Mat 23:8 But do not let yourself be called Rabbi: for one is your Master, [even] Christ; and all your are brethren.

Christ really didn't like the idea of one person following another as the basis of a social order. He was the first egalitarian, preaching that all people were equal and should behave that way. This was revolutionary in his time, but the idea of "following a Master" has a great gravity in every age. People have a strong desire to be followers.

Christ knowing this preached necessary obedience to physical authority, but insisted that they had no moral authority and that we cannot win our knowledge or salvation simply by following a Master. He insisted that every person have a one-to-one relationship with God.

His own status in this regard is cloudy. He says here that he wants us to think of Christ as a brother, that is, an equal, but at the same time, his followers addressed him as "Master" (though not in Matthew) and he doesn't seem to have stopped them.

My sense is that, since he was one with the father, Master was an approapriate title, but as a human being, he wanted to others to see him as a brother. This is why he usually referred to himself as "son of man" rather than as the "son of God."

"Master" is from kathêgêtês, which means "guide" and, by extension, "teacher" and "professor."

"Brethren" is from adelphos, which means "son of the same mother," "kinsman," "colleague," and "brother."

Mat 23:5 But all their works are done to be seen by men: they broaden their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,
Mat 23:6 And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,
Mat 23:7 And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

For some time I have struggled with how to separate social relationships, which Christ consistently disparages, with personal relationships, which Christ sees as one step away from spiritual. In the physical and mental realms, Christ describes getting "stuck" as the problem. You have to progress from the physical, the mental, into relationships to reach the spiritual and move onto the next cycle of life.

However, in the area of relationships, there is this problem with society that arises over and over. Christ defines personal relationships as the one-to-one relationships we have with those who are physically close-by. Social relationships are one-to-many and include people who are distant. In many of these discussions regarding the defects of society, the issue is our "getting our reward" from these social relationship. Christ never criticizes the rewards we get from personal relationships, but the rewards that people look for from social relationships are different.

Often, these social rewards often come from on clothing which are physically seen at a distance. Indeed, clothing is almost always mentioned when Christ talks about social relationships.

In this verse, Christ reveals the defect with social relationships: the matter of position. The people who Christ is criticizing want to set themselves above most people. They do this with their clothes, but they also do it with the places they take at feasts, in the temple, and how they are addressed in markets. It is all about being seen as higher in status.

Though we might worry about our position in one-to-one personal relationships, there is never a question of status. However, that idea is unavoidable in one-to-many social relationships. In other words, what gets us "stuck" in our relationships is our concern about "position."

This completes Christ's analysis of how people get stuck in one phase of life. With the physical part of life, we get stuck on pleasure. With the mental part of life, we get stuck on ego. With the relationship part of life, we get stuck on position or status.

On a personal note, there is some irony here, since a large part of my intellectual efforts are devoted to the science of strategy, which is all about advancing your position in those one-to-many relationships.

"Seen" is theaomai, which means "to behold," "to gaze with a sense of wonder," "view as a spectator," and "to contemplate."

"Phylacteries" is from phulaktêrion, which means a "guarded post," "fort," "safeguard," and "security." (It is the source word for "prophylactic." ) In Christ time, it was used to refer to protective verses from the Bible actually worn as clothing.

"Love" here is not the agapaô that Christ uses for loving God and others. It is
phileô, which means "to love," "to like," "to be fond of doing," and "to show affection."

"Uppermost rooms" and "chief seats" come from protoklisia and protokathedria which literally means "first place," and "first seats" respectively.

"Rabbi" is not from any Greek, but the Hebrew rab, which means "much," "many," "great," "strong," and "greater than." This is the first time that the word is used in the Gospels, and Christ does not use it again. All other references are by others to Christ. He must have really not liked that. Interestingly, the first such reference in the Gospels is by Judas when he betrayed Christ in the garden.

Mat 23:4 For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay [them] on men's shoulders; but they [themselves] will not move them with one of their fingers.

Alternative: They tie together heavy burdens that are hard to carry and put [them] on men's shoulders; but they will not remove their fingers [from] them.

Alternative: They tie together heavy burdens that are hard to carry and put [them] on men's shoulders; but they will not remove an digit of it [from] them.

While Christ maintains that authority must be listened to (and guarded against), he also maintains that, by their very nature, those who have authority over others will abuse their power. The nature of authority is to increase the burden on their subjects and never to let them rest.

My alternative translation is different from most "standard" versions, but I think it captures the sense of the original Greek more clearly, especially in the second part where all the other translation translate kineô as "move" while I think it means "remove." While "move" is the most common meaning, it just doesn't make sense here.

