Text: Matthew 22:34-46 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
The Greatest Commandment
34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sad′ducees, they came together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” 37 And 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. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
The Question about David’s Son
41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, 42 saying, “What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” 43 He said to them, “How is it then that David, inspired by the Spirit,[a] calls him Lord, saying,
44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord,
Sit at my right hand,
till I put thy enemies under thy feet’?
45 If David thus calls him Lord, how is he his son?” 46 And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did any one dare to ask him any more questions.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
“One of these things is not like the other …” The first hurdle for me in addressing this lesson is that verses 34 – 40 and 41 – 46 apparently have to do with completely different themes.
Yet there is a connection. Let’s start with verses 41 through 46, the part about David’s son.
So – what’s going on here? The first thing that’s important to note is that this interchange is the last time that the Pharisees try to trap Jesus with their arcane little riddles. From this point on, the gloves are truly off, the knives are out, and the very next day, they hatch their plan to silence Jesus for good.
The second thing about this exchange is even more important than the first – Jesus confounds their deliberate ignorance as to who he is and lets them know that he is indeed the Messiah. James Burton Coffman writes, “Christ in that question pinpointed the precise truth the Pharisees had missed concerning him, that he was (and is) God in man. ‘What think ye of Christ?’ is the most important question ever asked. All depends on the answer. No man can be saved who fails this test. To recognize and hail Christ as God come in the flesh, this is the beginning of eternal life. Without that perception, man must forever remain guilt-ridden, soul-blinded, and condemned forever. By propounding that question, it would seem that Christ, even at that late hour, was trying to relieve the sad condition of those evil men. He would even then have removed the scales from their eyes and directed their attention to the precise problem where their error lay, and which gave rise to the most important reason for their failure to recognize him.
“The reason the Pharisees did not recognize Christ (though some did) was that not all the Messianic prophecies were received by them. In the very nature of God’s revelation to humanity of the coming of that Holy One who is both God and man at once, there were necessarily SEEMING contradictions. Thus, Isaiah hailed the Coming One as ‘Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,’ etc., while at the same time portraying him as a man or sorrows, acquainted with grief, with no form nor comeliness, a root out of dry ground, bruised, chastised, and suffering death. That was too much for the unspiritual Pharisee to understand. They did the natural, human thing: they believed the more agreeable prophecies and rejected the others. One outstanding example of such duality in the prophecies was singled out by Christ and made the subject of the question here.
“The Old Testament passage Christ stressed in this confrontation of the Pharisees is Psalms 110:1 (“The LORD says to my lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’” – NIV). Of course, they had access to that information and could have known that Christ was both David’s son and David’s Lord; but they could not explain it, thus being liable, as were the Sadducees, to a charge of ignorance. Their ignorance, however, was not so much their sin as was their pride and egotism that prevented their learning from him who alone is ‘the Truth’”![1]
Ignorance is not a “sin,” as it can be corrected; pride and egotism, however, are willful and deliberate attitudes that really and truly can get in the way of seeing the truth. It’s kind of analogous to this: Say you’re driving down a road and you don’t see a speed limit sign, and you wind up getting stopped for speeding – you explain to the trooper that you’re sorry, but you just missed seeing the sign. You might get off with a warning. That’s ignorance. On the other hand, say you’re driving down that road, fully aware of the speed limit, get pulled over, and start arguing with the trooper – of course you saw the sign, but ignored it because, well, you’re a busy person and the law doesn’t really apply to you, anyway … you wind up paying the consequences. That’s pride and egotism.
The lesson for us? The Pharisees saw the Truth (with a capital “T”) standing right there in front of them, yet chose to remain stuck in their pride. We, however, have the opportunity to take a lesson from them and choose not live in the same way.
How do we do that? This brings us to the first section of today’s lesson.
The Pharisaic lawyer asks Jesus a question he thinks is unanswerable – which of the 613 commandments “on the books” is the one to follow above all the others?
This lawyer didn’t just pull the question out of thin air; it was a question that had vexed rabbis, teachers of the Law, as well as everyday Jews, for centuries. Going all the way back to the Old Testament, we read passages like Leviticus 19:18, “You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord” (RSV), as well as Leviticus 19:34, “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (RSV). Note that each of these directives end with “I am the Lord.” In other words, this is an executive memo from the head office and it needs to be followed to the letter, no ifs, ands, or buts!
