When Leadership Becomes Self Serving
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When Leadership Becomes Self Serving
Herb Montgomery | October 30, 2026
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our reading this week is from the Gospel of Matthew:
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
“Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.
“But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. (Matthew 23:1-12)
In our reading this week, Jesus confronts a troubling contradiction between religious authorities and their practice of justice. He tells the crowds and his disciples that the teachers of the law and the Pharisees occupy “Moses’ seat,” yet he warns them not to imitate those leaders’ behavior because “they do not practice what they preach.” Jesus then offers a powerful image of religious leaders who “tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders,” while refusing to lift a finger to help them. Beneath this criticism lies a profound message: religion betrays its purpose when it imposes burdens on vulnerable people while those who hold power remain unwilling to share the weight.
Jesus is challenging more than personal inconsistency. He is exposing a system in which religious authority can become a means of control rather than a source of liberation. Religious leaders have the power to interpret sacred traditions, establish expectations, and determine who is considered faithful. This authority was not just religious but social, political, and economic as well, and they interpreted the Torah to encompass every area of social life. Whenever that authority is used to impose exhausting demands on ordinary people without offering them compassion, support, or meaningful assistance, religion becomes another instrument of oppression.
This critique is relevant today whenever religious institutions establish rules that burden people who are already struggling. Communities may preach generosity while protecting wealth, proclaim compassion while withholding assistance, or celebrate human dignity while excluding people who do not conform to their expectations. They may demand that struggling families demonstrate greater faith while ignoring the economic conditions that keep those families struggling. They may condemn people for their circumstances without questioning the social structures that helped produce those circumstances. Jesus exposes the injustice of demanding sacrifice from others while refusing to make sacrifices oneself.
His words also challenge the tendency to interpret justice as a matter of individual responsibility alone. People experiencing poverty, marginalization, or hardship are often told to work harder, exercise greater discipline, make better choices, or carry their burdens with more faith. Yet those offering such advice may remain comfortably removed from the conditions others endure. They prescribe solutions without sharing resources, demand perseverance without addressing injustice, and celebrate personal responsibility while ignoring collective responsibility.
Jesus invites us to ask a different question: Who is carrying the burden, who benefits from the arrangement, and who has the power to change it?
A socially just understanding of Jesus’ teaching recognizes that compassion must involve more than expressing sympathy for people who suffer. Compassion requires participation. It means helping to carry burdens, sharing resources, challenging unfair arrangements, and transforming the conditions that make some people’s lives unnecessarily difficult. Rather than simply telling hungry people to pray, justice helps ensure that they have food. Rather than blaming struggling families, justice examines whether everyone has access to the resources and opportunities necessary to thrive.
This passage also challenges religious communities to examine whether their practices reflect the values they proclaim. The measure of faithful leadership is not how loudly leaders defend tradition or how rigorously they demand obedience. It is whether their leadership produces greater dignity, freedom, compassion, and justice for the people they serve.
Ultimately, Jesus calls his followers away from religion, politics, and economics that make life heavier for the vulnerable and toward a way of living that makes life more humane for everyone. Authentic Jesus-following does not stand above suffering and issue instructions. It draws near, listens, shares, and acts.
The challenge of Jesus’ words is unmistakable: Do not make other people carry burdens you refuse to help lift. If your faith demands sacrifice from the vulnerable but asks nothing of the powerful, it is time to reconsider. The purpose of leadership is not to add weight to people’s shoulders but to participate in building a society where everyone can live with dignity, where burdens are shared, and where no one is abandoned to struggle alone.
Next in our reading, Jesus challenges the leaders who make their faith a public performance: “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.” Beneath these words lies a critique of religious hypocrisy, social hierarchy, and the human desire to use faith as a means of gaining power, prestige, and recognition.
