengers. Ultimate hypocrisy. I pretend to love God's Word while I hate His Word. I pretend to be delighted about His prophets when His messengers come to convict me, but I am really secretly on the side trying to kill them.

The religious establishment during this era and this time built many religious monuments, and many of these religious leaders that he's literally speaking to here in the temple courtyards were likely part of commissioning some of those monuments to long dead prophets.

There are still monuments that date back to ancient times like this, and further these religious leaders love to read themselves back into history as heroes. Some of us might be able to relate to that kind of notion, saying if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would have been the good guys.

We would have been on the good side if we had lived back then, and I think all of us can at times trick ourselves into thinking that too. I would have been King David facing off against Goliath, but never with that whole Bathsheba thing.

That wouldn't have been me. I would have been more, I would have been braver than King Saul. I would have been bolder and more on track than Peter. Less like Jezebel, more like Elijah. That would have been me, but Jesus knew the hearts of these religious leaders was murderous even toward Him, and He calls them to go ahead.

It's a stark, stark statement in verse 32. I'll really go back to 31. Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your fathers.

What is He saying in this phrase? He's outright challenging them to go ahead and finish the work that their father set out in putting down the Word of God and His messengers who bring it. Their ancestors merely killed the prophets, but here before Him are the very guys who will be responsible for killing the very Son of God Himself, and He says, go do it.

Finish it. You're going to fill up the measure of the sins of your fathers, and as He reveals this murderous intent in their hearts, He spills out with His strongest statement of judgment in verse 33, and you can see it building and building and building until it comes to this.