A woe is pronounced upon you for your honor seeking pridefulness, ever demanding the best seats, ever pursuing the honored greetings.
Thematic Relevance:
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Every crack is being exposed in these false shepherds over God’s kingdom. |
Doctrinal Relevance:
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Honor seeking is ruled out for those who are in Christ. |
Moral Relevance:
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It becomes a steady drumbeat in this portion of the Gospels: Pride, ego, all that desires the focus to be on me; these are ruled out. And yet, we live in a society that feeds this beast at every opportunity, and we most assuredly suffer the effects. We are slaves to our own egos, and must join the battle for godliness first and foremost on this front else all else is lost. |
Questions Raised: |
On this occasion, I will give praise to my God and King that He does not suffer the false leaders to remain in their places, but will indeed expose every lie and deception for all to see. I tremble to consider that the same may as truly be said in my own regard, yet I remain entirely thankful that God will not be mocked, but will have His representatives be truly representative. |
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This point is one that has already been covered in previous studies. However, as we have it here in isolation, as it were, it would be well to put the issue under the microscope. The issue Jesus deals with directly is that of pride. This business of all but demanding the best seat, the seat seen as acknowledging one’s own preeminence, is a business of pride. The whole routine indicated by their pursuit of the public greeting goes well beyond a desire to be recognized and acknowledged. The whole thing was a competition, a competition for title of most pious. This is of a piece with those other aspects of Pharisaism that Jesus decries. In raising the hygienic necessity of hand-washing to the point of ritual, in stressing the outward forms such as the phylacteries and tassels, the same game was being played. Indeed, a study of this sect’s practices suggests that the whole life of the Pharisee, at least the public portion, was one long game of honors.
As to the specific forms we see Jesus denouncing here, I think we are pretty clear on the concept that such activities are unbecoming. There was a time, I shall note by way of an aside, when our politicians saw it thus as well. There was a time when to announce oneself a candidate for office was considered most unbecoming, and a fairly strong evidence of one’s unfitness for said office. Would that such a sense of propriety, however weak, still persisted. Instead, the whole process has become very much like the Pharisaic system that Jesus is denouncing here: All about pride of place. How many times do we hear of the politician so offended at being treated like a common citizen? “Do you know who I am?” Maybe yes, maybe no, but quite frankly, why should it matter? It would be tempting to read a bit of a democratizing impulse into Jesus’ stance on such things, but that is not at all the point. The point is not democracy, although there is a clear emphasis on equality amongst believers. There remains a King, and He is not subject to elections.
The issue is our love of being honored. Now, we may have battled this down in ourselves in some degree. I suspect, based on myself, that it is a battle only rarely won, if at all. Rather, it is a running conflict, a series of skirmishes. Worse, this honor-seeking habit has a way of ambushing us. Pride is a master of disguise, after all, and unless we are constantly on our guard against its return, we will find ourselves once more fully infiltrated and brought low by its evils.
Let me offer some of pride’s variations for our consideration here, as we see them reflected in the habits Jesus is pointing out. There is the obvious, of course: the love of being honored and proclaimed. Why, after all, do we find ourselves chasing titles at work? Granted, there is a sense in which these are merely classifications by which we can assess general qualifications. But, they are unreliable at best, just as the degrees obtained in college may prove a thoroughly unreliable measure of one’s actual capacity for applying knowledge to a specific task or problem. Yet, we have these rankings in every workplace. Once I was a junior engineer, then a senior. Eventually, I was acclaimed a principal engineer, a matter requiring a vote by a jury of peers. And, yes, you can be sure I felt a touch of pride at being thus acclaimed. It didn’t change a thing, frankly. I did the same job, and I did it with the same skill set. I didn’t suddenly gain new powers with the taking of this title, nor was I in any way superior to many of those I worked with who did not have such title. But, pride loves to be able to put out the display tag!
This still presents a problem if we are not the sort to chase such things. Even if we have not been chasing after them, they will come to us. Then what? How do we respond? To respond with a false humility is to respond with pride. Yet, to suddenly vest that title with a new significance, now that it applies personally, is equally a response of pride. This is a matter that goes straight out of the workplace and right into the church! And, rest assured it has done so pretty much as long as there has been a church. Go back to the apostles, jostling for position with Jesus. Who’s the greatest among us? Well, they learned their lesson on that one, but it remained a lesson that would need repeated application.
Now, we have our officers of the church, whatever our particular modes of organization might be, and where there are officers, there are places of honor. Even as a teacher, this applies. A teacher has a place of honor within the classroom, or may be perceived in that light. Beware! An elder, by Scriptural definition, is only so great as his capacity and determination to serve, to set aside any sort of right to honor that might be thought to accrue to that position.
