Woe to you, blind guides, who say, “If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the temple is bound.”
Jesus continues to condemn the Pharisees’ false piety, this time their distorted teaching about oaths. They distinguished, as if, between holy and non-holy oaths according to material value: they considered the gold of the temple binding, but the temple itself not. They belittled the holiness of the temple and placed material value above it, in this way replacing God’s holiness with profit. Jesus calls them “blind guides,” because they were leading others and did not see the foundational truth: God does not look at the material thing, but at the heart through which a person expresses himself. This word shows how formalism distorts faith by placing the material above the spiritual.