NOTES for Mt 23:1-12

The twenty-third chapter of Matthew's Gospel is an upsetting text. It is upsetting because it exposes our Pharisaism, our unwillingness for every person to be a free servant of Christ Himself. Pharisaism always carries a certain flavor of totalitarianism, and totalitarianism, in turn, carries a flavor of Pharisaism. It is spiritual totalitarianism that prompts us to prescribe to one another what must be done, 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 Last Judgment we might say, “But Father told me to do it.” Yet Christ says, “Call no one father.” How pale, incidentally, our feeble Orthodox justifications of this tradition look before Christ's clear and firm words! And, of course, Pharisaism is deeply infantile: it seeks support for faith not in the experience of communion with the Invisible One but in the uniformity of religious life.