Don't Be A Hypocrite (Lk. 11:37-54)
One of the biggest complaints against the Church—if not the biggest—is that we are a bunch of hypocrites. When pastors and Christian leaders spend their careers preaching purity and monogamy only for it to be revealed that they’ve been having an affair or abusing children, their actions confirm the skeptics’ accusations. When money meant for ministry is used to support lavish lifestyles while Christians cry out for care of the poor, their actions reinforce the charge. When crimes are covered up so Christian leaders don’t get exposed, or when those in the church protect their own reputation instead of protecting the vulnerable, the world looks at us and says, “See? This is exactly what I’m talking about. The church is full of hypocrites.” And the tragedy is that they’re not wrong a lot of the time. Our hypocrisy becomes the very evidence people use to justify their unbelief.
But the Bible warns us,
1 Peter 4:17 NKJV
17 For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?
Grab your Bibles and go with me to Luke 11:37. Jesus is invited to dinner at the home of a Pharisee and He addresses the issue of hypocrisy, but He pulls no punches.
Wash Your Hands (Lk. 11:37-38)
Luke 11:37–38 NKJV
37 And as He spoke, a certain Pharisee asked Him to dine with him. So He went in and sat down to eat. 38 When the Pharisee saw it, he marveled that He had not first washed before dinner.
This is surprising and convicting. Jesus and the religious leaders (Pharisees, scribes and lawyers) have gone back and forth on several matters. The religious leaders have accused Jesus of being demonically influenced. He has challenged their religious practices. They have questioned His authority and requested proof of authenticity. He called them a wicked and perverse generation for seeking such validation.
Indirectly, Jesus accused them of being trees that produce bad fruit (Mt. 12:33-37), filled with darkness (Lk. 11:33-36) and a people who will be judged by Gentiles in the last days. What surprises me is that as He is making His point about light and darkness, a Pharisee, perhaps convicted by what he heard, asks Jesus to dine with him. And Jesus agrees. This isn’t the first time that Jesus has been invited to dine with a Pharisee.
Luke 7:36 NKJV
36 Then one of the Pharisees asked Him to eat with him. And He went to the Pharisee’s house, and sat down to eat.
This is the account of the woman who wipes the feet of Jesus with costly perfume and the very hairs of her head. Something that we can learn from these two dining invitations is that Jesus will never force His way into anyone’s life. He goes where He is welcomed.
Revelation 3:20 NKJV
20 Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.
You can be the most ardent skeptic on the planet, you can find all kinds of fault with the church, you can have your doubts about the validity of the Bible or whatever, but if you will ask Jesus to come in—He will show up. And that’s what happens in these first few verses. The Pharisee, who had been challenging Jesus, asked Him to share a meal and Jesus accepted his invitation.
But here’s the convicting part for me. Though Jesus may come in, He will defy your expectations. He will not align Himself with your view of who He should be. He will not conform to the standards of religion you have set for everybody to meet. He accepts the Pharisee’s invitation but He doesn’t surrender to their religious traditions.
Matthew 15:3 NKJV
3 He answered and said to them, “Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition?
Handwashing is given lots of space in the Mishnah. In Yadayim 1-3 you will find occasions for when hands should be washed, what is an acceptable washing and even how much water is required.[1]
Some rabbinic teachers have placed so much weight upon this practice of handwashing that it is deemed to be among the most significant transgressions one could commit.
One talmudic sage even says that eating bread without washing is tantamount to having sex with a prostitute, while another says that acting contemptuously toward this ritual causes one to be uprooted from the world.[2]
Instead of washing His hands before eating, Jesus immediately takes a seat at the table. Did He forget to wash His hands? Did He not see the host wash his hands? Did no one offer Him water to wash with? Whatever the case, the Pharisee notices what he believes is Jesus’ blatant disregard for the rules and he takes exception to it. Handwashing was not about cleanliness, it was about purity. As the Pharisees understood it, Jesus had just come into contact with a sinful world and now, by eating with unwashed hands, He is going to take the sins of the world into the very core of His being and defile is own soul. So Jesus has to clear things up for the Pharisee.
Pharisees (Lk. 11:39-44)
Luke 11:39–44 NKJV
39 Then the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees make the outside of the cup and dish clean, but your inward part is full of greed and wickedness. 40 Foolish ones! Did not He who made the outside make the inside also? 41 But rather give alms of such things as you have; then indeed all things are clean to you. 42 “But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass by justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone. 43 Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. 44 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like graves which are not seen, and the men who walk over them are not aware of them.”
Man! You gotta have some thick skin to hang around Jesus. Can you imagine this happening at your house? You invite someone to dinner and they start telling you what a horrible person you are? How insulting!
In this section, Jesus condemns the Pharisees and scribes for giving more attention to their traditions than to God’s truth. Specifically they have neglected justice (love of neighbor) and love of God (Isa. 5:1-7). They also chase celebrity status and they are unwittingly spreading religious impurities to others.