Phylacteries are small containers holding passages from the Torah, while the tassels on garments serve as reminders of God’s commandments. Neither item was or inherently wrong. Jesus’ concern was rather that those symbols could become instruments of public display rather than expressions of genuine commitment to the social justice elements prescribed by the Torah. Outward demonstrations of devotion could replace the deeper work of compassion, justice, and solidarity with people who were suffering. Sacred observance might then become a performance designed to impress others instead of a practice that transformed how people treated their neighbors.
This criticism has profound implications right now. Religious institutions and people can be more concerned with appearing righteous than with confronting the conditions that produce poverty, inequality, and exclusion. Churches may celebrate their generosity while remaining silent about economic systems that exploit workers. Religious leaders may preach love while condemning marginalized communities or defending policies that deprive vulnerable people of safety and dignity. And communities may display symbols of faith while refusing to challenge the injustices happening in their own neighborhoods. Jesus invites us to ask whether our religious practices are helping people flourish or merely helping us maintain a respectable public image.
Jesus’ criticism of leaders’ love for honor and respect exposes another dimension of injustice: the human tendency to organize society around status and privilege. In Jesus’ time, the most important seats at banquets and in synagogues were more than comfortable places to sit. They communicated who mattered, whose voices deserved attention, and who occupied the highest positions in the social order. Such arrangements reinforced distinctions between the honored and the overlooked, the powerful and the powerless.
Here, Jesus challenges systems that assign human worth according to wealth, influence, education, religious/political authority, or social standing. When leaders become preoccupied with protecting their positions, they can lose sight of the people their leadership should serve. Those who are poor, excluded, or marginalized often pay the price when institutions prioritize the preservation of privilege over the pursuit of justice.
Jesus’ words also challenge our motivations for doing good. Acts of charity, advocacy, and service can become opportunities to build reputations rather than expressions of genuine solidarity. The question is not whether our work is visible, but whether recognition has become more important to us than the people we claim to serve. Justice requires us to listen to marginalized communities, share power, confront harmful systems, and pursue meaningful change even when doing so brings neither applause nor public approval.
Ultimately, our story this week calls for a kind of Jesus-following that is measured not by the size of its symbols, the prominence of its leaders, or the respectability of its public image, but by the quality of its relationships and its commitment to human flourishing. Authentic leadership does not seek the highest seat at the table for its own sake but works to ensure that everyone has a place at the table. Leadership can make it possible to expand options for others. It does not demand admiration from the community; it listens to the community, especially those whose voices have been silenced.
The call, then, is to stop elevating ourselves and start embodying an ethic that lifts others. When we become more concerned with recognition than liberation from oppression, more invested in prestige than compassion, and more protective of privilege than committed to justice, we have lost sight of the very transformation Jesus calls us to pursue. True Jesus-following is not a performance for the powerful to applaud. It is a commitment to building a world where dignity, justice, and belonging are available to everyone, a world that is a safe, compassionate, just home for all.
Lastly in our reading this week, Jesus challenges the titles, privileges, and hierarchies that distinguish religious leaders from the people they are called to serve. He declares, “You are not to be called ‘rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers.” He continues, “Do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven.” Jesus concludes with a radical reversal of conventional power: “The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
These words are more than instructions about religious vocabulary. They challenge the social arrangements that allow some people to claim superior authority, status, and privilege over others in the name of God.
In the world of Matthew’s Gospel, titles such as rabbi, father, and teacher could communicate honor, authority, and social standing. Religious leaders occupied influential positions in communities shaped by religious tradition, economic inequality, and Roman imperial rule. Jesus criticizes leaders who enjoy public recognition and elevated status while imposing burdens on others. His concern is not simply that they receive honor, but that their honor becomes a means of reinforcing unequal relationships. When religious authority elevates its possessors above the community, it risks contradicting the very teachings it claims to represent.
Jesus’ prohibition against calling anyone “father” must be understood within this larger critique. In the ancient world, fatherhood carried associations with household authority, inheritance, social identity, and patriarchal power. A father was not merely a biological parent but could also represent the authority of the household. By reserving ultimate fatherhood for God, Jesus challenges the assumption that human beings could occupy unquestionable positions of spiritual superiority. His declaration that his followers are “all brothers” (blinkered as that label is in relation to women) imagines a community in which belonging to God establishes a shared dignity that no religious title can override.
