“Woe/alas to you, you blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing, but whoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor.' You fools and blind, for which is greater, the gold, or the temple which has sanctified the gold?”
Jesus is so moved by the idea of how they are turning both Jews and Gentiles from the truth that He changes His description from ‘hypocrites' to ‘blind guides', and He gives an example of the way in which they take men's minds off the essentials and fix them on what is marginal. By what they advise men to swear on they treat the gold in the Temple as more important than the Temple itself. Their eyes are not fixed on the great King himself, to Whom the Temple points, but on the great treasury which contains their gold. In other words they are not on God but on Mammon, even if it is ‘sanctified' Mammon (Matthew 6:24). But if they had only thought about it honestly they would have recognised that the Temple as the symbol of God's presence, and as such being the very reason for the gold being offered, was far, far more important than the gold within it. The One to Whom the offerings are made is more important than the offerings. On the other hand their concentration is on their offerings. They have made the creature more important than the Creator. (They have failed to recognise that God is Spirit and that those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth - John 4:24). Thus they are ‘fools and blind'.
The use of ‘fools' had been forbidden in Matthew 5:22 in private conversations. But it was different for the One Who was the Judge of all men when giving His official indictment. These people, who easily called others ‘fools', had proved to be ‘fools' themselves in the most important thing of all, their attitude towards God. The use of the term here confirms how carefully the actual words of Jesus were preserved. No one would have put what seems to be such a contradiction onto His lips by accident.
‘Whoever shall swear -- he is a debtor.' They considered that to swear by the Temple did not make a man liable to perform his oath, but that to swear by the gold of the Temple did. What could more indicate where their hearts were set? It was set on aspects of their own ‘worship' rather than on the One Whom they claimed to worship. Part of the reason might well have been because these were physical things that the ordinary people participated in, and might therefore be seen as more connected with them, but that was only because their spiritual vision was blurred. Had their hearts been right that would not have been so. Some suggest that the idea was in order to prevent people from swearing on something so sacred as the Temple, but that was probably an idea that grew up later when the Temple was no more. Jesus seems to be suggesting that their attitude towards the Temple here was rather somewhat casual in comparison with their views about their way of worship, possibly because they did not see themselves as closely connected with it (in their view it had been built by an impostor). And the Temple, we should remember, was outside Pharisaic control. We can therefore understand why their concentration was on the Law and the people's contributions. So it might well have been that they concentrated more on things with which the people were directly involved, and wanted others to do so as well. (We can compare how, as Christianity became more ‘formal', concentration for many turned on things like ‘relics' instead of being fixed on God Himself. God became far off. In their formalism they had lost the significance of His words in John 4:24).
‘You blind guides.' The alteration in address from ‘Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites' is an indication that we have here Jesus' own words. Somebody just giving the gist of His words would have used the same formula as on the other woes. But we can see perfectly how Jesus, deeply moved at how they are keeping people out of the Kingly Rule of Heaven, might switch to this description.