Christ is always using contrasts to create vivid images his point. Here the contrast is adding burdens and refusing to remove them. The term "finger" is used in the same sense that we might say, "keeping someone under your thumb." Actually, an alternative for daktulos is "thumb" instead of "finger." We could also translated daktulos as "an inch" or "a digit" which would give it the sense was removing a little of the burden.

"Bind" is from desmeuô, which "to fetter," "to put in chains," "to tie together," and "to lay snares for." Not the same words used earlier for "bind" in Matthew.

"Burdens" is from phortion, which means "to load," "to burden," "to freight" and "a child in the womb." In plural, it means "merchandise" and "wares."

"Grevious to be borne" is from dusbastaktos, which means "intolerable." Literally meaning "hard to carry."

"Lay" is from epitithêmi, which means "to lay," "to put," "to impose," and "to place upon."

"Move" is from kineô, which means "to set in motion," "to move," "to remove," "to change," and "to disturb."

"Finger" is from daktulos, which means "fingers," "toes," "the thumb" "an inch," and "a digit."

Mat 23:2 The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat:
Mat 23:3 All therefore whatever they bid you observe, [that] observe and do; but do not after their works: for they say, and do not.

It is interesting that Christ never teaches anything but respect for existing authority. Well, perhaps "respect" is too strong a word. Recognition of authority may be closer to the idea. At the same time Christ also teaches that civil institutions are never the source of either moral authority or true justice. This verse is a perfect example of his philosophy.

Here, he doesn't exactly say to "obey" authority. The word he uses means "to give heed to" and "to guard." You might translate it as "What out for whatever they tell you to do and do it." It is almost like a warning.

At the same time, Christ criticizes what those in authority produce. "Don't do what they do."

"Seat" is from kathedra, which means "a chair," "a seat" "a sitting position," and "a throne," is used to denote a position of power.

"Sit" is from kathizô, which means "to make sit down," "to seat," "to place," "to sit," "to recline at meals," and "to settle."

"Observe" is from têreô, which means "to watch over," "to guard," "to take care of," "to give heed to," "to keep," and "to observe."

"Done" is from poieo, which means "to make," "to produce," or "to do."

"Works" is from ergon, which means "work," "deeds," "[peaceful] contests," "works of industry," "deed," "property," "wealth," and "occupation."

Mat 22:42 What do you think of the Christ? whose son is he?
Mat 22:43 How then did David in spirit call him Lord, saying,
Mat 22:44 The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit you on my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool?
Mat 22:45 If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?

This chapter began with a king giving a wedding feast for his son. It then discusses the nature of earthly authority and the afterlife. It ends with a discussion of another king's son: the Messiah, who was expected to be the son of David. These final verses bring together this seeming range of topics together an important conclusion.

The Jews of Jesus's era thought they understood who the Messiah was and the source of his authority. He was a decendant of David, and his authority came from David as "the annointed" king of the Jews.

Here, Christ demonstrates that, according to Jewish tradition itself, David recognized the Messiah's authority as superior to his own. By Jewish law and custom, a son cannot be master to his own father. The term used here for "lord" is kurios, which means "master" (see below). The general assumption here, and in the tradition of the times, was that authority passed from father to son. Thus, the original question about the Messiah's father was a question about the source of Christ's authority.

Note that Christ doesn't answer his own question nor does anyone ask him to. Instead, Christ simply makes it clear that on this central question of authority, the traditional Jewish viewpoints were insufficient.

In the end, this chapter comes to one conclusion: that all authority comes from God. Intermediary authorities, such as earthly kings, must be respected, but only within their own realms. There is a strong hint here that the realm of the Messiah reaches beyond this world to the next. The only other place in the Gospels that Christ mentions a "footstool" is when he referred to the earth as God's foodstool.

"Spirit" is pneuma, which means "blast," "wind," "breath," "the breath of life," and "divine inspiration." In this case, it means that David was speaking under divine inspiration.

The only word that we might expand on is kurios, which means "having power," "being in authority" and "being in posession of." It also means "lord," "master of the house," and "head of the family." In the original verse quoted, Psa 110:1, two different words were used in the Hebrew translated into Greek as kurios, Y-hova for the first LORD and 'adown for the second. Kurios and 'adown are very similar in meaning, referring to whoever is in authority in a given situation.

"Footstool" is from hupopodion, which means "footstool."

Mat 22:39 And the second [is] like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself.
Mat 22:40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

This second commandment highlights a point that is often overlooked about Christ's teaching. Christ never deals with people as abstract, ideal, or social entities. For him, the people who are important are the real, live, flesh and blood people that you come into contact with in your daily life. Christ does not expect you to love people as social classes or as "the masses" or as the faceless crowd. (The lyric from the song, Easy to Be Hard, in the musical HAIR captured this idea perfectly, "Do you only care about the bleeding crowd? How about a needy friend?")

