NOTES for Мф 22:41-23:12
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.