I was reading last night of one of the early church fathers, and of his unwillingness to step into any high office. Indeed, when drafted into such positions, he seemed to have a habit of going off into monastic seclusion instead. Why? Did he fear responsibility? No, that was not it at all. Rather, I think he feared his own pride. To be a bishop, to oversee even one congregation: Yes, there is great responsibility there, but with that responsibility comes an incredibly narcotic effect on one’s self-esteem.
In the case of the Pharisees, we see this in the extreme, as there is not only the matter of being honored for oneself, but there is that competition, that need to be seen as more honorable than somebody else. That’s at the root of the complaint here. Those greetings, the seating arrangements: These were matters of being publicly declared more pious, more reputable, than the guy in the next seat down, however honorable he may have been esteemed.
Now, look at the effect this had on the rest of the religious (and I do not intend that in any derogatory sense, merely as distinguishing from the irreligious). We are told that people actually vied to be the first to offer these honor-laden greetings to whatever Pharisee happened by. See, there was a pride to be fed by feeding their pride. It’s as if their honorability somehow rubs off on the one who first honors them. What nonsense, we say, and rightly so. Yet, we play the same game in our own quiet way. Who do we seek out to greet at church? Or, who do we not? Now, ask yourself why. What drives our selection process? Granted, we can’t greet everybody, but do we treat everybody as equals as we go about the process of greeting? It needs checking.
We may not see ourselves in this image of the honor-seeking prig. But, perhaps we might recognize ourselves in the title I’ve opted to give to this study: Hunger for Recognition. Nobody, I should suppose, is happy to keep working hard at their labors when those labors go unnoticed and uncommented. A homemaker is not going to be happy to continue in such efforts as make a house a home of those others who share the abode never seem to appreciate what they gain by those efforts. Likewise, the breadwinner may not be too thrilled to keep toiling at work and sacrificing for family, if the family shows no sort of realization that this is what he is doing, that he is trading his own desires for their interests. For all that, set aside the familial interactions. Even within the workplace, how long will a worker continue to give his best effort if there is no reward for having done so? If his work is seen as no more and no less than that of the next guy, the one who just puts minimal effort into what he’s doing, how long will he see the point in trying to do his best? Oh, to be sure, we want to do all things as unto the Lord, but we remain creatures of flesh and blood, and flesh and blood desires to be acknowledged. We want to have a sense of worth.
The problem is that hungering for a sense of worth is not so very far removed from the sort of honor seeking that we more clearly recognize as problematic. Further, we tend to feed into this with one another. In our desire to make certain that the efforts people put in are recognized, we actually wind up feeding that egotistical need in one another. We make it that much harder for ourselves and for those we seek to uplift, because we cause that pride issue to rise up. In seeking to honor, we instead put the recipient in the position of having to battle once more his own urge toward honor-seeking. It’s hard.
Hunger for recognition: I am inclined to think there’s a line below which this is normal and acceptable, a simple desire to belong. This is not at issue. We were created with a desire to belong. There is a reason that the church is viewed as family, and it’s not simply our psychological need expressing itself upon our organizational habit. No. This is what God intended. We are, after all, declared His children. We are family, with all the benefits and challenges that entails. We do belong. This does not in any way preclude us from having favorites amongst our family members. Some bonds will be stronger than others, and there’s nothing really wrong with that, so long as those bonds don’t become so exclusive as to reject other family members outright. Likewise, if we are taking pride in the matter of who we are thus united with, yes, we have a problem now.
It’s not about being honored, and this is where the problem lies. It’s not about being honored, it’s about being honorable. Indeed, it’s about being honorable, even when being honorable isn’t honored; even when being honorable is ridiculed, denigrated, spat upon as being unhip, unhelpful, and downright antisocial behavior. Being honored is of no value unless one is truly honorable. It’s rather of a piece with the point Jesus was making in regard to these washing rituals. Making the outside clean isn’t of any value unless the inside is clean. A ritually purified dish filled with the proceeds of ill-gotten gains is just as impure as if you’d left it in the sink unwashed for the last week, let the dog lick it out, and then served from it again.
We have got to remain keenly aware that we remain largely slaves to our own egos. In this generation, particularly, in the age that has arisen from the sixties and seventies, we are so thoroughly self-infatuated by nature and by nurture, that it will require constant vigilance and constant battling to put the habit of honor seeking to death. Like any other addiction, one victory will not suffice. Even a month spent establishing new habits and patterns will not suffice. We shall remain ego addicts unto death, and must therefore be ever on our guard lest the old addiction reasserts itself and we succumb.
Let us therefore commit ourselves to learn how to ensure that our brothers and sisters know themselves welcomed in the family without feeding their dishonorable thirst for being recognized. Let us commit ourselves to discerning how to demonstrate appreciation for all those who labor on our behalf without nudging them into the place of lusting after honors. Let us commit ourselves to annihilating any such thirst for the ego strokes in ourselves, lest we find ourselves on the receiving end of these same woeful pronouncements from a severely disappointed and even insulted Lord and King, to Whom alone be all glory and honor.
