23:29-30 By building monuments to the prophets and other righteous people that their forefathers had martyred, the Pharisees were saying that they would not have killed them if they had been alive then. These construction projects constituted professions of their own spiritual superiority as well as honors for the dead. The Christian who naively thinks he or she would not have committed the mistakes that the early disciples of Jesus did makes the same assumption of superiority.
23:31 The "consequently"refers to the Pharisees' acknowledgment of themselves as the sons of those who killed the prophets (v. 30), not to their tomb-building (v. 29). The Pharisees were the descendants of those who killed the prophets more than they knew, not just physically but also spiritually. They were plotting to kill the greatest Prophet (21:38-39, 46).
23:32 The Old Testament idea behind this verse is that God will tolerate only so much sin. Then He will act in judgment (cf. Gen. 6:3, 7; 15:16; cf. 1 Thess. 2:14-16). Here Jesus meant that Israel had committed many sins by killing the prophets. When the Pharisees killed Jesus and His disciples (cf. v. 34) the cup of God's wrath would be full, and He would respond in wrath. The destruction of Jerusalem and the worldwide dispersion of the Jews happened in 70 A.D.
23:33 Jesus repeated epithets that He had used before to announce His critics' condemnation (cf. 3:7; 12:34). They would perish in hell for their failure to accept Jesus (cf. 5:22; 23:15).
"There is today only one proper Christian use of the woe saying of this pericope. It is found not primarily in the application of the passage to the historical Pharisees, and even less to modern Judaism as a religion, but in the application of the passage to members of the church. Hypocrisy is the real enemy of this pericope, not the scribes, the Pharisees, or the Jews. If, on the model of this pericope, a bitter woe is to be pronounced against anyone today, it must be directed solelyagainst hypocrisy in the church (cf. 1 Peter 2:1)."844
23:34 The antecedent of "therefore"(Gr. dia touto) is the Jews' execution of the prophets that God had sent them in the past (vv. 29-30; cf. 22:3-10). Because the Jews had rejected the former prophets Jesus would send them additional prophets, wise men, and teachers. These the Jews would also reject, filling up the measure of their guilt to the full. This is probably a reference to the witnesses that followed Jesus and appealed to the Jews to believe in Him (Acts 3:19-21; 7:2-53; cf. Matt. 5:10-12; 9:37-38; 28:18-20).
Jesus would not establish His kingdom then because Israel rejected Him as her Messiah. However, now Jesus revealed that God would punish the generation of Israelites that rejected Him and the apostles who would follow Him in an additional way. This included the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews from the Promised Land. Jesus clarified these events in the Olivet Discourse that follows (chs. 24-25).
Since the Jews did not have the authority to crucify people, we should probably understand Jesus' reference to them crucifying some of these witnesses in a causative sense. They would cause others, notably the Romans, to crucify them (cf. 10:24-25).
23:35 Jesus was not saying that the Jews who rejected Him were responsible for the deaths of all the righteous martyrs throughout biblical history. They simply were the ones who would add the last measure of guilt that would result in the outpouring of God's wrath for all those murders.
"In the case of the Jews, the limit of misbehavior had been almost reached, and with the murder of the Messiah and His Apostles would be transgressed."845
Abel was the first righteous person murdered that Scripture records (Gen. 4:8). We do not know exactly when Zechariah the prophet, the son of Berechiah, died, but he began prophesying as a young man in 520 B.C. and delivered some prophecies in 518 B.C. He was evidently the last martyr in Old Testament history.846
Many students of Scripture believe that the Zechariah to whom Jesus referred was the priest whom the Jews stoned in the temple courtyard (2 Chron. 24:20-22). However, that man died hundreds of years earlier than Zechariah the prophet, and Jesus seems to have been summarizing all the righteous people the Jews had slain throughout Old Testament history. Zechariah ben Jehoiada was the last martyr in the last book of the Hebrew Bible, so Jesus may have been saying the equivalent of "all the martyrs from Genesis to Revelation."Nevertheless that Zechariah was the son of Jehoiada, not Berechiah, and Jesus mentioned Berechiah as the father of the Zechariah He meant (cf. 2 Chron. 24:22).
23:36 With a strong assertion of certainty Jesus predicted that God's judgment would fall on the generation of Jews that rejected Him. This is Jesus' formal rejection of Israel for rejecting Him as her Messiah. "These things"refer to the outpouring of God's wrath just revealed (vv. 33, 35). That generation would lose the privilege of witnessing Messiah's establishment of the kingdom and the privilege of being the first to enter it by faith in Jesus. Instead they would suffer the destruction of their capital city and the scattering of their population from the Promised Land in 70 A.D. The whole generation would suffer because the leaders acted for the people, and the people did not abandon their leaders to embrace Jesus as their Messiah (cf. Num. 13-14).
"The perversity of the religious leaders of Israel does not excuse the people of Israel. They were guilty of willfully following blind guides."847
However notice that it is only that generation that Jesus so cursed. It was not the entire Jewish race. God is not finished with Israel (Rom. 11:1). God postponed the kingdom. He did not cancel it.
Jesus' mention of the suffering of the present generation led Him to lament the coming condition of Jerusalem (vv. 37-39).
