Jesus Christ
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33. When Jesus said that we must not call anyone on earth ‘father’
(Matthew 23:9), did He mean that we can’t call even our earthly father
‘father’? |
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Not at all.
Each of us can call his father ‘father’, for when one of His disciples said
to Jesus: “Lord, let me first go and bury my father” (Matthew 8:21 – NKJV),
Jesus did not rebuke him for calling his father ‘my father’, but He just said
to him: “Follow Me, and let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22 -
NKJV). |
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We must
not call anyone who has some authority in the Church, such as an apostle, a
prophet, an evangelist, a teacher or a pastor, or the brother who first spoke
to us about the Lord and so on, ‘our father’ or ‘father’. In other words, we
must not act like king Joash (when he went to visit the prophet Elisha, who
was sick and near to death), who said to Elisha: ‘O my father, my father” (2
Kings |
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In
addition to this, we must not call ‘Father’ anyone who thinks he acts in
God’s stead on earth or claims that he is someone great and so he thinks is
worthy to be called in this way: a very eloquent example is the head of the
Roman Catholic Church whom many call ‘holy father’. However, in the Roman
Catholic Church the priests also are called ‘father’ by the Catholics
(‘father Anthony,’ ‘father John,’ and so on), therefore when we talk with a
priest or we speak about a priest, we must call him ‘priest’ or ‘parish
priest’, and not ‘father’. As for the ‘pope’ also, we must not call him ‘holy
father,’ but simply ‘the head of the Roman Catholic Church’, or ‘the head of the
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