ACC ~ Matthew 23 v10

YOU HAVE ONE MASTER

CHRYSOSTOM: Previously when he had asked, “What do you think of the Christ?” it is worth noting that he did not say, “What do you think of me?” So it is here that he says you have one master, and he does not make this subjective by saying “me” but “the Christ.”

Yet note that this passage repeatedly speaks of the one master, the one teacher, repeatedly applying the term one. [1] Does this term apply to the Father alone so as to reject the only begotten Son? Is the Father guide? All would agree, and none would challenge it. And yet “one,” he says, “is your guide, even Christ.” For just as Christ, being called the one guide, does not cast out the Father from being guide, even so the Father, being called Master, does not cast out the Son from being Master. For the expression one is spoken in contradistinction to the human way of speaking and within the rest of the creation. THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW, HOMILY 72.3. [2]

[1] Chrysostom’s entire reasoning is intended to demonstrate that even though Jesus speaks of one master, one father and one guide, he means to combine himself and God the Father together. Jerome makes more or less the same argument in an even more general sense by emphasizing the distinction between the intrinsic and the figurative sense of a name (e.g., only God is the Father in the strict sense of the word, but in the figurative sense there are many fathers).

[2] PG 58:670; NPNF 1 10:438.

Mt