One of the most influential rabbis who lived around the time of Jesus was the Rabbi Hillel. The Talmud, one of the mainstream texts of Judaism, records the following story about Rabbi Hillel: A pagan came to him saying that he would convert to Judaism if Hillel could teach him the whole of the Torah [the Jewish Bible] in the time he could stand on one foot. Rabbi Hillel replied, “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary. Go and study it.” (Talmud Shabbat 31a). Sounds a lot like Jesus’ “Golden Rule”? But this idea was a fundamental part of Judaism long before Hillel or Jesus. It is a common-sense application of the Torah commandment to love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18), which Rabbi Akiba described as the essence of the Torah (according to Rashi‘s commentary on the verse).[2]
In Jesus’ day, there continued to be great confusion on this point, as well as what, exactly, the purpose of the Law itself was in the first place. So when the Pharisaic lawyer asks his question, you can almost see the others in the crowd coming closer and leaning in to hear what Jesus has to say.
Jesus’ answer echoes Rabbi Hillel’s but completes it, first by putting love of God in the center of one’s life, as well as by the significant addition of these words: “And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Note that we are not commanded to love ourselves – that is assumed. The point being made is that we must love and value others as we already love and value ourselves.
With this Great Commandment, Jesus puts in place the cornerstone of our faith: “Love God. Love neighbor.”
A word about what is meant here by “love.” Love in this context is not the mushy kind of emotional love we’re used to thinking about. That love certainly has its place, but that’s not the kind of love we’re talking about here.
What does it mean to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind?” That might seem a little hard to grasp. What does that look like? What does that feel like? Nancy Missler writes, “What does loving God really mean? According to the Bible, loving God means totally surrendering ourselves to Him—“with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul and with all [our] mind.” The Greek word for the verb love in this Scripture is agapao (ἀγαπάω), which means “to totally give ourselves over to something.”… It’s what we put first in our lives. Agapao means a total commitment of our wills and our lives to something… Loving God means no longer living for ourselves. Loving Him is a demonstration of complete selflessness.”[3]
When we read this commandment, we might get the impression that it demands that we somehow are expected to give up who we are, totally relinquish our entire personhood, in order to become some kind of instrument of God’s will. Certainly there’s a distinct element of self-sacrifice involved here; but when we read about total surrender and especially when we read that small but powerful word “all,” we can easily get cold feet – “I can’t just give up everything I am!” we might say.
Well, I don’t think that’s what’s meant here. It’s not so much giving up or giving in as it is giving over, just what the verb agapao means. It’s us saying, as Jesus did, “Not my will, but Thy will, be done.” It’s a change of focus. Harking back to the old “God is in the driver’s seat” metaphor, we might more accurately say that we may still be the drivers, but God gives us our direction of travel. In short, we recognize that, in Christ, we have been redeemed and blessed, that we live for, and serve, a higher purpose.
“And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
A related word to agapao (ἀγαπάω), totally giving ourselves over to God, is the verb agape (αγάπη). Agape love is the love we have in mind when we talk about loving our neighbor. It is the kind of selfless concern for others that makes a perfect stranger rush out into a busy street, risking life and limb, to rescue a child from an onrushing truck. It is the kindness of a person who presses a $5 bill into the hand of a homeless person at the top of a freeway exit ramp. It is the reaction of a person who whips out her cell phone and calls 911 when she witnesses someone having a medical emergency. It is the deep and caring action of a neighbor who knocks on the door of a neighbor he hasn’t seen for a while to make sure they’re OK.
These – and so many, many others, large and small – are the kinds of actions that we do that let others “know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Coffman, James Burton. “Commentary on Matthew 22:41”. “Coffman Commentaries on the Old and New Testament”. https:https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/bcc/matthew-22.html. Abilene Christian University Press, Abilene, Texas, USA. 1983-1999.
[2] Judaism 101, http://www.jewfaq.org/brother.htm
[3] Nancy Missler, “What Does it Mean to Love God?”, Koinonia House, https://www.khouse.org/articles/2012/1043/print/