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Looking up content for: Matthew 23:1-12 (posted on 10/24/2005)

Comments and Observations

  • Here’s a passage that seems almost designed to make the one preaching on these words feel uncomfortable! Of all the people in the sanctuary when these words of Matthew 23 are read, there will likely be only one or two who go by the title “Reverend” or “Father” and probably just one at that precise moment who may be arrayed in some kind of clergy robe or vestment. Yet here is Jesus saying that titles like “Rabbi,” “Father,” and “Teacher” ought not be used. What is going on here? Is the Church wrong to separate out clergy by such titles?
  • As many commentators have noted, if Jesus’ words here do literally prohibit the bestowing of any titles or the making of any distinctions in the church, then this must count as among the least-heeded sections of the entire New Testament!
  • At the very least these words properly call the church up short and force it to examine and re-examine its practices. The problem with the religious leaders of Jesus’ day is that they had elevated themselves to such a lofty place as to forget that there still was One whose loftiness was so grand as to reduce even the mightiest on earth to no more than a whirring gnat by comparison. What’s more, they forgot that they were to be servants and not overlords.
  • So we need to read Jesus’ admonitions against titles and honorifics in the light of that to which he was making a comparison. The problem with the religious leaders of his day was that they did not walk their talk. They were experts in Scriptures that made no impression on them whatsoever. It was this rank hypocrisy that rendered their lofty titles hollow and even offensive.
  • In the movie Godfather III there is a scene in which a Catholic cardinal removes a stone from a fountain in the Vatican. He holds the stone up and says (in essence), “This stone has been submerged in this water for maybe hundreds of years but look: I take it out, dry it off in a moment, and it is as though the stone had never been in the water at all. The water has had no effect on it.” His point was that it is indeed possible to be immersed in Christian teachings and even in the Scriptures for years and yet be unaffected, unchanged.
  • That was the plight and problem of the leaders in his day. But as verses 11-12 make clear, this saws against the fundamental grain of the gospel. Hypocrisy, pride, and arrogance are always sad vices in human behavior. But for people who follow no less than the very Son of God—who became human for our sakes and who died a humbling and humiliating death—such arrogant behavior is far worse than a vice. It is the gospel’s nemesis.
  • Or put another way: no pastor likes to hear that people think he doesn’t practice what he preaches. Such a criticism stings like few others. But when the behavior in question is as fundamentally un-Christlike as what the Pharisees and others were guilty of, this is magnified many times over!

Questions to Ponder/Issues to Address

  • What can pastors—who have an undeniably public role in worship each week—do to avoid the criticism that everything they do is just for the public to see (as Jesus says of the Pharisees in verse 5)? What forms of “pulpit talk” can pastors engage in that will make it clear that they are not putting heavy loads onto their people that they themselves do not also have to bear and with which they also need to wrestle?
  • A challenge here is to shape a sermon that will be for the whole congregation and not merely for the pastors in attendance. Perhaps the punch of Jesus’ words here is strongest for those who are themselves pastors but remember that Jesus in Matthew 23 is addressing not just the disciples but also “the crowds” (verse 1).
  • Perhaps there is a reminder here that can also be heartening. Despite the wretched condition of the religious leaders in Jesus’ day (they were, after all, on the cusp of having Jesus arrested and killed), even so Jesus’ commends the content of their teaching. So if there could be something worthwhile conveyed by even people/leaders who were this bad, then there is more than a little hope for pastors and religious leaders today. We may not be perfect—we may be, in Paul’s well-known words, “earthen vessels” and cracked pots—but even so, words of truth and life can and do get across. Thanks be to God!
  • Maybe acknowledging our own struggles—yet without turning the pulpit into a kind of spiritual striptease or therapy session—can go a long way pastorally toward demonstrating personal humility while also making clear that we as preachers are not loading anything on to the shoulders of others that we ourselves do not also bear.

Textual Points

  • Jesus’ words in Matthew 23:1-12 are not exactly complimentary of the Pharisees and other religious leaders but they are downright mild compared to what will come next in the balance of this chapter. So even though Jesus claims that the people must “do as they say not as they do,” it will become subsequently clear that the kind of hypocrisy displayed by these leaders is very serious business in God’s sight.

