Text: Matthew 22:34-46 (Leviticus 19:1-18)                                                       W 23^rd Sunday after Pentecost

Hanging On Two Commands

In the name of him who rescues us from the coming wrath, dear friends in Christ: The Gospel reading for this morning reports the last in a series of exchanges that take place between Jesus and different groups of his enemies within the Temple courts in Jerusalem during the last week of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Recall that Jesus arrived in the city on Palm Sunday with much fanfare and excitement.  People were expecting great things from him and they were flocking to the Temple to hear Jesus teach.  This really made his enemies angry.  They didn’t like all the attention Jesus was getting; but they thought that with him teaching in front of the crowd, this would be a perfect opportunity to bring him down.  They knew that Jesus was known to say some pretty provocative things on occasion. And now they thought if only they could come up with a question that would stump Jesus, or that would get him to say something foolish or unacceptable to his supporters, or even something illegal as far as the Roman authorities were concerned, then Jesus would be discredited.  His popularity would diminish and he’d be just another flash-in-the-pan prophet: here today, gone tomorrow.  Their Jesus worries would be over.

So it was that last week we heard about one such attempt.  What happened was that an unlikely coalition of Pharisees and Herodians, who were normally on opposite ends of every issue (on the same order of, say, Rush Limbaugh and Hilary Clinton) came to Jesus with a question about paying taxes to Caesar.  They wanted to know if it was morally right or not.  The question, they thought, was brilliant.  No matter what Jesus said, he was going to be in trouble. If he said, “Yes, it’s all right”, the Jewish people would think he was a lackey for the hated Romans.  They would turn on him in a heartbeat.  If he said, “No, it’s wrong to pay taxes to Caesar”, then he could be accused of being an anti-Roman agitator, and since the Romans weren’t exactly known for their tolerance of such rebels – and yes, that’s an extreme understatement – they could be counted on to remove Jesus for them.  So the question seemed perfect.  But unfortunately for the people behind it, Jesus saw right through their trap and, as we heard, he answered their question with such wisdom that the crowd was even more impressed with him.  The plan to make Jesus look bad backfired on those who had hatched it.

Well, then group from the party of the Sadducees stepped forward for a try. The Sadducees were the theological liberals of the day.  There was a lot that they didn’t believe about the teachings of the Scriptures – they were too enlightened and scientifically modern-minded, you see. Anyway, one of the teachings of the Bible that they flat out denied was the resurrection from the dead.  They simply couldn’t imagine how it could happen that there was going to be an afterlife populated with people whose bodies physically reassembled from dust in graves.  To the Sadducees the very notion was ridiculous.  So they cooked up a question that they thought proved how absurd the idea of a resurrection was.  “Suppose”, they said to Jesus, “you have a woman who was married and widowed seven times during her life.  To which of her seven husbands would she be married in heaven?”  Jesus told them that the only absurd thing was their infantile thinking.  He said it was foolish for them to think about how life in heaven will be in such earthly terms.  He also rebuked them for their blatant unbelief and he told them they didn’t know how to read the Scriptures, proving to them that the Bible clearly and explicitly speaks of those who have died in faith as being alive with the Lord.  So once again, those who thought they had the ultimate “gotcha question” for Jesus only made him look better in the eyes of the crowd while they scuttled away with egg on their faces.

            And that’s where the action in today’s Gospel begins, right after Jesus silences the Sadducees.  Now it’s the Pharisees who step up again going in for round two, this time without their erstwhile Herodian allies.  And for the Pharisees this is an opportunity to bring down Jesus and at the same time show up their philosophical archrivals, because the only people the Pharisees hate worse than the Herodians are the Sadducees.  To best Jesus now would be a sweet victory over all their opponents.  So they send in one of their big guns to ask what is for the Pharisees the mother of all theological conundrums:  “Which one law that God gave us is the most important?”

