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Some of us will be of an age to remember Richard Dawkins in his prime, back at the end of the 20th century, when he sought to do away with religion. He said: "I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
Over these four weeks, we've been listening in to Jesus's warning with regard to religion. Religion does more harm than good. Well, lo and behold, it seems Jesus agrees.
Three key words dominate Jesus's final public sermon here in Matthew 23. Like the Sermon on the Mount at the outset of Matthew's gospel, this sermon begins with Jesus speaking to his disciples and then moves on to castigating the religious — suggesting that religion means we fail to understand ourselves.
There are seven woes in this sermon. "Woe" is a statement of lament or condemnation at one who faces the sure judgment of God. We find it used repeatedly in the prophets, there in Isaiah:
Woe to those who join house to house and add field to field but have no concern for the poor. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to those who are heroes in drinking wine and mixing strong drink. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes.
Here we have it on the lips of Jesus — verse 13, verse 15, verse 16, verse 23, and verses 25, 27 and 29.
Hypocrisy speaks of double standards, and we see it at the outset of the sermon. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, laying them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move a finger to help.
The establishment religion of Jesus's day, like all religion, was a religion of works. I must do this to get into God's good books. I must earn brownie points, air miles to heaven, collect my loyalty reward points. Jesus says those who teach religion like this are like someone laying a heavy burden on a pack animal but not lifting a finger to help — and anyway, they don't keep their own rules in the first place.
Five times Jesus accuses the establishment elite of blindness — blind guides (v15), blind fools (v17), blind men (v19), blind guides (v24), blind Pharisee. Blind guides are dangerous. Blind fools are dumb. The blind religious are foolish and misleading.
Jesus is nothing if not straight-talking. I wonder if this is the Jesus of your primary school. To the man or woman who suggests Jesus offers a soft comfort-blanket cuddle, we might say: clearly you've never read the teaching of Jesus.
Ultimately, the woe, the hypocrisy, and the man posing as a leader while unable to see, leads a person to hell.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! 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. (v15)
And in our reading today:
You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? (v33)
Hell is real. Jesus speaks more about hell than any other teacher. Hell is populated. Hell is eternal. Hell is not the absence of God — hell is the presence of God in condemnation and judgment. There's a broad road that leads to hell, says Jesus, and religion is part of the DNA of those who are on it.
Religion looks polished on the outside, but it deceives. Religion is only going one way. In a city full of risk registers, whole parts of banks devoted to risk, and insurance being all about risk, there is a very real risk the city needs alerting to: the risk of religion and hell.
The woes work in pairs — three pairs of two, and one final one at the end. It's actually one long sermon, so over these last three weeks we've had three sermons on a sermon.
The first pair of woes show that the Pharisees' religion is Christless. They bar people from entering the kingdom, seeking to stop people coming to Jesus. They recruit people for a religion of works — do this to get into God's good books — and block access to the open door of free forgiveness, which is the religion of grace.
Jesus offers, free of charge, full access to the family of God by faith in him alone.
Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden. I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Give him the name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.
But the religion of Jesus's day was Christless — barring people from Jesus, recruiting them for a works religion that leads to hell.
Woes three and four look at our ethical standards. My word is my bond, in utmost good faith. I give to charity. I pay my dues. But the promises we make without reference to God are, by definition, godless promises. It's all horizontal.
And so our contracts come with countless small print, loopholes and technicalities. The minimalist charitable giving — a mere 0.5% of the company's annual profit or of the CEO's absolute worth — is made to avoid the absolute demand of God for justice, mercy and faithfulness.
Today we discover religion is also powerless and defenceless. We move from entry standards and ethics to performative piety.
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. (v25)
Religious ritual papers over personal impurity. A number of years ago I visited a country where public washing before eating was religiously compulsory — not to do with COVID and singing happy birthday twice. It was what was required spiritually to remain pure before the gods. There were big troughs, and everybody washed.
Here it is the outside of the cup or the plate. It wasn't simply a matter of food hygiene — it was what might be on the outside of the cup which, if ingested, would make one unclean before God. Food laws and cleansing laws were a key part of Jewish religion.
But Jesus makes the obvious point: however much you polish the outside of the cup — no matter how much you seek to cleanse the past record of your social media — that's not where the problem lies. The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.
Remember when Jesus came up against this earlier in chapter 15:
Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, and slander. These are what defile a person.
We can mark our forehead with a cross on Ash Wednesday. We can engage in a Lenten fast. We can make our confession, do our penance, attend mass and seek to make recompense. But external administration will not cleanse internal contamination. The problem comes from within.
