Questions, Testing and Commandments
Scriptures: I Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46
As the old Kingston Trio lyric used to say, “Here we go, ‘round again…..” The Pharisees will just not let up on Jesus. Actually, in the lectionary passages from Matthew we’ve skipped a beat, because there’s a section in between the question about paying taxes to Caesar that we dealt with last week and this week’s question about the greatest commandment when the Sadducees get into the act, asking a very convoluted question about whose wife will a woman be in heaven if she’s married seven brothers as each one of them died. Jesus side-steps the question by saying quite clearly that there is no marriage in heaven but rather they are all like angels (which is an important verse to keep in mind when arguing with someone who feels that marriage must be only between one man and one woman – but that’s another sermon).
In what Dale Bruner refers to as a “tag-team effort” (love that phrase) it becomes the Pharisees’ turn again and they ask him a question about the Law of God. They’re really stepping into the Sadducee’s territory here. The Sadducees, after all, were more conservative. They said that if it isn't in the Laws of Moses it doesn't matter. The result was that they preserved the message that came down to them, but they were too rigid and couldn't adapt to change. They didn't even consider the words of prophets like Amos and Isaiah to be binding. But that approach did leave them with 613 laws to remember and follow every day if you were to do God's will. If you asked one of them what the will of God was they would say, "Here are 613 laws memorize them."
But the Pharisees took a somewhat more liberal approach, and they were really trying to get Jesus to interpret the law. Their understanding of the will of God was even more complex than the Sadducees. If you had asked one of them what the will of God was they would have said: "Here memorize these 613 laws and this library of commentaries on those laws."
And so they ask Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (Recall that last week I said that only those who did not follow Jesus called him “teacher”.) It's an innocent-looking question, but really it is a stealth attempt to make Jesus look like a theological liberal. If Jesus picked out any of the Bible's commandments and elevated it to the status of number one, that would imply that he was treating everything else as second-class. It’s a little bit like if you are the parent of five children and one of them asks you who your favorite kid is, a wise parent says, "I love you all the same." No good parent wants any child to feel like he or she plays second fiddle to the other siblings.
If the Pharisees can trick Jesus into picking a favorite commandment, he’ll be guilty of downplaying the other commandments. From the Pharisees standpoint since every commandment represents the very word of God, picking and choosing among them would be heretical – and grounds for being discredited.
But of course we know how Jesus refuses to fall into this trap. With great simplicity – and great profundity – he just says love of God is the greatest of all commandments. After all, if you don't love God, you won't be much inclined to keep any commandment. If, however, you do love God, then all the rest follows.
This was radical stuff. It revolutionized the whole "will of God industry". You know how miniaturization has revolutionized the electronics industry. What used to take a room full of vacuum tubes can now be put on a computer chip. The ability to perform complex mathematic calculations now fits in the palm of your hand or in your shirt pocket. Well, that is what Jesus did to the will of God. He took volumes and volumes of law and commentary and put it in a few simple words. He put the will of the Almighty God of the universe in a nut shell that you can carry around and look at any time. This teaching could put the Pharisees and Sadducees out of business. Any farmer or homemaker could learn that and know how to do the will of God. They wouldn't need to go to the Sadducees and Pharisees anymore to get them to explain what God's will was with those 613 laws. And it didn’t exclude any of the other laws and commandments. Rather, it summed them up. Then, for good measure Jesus throws in a second commandment that reflects the meaning of the first: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This double commandment was the Law and the Prophets in a nutshell.
But this simple summing up begs the question: how? How do you love God? How do you love neighbor? How do you love self? We’ve talked before about how “love” is such an amorphous term; it can refer to all kinds of feelings and reactions from love of chocolate to romantic love to the kind of ecstatic bliss that makes you feel as one with the divine. As David Albert Farmer notes, the kind of love about which Jesus speaks here isn’t a butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of love. It’s an action-based kind of love; it’s a doing-the-right-thing kind of love.
Here’s an illustration of the kind of action-based love that is what Jesus was pointing to as a way of loving neighbor. It’s a story out of the events of 9/11 that first appeared in The New York Times as part of their “A Nation Challenged” series, written by Jim Dwyer. Now, admittedly, this is a fairly extreme example and does not represent the kind of situation we are very often likely to find ourselves in. But the principles of “action-love” here are ones we can apply to other, more mundane, experiences in our own lives.
“It was almost exactly 9:00am on the morning of September the 11th in 2001 when Melanie Belkin emerged from the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel onto a street in Lower Manhattan. Her two children were in the backseat. Ava was 22 months old and Noah just over four. Even though Noah was only four he had already endured thirteen surgeries to repair a welter of birth defects. To help him breathe, doctors had done a tracheotomy in Noah's throat such that he now took in air through a small tube in his neck. It sometimes would get clogged so Melanie always kept a portable vacuum pump in her purse in case the trach needed suctioning. They were on their way to Noah's school that day, a trip they'd made countless times before. But this day was horribly different. Suddenly they were surrounded by emergency vehicles, and it all upset Noah so much he threw up in the back seat of the car.
