Reverend, Father, Rabbi
The One Place Jesus Talked About Titles
Somewhere along the way, following Jesus grew a vocabulary of honorifics. Reverend. Father. Most Reverend. Doctor of the church. Bishop, and then archbishop above him. The church learned to stack titles the way other institutions do, each one marking a rung a little higher than the last, and we rarely stop to ask whether the stacking itself might be the problem.
Which is why it is striking that in one of the very few places where Jesus spoke directly about titles, He told His followers to set them down.
The Scene Behind the Words
The setting is Matthew 23, and Jesus is watching the religious leaders of His day. What He puts His finger on in this moment is not their doctrine but their appetite. They love the best places at feasts, the best seats in the synagogues, greetings in the marketplaces, and to be called by men, 'Rabbi, Rabbi' (Matthew 23:6-7). It is the hunger to be seen, to be elevated, to be addressed by a title that sets one man visibly above the others.
Then comes the instruction. But you, do not be called 'Rabbi'; for One is your Teacher, the Christ, and you are all brethren. Do not call anyone on earth your father, for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. And do not be called teachers, for One is your Teacher, the Christ (Matthew 23:8-10).
Three titles, all set aside, each with the same reason attached. There is One above you, and the rest of you stand on level ground as brothers and sisters.
Two Ways to Misread It
There are two familiar ways to get this wrong, and they run in opposite directions.
The first takes the words with wooden literalness, as though Jesus had banned certain sounds, so that calling your dad "father" or a schoolteacher "teacher" becomes a violation. That reading collapses quickly, since the New Testament itself goes on to use these very words. Paul calls himself a spiritual father to his converts and calls Timothy his son. Something other than vocabulary is plainly at stake.
The second error effectively sets the passage aside, building ever taller ladders of religious title and treating them as marks of spiritual arrival. Many who use such titles are not ignoring the text so much as reading it differently, yet the practice can still recreate the exact appetite Jesus was naming. This is the more common drift, and the more serious one.
Between the wooden reading and the ignoring reading is the thing Jesus actually meant. He is not policing sounds. He is dismantling an impulse, the craving to be elevated above one's brothers and sisters, to wear a title that places you on a higher rung before God's people.
Where This Sits on the Timeline
The timing matters more than it first appears. When Jesus said these words He had not yet gone to the cross, and the reason He gives points forward to what the cross was about to accomplish. One is your Father. One is your Teacher. You are all brethren. He is describing a family in which no one stands as a caste between the people and God, and that family is precisely what His finished work was about to open.
Under the old covenant there was a priesthood, a class of men set apart to stand between God and everyone else, with a high priest above them and a veil marking the distance. Access to God ran upward through layers. When Jesus died, that veil tore from top to bottom, and the whole architecture of mediators came down with it. What replaced it was not a new and improved priestly class. It was a torn veil and open access for everyone.
What the Cross Actually Opened
On the far side of the cross, the title question resolves. The instruction in Matthew 23 was pointing to a reality the resurrection would make real, a people among whom the old ranks no longer apply because every one of them now belongs directly to God.
Peter, writing to ordinary scattered believers, hands them the language the old covenant had reserved for a select few. You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people (1 Peter 2:9). Every believer is now a priest. There is one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5), and no other stands in that place. The layered titles that tradition later stacked up are, in a real sense, old covenant furniture carried into a new covenant house, a house that was built without them and does not need them.
None of this erases genuine roles or the honor owed to those who lead and teach well. Scripture is clear that faithful leaders deserve real respect. The point is narrower and deeper than manners. It is that no title makes one believer a higher grade of Christian than another, because the cross leveled the ground completely. The elder and the newest convert draw near to God through the same torn veil, by the same finished work, as members of the same family.
The Family Table
A healthy family does not run on ranks. Around the dinner table no one needs a title, not because titles are forbidden but because they are beside the point. Everyone there already belongs, fully and without qualification, and a nameplate would only get in the way of that belonging. This is the picture Jesus was pointing to and the cross made real, a household of brothers and sisters gathered under one Father, with one Teacher, needing nothing stacked between them and Him.
That is where this whole series has been heading. Strip away the inherited hierarchy, the borrowed ranks, the titles that quietly imply some believers stand nearer to God than others, and what remains is not a barren church but a family. Shepherds among the sheep. Servants at the table. Gifts given to build everyone up. And beneath it all, a level floor bought at the cross, where the ground is even because the work is finished.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)
