NOTES for Mat 23:1-12
Jesus' assessment of the Pharisaic teachers may at first seem ambiguous: after all, He does not condemn what they say, but only what they do. Yet in the context of Jewish tradition, which requires a Torah teacher instructing others to be an example of following the Torah he teaches, it was utterly devastating. By saying what He said, Jesus in effect accused His opponents of being false teachers who did not themselves follow what they taught their pupils and followers.
But Jesus does not see the main problem in what His opponents say. Apparently, He has no objection in principle to the Pharisees' teaching: ultimately, it concerned the Torah and the way of righteousness, without which one cannot enter the Kingdom.
The main problem evidently lay in the teachers themselves, or more precisely in their attitude towards those whom they tried to teach and guide. And Jesus identifies the ‘teachers'’ main problem with the utmost precision: pride and the desire for self-assertion.
In fact, the very unwillingness of which the Saviour speaks—they lay on the people a burden that cannot be borne, yet will not move even a finger themselves—shows how many Pharisaic leaders regarded the Torah, the people and themselves. They apparently considered themselves experts in the Torah whose knowledge gave them special power over people who did not know the Torah, or knew it less well than they did. This peculiar ‘elite’ placed in that category everyone who had not received the appropriate education and therefore had no access to the circle of the ‘chosen’.
They regarded knowledge of the Torah as something that gave them special rights not only over the people, but in a certain sense even before God. We may suppose that this very attitude was the ‘burden’ which ‘teachers’ of this kind laid on the people's shoulders: for them, every ‘commoner’ was essentially a second-class person and, as such, had to depend entirely on them, the chosen ‘experts’.
They had completely forgotten that knowledge of the Torah implies, first and foremost, not rights but responsibility, and that being a teacher doubles that responsibility. A person approached for advice on matters of Torah is answerable for every word spoken, not only to people, but also to God.
And the power which a person giving advice gains, however briefly, over the soul and heart of the one receiving it is akin to a surgeon's power over a patient on the operating table. To abuse it is a grave sin and a crime, which can be avoided only by becoming, in the Saviour's words, ‘a servant to all’. Only in this way can a teacher become a true servant of God.