Whether it's greenwashing, virtue-signalling with lapel badges, washing your hands or your cup, or ensuring your meat has been slaughtered properly — that's not going to do the trick. It's not what goes in that's the problem; it's what comes out.
The word for self-indulgence means lack of self-control. It's only used on one other occasion in the New Testament — in 1 Corinthians 6, in the area of sexual purity. We may wear the Me Too lapel badge, fine and good, but it's actually what we're looking at on our screens, thinking about in our heads, doing in our imaginations and our bedrooms that betrays what we're really like.
Verses 25 and 26 point out the problem; verse 27 identifies the acute danger.
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 all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. (v27–28)
If the problem of verse 25 is greed and self-indulgence that keeps coming out, the problem of verses 27–28 is where that leads.
Contact with a dead body made a person unclean. Because tombs contained the bones of the dead, the Jewish people would whitewash them, painting them to disguise the decay within. But no amount of prettifying the exterior can conceal the interior.
We have great illustrations of that here. Thomas Gresham has been in his tomb since 1579. Earl Spencer at the door has been there since 1612. Dame Abigail Lawrence, 1682. They're fine tombs. I asked one of the people working on the tombs at the moment how much it would cost to build me one — he reckoned £150,000. But when I'm dead, it doesn't matter how much you spend; nothing changes it.
So we may decorate the tombs of our dead and build costly monuments. But on the inside, the dead are still dead.
Externalism actually adds to our problems. Religion means we fail to understand ourselves. It suggests all is well; it gives the impression of health and vitality; it implies a positive diagnosis — I've prettified the outside with my virtue-signalling and my religious attendance. But on the inside it keeps coming out: death.
The wages of sin is death. Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned.
The thoughts, words and deeds of the religious lead in only one direction.
Religion is powerless to deal with the problem of the human heart.
The seventh woe — and forgive the pun, this is the nail in the coffin:
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 yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. (v29–31)
The Jews of Jesus's day commemorated the prophets, martyrs and great spiritual leaders who had shaped their culture. Their unspoken claim was that they would never have taken part in the persecution of those heroes. But at one and the same time, they were plotting to crucify Jesus.
One writer put it like this:
We won't have Jesus named as a historical figure and the only way to the living God — which is what they died for.
We commemorate William Tyndale. 2026 marks the 500th anniversary of his extraordinary Bible translated into English that shaped our culture. According to the director of the Shakespeare Company, you won't understand English if you don't understand Shakespeare, and you won't understand Shakespeare if you haven't understood Tyndale's translation.
And what did they do with William Tyndale? They hunted him down, strangled him with a hemp noose at the stake, and then burned him. What do we do as a culture with the Bible and its ethical teaching that he died for? We won't have it in parliament, in our schools, in our companies. Thus you demonstrate that you are children of those who murdered the prophets.
We agree with Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, Mary Harrington — even Richard Dawkins — that so much of what we value in our culture comes from the teaching of Jesus. We celebrate John Newton, William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, yet we utterly reject the Bible many of them suffered and died to place in our hands. We celebrate Jesus and John the Baptist — they're even honoured in the Quran. But what do we do when someone turns to follow Jesus? In that religion's purest form, we seek to cut them out of the family and destroy them.
Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers! (v32–33)
The serpent and the snake in the Bible are symbolic of Satan. Any religion that is Christless, godless, powerless to deal with the internal problem of the human heart, and defenceless — that religion is of the devil, and it leads people to hell.
Consider it like this:
Blind guides. Blind fools.
Next week we'll see that what Jesus is saying is historically specific to Jerusalem in the first instance. Jesus is signalling the end of Jerusalem and Israel as being, in its historical form, of any spiritual significance. Jesus is now the centre of it all — which is why he finishes the gospel saying, "All authority has been given to me." But the religion encapsulated in Jerusalem — the religion of man — is absolutely everywhere.
It's essential we're clear on this, because in our age we're seeing a movement of young men and women moving back to the Christian faith. We need to be clear that what we're offering is not religion.
Jesus offers a relationship with him. Jesus offers free forgiveness. Jesus does not offer us more do this, do that, do the other. He is not offering works religion — he is offering grace, relationship.
Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Give him the name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.
If you come to Jesus, you will be freed from religion. The filth within will be washed clean by him once and for all. Yes, you'll go on churning out garbage — but he's dealt with it for free, for nothing. It's so liberating.
We thank you, Father, for the courage of Jesus. No wonder they crucified him. We thank you for warning us against blind and dumb religion. We pray that you would drive us to the Lord Jesus. Help us to see what we're really like, and, as we recognise that everything invented by man is powerless and defenceless, we pray that we might be driven to Jesus for free forgiveness and a living relationship with him in your glorious family. We ask it in Jesus's name. Amen.