Yet Christianity eventually developed the practice of addressing priests as “father.” Early Christian communities had various ways of describing spiritual leadership, and the New Testament itself occasionally uses familial language for spiritual relationships. Paul, for example, refers to himself as father to communities he has nurtured in faith (1 Corinthians 4:15). Over subsequent centuries, the language of spiritual fatherhood became increasingly established in Christian monasticism and ecclesiastical life. Monastic spiritual guides were addressed as fathers, and the practice eventually became especially prominent among Catholic and Orthodox clergy. Today, the title “father” remains customary in many Catholic, Orthodox, and some Anglican traditions, although its use varies.
This history presents an important interpretive question: Does Jesus prohibit every use of these titles, or does he instead challenge the hierarchical status and unquestioned authority that titles can reinforce? Christians disagree. Some understand Jesus’ words as a direct prohibition against all religious honorifics. Others interpret them as warning against treating any human leader as the ultimate spiritual authority in God’s place.
From a justice perspective, the essential question is whether religious leadership empowers people or subordinates them. A title becomes problematic when it shields leaders from accountability, discourages questions, silences marginalized voices, or allows spiritual authority to be used for exploitation. No title, tradition, or institution should place its representatives beyond criticism and accountability when their actions harm others.
Jesus offers a radically different definition of greatness: service rather than superiority, humility rather than prestige, and solidarity rather than domination. Religious leaders are not called to stand above the community but to participate in its shared work of healing, liberation, and justice. Their authority should be measured not by the honor they receive but by the burdens they help remove and the dignity they help restore.
Ultimately, Jesus’ teaching invites Christianity to examine not merely what it calls its leaders but how those leaders exercise power. If God alone is the ultimate spiritual authority, no human being should use religious status to claim unquestionable control over another. The test of spiritual greatness is not how many people call us “father,” “teacher,” or “leader,” but whether our lives help create a community where everyone is treated with dignity, no one is excluded from belonging, and those who have been burdened by power are finally able to flourish.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How does our reading this week inform your own justice work, today? Share and discuss with your group.
3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?
Thanks for checking in with us, today.
I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
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Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.
I love each of you dearly,
I’ll see you next week.
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 3 Episode 45: When Leadership Becomes Self Serving
Matthew 23:1-12
A socially just understanding of Jesus’ teaching recognizes that compassion must involve more than expressing sympathy for people who suffer. Compassion requires participation. It means helping to carry burdens, sharing resources, challenging unfair arrangements, and transforming the conditions that make some people’s lives unnecessarily difficult. Rather than simply telling hungry people to pray, justice helps ensure that they have food. Rather than blaming struggling families, justice examines whether everyone has access to the resources and opportunities necessary to thrive. Our reading this week challenges religious communities to examine whether their practices reflect the values they proclaim. The measure of faithful leadership is not how loudly leaders defend tradition or how rigorously they demand obedience. It is whether their leadership produces greater dignity, freedom, compassion, and justice for the people they serve.
Available on major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/when-leadership-becomes-self-serving
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery
Available now on Amazon!
In Finding Jesus, author Herb Montgomery delves into the profound and often overlooked political dimensions of the gospels. Through meticulous analysis of biblical texts, historical context, and social discourse, this thought-provoking book unveils the gospels’ socio-political, economic teachings as rooted in a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of the marginalized. The book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, presenting a compelling argument for a more socially engaged and transformative Christianity.
Finding Jesus is not just a scholarly exploration; it is a call to action. It challenges readers to reevaluate their understanding of Christianity’s role in public life and to consider how the radical teachings of the gospels can inspire a renewed commitment to justice, equality, and compassion. This book is a must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the social implications of Christian faith and a blueprint for building a more just and inclusive society.
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