            I suppose to us that sounds like an easy question; but that’s only because we’ve heard Jesus’ reply  For the Pharisees and people who thought like them, however, it was a question that had no satisfactory answer.  You see, the Pharisees were the consummate experts in the Law of God.  They loved the law and devoted their lives to studying, analyzing, dissecting, and obeying every ordinance in the Bible.  And as such they recognized that not all laws carry the same weight.  For example, they would say that murdering your neighbor is a more serious offense than giving him a black eye, or that stealing an apple from a vendor’s cart is less of a crime than rustling an entire herd of cattle. We do the same thing with our legal codes that classify crimes as felonies or misdemeanors, with various degrees of each.  The Pharisees also knew that sometimes to keep one command you have to break another. If your neighbor’s house caught fire on the Sabbath, say, when the law said you were to do no work, what were you going to do, let it burn?  The law also said to help your neighbor in need and protect him from loss.  You can’t have it both ways.  And so the Pharisees spent their time categorizing the laws and assigning them relative values so that they could determine what was the right thing to do in any and every situation imaginable – with the result that they argued among themselves endlessly about technicalities and contingencies concerning which laws were of a higher order than others and under what special circumstances certain lower level laws might actually supersede a law higher on the list.

            Now, because this was their mindset and their chief preoccupation, the very idea that there might be just one law that always trumped all the others was sort of like the Holy Grail to the Pharisees:  something of an ever-elusive quest to be pursued but one that could never be attained.  But behind it all, what was driving this obsession of theirs was the desire to be always recognized as being correct—not just in the sense of knowing the right things; but more than that, actually doing the right things.  They wanted to be in perfect compliance with the Law of God. They wanted to be able to say, “I’m a good person.  Here’s what God says to do, and I’m doing it.”  Which I suppose is a noble goal to pursue … but what happens in this fallen world of ours is that whenever a person finds that he’s not in compliance with the law (a situation sinners find themselves in frequently), he attempts to justify himself by appealing to other laws or to technicalities or to common customs that prove that what he did really wasn’t a violation of the law.  I mean, c’mon, this is what defense lawyers do for a living:  they try to show that their clients are not really guilty of the crimes of which they are accused.  “No, your honor, my client did not rob the bank by threatening to kill the teller with a gun unless she filled the bag with money.  What he did was make an emergency withdrawal at a bank that he had as yet forgotten to open an account in order to get the funds he needed to buy the criminally overpriced medicine his poor sick mother needs to survive. The gun he found in the parking lot. He was only waving it around in an effort to find who might have dropped it.  That’s what kind of guy he is:  a devoted son and good neighbor.  But I want you to know that the real robber in this case is the drug company who is holding the life of my client’s mother hostage.”

            And yes, it’s a ridiculous example; but I’m sure we’ve all heard of worse arguments made in real cases – and judges and juries falling for them.  But this was the way the game was played by the Pharisees.  The laws of God were manipulated in such a way that they could convince themselves that they were righteous people.  And imagining themselves to be righteous, they hung their reputations and their eternal destinies on the law of God.

            Of course, it’s easy for us to sit here and condemn those blind, stupid Pharisees; but the fact is that we are exactly like them. Each of us has his or her own system of rating the commandments of God.  We elevate the ones we think we keep pretty well, and we downgrade and excuse ourselves for the ones we don’t do so well on.  I mean, which of us has not tried to justify himself saying things like, “It’s true that I do this little thing once in a while, but at least I’ve never even considered doing that” or “Normally I don’t behave like that; but he made me really mad”, or this perennial favorite:  “She started it”.  There are thousands more; but you see, it proves that there’s a defense lawyer in each of us concocting reasons why the wrong things we think, say, and do aren’t so serious and demonstrating that the things other people do are far worse.  We do this to convince ourselves and others that deep down inside we really are good people.  We are keeping the laws of God – at least the ones that matter most at any given moment.  And so, like the Pharisees, we too try to use the law to defend ourselves to the end. With them we hang our reputations and our lives on how well we obey the laws of God.

