NOTES for Mat 23:1-12
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.