Christ understood that we all sit at the center of our own universe. We don't have to worry about the fate of all people, everywhere. We just have to concern ourselves with the people who are physically around us. The term translated as "neighbor" here actually means "those nearby." In other words, we do not honor this second commandment by giving money to charity (not that this is bad) or voting for politicians who support welfare. If we think we are honoring our duty by these acts, we miss the point entirely.

Only God knows everyone and can make judgments about "the crowd." For God, the crowd is not faceless. He know every human being better than we know those who are close to us. However, when we try to see humanity from His perspective, we are only fooling ourselves. We can only generalize and our generalizations are based more on ignorance than understanding of the real needs of all people everywhere.

In this second verse, Christ makes the point that these two commandments (from entole, meaning "orders," "command," or "rules"), we get all of the rest of the law (from nomos, meaning "customs," "tradition," or the "law"). The Old Testament word for "law" is torah, which means not only "the law" but "the truth." So love of God and love of those around us is the basis for all the more detailed customs or laws that we create over time to enable us to live together. Both of these, the divine perspective and the personal perspective are needed.

What happens when we don't put the love of God first? One problem in modern law-making is that many people are trying to strip away one half of this historical foundation: that is, the love of God. If we make the rules only for the love of those close to us without a higher guide, only corruption results. By our nature, we cannot know the "faceless crowd" and our interpretation of "the common good" is always self-serving. The only way we can really act in the common good is to act based upon divine law, that is, the rules that God has written in each of us and that are captured in scripture.

Neighbor is from plêsios (plesion), which means "close," "near," and "one's neighbor."

Mat 22:37 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
Mat 22:38 This is the first and great commandment.

A lot of our analysis of terms revolves around Christ repeated use of symbols regarding the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual realms. Almost every parable touches on these realms. Here, in relationship to God, three of those realms are specifically address: the emotional (heart), the spiritual (soul), and the mental (mind). One is left out: the physical realm of the body. This

The focus of this command (from entole, meaning "orders," "command," or "rules," not nomos, meaning "customs," "tradition," or the "law") is love. However much of our understanding of that word itself has been elevated into a more abstract ideal its use in the New Testament. The Greek means simply "to be fond of" and "to be pleased with." Christ himself elevated the idea to putting the loved one above yourself. Originally, the concent was simply being pleased with or being fond of something.

"Love" is from agapaô, which means "to be fond of," "to greet with affection," "to persuade," "to caress," "to prize," "to desire," "to be pleased with," and "to be contended with." The word is seldom associated with sexual love. It actually took on its modern meaning of "brotherly love" from the English translations of the New Testament.

"Heart" is from kardia, which means "heart" and which we discuss in a larger Greek context here.

"Soul" is from psuchê, which which means "breath," "life," and "soul." It has the clear sense of the conscious self. It is also used to describe "the spirit" of things.

"Mind" is from dianoeô, which means "to have in mind," "to intend," "to have a purpose," "to think," "to suppose," and "the process of thought."

Mat 22:31 But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which was spoken to you by God, saying,
Mat 22:32 I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Since the afterlife has become the focus of Christianity, this and the previous verse referring directly to the afterlife should be the focus of a lot of attention. However, like many of Christ's statements, these verses don't lend themselves to a simple explanation, so they are often ignored or at least their complexities are.

Here, Christ talks about the afterlife directly. He does so with authority. In doing so, he combines what was written in scripture with his own very revolutionary (and difficult) insights. Here, he points out an important distinction between his view of the afterlife and other views.

First, we have to remember that the ancient world had a very clear concept of a "god of the dead." From the earliest Egyptian religions from the time of Moses to the Roman religions of Christ's era, there was a clear model for the afterlife. Souls, referred to as "the dead," traveled to the underworld where they were judged by the god of the dead (Anubis in Egypt, Pluto in Rome, Hades of the Greeks). The "dead," no matter how they were judged, lived a type of half-life, without a body (though among the Romans, some thought that the most heroic dead could achieve a godlike status in the underworld and could affect our world). The Egyptian religion was built around the idea that spirit of the dead would joined by resurrection of the body at some future date, but that idea was not widely shared in the ancient world.

Some ancient Jews (specifically Job) don't seem to have believed in an afterlife. It wasn't until Isaiah (Isa 26:19) that the resurrection of the dead is spoken of directly, instead of indirectly. The Hebrew word Olam Ha-Ba ("the world to come") is used for both the messianic age and the afterlife. Many Christians seem to look at "the kingdom of heaven" in the same way: the future world and the afterlife. However, Christ talks extensively about the kingdom of heaven and most of his statements are not consistent with either of those views.