“Traffic came to a standstill and so Melanie was forced to abandon the car. She put baby Ava into the bright yellow stroller they had bought a few weeks earlier -- Noah had picked it out for his baby sister because he liked how bright it was. As they raced through the streets looking for shelter, Melanie knew Noah's tracheotomy tube would soon be clogged. The air was already filthy with smoke and debris. Seeing their plight, a stranger took off his shirt and ripped it into three pieces so that Melanie and her children could use the fabric as a makeshift breathing mask. She stopped at a phone booth to call her husband, but the phone was dead, and then the earth shook as 2 World Trade Center collapsed.
“Now a billowing cloud of hell was coming their way. Another stranger picked up the stroller, Ava and all, and herded Melanie and the kids into the cab of a delivery truck. As the dust cloud swept over the truck, Melanie cleaned out Noah's tube while another woman in the cab held Ava. A business man tore off his Ralph Lauren shirt and also tore it up into pieces to help shield noses and mouths from the foul air. Then the second tower went down and it began all over again. Someone quoted Psalm 23. The truck driver saw a restaurant that had just been opened for shelter. Fighting through the dust storm, he led them all there.
“But now the vacuum pump was left behind, so the truck driver went back out into the chaos to retrieve it while the restaurant's pastry chef tended to Melanie's children. Eventually, a park ranger arrived, and the strangers around Melanie made sure the ranger put her and the children on the first ferry back across the water to Brooklyn. Once there, Melanie realized her purse and the stroller had been left behind. She had no money, so yet another stranger handed her five $20 bills and then disappeared.
“Weeks later, Melanie Belkin was still reeling from the waves of strangers who saved her children's lives. She didn't know the name of a single one. Then one day a UPS man arrived at Melanie's door. He had the bright yellow stroller and Melanie's purse, the stroller scrubbed clean by the restaurant's staff and sent back to the address found inside Melanie's wallet. The restaurant people told her the truck driver wanted to be sure she got this back. Noah was delighted since he had picked out that stroller in the first place. That morning Melanie had kept such a tight grip on the stroller, she actually bent her wedding ring, as she discovered after getting back home that awful day. But it was the sea of good and loving neighbors, not her own fierce grip, that had saved them all.”
The key to Jesus’ commandment is to love other people as we love ourselves. Back when I was in high school and going to church youth camps during the summer we were frequently told that the proper order of importance was to put God first, others second, and ourselves third. But this goes against human nature, because, after all, we do and should have a pretty high regard for ourselves. More importantly, though, it contradicts what Jesus is saying in this second commandment. Precisely because we do or should have a strong sense of self-worth and self-importance we should apply those feelings (which are, after all, a form of love) to others. The good neighbors in the illustration I gave you from 9/11 were reacting to Melanie Belkin exactly as they would wish someone else would react to them in a similar situation. Love of neighbor, from Jesus’ standpoint, is love of self projected onto the needs of others.
There’s one other significant aspect of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ question and their attempt to trick him. He is actually quoting back to them one of THE great dictates in the Deuteronomic law – a saying so important that it was even given its own name: the Shema. From Deuteronomy 6:4: “Here, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This was significant because, as we said last week, Jesus’ primary focus in this last week of his life was to get his listeners to realize that they must give their loyalty and obedience to the one God alone. The Shema was traditionally recited by every Jewish child and adult at the start of each day and at the conclusion of each day. In other words, there was no single verse from the entire Torah that the average Jew knew better than this one.
But Jesus also makes a curious and subtle change in the Shema. Instead of loving God with all your might, he says that you must love God with all your mind. Surely, the Pharisees must have realized this shift. As Neal Plantinga once said, if at bedtime some night your child prayed, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my brain to keep," you'd take note of this departure from the usual phrasing! Why did Jesus make this change? Obviously, we can’t know for sure, but possibly it was a subtle dig at the Pharisees, telling them, in effect, “God has given you minds to use and you waste them in repeating sterile legalisms. Open yourselves up to what it could mean to love God with your intellect.”
And this has its significance for us – children of the Enlightenment, citizens of a scientific age that we are. Loving God does not mean blind obedience, but rather using logic and reason and doubt and thoughtful challenges in order to understand the will of God for our lives. That “will of God industry” that we spoke of tongue-in-cheek before which has been summed up as all the Law and the Prophets now includes using our minds to move out beyond the narrow dictates of a too confining religion.
And now Jesus turns the tables on his interlocutors by asking a question of his own: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They say, “The son of David” – precisely the appropriate answer you would expect from the Pharisees. What is it about Jesus’ question that so baffles (and silences) the Pharisees? It seems that Jesus is saying no more than that the Christ, although in the line of David, is greater than David’s ancestry could produce on its own. The Christ will be more than the sum of his historical parts/ancestors. But what makes that observation so startling?
Because it means that if Jesus is the Christ, then the answers he had just been giving to this mini-barrage of questions represent nothing short of the voice of God. The divinity of the Christ is here more than just a little strongly implied! No wonder the Pharisees are thrown off and no longer try to question him. Now all they can do is set in motion the events that will lead to his crucifixion.
But it doesn’t matter because we have already been given the key to it all: love of God, love of neighbor, love of self. The fact that Jesus here confirms for us that he is the Christ cements the certainty of this key. That same key leads Paul in writing to the church at Thessalonica to offer this wonderful image of what that love means: “…we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” Paul sums up what Jesus is saying in the Great Commandment: “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God, but also our own selves…..” May you share your selves with one another and with your neighbors far flung across this city and state and planet in the years to come.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
October 26, 2008