Pentecost 22

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Pentecost 22
PROPER: 25A
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: October 24, 1999

TEXT: Matthew 22:34-46 - "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"
(See also Exodus 22:21-27)

ISSUE: The passage is an example of how Jesus and the Pharisees (and the Sadducees) spar with Jesus challenging one another's position and honor. In this case, Pharisees challenge Jesus in terms of what is the greatest law, and Jesus challenges them with the question about who do they think the Messiah is. What is also particularly important is that Jesus teaches that God commands that they love God and their neighbor. He challenges them on the point that Messiahship is not one who is the military successor of King David. Who is he, but one who follows the command to love God with profound devotion and the last, the lost, the least, the poor around him.
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The sparring and challenging of Jesus with the Pharisees, and the Sadducees continues. Recall that in last Sunday's gospel reading Jesus was severely challenged by the Pharisees and the Herodians who asked him whether is was lawful according to the Jewish Torah to pay taxes to Caesar or not. It was a vicious challenge to entrap him. Jesus did escape the entrapment by telling them to pay Caesar what belonged to Caesar, but that they should pay to God what they owed God. Paying God the allegiance that was owed to God was often the great failing of the Herodians, the Pharisees, and even ourselves today. Jesus won the challenge, and maintained his honorable position as a prophet in their midst.
That kind of challenging continues in the passage from Matthew this morning. First, the Pharisees challenge Jesus on what is the most important law is the greatest. Again, this is a "testing" question. Jesus provides a very satisfactory answer. Actually a very conservative answer that is quite acceptable. But then notice that Jesus comes back at them, the Pharisees and challenges them with the question: "What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?" They return the popular response of what they believed the Messiah to be, "Son of David," that is, someone in the lineage, ancestry of King David, and someone of a militant type. Then Jesus, trapping them, quotes Psalm 110:1. (It was believed at that time that David had written all of the Psalms, which is not the case.) The Psalm reads: "The Lord said to my lord, the king, 'Sit here at my right side until I put your enemies under your feet.'" If the Messiah is addressing David, how can the Messiah be a Son of David? This challenge stumps the Pharisees, so they go away no longer asking him any questions. Matthew is stressing here the wit and the victory, the honorableness, of Jesus over the leadership of his time.
It seems that the point of the passage is that what is basic to human existence is loving God, - i.e. paying to God what belongs to God - and loving your neighbor. The essence of the Messiah, the leader and deliverer of God's people is not one who is militant, but one who conveys and lives into the law of love.
Let's take a closer look at Jesus response to the question: "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" Which was the greatest law, or the most important one in the law was an ongoing question for the people of Jesus' time. In the torah, or first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures there were considered to be 613 laws. How your remembered all of these was an issue. Some were of more imporantance than others. Obviously the Ten Commandments were of great importance. The command (Dt. 22:6-7) that if you found a nest, you could take eggs or young, but not the mother bird, was a less importance. Rabbi's and prophets tried to summarize the law for their people. King David in Psalm 15 declared 11 important rules. The prophet Micah (6:8) declared only three: Do justice, show constant love, and live in humble fellowship with God. The prophet Amos (5:4) had only one: "The Lord says to the people of Israel, 'Come to me and you will live.'"
Jesus summarization of the God's law is the Hebrew 'Shema' from Deut. 6:5; it is not anything particularly original, and so Jesus could not be condemned for it. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and will all your soul, and with all you mind." This is how you paid God back what you owed, with your love. Jesus added also a quotation from the Hebrew Scripture, Lev. 19:18: "Do not take revenge on anyone or continue to hate him, but love your neighbor as you love yourself." Popular belief at the time was that neighbors were often thought of as merely your kinsmen. Although the reading from Exodus 22:21-27, for today, calls for a respect and compassion for resident aliens, remembering that the nation Israel was herself once a resident alien in Egypt. Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan also expanded the notion of who a neighbor was. Even the hated Samaritans could be good neighbors. So Jesus summarizes the 613 commandments of the Hebrew Scriptures into two memorable laws: Love God and love your neighbor in the widest sense of that word as you love yourself.