Among the Jews of Christ's time, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead into bodies, but the Sadducees did not. One group of Sadducees didn't believe in an afterlife of any form. In other words, they followed the ancient tradition. They didn't believe in angels, the soul, or resurrection. Life was literally "dust to dust." While some Sadducees believed in a spiritual afterlife, they didn't agree with the Pharisees regarding "the rising." The view of the Pharisees was similar to that of the Egyptians, that people would rise from the dead with their bodies. This idea can be traced directly to Isaiah in the verse cited above. It is important to note that, especially for the Pharisees, this resurrection was connected to the coming of the Messiah, which, for them, was the end time like Christians see the Last Judgment.

Christ's first message here is, that, though Christ taught that there was a "rising" as taught by the Pharisees, it was not what the Pharisees taught, that is, something that happened at some end time when the Messiah comes. When God spoke of the Patriarchs, he spoke of them as living beings, in the present tense. He did not of them as the dead. In other words, there was never a time when God saw Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob as dead or spirits alone.

For Christ, the statement that God is not "a god of the dead" speaks directly against the existence of an afterlife that is some form of holding cell where spirits kill time until the resurrection. A big part of what I am discovering by studying Christ's words is that our concept of "heaven" has little to do with how Christ used the word. Notice no mention of heaven (ouranos, meaning "sky" or "universe") is made in this discussion where the afterlife is discussed specifically.

Christ, however, also seems to reject some future resurrection of the body as taught by the Pharisees. I know that this contradicts a basic tenant of popular Christianity, but Christ says clearly that the Patriarchs are living and have always been living, at least from Gods point of view. He makes it clear that he is not talking about life of the soul, but a "resurrected" life.

In the previous verse, Christ makes it clear that this resurrected life doesn't include relationships as we have them now, but it says nothing directly about the body of those resurrected. By discussing the topic in terms of "rising," he seems to be indicating that we have a body, but it tells us only that those bodies are different. The reference to "angels" in this prior verse may just refer to angels in their spiritual (hidden form) or to angels as they walked the earth in scriptures, in which people see them as physical.

What are we left with? I believe that here, as in many other places, Christ is dealing with our faulty perceptions of time. As we now know, time is a dimension of our physical universe, just like height, depth, and breadth. Christ is saying that God, angels, and our own resurrection exist outside time, that is, outside of our current framework of existence.

From God's point of view, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living in every sense. Their life in what we consider the past exists now for God, but their resurrected lives also exist now. Though we cannot conceive of a timeless state or a state which has direct access NOW to all of time, this is a limitation of our current state, not a limitation on God, the angels, or our future state.

Because we cannot think outside of time, we try to force both God and the afterlife to conform with our perspective, which exists within time. So, we conceive that, after we die, time passes until the Last Judgment. We have to spend that time in a spiritual heaven, which is different than the final paradise, or we have invent a concept call "soul sleep," which assumes our spirit "sleeps" until that final Judgment Day.

For Christ and God, time does not pose a problem. Creation through all of time exists as a whole. Any part of it is directly accessible. There is no real "before" or "after" except as different points, like different points in space. God didn't walk with Adam and Eve in paradise before or after Christ's death and resurrection in the Roman ear. God is walking in Eden. Christ is walking on earth. The Judgment Day is happening now. We are being born now. We are dying now.

We just cannot perceive these things while we are living in our current state.

"I am" is from eimi, which means "to exist," "to be," (as the opposite of "to become"), and "to happen."

"Dead" is from nekros, which specifically means "a corpse" as well as "the dead."

"Living" is from zaô, which means "to live," "the living," and "to be alive." It is a metaphor for "to be full of life," "to be strong," and "to be fresh."

Mat 22:30 For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

Christ refers to the afterlife as "the rising up," we assume, of the dead. He says here that the risen do not marry. He describes them as like the "angels of God in heaven." "Heaven" is from ouranos, which means "sky," "the universe." Of course, when God's messagers visit earth, they take on human form, but is it their form or lack of it that Chrit is referring to here?

In terms of Christ's three realms, marriage is that of relationships. In the afterlife, relationships with other people change. Our primary relationship or partnership is with God. This is why Christ compares the risen to the "angels of God" because we will be defined by our relationship with God and not each other. Though God, we will know others intimately, but we will know all others infinitely. Since God is everywhere, in everyone, how could such a relationship be exclusive?

"Resurrection" is from anastasis, which means , "a standing up," "removal," "a rising up," "a setting up," and "rising from a seat." It is the noun form of anistêmi, which means "to make stand up," "to raise," "to wake up," "to build up," "to restore," "to rouse to action," "to stir up," and "to make people rise."

"Angels" is from angelos, which means "messenger" and "envoys" though it became to mean "semi-divine beings" in later use.