Matthew 23:35 - Exposition

That upon you may come ( ὁ ì πως ἐ ì λθῃ ). This phrase does not express a simple consequence, neither can it mean "in such a way that"—explanations which have been given by some commentators to avoid a seeming difficulty in the final sense; but it is to be translated, as usually, in order that, ut veniat. God, foreseeing the issues of their evil heart, puts in their way occasions which will aid his vengeance and accelerate the time of their punishment. He lets them work out their own destruction by committing an unpardonable sin. He does not force them into this course of conduct; they can resist the opportunity if they will; but he knows they will not do so, and the visitation becomes judgment. To have a man's blood upon one's head is to be held guilty of the crime of murder, and to be liable to make the required atonement for it. So in their blind fury, taking the punishment on themselves, the Jews a little later cried, "His blood been us, and on our children!" ( Matthew 27:25 ). Righteous blood . So in the Old Testament we often find such expressions as "innocent blood" ( 2 Kings 21:16 ; 2 Kings 24:4 ; Jeremiah 26:15 ); "blood of the just" ( Lamentations 4:13 ); comp. Revelation 6:10 and Revelation 18:24 , where it is written that in Babylon "was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all them that were slain upon the earth." Righteous Abel. The first of the murdered, the prototype of the death of Christ and of all good men who have died for truth, religion, and justice ( Genesis 4:8 ; 1 John 3:12 ). The catalogue of such is long and terrible. Our Lord assigns a period to its dimensions, commencing with the first death mentioned in the Bible, and ending with the murder of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple ( τοῦ ναοῦ , the sanctuary ) and the altar. Our Lord is speaking of a past event well known to his hearers; but who this Zacharias was is much disputed. Origen mentions a tradition, otherwise entirely unsupported, that Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, was the son of Barachiah, and was murdered in the temple. But the story looks as if it was made to relieve the difficulty of identification; neither, as far as we know, was he a prophet. Zechariah, the minor prophet, was the son of Berechiah; but we read nothing of his being slain in the temple or elsewhere. It is true that Josephus ('Bell. Jud.,' 4.5. 4) tells how a "Zacharias, son of Baruch," an honourable man, was slain by the zealots in the temple. But this murder took place A.D. 68, and our Lord could not number it among past crimes, or speak of it as an event familiar to those who heard him. The only other prophet of this name in the Bible is one mentioned in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22 , as stoned by the people at the command of Joash, in the court of the house of the Lord. "And when he died," it is added, "he said, The Lord look upon it, and require it." This makes his case correspond to that of Abel, the voice of whose blood cried unto God from the ground. He is also the last prophet whose death is recorded in the Old Testament, and the guilt of whose murder, the Jews say, was not purged till the temple was burned under Nebuchadnezzar. It seems to be a kind of proverbial saying which the Lord here uses, equivalent to "from the first murdered saint to the last," taking the arrangement of the Hebrew canon of Scripture, and regarding the Books of Chronicles as the conclusion of Jewish history. This (though it would exclude the murder of other prophets, e.g. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.) would all be plain enough and quite appropriate to the context were it not that the Zechariah thus referred to was the son of Jehoiada, not of Barachias. But there are two solutions of this difficulty suggested; and, allowing either of these, we may confidently assert that the above-named prophet is the personage intended.