Illustration Idea

Illustration Idea #1: If you wish to write a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, official papal etiquette would suggest that you close and sign your letter as follows: "Prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness and imploring the favor of your apostolic benediction, I have the honor to be, Very Holy Father, with the deepest veneration of Your Holiness, the most humble and most obedient servant and son/daughter, (Name).” As someone has wryly noted, this may explain why the pope gets so few postcards!

Whether or not any given pope would ever insist on such a salutation, the fact is that over time, honorifics and titles of privilege and prestige have most assuredly accumulated for members of the clergy. The pope is addressed as "Very Holy Father" or "Your Holiness," cardinals and bishops are often referred to as "Your Eminence," ordinary priests are always addressed as "Father." Although the Catholic Church is a fairly obvious and large example of this kind of thing, they hardly have that market cornered. Pastors in almost every denomination are differentiated from the rest of the congregation by titles of “Reverend,” “Preacher,” “Pastor,” and where it applies, “Doctor.” What do we make of all this in the light of Matthew 23?

Illustration Idea #2: "Do what they say, not what they do," Jesus says. "They don't practice what they preach, and so even though they want you take note of their lifestyles, ignore them!" He doesn't practice what he preaches. There are few indictments of a minister more wounding than that. Such comments cut straight into a pastor's heart like the sharpest of scalpels.

It is hurtful because if it were true, that charge would undermine all credibility. It is not something to say lightly, and there is every indication that Jesus has given this a lot of thought. This is not how Jesus began his ministry, this was not based on a mere week's worth of observation. This had been a long time coming. But after all that time had passed, Jesus felt certain that this was the verdict. The Pharisees did not practice what they preached. They did not listen to the words of God they themselves read from the pulpit.

Instead, they focused their energy on just looking good. They strutted around trying to look ever-so-holy but only because it generated prestige. They made certain always to have their flowing robes on because when they did, they got a clergy discount on fruit in the marketplace, got upgraded to First Class when they traveled, got seated up on the dais at the head table whenever VIPs came in from out-of-town to speak at a banquet.

Like altogether too-many celebrities today, the Pharisees came to believe their own press releases. Actress Helen Hayes was always known as, introduced as, and lauded as "the first lady of American theater." But over time what most reporters forgot was that it was Helen Hayes herself who first cooked up that sobriquet and then spread it around! But that's the way it goes when image becomes a way of life. After a while, things get so weirdly inverted that it's difficult to tell what's what anymore.

The entertainment industry is an ego-driven affair populated by throngs of people who are full of themselves. As even actor Marlon Brando once observed, "The greatest love affairs I have ever witnessed took place with one actor, unassisted." Yet there is even so a kind of unspoken "code" among these people that says if you are too obvious with this self-infatuation, you will be shunned. Some years ago when actress Sally Field won her second Oscar in the span of only a few years, she famously gushed in her acceptance speech, "You like me! You really like me!" She has never been nominated again.

After F. Murray Abraham won an Oscar for his stellar performance as Salieri in the movie Amadeus, he was tapped to be an Oscar presenter at the following year's ceremony, and when he did this, he conducted himself quite pompously--in other words, he outwardly displayed the same pompous pride that inwardly filled the hearts of every actor there. But because he made the mistake of letting it show, he, too, has ever since been cast out into a kind of wilderness.

So here is a curious combination: the Academy Awards depends on self-congratulatory people all getting together to celebrate themselves, yet if a person lets this pride show, it is considered bad form. But probably what that points to is the core of hypocrisy: deception. The hypocrite is a deceiver of other people. What counts is not what you are really like but what other people think you are like. What counts is not whether you are worthy of the nice things people say about you but that they say them in the first place. What counts is doing whatever it takes to maintain your image, which often consumes so much time and energy that there is little left to nurture the genuine article in your heart.

Jesus, of course, is interested only in the inner person. If it should be that people admire you for the kind of person you genuinely are, that is fine as far as it goes, but Jesus' warning in Matthew 23 indicates that even so, those honors should not assume too high a profile in your own mind. Because Jesus also knows the seductive power of such things. If you start falling in love with your own P.R., then even if public respect for you began originally as a proper response to the kind of person you really were, eventually it may well be that your own focus will shift. Because in the end it is always true: you cannot live as a child of the light if you spend your days keeping other people in the dark!