Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. This saying points to men who used their wealth for self-indulgence, for the mere gratification of the senses. "The fulness," writes Dean Plumptre, "is the satiety of over-indulgence."
Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. These are they who, proudly self-satisfied, dreamed that they needed nothing, neither repentance in themselves nor forgiveness from God?봞 character too faithfully represented in the self-satisfied, haughty Pharisee of the time of our Lord, a character, alas!
not extinct even when the hapless men to whom the Lord specially referred had paid the awful penalty of extinction of name and race, loss of home and wealth. The hunger, the mourning, and the weeping were terribly realized in the case of the men and their proud houses in the national war with Rome which quickly followed the public teaching of Jesus.
When the Master spoke the words of this sermon the date was about a.d. 30-31. In a.d. 70?봳hat is, within forty years?봋erusalem, its temple, and its beautiful houses, were a mass of shapeless ruins. Its people, rich and poor, were ruined.
Its very name, as a city and nation, blotted out. But from parables, and still more from direct words, we gather, too, that the hunger, the mourning, and the weeping point to the cheerless state of things in which those poor souls who have lived alone for this world will find themselves after death.