NOTES for Mat 23:1-12

The beginning of the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew is a very joyful text. And there are at least two reasons for this. The first great joy is that the power of Truth is so great that our sinfulness, felt especially sharply and painfully when we are speaking of servants of the Church, is no obstacle to it. What could be more joyful than this news? For what is the whole sorrow and anguish of all atheists and apostates of all times and peoples: they cannot believe what comes from the mouths of unrighteous priests, and they transfer their rejection from the person to what he says. This is a very strong psychological phenomenon; fighting it can be simply impossible, and from this come anguish, disappointment, absurdity, and the rest. But in fact: no. We need to destroy this terrible cliche in our consciousness, that priests are a kind of God-chosen people who are higher than the angels. On the one hand, for example, Symeon the New Theologian often writes that a priest approaches the Sacrament before which even angels tremble: "it will show me to be like the angels of God, and perhaps make me greater than they, O my Master," he writes. And this is so. But on the other hand, the priest says very important words during the prayer of absolution after confession: I, only an unworthy priest, by the authority given to me by Him, forgive and absolve... And this too is a prayer sanctified by the Church. In other words, the miracle about which the Gospel speaks to us today is that Truth is not damaged by our sinfulness. And although we are all people, all human beings, Truth, as if in an ark, floats down the river of generations without suffering harm. Truly, a miracle and a joy.

And the second joy. We very often want a "spiritual director"; people endlessly pray for a spiritual director. But is there not in this a desire that someone else finally take upon himself your own burden of responsibility? It seems to us that we are so humble, ready to be disciples; let them come and teach us how to live, and we will obey. But the Apostle speaks against this: "Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature" (1 Cor 14:20). Be mature in your thinking; be responsible for your own actions. This is precisely what is meant by the very important words "and call no man your father on earth", which the Lord speaks to us today. In essence, we violate them; the whole structure of the church violates them. Let us not break the structure of the church, but let us at least understand this. Then there will be such joy in communication with a confessor: he is not your teacher and not your father, but a brother, perhaps an older one, but a brother, while your Father is in heaven.

There is so much joy in this: to be all equal, so that no one suppresses anyone's personality, no one punishes anyone, no one forbids anyone anything, but only advises and helps. Yes, we all have different experience and different wisdom, but the Lord is so much more perfect than we are that before Him we are all equal. It is impossible to understand this while remaining only on earth, but as soon as you lift your mind to heaven, from there both small houses and tall bell towers look almost the same. In the same way we are all equal before the Lord, and this is wonderful.

The twenty-third chapter of Matthew's Gospel is a difficult text. For a person trying to be honest with himself, it is even offensive because it exposes us as Pharisaic, unwilling for every person to be a free servant personally of Christ Himself. Pharisaism always has a certain flavor of totalitarianism, and conversely, totalitarianism has a flavor of Pharisaism. It is spiritual totalitarianism that prompts us to prescribe to one another what they must do and how in order to be saved. It is spiritual totalitarianism that prompts us to shift responsibility for our own soul onto others, so that at the dreadful judgment we can say: someone else told me to do this. And of course Pharisaism is very infantile: it seeks support for faith not in the experience of communion with the Invisible One, but in the uniformity of religious life.

But that is not the main thing the evangelist wanted to convey to us in this part of the book. After His devastating words about Pharisaic spirituality, the Lord opens to us another way, without which even the rebuke would have no meaning. "The greatest among you shall be your servant," or, as the same thought is formulated in another Gospel, "whoever wants to be great must be servant of all." Because this is how the Lord Himself acts. Because His greatness is that He gives Himself to us as a gift. Because He, in the words of the apostle Paul, "emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant." And service to others becomes for us the way of following the Lord Jesus, and this way is directly opposite to Pharisaism in everything the Lord speaks of at the beginning of the passage.