What is important for us to understand is what love meant when Jesus gave this commandment. We think of love today as a good feeling. We think of love as a romantic inclination. Love is thought of in terms of giving our old left over clothes to the poor. Love of God is giving to the church what's left over after everything else has been paid. Love in modern American Culture is making oneself feel good, or being nice, or polite. Love is a bumper sticker with a heart on it: I (RED HEART) SAILING. Whatever. . . . We have a very psychological and emotional concept of love. We might even say that you can't command people to love. You have to feel love.
The emotional concept of love creates problems for us in a religious sense, because people don't understand what it means to love God whom they cannot see. It's hard to love even Jesus. He was a great persons, no doubt, but how do I love him? He's remote a figure in Scripture, who love 2,000 years ago. People in Jesus' time did not see love as an emotion. Love was an attachment, a belonging. People of this time were very group oriented. The most important thing in your life was your family group. You may not have had a lot of real fuzzy feelings about some people in that group, but you live and died for your family. It was you own security and well being, you survival. Love was attachment and belonging and you did what was expected and commanded by the family.
To love God was not a matter of having a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings about God, but it was a matter of attachment to God with enduring faithfulness. Israel as a nation was expected and commanded to stay attached to God and God's way. They were bound to God in a Covenant relationship. God was your protection and survival. You honored God with obedience and faithfulness. Israel was to be a light to the nations of the world in her faithful attachment to Yahweh God.
When Jesus says love your neighbor, it is again not a matter of warm fuzzy feelings, but to be attached to them as if they were your own family. You were to respect them, honor them, and enable them to participate fully in the community with honor and justice. We are often startled by Jesus command to hate you mother and father; "Whoever loves his father or mother more than me is not fit to be my disciple; whoever loves his son or daughter more than me is not fit to be my disciple." (Matt.10:37; Lk 14:26) This does not mean an emotional abandonment of you family. It means that you need to be attached to Jesus Christ, you need to be in his group and live in accordance with his way and command. In the community of Christ, you belong to one who died for humanity. Therefore the members of the group are willing to die for one another as that's what it means to love or to be attached. You may not be "crazy about" one another, but you respect the dignity of every human being, because that is what Jesus Christ did, and that's what it means to be in his family.
Remember what it was like when you got married, those of you that are. It was all very romantic, and emotional. Lots of good feelings. But to stay married requires so much more than just warm fuzzy feelings. It is an all out devotion in sickness and health, when we grow older. When we enter the demand, tiring and wearing struggle with raising children. When we have to take care of one another's aging and dying parents. When hit high points and low points. Yet still keeping the attachment. Is this not what it means to love God, to be attached and caring on with patience and compassion and caring. The Gospel of John (15:13) expresses it best of all when Jesus says: "My commandment is this: love one another just as I love you. the greates love a person can have for his friends is to give his life for them. And you are my friends if you do what I command you."
It was once so hard for me to imagine that people who came to church Sunday after Sunday, year after year, walked out on one another when we changed the Prayer Book. In American culture attachments are often so weak as people serve only themselves and what feels good for themselves. How can fathers walk out on their children so that they can, so called find "find themselves"? How can wives and husband walk out on one another so incredibly easy? This issue is one we must face as Christians in the community of Christ.
We will say that we cannot be commanded to love. You can't make me have good fuzzy feelings for another person when they just aren't there. Yet unmistakeably, God commands us to love one another. Christ Jesus picked up on that very point to reinforce it. You are commanded to stay attached to God. You are commanded to be attached to one another as you are attached to yourself. We belong to God, and God revealed in Jesus Christ how he was willing to die for us. We are called upon to be attached to and belong to one another. The two commands so far as Jesus was concerned were inseparably linked. If you want a world that is at peace, if you want a world that expresses the Kingdom of God, then you must be attached to the way of God, and you must be attached to one another as the family of God.
When then is the Messiah, the deliverer, the savior? What do you say about him? Is he the militant leader, the Son of David. Is the Messianic hope to be found in devotions to our American rugged individualism? Is the Messiah a devotion to good feelings, niceties and politeness? Is the Messiah a devotion to "finding myself"? Is the Messianic hope is warm and fuzzy feelings? The Messianic hope is in Christ I do believe who calls us to accept the command to love, to be attached firmly to the Creator, and to be attached to a caring compassionate way of life in which we serve one another, and live for one another, in which we will die for one another, as Christ Jesus has done for us.`