This is a hard section of scripture to read and preach on because it implicates every single one of us in the patterns of injustice and hypocrisy we cry out against in our world. The unfettered anger we hurl at our government, the social media rants we go on over someone’s post, the suspicion we cast on those who are different than we are, even the moral posturing we adopt in cultural debates, every one of these comes back on us. We see it in the burdens we place on our children in the name of success, and the comforts we protect at the expense of compassion reveal a truth we’d rather avoid: the injustice we protest “out there” is often alive and well in us.
All of our religious practices, the praying, the Bible reading, the fasting, the serving, the giving, the solitude, the church attendance, while good and expected, for many people it’s nothing more than a cover up for the darkness on the inside. We feel good about ourselves because we do these things even though we aren’t actually living out the core tenets of what we’ve learned.
Notice though, Jesus doesn’t tell these guys to stop their religious practices. And you shouldn’t either. He doesn’t tell them to give up their traditions. Instead, He tells them to ramp up the parts they have neglected. Maybe Jesus knew what He was talking about when He said the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love people. The entirety of our Christian faith circles back to these two core commandments.
Isn’t this what the prophet Micah records?
Micah 6:5–8 NKJV
8 He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you But to do justly, To love mercy, And to walk humbly with your God?
This isn’t a cute slogan for us to wear on our t-shirts or hang on the walls of our home. This is a requirement for the Followers of Christ. The way in which you do justly and love mercy is by walking humbly with God. Unfortunately, this does work in reverse though. If you do not walk humbly with God, as the Pharisees had failed to do, you most-likely will do injustice and be unmerciful.
Yahweh is not pleased with our religious activity when it is void of the very image Who created us.
Isaiah 64:6 NKJV
6 But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away.
Luke 11:44 NKJV
44 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like graves which are not seen, and the men who walk over them are not aware of them.”
This is like a doctor who, instead of bringing healing to their patient, unwittingly spreads incurable diseases. Or a teacher who, instead of helping students learn, ignorantly spreads misinformation and gives wrong answers.
Expounding on Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees and scribes, NT scholar Leon Morris points out,
There is irony in the comparison of the religious Pharisees, who thought so well of themselves, to these unsuspected sources of defilement. People who walked over unmarked graves became ceremonially unclean. And people who walked in the teaching and ways of the Pharisees became morally unclean.[3]
So Jesus says, clean the outside of the cup and the inside as well. Call out the hypocrisy of a government or organization that claims to honor God while profaning His Name, but we have to judge ourselves with the same intensity. We have to judge ourselves for every time we’ve hidden our light. We have to judge ourselves for the careless and cutting words we’ve spoken against our spouse and kids. Every insulting post we’ve made. We have to hold ourselves accountable for the neglect of holiness in our own lives. Judge yourselves for every soul you’ve pushed away from the Father because your own hypocrisy spoke louder than the true expression of your faith. Don’t be a hypocrite.
Lawyers (Lk. 11:45-54)
Something I’ve noticed from reading Luke’s account is that lawyers don’t know when to shut up. In chapter ten Jesus was tested by a lawyer when the lawyer asked
Luke 10:25 NKJV
25 “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
In response Jesus asks, “What does the law require?” The lawyer responded by saying, “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” “So do that,” Jesus says. But, Luke tells us, the lawyer wanted to justify himself so he asks, “Who is my neighbor?”, and Jesus teaches him a lesson he will not soon forget. Well, here in chapter eleven, another lawyer pops off without thinking and he lives to regret it.
Luke 11:45 NKJV
45 Then one of the lawyers answered and said to Him, “Teacher, by saying these things You reproach us also.”
This lawyer should’ve learned the lesson that Job’s friends learned.
Job 13:5 NKJV
5 Oh, that you would be silent, And it would be your wisdom!
The lawyer takes issue with Jesus’ words against the Pharisee because basically, the Pharisees only enforced what the lawyers said was lawful. Well, since the lawyer inserts himself into the conversation, Jesus is not going to mince words. Just as He did with the Pharisee, so He does with the lawyer. Here He has three specific woes for him to heed.
Be a Blessing Instead of a Burden
Luke 11:46 NKJV
46 And He said, “Woe to you also, lawyers! For you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.
Luke 11:52 NKJV
52 “Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered.”
Jesus has been setting people free by the Finger of God and these lawyers will not lift a finger to show the slightest bit of compassion for the people they have crushed under the weight of their expectations. This kind of behavior zaps the power of our testimonies and it robs people of a real and transformative experience with the Lord.
Matthew 23:15 NKJV
15 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.
You go through all of the trouble of sharing the Gospel in order to win a convert only to send him back into the world worst than you found him. How does this happen? By keeping Christians busy with non-essential matters. When we take our focus off of Jesus and we get pulled into endless debates about how to vote, where our children should go to school, which stores to buy from, and which companies we should avoid. Only listen to Christian music and only watch Christian movies. Like and share this post with 10 people or you don’t love Jesus. We pile expectations like these onto people who are sincere in their desire to follow Jesus. These are tests they have to pass, positions they need to hold, behaviors they gotta perform, in order to “prove” their faith. And we justify this with scripture. “Well, doesn’t the Bible say that you will know them by their fruit?”
