Jesus spent an enormous amount of energy trying to teach his disciples not to allow any form of authoritarianism into their circle. He harshly rebuked those who attempted to lord it over the others. He never tired of correcting them when they argued about which of them came first.

Jesus shocked the religious leaders of his day when he said that prostitutes and cheaters would find their way into God’s reign sooner than they. They deeply resented his charge that they were blind leaders of the blind.

Not all the Scribes and Pharisees deserved the condemnations Jesus directed at them. But too many of them did.

I have come to believe that the Gospel accounts are not simply historical records of what Jesus did and said, but that the early Christian community kept reflecting on their own lives and remembered the lessons Jesus taught. When they saw their own leaders using their powers of leadership in lording it over others, they recalled what Jesus said about religious leaders who abuse authority.

Faced with reports of the abuse of power by our own leaders and by others in positions of power taking advantage of others, we need to revisit the tirades of Jesus once again, and reflect on their possible meaning today.

The following paraphrase of Matthew’s Chapter 23 is directly applicable to religious authorities, but parents, CEO’s, principals, teachers, judges, coaches, anyone in leadership, can also ponder these words, uncomfortable as they might be.

Those who would see Jesus only as the gentle healer need to consider the blazing rage that he also displayed.


Shame on you clerics and canonists for the way you succeed in hiding behind your precious policies and legalities to do grave injustice to the powerless.

Shame, shame on you for dressing yourselves in distinctive garb and expecting the adulation of your “faithful,” while inside, your hearts reek of fraud and abuse of power, and the real tragedy is that you are totally unaware that you have a problem.

Shame and double shame on you for expecting the best seats at table, at the theater, wherever you go.

Shame on you for trying to cover your greed for power with long prayers read out of books and not from the heart. You’ve got all the reward you are going to get. Don’t expect God to be pleased with your outward show of piety.

Let unbelievers lord it over each other with their superior wealth and power. But you should never have allowed this to happen among you. You want to be great? Then serve. Just as I served and serve you still.

Often enough you give good advice, and then fail to follow it yourselves. You preach equality and refuse it to the weak. You preach love and concern for others, and show not the slightest trace of it in your own dealings. You tell the world it must act justly, but then you refuse a living and just wage to those you employ, especially women. You take advantage of their goodness and generosity and shamelessly rob their children.

You do everything you can to look good in public, with your fine garb, your big homes, your classy cars, your elaborate parties. You love to accept special titles, like Your Eminence, and Your Excellency and Your Grace and Your Lordship and Your Holiness. You should not be using the title “Father” if that in any way gives the wrong impression to simple people.

You should not even accept the title of leader. You need to live a more radical equality of sisterhood and brotherhood with no distinctive honors at all, except the honor to serve each other.

Shame on you for your lack of sincerity, double shame. You are hypocrites and play-actors. Your laws slam the doors of heaven (to which you do NOT have the key) in the faces of people who are trying the best they can. I’m telling you, you make me sick.

You are frauds. You can pick out all the little flaws of everyone else, and swallow the grossest injustice and haven’t a thought about mercy and good faith.

You can look so good on the outside, while inside you harbor untold greed and self-indulgence. You pay enormous sums to cover your misdeeds, money you filched from the poor who can least afford it.

You remind me of beautifully kept cemeteries with their fine white stones and beautifully manicured lawns that cover decay and rotting flesh.

Shame on you for your fearfulness. You are so afraid of anything new, anything different, anything you have not seen before that you cannot bring yourselves to trust anyone but yourselves. Shame on you for not trusting that the Spirit breathes where she will.

What miserable frauds you are! Shame on you for building great cathedrals, monuments to yourselves, while people starve. You hide this behind a perverse justification that nothing is too good for God. God takes no joy in great churches as long as there is a single beggar on the street, as long as there is even one homeless child wandering hungry and alienated in an alley.

And when God sends you those who try to straighten you out, you condemn them, you excommunicate them, you call them faithless rebels, you shame them as disloyal dissenters. You heap abuse on them.

You are guilty of the vilest form of injustice, a form that hides behind righteousness and law.

I can say, you do carry on a long tradition you inherited from your ancestors, and that is also to your eternal shame. You’ve had too much practice, too many bad examples from those who have gone before you. You haven’t the courage, the heart, the faith to break away.

And yet I call on you to do so before it is too late.

I would love to gather all of you together with all the people of God into one wonderful family. But you have had and will have none of it. You think you know better. All the worse for you.

You seem unable to recognize the call to the family of God. I feel sorry for you.

You have amassed far too much wealth, far too much power, far too much control. You will not willingly let it go.

But the day is coming when you will lose it all, every monument you have raised will come crashing down to earth. You will not be able to understand why it all happened so quickly because you are too blind to see, too deaf to hear, too hard-hearted to search with loving care for the truth.

Your blindness is the more culpable because you are so sure that you alone can see and everyone else is blind.