Preaching Paths 5 November 2023

Sally A. Brown, Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary

Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem amid much popular acclaim (Mt 21:1-11) has provoked a series of sharp confrontations with different cohorts of the Jerusalem leadership (Mt 22). Now, as chapter 23 opens,  Jesus’ detractors have left the scene. He speaks to his disciples and other followers—and of course, to Matthew’s readership and to us. Matthew wrote years later, his own community of Jesus-following Jews locked in conflict with synagogues dominated by an intensified version of Pharisaic doctrine and practice. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, all of the cohorts with whom Jesus had debated, except for the Pharisees, were gone (Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots). Post-Temple Pharisees, convinced that Jewish identity would dissolve without ever more rigorous adherence to Torah, cracked down on careless observance, especially ritual purity laws. Yet these statutes, rendered yet more onerous by added layers of detail, were all but impossible for the urban poor and rural peasants to fulfill. Practicing rigorous purity rituals became a status symbol. Pharisees also enjoyed high-status social prerogatives and wore elaborate religious attire.

The question implicit behind Jesus’ critique of religious leadership is clear:  What are the marks that distinguish religious leaders worthy of our trust and emulation from those who deserve neither our trust nor our emulation? This question is as relevant in our time as in Jesus’ day or Matthew’s.

Preachers do well to begin where Jesus does: he underscores what the Pharisees and scribes of his time were getting right. They read the scriptures and saw that the people knew and understood them. (Reference to “Moses’ seat” may evoke Moses’ teaching of the law to the escaped Hebrew slaves.) We, too, need to affirm what pastors, preachers, ecclesiastical administrators, and lay leaders are accomplishing that is good and true. Beyond that, Jesus’ portrait of religious leaders of his day is devastating. They are hypocritical, overbearing, ostentatious, and expect deferential titles and special treatment. One wishes this list of failings were not so instantly recognizable.

 Addressing hypocrisy, Jesus advises, “Listen to what they teach, but do not do what they do. Watch what they do, and do not emulate it. They do not do what they teach.”  Second, the scribes and Pharisees are overbearing; they heap on the poor a burden of ritual obligations they themselves evade. Meanwhile, the “weightier matters of the law” (Mt 23:23), justice and mercy—both of which the poor desperately need—are neglected. Jesus also targets ostentation and a tendency to seek the limelight: extra-long fringes on the customary prayer shawls, special seating in the synagogue, lofty salutations in the streets, and large phylacteries. (These leather boxes, strapped to forehead or hand and still in use, hold short quotes from Torah, although their warrant in Deut 6:8 is sometimes understood as a metaphorical admonition to let thinking and action be shaped by Torah.)

Jesus lays down a single criterion for true leadership: “The greatest among you will be your servant.” Since only God is father, and Messiah the one true teacher, trustworthy leaders will not demand deference. They will not dominate the flock; they will walk alongside it. Trustworthy leaders model the life-shaping practices they teach, showing healing mercy and practicing liberating justice. Perhaps the most challenging thing about preaching this text is that, this week, we cannot get to the pulpit except by way of the confessional.