By doing this, we burden them with noise instead of leading them to Jesus. We distract them with lesser fights until their trust in God is strained, confused, or even broken. Church, we gotta quit it with the double-standards of religiosity and keep our eyes on Jesus.
The words of Paul are so appropriate in times like these,
1 Corinthians 1:23 NKJV
23 but we preach Christ crucified...
1 Corinthians 15:1–3 NKJV
1 Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, 2 by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
Do you really want to lead people into a lasting life change? Then help them to discover the Light of the World in the darkness around them. Teach them to trust the promises of God. Encourage them to walk in faith when life is hard. Show them how to comb through the Scriptures and find hope. Teach them how to pray without ceasing. Model for them how to love God and neighbor without hypocrisy. Be a blessing instead of a burden.
Break the mold
Everything that our parents did wasn’t correct. Everything they taught us wasn’t truth. At some point we have to recognize that and break the mold and start fresh by following the Spirit of God instead of the worldly patterns of those who came before us. That’s what Jesus was getting at when He confronted the lawyers.
Luke 11:47–51 NKJV
47 Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. 48 In fact, you bear witness that you approve the deeds of your fathers; for they indeed killed them, and you build their tombs. 49 Therefore the wisdom of God also said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute,’ 50 that the blood of all the prophets which was shed from the foundation of the world may be required of this generation, 51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah who perished between the altar and the temple. Yes, I say to you, it shall be required of this generation.
Think about this: what Jesus says in these verses mirrors our own history. This is how we treat many of the people from our past whom we now celebrate as models of righteousness and champions of justice. We honor the countless men and women who served in our military. We revere the leaders of the civil rights movement. We praise the change‑makers who held our feet to the flames of God’s refining fire so that we might live in a more just world. Today, we build monuments to them, name holidays after them, and parade their memory through our streets. But the truth is sobering: the very people we celebrate now were often rejected, opposed, ignored, or even condemned by the generations who lived alongside them. We say, “If I had lived then, I would have stood with them.” But history, and our own hearts, prove that’s not true.
Even as we read our Bibles and judge those men and women of Scripture who missed the Messiah’s coming. Those who passed over the preaching of the prophets sent in the name of Yahweh, we wonder how they could’ve missed it, and we stick out our chest convinced it wouldn’t have happened to us. Oh, some of us may get a chance to prove ourselves right or wrong on this matter when Jesus returns.
I told you at the beginning, we are implicated in the patterns of injustice and hypocrisy we see in our world and in the Church. Just as Jesus spoke to the Pharisees, scribes, and lawyers so He says to us. “Keep your traditions, but elevate God’s truth above it all. Pray and fast and tithe and what have you, but love your God and your neighbor as yourself.” Don’t be a hypocrite.
While our religious practices may be correct, the outside of the cup is clean, our motivations are all-together wrong. Filth remains at our core. Our hearts are not pure like we think they are. We may read the Bible accurately and misapply it intentionally.
Pastor Charlie Dates tells us why that is the case.
There is a pathogen in our theology that anesthetizes us to the bleeding, broken people of the world. The danger is that a cold heart is often next to a correct mind.[4]
That’s why Jesus told the people,
Matthew 23:3 NKJV
3 Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do, but do not do according to their works; for they say, and do not do.
Hypocrisy frays the fabric of our faith. The world is looking at the Church to see if we have actually bought into what we proclaim. Keep your traditions, but don’t allow tradition to tower over the truthful expression of God’s Word.
Respond
A Prayer of Repentance
Holy Father, against You and you alone have we sinned and done wickedness. Our sins of hypocrisy are always before us Lord. We confess that we have oftentimes been insincere in our love. We have been selfish in our dealings with others. We have been selfish in the way that we have treated our neighbors and our enemies, selfish in the way we have withheld generosity and compassion when it was within our power to show it. Our sins of hypocrisy have fueled the disdain that others have for you. We have inspired their unbelief and we have caused them to blaspheme Your holy name. We have sinned against You in the way we have put the things of this world ahead of You.
We repent dear Lord. Holy Father we ask for restoration. Restore us in Your loving kindness to a right mind and heart. Gather us yet again in Your tender mercies O God. Forgive our sins according to Your holy Word. And may we commit from this day forth O God, to live our lives in this world as lights in a dark place that those who look upon us would see who You really are and confess with all who have received Your life changing truth that You alone are God. Amen.
Mishnah Yadayim 1:1 | The Sefaria Library. https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Yadayim.1.1?lang=bi.
Ritual Hand Washing Before Meals | My Jewish Learning. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hand-washing/.
Leon Morris, Luke: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 3, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 222–223.
Charlie E. Dates, What Hath Justice To Do With Righteousness?, 11.
