Cleanliness That’s Not Godliness

The Stage is Set

In Matthew 27, we see perhaps the most stark example of people more concerned with keeping up appearances than actually living a right life. The chief priests and elders had been looking for a way to kill Jesus for a while, but because large crowds followed him wherever he was going, they never had the chance. Judas, seeing an opportunity to gain some profit and favor with them, offered to betray Jesus to them so that they could arrest him when he didn’t have a crowd. The money (30 pieces of silver) is exchanged, and Judas leads them to Jesus when he’s off praying with only a few disciples.

Upon seeing that Jesus was condemned to death, Judas regrets having betrayed him. He comes to the priests and exclaims that his sin is great because Jesus was innocent (verse 4 “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”) The priests don’t deny that Jesus is innocent, but rather simply refuse to consider Judas’s guilt at all (“What is that to us? See to it yourself.”) What is that to us?! Well, if Judas’s guilt is in conspiring to betray the innocent Son of God, the guilt of these men was in actively seeking to destroy him! Despite having the greater guilt, they are entirely unfazed even by Judas’s clear grief at being their accomplice.

Admission of Guilt

As awful as this all is, the most sinister part is what happens when Judas throws down the coins and leaves to kill himself. These leaders consider the coins and determine that it would be wrong to put the coins back in the temple treasury because it was used as a price to betray innocent blood (verse 6). These men, who have conspired to take the life of the spotless lamb of God, who paid one of Christ’s friends to betray him, now consider the uncleanliness of their sin only as it regards to the silver!

So what is the solution? They have this money which they believe to be defiled by the shear horribleness of their actions. Surely, these coins serve as an object lesson of their great depravity and they repent in dust and ashes. Nope, instead, they find a way to be rid of the coins which will make them look charitable to the watching world. They purchase a field as a place to serve as a burial ground for strangers in Israel.

Just 4 chapters prior, Jesus had used this imagery to describe them:

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.

Matthew 23:27-28

Application

However, before this observation becomes only about these men and without practical application: consider the warning to the rest of us. How often, when we sin, are we more concerned with covering our tracks and presenting a “clean outside”?

Is sexual sin a problem only because people could find out? Is it okay to be uncharitable as long as you demand others give (as we find Judas doing in Matthew 26:9)? Is it okay to harbor hatred for others as long as you’re only passive aggressive rather than throwing a fist?

For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.

John 3:20-21

But there is nothing that is hidden that will not be made visible. Hiding is futile. It has probably never been easier in our detached, social media society to put on a public face and care nothing for the mess we’ve got inside.

The good news is that Jesus has promised that those who would forsake their sin and turn to him will be made clean in his righteousness. It’s a deep clean that cleanses a person to their core. He sees our hearts and knows the dead bones in there. We’re not fooling him at all. Yet he died as punishment for the sins of, and raised to new life as the first of many, who would follow him in faith.