To Be Seen by Others

Matthew 23:5, 11-12 (cf. 1-12)

“They [the ‘scribes and Pharisees’] do all their deeds to be seen by others. . . . The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

When we look at [verses 11 and 12] we realize, not for the first or last time, that we are indeed called to follow Jesus himself, who issued these denunciations not from a great or pompous height, but on the way to the cross. . . . He had already promised that his load was easy and his burden was light, and that people carrying heavy loads should take his instead (11.28-30). Now he was on the way to shoulder the heaviest burden of all, so that his people would never again have to be weighed down by it (100).

A. Orendorff

So much of what we do, whether it’s religious or not, is done, as Jesus says, “to be seen by others.” Why is that? What is it about recognition that’s so intoxicating and addictive?

The answer is simple: we are what others perceive us to be. I don’t mean this in an absolute sense, of course. Rather, what I mean is we think we are (or perhaps better, we feel like we are) what others perceive us to be. All of us want to look good because (as the saying goes) “if you look good you feel good.” Our identities, in other words, are rooted in other people’s opinions, in what other people think of us.

Jesus turns this kind of thinking on its head: “Real greatness,” he insists, “lies in servanthood and exaltation comes through humility.” The way we work this new way of thinking into our lives and hearts is, as Wright says, to be captured by a vision of the One who was enthroned upon a cross—for all to see—and who was exalted not through bare humility but divine humiliation.