23:8
“You are not to be called rabbi..” Does this mean we must never have titles? I don’t think so, I think it is our attitude that matters. We are not to take delight in titles, we are not to consider ourselves better than others or superior to others. What is the foundation for this? It is that we have only one Master and we are all brothers. Christ is my master, and Christ is your master. So we both look first to Christ. And we are brothers, we are part of the same family. There may need to be a hierarchy for functional reasons, but never for relational reasons.
23:9-12
Jesus then extends the principle to other categories: father and teacher. We need to look first at the positive reasons. We all have our Father in Heaven. Any supposed human relationship looks rather paltry in the light of this (of course, I am not saying human relationships do not matter and that we should not delight in them). And each person’s greatest relational need is to appreciate more and more our relationship with God our Father. Now in 1 Corinthians 4:15 Paul rebukes the Corinthians for not having many fathers, so again we must not take these words here in a legalistic sense. It is heart matters that Christ is concerned with. We need to know our Father in Heaven. And the same principles apply to teachers. Teachers are explicitly mentioned as a God given ministry in the New Testament, but Christ, the Messiah, is our primary teacher. Verses 11 and 12 get to the heart of the matter, the issue that Jesus is dealing with, and that is exalting ourselves. We are servants and are to see ourselves as servants. We not to seek to exalt ourselves, but to build others up and to glorify Christ.
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