Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Matthew 23:28

"Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." — Matthew 23:28 (ASV)

During the month of Adar, just before Passover, it was customary to whitewash with lime graves or gravesites that might not be instantly identified as such, in order to warn pilgrims to avoid ritual uncleanness from contact with corpses and so prevent participation in the Passover. But in that case whitewashed tombs would not have been objects of beauty but of disgust: they were places to be shunned. Why does Jesus, then, call them “beautiful”? Most likely the graves were beautiful because of their structure (cf. v.29), not their whitewash. Thus Jesus’ mention of whitewashing is a further thrust at the Pharisees’ distinctive preoccupation with avoiding ritual defilement. They are sources of uncleanness just as much as the whitewashed graves are. In the context of ch. 23, the point Jesus is making is not that the scribes and Pharisees were deliberate and self-conscious hypocrites, but that in their scrupulous regulations they appeared magnificently virtuous but were actually contaminating the people. The supreme irony is that their preoccupation with their law left them steeped in “wickedness.”