But with his response to the question, “Which command is the greatest?” Jesus makes this completely impossible.  When we discuss the relative importance and application of individual laws, we are in a sense seeing trees without seeing the forest.  The answer Jesus gives describes the forest:  all the laws are really about one thing:  love.  First and most important there is the vertical component of the law:  loving God.  And when we say love here, we don’t mean that emotional thing. We’re using biblical meanings here. So when we say love we mean a commitment to give oneself completely and sacrificially for another.  That’s what God requires of you:  that you entrust yourself one hundred percent to him and let him do with you whatever he sees fit.  But none of us comes even close to that.  In fact, each and every time we break any commandment by thought, word, or action, we are telling God that we do not trust him and that we do not love him. If we did, we wouldn’t break his commands.  And as if that weren’t enough to wipe out any sense of self-righteousness we might want to hang on to, then Jesus hits us with the horizontal component of the law, which is the requirement to love your neighbor as yourself.  Which neighbor?  All of them.  There are no exceptions.  And there is no such thing as partial credit.

Here’s the thing when it comes to the law:  we want to talk about trees, individual do’s and don’ts by which we try to give ourselves a passing score – but if we have failed to love God or our neighbors as ourselves in any way then we’ve already burned the whole forest down.  This being the case, it’s foolish now to point to the smoldering stumps of the handful of laws we think we haven’t botched too badly and try to hang our hopes on them.  But that’s the way it should be.  You see, God didn’t give us his laws to make us good.  We are not to hang our hopes for eternal life on them.  God gave us the laws to hang our sinful lives on so that they’d die with every bit of pride and self-righteousness we possess. The Law always only condemns us.

            So, is there any good news here?  Well, I hadn’t caught this before, but it’s interesting the way Jesus states these two commands.  I don’t want to confuse you, but the translation we heard has him saying, “Love the Lord your God … and love your neighbor”, which makes it sound as if he’s issuing commands in what linguists call the imperative form of the verbs; but it turns out that the verbs Jesus uses aren’t that way. Instead he uses what’s called the future indicative, which is the form you’d use to describe something that’s definitely going to happen.  So, Jesus really doesn’t say, “Thou shalt love”; what he says is, “You will love the Lord your God” and “You will love your neighbor as yourself”.   They’re not commands; they’re statements of fact.  The other interesting thing is that the verbs are singular rather than plural as you would expect when the Lord gives commands to his people.  That is, he doesn’t say, “You all will love the Lord”, but he speaks as if to just one person, “You will love”.

            So as I studied this passage, it occurred to me that these two greatest commandments are more than first meets the eye.  They aren’t just commands; what makes them even greater is that they are in fact prophetic statements that Jesus makes concerning himself.  He is the One the Scriptures promise will actually keep the law.  He’s the One who will love the Lord with all his heart, soul, and mind.  And he’s the One who will love his neighbors – all of them – as himself.  And then Jesus goes on to say that on these two commands hang all the Law and the Prophets.  Do you see it?  It’s the Gospel itself.  Jesus is the sum and substance of all the Law and the Prophets, he’s what it’s all about; and when he goes to the cross he literally hangs from those two commands. The vertical component, loving God, by submitting himself entirely to the will of his Father, taking on human flesh, and allowing himself to be the bearer of our guilt, and the horizontal component, loving his neighbors as himself, by sacrificing himself for us, suffering and dying in our place for our sins so that we can live.  When Jesus is on the cross, all the Law and Prophets hang on these two commands.

            And because he has done this for us, the two great commands are prophetic statements concerning each of us as well.  Because of what Jesus did for you, there will come a day when you too will love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind; and you will love your neighbors as yourself.  People sometimes ask what wonders and glories heaven holds for us. These two will surely be among the greatest:  to be free from sin, selfishness, unbelief, and pride and finally to be able to love the Lord God and each other as we were meant to.

But we don’t have to wait until the resurrection to start.  The new life we have in Christ has already begun.  It continues to grow as we use the law for what it was meant for:  to kill what’s unbelieving and unloving in us.  We are to use the law to hang our sinful selves so that they die with Christ; and then, rising with him to new life and filled with his Spirit, we can begin even now to display in our lives the same kind of love he has for us.  May God in his grace help us to make this our goal. In Jesus’ name.  Amen

Soli Deo Gloria!