We’ve been in northern Indiana this week so I get to jog in a new neighborhood. Which also means new bumper stickers and yard signs. Needless to say, the signs in northern Indiana are very different from the ones in D.C.
You get some interesting pairings, like, "I voted for the convicted felon" on the bumper and "Jesus is Lord" staked in the lawn. An American flag flying next to a cross, the current empire's banner bolted to the last empire's execution device. Nobody in these yards seems to catch the irony.
This week the lectionary hands us Matthew 23, Jesus' seven woes. So let's do the obvious thing and aim them where they belong: at American white Christian nationalism.
One thing to get straight first. Jesus is not attacking outsiders in this chapter. He is a religious insider torching the religious insiders who hold the power.[1] Therefore, we should not use the woes as a way to attack other religions.
Woe 1: They Lock the Door (23:13)
Jesus says that the scribes are locking “people out of the kingdom of heaven," refusing to go in themselves, and blocking everyone else who tries. Notice the odd thing he keeps admitting across the Gospels: humans, somehow, hold the keys to the kingdom. We apparently really do have the power to slam the door. Which raises the question: if you had the power to let everyone in, why on earth wouldn't you?
But Christian nationalism runs on bounded-set religion. You are in if you clear the checklist: right flag, right border, right bathroom, right party. Jesus keeps trying to prop open a centered-set door—are you turned toward him or not?—while the self-appointed bouncers guard a threshold Jesus never wanted guarded.
Woe 2: Twice the Child of Hell (23:15)
"You cross sea and land to make a single convert," Jesus says, and make that convert twice as fit for hell as yourselves. Read in the rearview mirror, this verse predicts colonialism with precision. Crossing sea and land was the missionary-and-empire package deal, the cross arriving on the same boat as the cannon. You can circle the globe making converts and hand each one a religion angrier and more enslaved than the faith you found them in.
Woe 3: Straining the Syllable, Blessing the Bomb (23:16–22)
The bit about swearing by the temple's gold but not the temple itself is Jesus mocking sacred-sounding technicalities. Translate it forward to today. These are the people who will fight you for saying "Jesus!" when you stub your toe, while their leaders invoke the holy name to bless the bombing of other people's children. Straining the syllable. Swallowing the airstrike.
Woe 4: Coffee Cups, Not Child Abuse (23:23–24)
Jesus indicts people who tithe their spice rack while neglecting "justice and mercy and faith." These are the folks with strong opinions about whether you may carry a coffee cup into the sanctuary, exactly how far your shorts must fall below the knee, but who somehow cannot locate a policy for protecting a child from abuse. The herb garden gets audited. The camel walks right through.
Woe 5 & 6: A Clean Cup Full of Bones (23:25–28)
Spotless on the outside, greed and dead men's bones on the inside. This is "we can say Merry Christmas again." It is the bumper sticker, the WWJD bracelet, the cross resting on the collarbone, the whole merch table of Christian identity, polished to a shine while the policies those same Christians cheer gut the aid and healthcare keeping millions of people alive. Beautiful cup. Bones inside.
Woe 7: Monuments to the Prophets They Would Have Killed (23:29–36)
They build tombs for dead prophets and swear they never would have joined the mob that killed them. Every January they will quote the one safe sentence from Dr. King while opposing everyone alive who says what he actually said.
Then Jesus lands a powerful insult: brood of vipers. The ancient world believed baby vipers ate their way out of their mother, killing her to be born. Herodotus wrote it down as fact. So this is not merely "snakes." It is mother-killers. A religion so hungry to be born powerful that it devours the very gospel that gave it life.
The Head Table No One Will Leave
Right before the woes, Jesus gives us the antidote to all of this (23:8–12): relinquish power. No rabbis, no fathers, no masters, no titles, no head table. The greatest among you is the servant. The self-exalting get humbled; the humble get raised.
Christian nationalism wants the head table. It wants the honorific, the establishment, the nation with its name stitched into the hem. But the kingdom Jesus describes has no head table to fight over.
- A necessary word on aim. For most of church history, Christians read Matthew 23 as Jesus attacking "the Jews," and "Pharisee" hardened into a synonym for hypocrite. That reading is both false and lethal; it helped fuel centuries of Christian violence against Jewish people. Jesus is a Jew, standing inside his own tradition, doing what Amos and Jeremiah did before him: indicting his own people's leadership from within. The Pharisees were a lay renewal movement, in many ways the group closest to him. The line never ran Pharisee → Jew → whoever I resent this week. It runs from the behavior Jesus names to whoever holds religious power. Which is exactly why it lands on us.↩︎
