Jesus Brought True Covenant Renewal
Daily Scripture
Matthew 23:29-36
29 “How terrible it will be for you legal experts and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30 You say, ‘If we had lived in our ancestors’ days, we wouldn’t have joined them in killing the prophets.’ 31 You testify against yourselves that you are children of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead, complete what your ancestors did. 33 You snakes! You children of snakes! How will you be able to escape the judgment of hell? 34 Therefore, look, I’m sending you prophets, wise people, and legal experts. Some of them you will kill and crucify. And some you will beat in your synagogues and chase from city to city. 35 Therefore, upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been poured out on the earth, from the blood of that righteous man Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. 36 I assure you that all these things will come upon this generation.
Daily Reflection & Prayer
Jesus’ final “woe” directly told his religious opponents that he knew what they planned. Jesus drew on a fact: “In this period many tombs were being built in Jerusalem to honor prophetic figures.” * Verse 35 matched the Hebrew Scriptures: “Abel: See Genesis 4:3-12. Zechariah: See 2 Chronicles 24:20-22. According to the Jewish order of books in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis is first and 2 Chronicles is last. So Abel would be the first righteous person murdered and Zechariah the last.” **
- Scholar N. T Wright wrote, “Jesus sees the present self-styled teachers of the law as fitting exactly the pattern of previous generations: killing the prophets and truly righteous people of old. They protest… but Jesus knows from their longstanding opposition to him that their protests are only skin deep. They are true children of their prophet-killing ancestors, and are about to complete the work by handing over to death the greatest prophet of them all.” *** Do you ever resist Jesus’ prophetic voice? Can you accept Jesus’ call to change something you are comfortable with?
- Wright noted, “Jesus is on his way to accomplish the real covenant renewal (see Matthew 26:28),” something the Pharisees’ obsession with rules could not achieve. “He is on his way to draw on to himself all the… wickednesses he was denouncing… to take their full force on to himself. It would be a bad mistake to read a chapter like this as… just a moral denunciation of somebody else.” **** How can you keep Jesus’ goodness, not your own, as the focus of Lent and Easter??
Prayer
Lord Jesus, help me not to build monuments to the past while repeating its mistakes. Keep the refreshing, purifying wind of your Spirit blowing through my life, even when it disturbs my comfort. Amen.
GPS Insights
Lauren Cook
Lauren Cook, who serves as Director of Online Engagement & Entry Points at Resurrection, wrote today’s Insight. She is a self-proclaimed foodie, a bookworm, and is always planning her next trip. She has the sweetest (and sassiest) daughter, Carolina Rae, a rockstar husband, Austin, and a cutie pup named Thunder. She loves connecting with others so let her know the best place you've ever eaten, best book you've ever read, or best place you've ever been!
In 1905, a Spanish-American philosopher named George Santayana wrote The Life of Reason, a five-volume philosophical work that explored how reason shapes human progress. It contained this famous quote:
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You’ve heard this before. If we turn our eyes from the past, if we refuse to learn, we become incredibly susceptible to repeating it.
Jesus called out the religious leaders in his context for exactly this. Generations worth of leaders, and humans, had silenced voices that challenged them or challenged the status quo, and the current leaders were ready to do the same. Does this sound familiar?
You might be like me—in the world today, our individual powerlessness can feel overwhelming. We look back at the past, forward into the future, and we sit in the present so incredibly unsure of what to do. How do we collectively remember? How do we collectively change, not repeat, make new?
I believe we begin this work by individually remembering, individually changing, individually making new.
We do this by challenging ourselves, getting outside of what is comfortable and normal and safe. We do this through reading, conversing, learning, growing and these things can happen in so many different ways. And guess what? We have an example of this–Jesus!
This is what Jesus did throughout his ministry–he ate with, walked with, learned from, spent time with the outcasts, the marginalized, the lost, the different.
Maybe you start today by asking yourself: Who can I learn from? Who am I listening to? What am I reading? What conversations am I starting?
How am I looking back to learn? How am I looking forward toward new life? How am I building Christian community where I might join hands with others to remember, make change, and repeat not the past, but repeat what Jesus taught us?
Instead of letting the past overwhelm you, let it guide you, guide us toward small, daily efforts that can inform our greater future.
© 2026 Resurrection: A United Methodist Church. All Rights Reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References
* Craig Keener, comment on Matthew 23:29 in NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (p. 8904). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
** Eugene Eung-Chun Park and Joel B. Green, study note on Matthew 23:35 in The CEB Study Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2013, p. 51 NT.
*** Wright, N. T., Matthew for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 16-28 (The New Testament for Everyone) (p. 106). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.
**** Ibid.