When someone tries to explain to us a truth that is inconvenient for us, we always have a fine argument in reserve: "And are you yourself able to live that way? No? Then be quiet." Very convenient and, it would seem, logical: only the one who has himself fulfilled all the commandments has the right to teach others. Jesus says an astounding thing: truth does not stop being truth if it is spoken by an unworthy person. Yes, one should not imitate the scribes and Pharisees, but one must obey their words. For the Pharisees' sin is not that they teach wrongly, but that they only pretend to fulfill the commandments. Jesus calls His disciples to fulfill everything the Pharisees teach, and at the same time not to consider themselves righteous, remembering that any human righteousness is nothing before the Righteousness of God.

A godless society that has lost any real incentives for its development has in every age tried to "morally" motivate people by playing on their vanity. In the community of people that Christ offers, everything is different: there is only one competition, the competition in love, where success is rewarded with the possibility of loving still more, that is, of serving other people. For one who loves, the other is always more important than himself, and growth in love means that the other becomes still more important.

"This contradicts human nature," we have often heard. Yes, fallen nature, but not the nature created by God and revealed in perfect fullness in Jesus Christ.

The Pharisees liked being religious people. They were an authority for their fellow countrymen, respected teachers of the law, guardians of cultural tradition, and so on and so on.

We, too, are not opposed to greetings in gatherings, if there is such an opportunity, and are ready to speak our weighty word in any situation; in general, to be on top. But the essence of our religion, if life with Christ can be called that, is not at all in this.

We are ready to be the Pharisees of our own time, or we already are. But are we ready to have no teacher other than Christ, no father other than God, no homeland other than His Kingdom, to be servants and not masters? Does this correspond to our ideas about religious life, about the tradition of the fathers whose heirs we are?

The question asked of the Pharisees about what they think of the Christ echoes the earlier question asked of the disciples about who people take Him to be. But He has not yet revealed to the Pharisees who He is. Nevertheless, into the minds of the Pharisees, filled with dry information, Jesus tries to sow seeds of a deeper understanding of Revelation than what they had habitually memorized. To those accustomed to expecting the Messiah as the heir of King David, entitled to the throne of his glorious ancestor, Jesus makes clear that the Messiah is immeasurably higher and that His coming is incomparable with everything people had grown used to expecting.

Such words may seem to contradict the fact that in the Gospel Christ Himself is called the Son of David. But Jesus' words do not imply a rejection of this messianic title, for He is asking them not to reduce its meaning to a literal interpretation. It must not be accidental that those who were listening stopped asking questions precisely after these words. Apparently they sensed the breath of another, higher world, beside which even the wisest human reasoning appears imperfect.

Yet there is a danger in giving more attention to reasoning than to deeds. Meanwhile, in denouncing the Pharisees, Christ in no way denies the truth of their theoretical convictions, but exposes the gap between their words and their deeds. What He said on this subject then remains relevant to this day. For Christianity is not a set of ideas, but life itself, and a split between theory and practice is especially unacceptable here.

Christ's call not to be called teachers and to be brothers, to call only the Heavenly Father "Father," like many other words of His, may at first cause bewilderment. After all, one has to address one's own father somehow, or a schoolteacher whose profession no one has abolished. But we must remember the many meanings of these words, which are often used improperly. Here the point is that it is unacceptable to place oneself willfully in a position that demands special honor. In that case we risk becoming thieves of what by right should not belong to us.

But if the Lord places us there for service, we should not shrink from it. We need only remember that we have been placed there to work, not to exalt ourselves.

For those to whom this Gospel was first addressed, the image of the "scribes and Pharisees" embodied both the people who did not accept and condemned Jesus, and the main "internal" threat to their community: after all, the "leaven of the Pharisees" could lead a believer to the same betrayal as then. And so, in the place of Moses the lawgiver and prophet sat "religious functionaries," and then Jesus paints a picture recognizable in every age: the first places at feasts and "in the synagogues."

Christ's disciples, in one way or another, will take up the religious realities familiar to them in order to build the Christian Church, and someone will have to occupy the first places, to lead, instruct, and be "teachers" and "fathers." What then should be done? Christ gives a paradoxical answer: the great must be lesser, the leaders servants, the high low. This is possible only if both the "great" and the "lesser" are first of all children of one Father, disciples of one Teacher.