Matthew 23:16-22 16“Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound.’ 17You blind and foolish, for which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold? 18And, ‘Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing, but whoever swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound.’ 19You blind! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift? 20Therefore, whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. 21And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it. 22And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.
The focus of the third woe is on the pious worship practices of the scribes and Pharisees. Instead of naming them, Jesus describes them as blind guides. They lead people astray because they are blind themselves (15:14). Jesus repeats the word blind three times and swears ten times. This repetition hints that making empty vows was a big problem. Jesus warned about this earlier in 5:34-37. This passage hints at how the Jews had made swearing oaths into a science. They made a distinction between swearing by the temple and the gold in the temple, and between swearing by the altar and the gift on the altar. They had so fine tuned their oath taking that they lost the purpose of the temple and altar. Their thinking and logic broke apart and showed them to be fools.
Jesus corrects them by showing that gold and gifts offered on the altar only have value in their relationship to God. They are made holy by their relationship to God, not anything intrinsic in themselves. In other words, what makes something sacred is the act of faith with which one comes to the altar and temple. The altar and temple are greater than gold and gifts because they have been sanctified by and to God. Swearing by sacred objects means one is swearing by who these represent. Swearing by the altar or the temple means one is swearing by God, which is a serious matter and why we should not swear at all. We should simply let our yes be yes or our no no. These Jews has lowered the significance of their oaths and made them a trivial matter. Their example was causing others to fall into the same trap.
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