Jesus implies that vows had morphed from the original intent of making promises directly to God into making statements and using the “things of God” as the weight behind those statements. Vows to God had devolved into the equivalent of “I swear on my mother’s grave.” The point is that in their obsession with money, the Pharisees had gone from simple personal promises to God which would be seriously kept because of God’s personal majesty, to using merely things of God to validate the truth of a statement, which focused on the monetary value of the things of God.
