Woe to you Pharisees, woe to you scholars of the law! ‘Woe’ – we don’t often hear this word today, so I checked the meaning of ‘woe’ and it means “great sorrow or distress or things that cause sorrow or distress; troubles. ”Nobody would like to bring upon himself any sorrow or distress. We all want to be happy; we want to be saved. But today in the Gospel, Jesus keeps warning us that there is one thing that can bring sorrow and distress upon us, namely hypocrisy. These strong words are addressed to the Pharisees and scholars of the law, those who should give a great example of what they teach others, but they didn’t do themselves. Jesus may say woe to me and to you, if we become hypocrites by not observing what we believe or by correcting others but won’t make necessary changes in our lives. We know what woe means and we know that Jesus never liked hypocrisy. Let’s pray that Jesus would never say woe to us.
