Matthew 22:34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37 Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments 41 While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, 42 "What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?" "The son of David," they replied. 43 He said to them, "How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him 'Lord'? For he says, 44 " 'The Lord said to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet." ' 45 If then David calls him 'Lord,' how can he be his son?" 46 No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.
I don't often do this, but this week I am so in agreement with Kathryn Matthews Huey (from sermon seeds ucc.org) that anything I'd say would be a paraphrase of what she's written. Instead, it just seems appropriate to quote her.
Today's passage is only one small piece of a conversation we're overhearing, between Jesus and the religious authorities of his own people. It's a little bit like listening in on a family argument, with higher stakes. The displeased leaders uncomfortably recognize Jesus' parables as "speaking about them": "They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet" (Matt. 21:45-46). Feeling offended and "disrespected" and perhaps threatened, they fight back with the only weapons they have: their learning, and their way with words.
Like our modern presidential debates, these exchanges appear polite on the surface, but the tension underneath is hard to miss. In Matthew's descriptive account in chapter 22, the authorities "plotted to entrap him" (v.15), and "Jesus, aware of their malice," calls them "hypocrites" (v. 18) and tells them that they "know neither the scriptures nor the power of God" (v. 29). Perhaps we might understand Jesus' hostility if we (as always) consider the setting: after his triumphal procession into Jerusalem, he immediately "cleansed" the temple and confronted the religious leaders who then questioned his authority to teach on their turf. Clearly, they're not fans.
Jesus hasn't applied for a license or passed their test of orthodoxy, and yet his answer today to a question about the heart of the law, the heart of his people's tradition, shows that he is an utterly faithful Jew. On round three of theological questions, the Pharisees have sent in their "big gun," as Beverly Zink-Sawyer describes this legal expert (New Proclamation 2008) to get to that heart of the matter. Richard Swanson continues the image: "The Pharisees take their best shot and it misfires. Jesus fires back, and no one bothers to reload." The lawyer has asked a "Do-You-Have-A-Clue-About-Being-Jewish? question," Swanson says, and "Jesus clearly has a clue about being a Jew" (Provoking the Gospel of Matthew).
If we turn to a baseball metaphor instead, we might say that the Pharisees throw Jesus an easy pitch and he hits it out of the park. After all, even though the Pharisees want to trap Jesus in heresy (i.e., saying the other 612 laws are less important), scholars seem to agree that Jesus isn't the first to put together these two laws about loving God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). But as always there's a twist in the way Jesus interprets the tradition, a twist that turns our perspective around today just as much as it "confounds" his listeners long ago. (Isn't that one of the most important roles, and gifts, of a good teacher: to turn around the perspective of their listeners?) Instead of reducing the importance of the rest of the laws, he paints a picture of them as a coherent whole that "hangs together." Even more, Thomas Long tells us that Jesus sees the law very differently than its experts do, and his response "undermine[s] the whole notion of the law as rules and regulations. What Jesus claims is that the whole law is about love, not rules, about really loving God and one's neighbor, not about figuring out how to avoid stepping on cracks in the legal sidewalk" (Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion).
We might begin our closer look at these two commandments by asking how humans can indeed be "commanded" to love. (What kind of love is it if it's forced, some might ask.) And then we might look more closely at how we define love mostly as a feeling that then causes us to behave in a certain way. When we don't feel love, it influences and even justifies our behavior, or our lack of right behavior. We claim that no one can force us to love someone else. "In an age when the word 'love' is greatly abused," Douglas Hare writes, "it is important to remember that the primary component of biblical love is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that Deut. 6:5 demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment" (Matthew, Interpretation). And commitment can be seen as a setting of the heart, something we choose to do, a way we freely choose to live our lives. Commitment is that mysterious mingling of feeling and action, a beautiful dance between the two.
An example during this stewardship season in many churches: several years ago, inspired by the witness of two older women, longtime and faithful members of the church who told me their stories of tithing, I decided to take the step of increasing my own giving to the church I loved. Increasing to a tithe was a challenge but it surprised me that my feelings followed after the action, or after the commitment, if you will. I found that I loved my church more when I gave more to it, much as we love our children more after giving of ourselves to them over many years. So it seems that when we decide to set our hearts in a direction, toward something or someone, and when we do the things that fulfill that commitment, our feelings often follow afterward. The laws of giving and Sabbath and loving, I believe, are God's way of getting us to do what we need to do, what's good for us; these laws give us the direction for setting our hearts. Again, it's a thing of mystery.
The great scholar Marcus Borg has famously called these two commandments the "great relationships," and he even ends his excellent book, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, with this "remarkably simple vision of the Christian life. It is not complicated, though it is challenging." It's as if it all comes to this, for "at the center of a life grounded in the Bible is the twofold focus of the great relationship."
So at the heart of being a faithful Jew, and at the heart of being a faithful Christian, we have these two great relationships, intertwined in yet another mysterious mingling for people of faith. Beginning with the second, we know that we're called to love one another, not just the people we feel love for, but all of God's children, which is where justice comes in, what Borg calls "the social form of love" in the Bible (The Heart of Christianity). The tradition in which Jesus taught and lived called Israel (as we are called today) to "justice, mercy, and faithfulness," Douglas Hare writes, "that is, forms of behavior demanded by the prophets but beyond legal regulation" (Matthew, Interpretation). We know that Jesus interpreted this law of love to cross boundaries in place in his own culture, beyond family or group loyalties, and he ran into trouble for doing so.
We might also ask what boundaries we have placed around our own commitment to love our neighbor, which of God's children live on the other side of those boundaries, and how comfortably we live on this side of them, all the while thinking that we too are faithful to the two great commandment/relationships. God didn't mean for us to love those people, right? And yet Jesus made clear the reason we love even the stranger, even the "least" among us: later in Matthew's Gospel (the well-known Chapter 25), he said that we will be judged by whether we were able to see him, to see Jesus, to see God, in every single person we encounter, and he describes that love in what we do, not what we feel.
Turning then to the first and greatest commandment, to love God with all our heart and soul and mind, we once again consider the orientation, or setting, of the very center of our being: "Within ancient Jewish psychology," Borg writes, "the character of the heart depended upon its orientation, what it was pointed toward or centered in…what mattered was the orientation of the self at its deepest level, its 'center' or fundamental loyalty" (Jesus: A New Vision). Jesus was a radical, Borg says, in teaching that we are to be centered in the Spirit, and not in the many other things that call for our loyalties, "rival centers" like "family, wealth, honor, and religion." Two thousand years later, we might ask if nationalism has demanded our loyalty in ways that displace the primary importance of God, and if God is indeed first in our hearts and our lives. And we should be prepared to be called a radical, too, if we follow in the way of Jesus.
Cheers,
TM
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