A Sermon Preached at University Baptist Church, Columbus, Ohio
23 October 2011
I. Introduction
- You may know that the name by which modern Jews refer to the Bible, that is, the Hebrew Bible is Tanakh – this is the collection of texts that Christians have traditionally referred to a the Old Testament – Tanakh is an acronym that arises from three Hebrew words: Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim – these words refer to the three divisions, the three sections of the Hebrew Bible: The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings – Torah, or the Law, is, of course, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible – the traditional author of these books is Moses – the books contain the earliest history of the people of Israel, from creation to standing on the doorstep of the Promised Land – the stories tell of the roots of the relationship between God and the people, of their slavery in Egypt, of the Exodus, and of the Law, or instruction, of God – the second section, Nevi’im, or the Prophets, focuses on the work and words of several of the preachers in the history of the people, on what God spoke to the people through the preachers – the third section, Ketuvim, or the Writings, includes a number of books of poetry, such as the Psalms, Lamentations, and the Song of Songs, along with other books that do not fit into the former categories, such as the books of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Ruth, and Esther – in Jesus’ time, only the Law and the Prophets had become fixed in the canon of Hebrew sacred writings
- For Jesus in our gospel text today to refer to the Law and the Prophets tells us a number of things – and we need to listen to him
II. Further Dispute with the Pharisees
- Our text today resumes the dispute that the Evangelist has been describing in the sections leading up to this one – but our lectionary omits a piece, and I do not know why – in the omitted story, some Sadducees come to Jesus with an elaborate question concerning Levirate marriage, which required the brother of a deceased man to marry the deceased man’s widow – the question the Sadducees ask extends this requirement to an absurd length, passing through seven brothers who all marry the same woman – and then asking whose wife she would be in the resurrection – of course, the irony of the question is that the Sadducees as a group did not believe in the resurrection or in any afterlife at all – Jesus’ response is to tell them that they do not know the scriptures – if they did, they would know that they have made a number of incorrect assumptions, the chief of them being that God does not view life and death as human beings do – to some extent, we think of life as the state of being not dead – perhaps because our mortality is always with us, even being alive is in some ways a march toward the grave – that is certainly true of the Sadducees who are questioning Jesus – God, on the other hand, is radically alive – God does not die, will not die – God is not just immortal, God is the opposite of mortal – death does not shade or affect God in any way – thus, Jesus is not simply telling the Sadducees that they are wrong, he is also telling them that they have no idea who God is – and with this declaration, he silences the Sadducees
- When the Pharisees hear of it, they return to their dispute with Jesus – they decide to test him again – one of them, a lawyer, asks Jesus a question concerning great commandments – in one way, Jesus’ response is entirely orthodox – he could not have answered any better – apparently without hesitation, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6.5: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind – this is an extremely familiar text for the Pharisees – they would repeat these words often in worship and in prayer – they are a part of the saying called the Shema, which means “hear,” and begins “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is One” – with his answer Jesus demonstrates that he knows what is orthodox by the definition of the Pharisees – but Jesus does not leave it at that
- Instead, Jesus adds to the words about loving God another saying from Torah, this time from Leviticus 19.18: Love your neighbor as yourself – I cannot be absolutely sure of this, but I do not believe that any of the Pharisees had ever connected these two commandments before – I believe that the Pharisees knew them and more or less practiced them, but I do not believe they had ever connected them – and certainly with the implication that the second is “like,” or “similar to,” or “the same as,” the first – I believe they had not thought of loving God and loving others as two sides of a coin, as two expressions of the same thing, i.e., the Law of Love
- To top it off, Jesus tells them that everything else in the law and the prophets hangs on these two commandments – everything else is lower branches compared with these two – the Law of Love is above all else – this message is at the heart of the Law, the Prophets, and the mission and ministry of Jesus
- In the next piece of the story Jesus is the one with the questions – he asks the Pharisees whose son Messiah is – by this he may be inquiring of which tribe Messiah will come – the answer is, quite naturally, that Messiah is David’s son – the expectation in Jesus’ time is that Messiah will be a political and religious figure who will reestablish the golden age of David’s reign – but Jesus’ next question stuns the Pharisees – Jesus refers to Psalm 110.1, assuming that David is the author of the psalm and that when David refers to “my lord” he is referring to Messiah – but Jewish interpretations of the scripture do not understand Psalm 110 as a messianic psalm – Jesus reinterprets scripture in a new way, and the Pharisees have no answer – in Matthew’s gospel, this ends the dispute between Jesus and the religious authorities
III. The Law and the Prophets
- Among the things that Jesus is saying by his reference to the Law and the Prophets is that these two commandments, which are related but not completely identical, is that this is what God requires of the people of God – when Micah the Prophet says that the Lord requires people to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, that is included in the summary that Jesus offers
- Another thing Jesus is saying is an echo that I hear from his other use of the phrase in Matthew’s gospel – in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says: In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the Law and the Prophets – there are other places, perhaps, where Jesus refers to the Law and the Prophets together, but only in the Sermon and here does he refer to a summary of the Law and the Prophets – what I hear is that loving others means doing to others as we would have them do to us – we might say that it is difficult to know what the loving thing to do is in a situation, but if we follow Jesus’ teaching here, finding the loving thing to do may be as simple deciding what we would want someone to do with us if we were in a similar situation
- Loving others and dealing with them as we would have them deal with us is also simple when we follow the example of God’s love for us and for creation – who does God love? What does God love? – God loves everyone and everything
- By comparison loving God is simple – we give everything we feel, everything we are and have, and everything we think to God – our lives are not our own exclusively – we are God’s, we are people of God’s Vision – while we are free to live as we want and to do and to be whatever we choose to do and to be, for all who live in relationship with God through Jesus Messiah, that relationship informs all our choices – we can choose whatever we want, but the Law of Love guides us to choose to live in loving, compassionate, and peaceful ways, to choose to live according to the Law and the Prophets
IV. Conclusion
- Insofar as loving God and loving neighbor is a matter of discerning the loving thing, it may be easy to do – the problem for us is that the loving thing is not always the easy thing to do or the popular thing to do – sometimes the loving thing to do seems almost to be an accusation or judgment of others who would act differently, but it need not be that
- In any given situation there may be any number of loving things to do – surely the depth of the Law and the Prophets, surely the depth of the Law of Love give us latitude in our actions
- Whatever we choose to do, let us do it all in love – everything hangs on this, including the Law and the Prophets
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Tags: Matthew 22.34-46
