Which Question Matters?

In Matthew’s telling of the story, we read that after Jesus entered Jerusalem for the final time, there was almost constant conflict with the religious authorities. That friction heats up considerably in the scripture for today which describes the conflict in two questions: what is the heart of the moral law and who is the Messiah?

The question of the moral law is stated by asking which is the greatest commandment. The rabbis traditionally counted in the scriptures 613 moral commands (248 positive commands, corresponding to the number of parts of the body; 365 negative commands, corresponding to the days of the year). Some rabbis argued that all commandments were equal and any ranking of them was mere human presumption to evaluate the divine law, all of which was equally binding. Other teachers insisted that knowing the most important commandments was necessary to manage the inevitable times when the 613 commandments conflicted with one another. Apparently they tried to engage Jesus in this ongoing debate in a way that would put him and his teaching in a bad light.[1]

But Jesus gave an answer Jesus with which many rabbis would actually agree: the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind; the second and connected commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. These commandments help us sort out and order all the rest of the moral law.

Then the text says that Jesus asked a question of the Pharisees. In fact, he trapped the leaders with a scripture riddle.[2] He asked them, whose son is the Messiah? They answered that the Messiah was the son of David, that is, a blood descendant of Israel’s greatest king. Jesus then quotes Psalm 110.1, a psalm written by David, to suggest that David thought of the Messiah as his Lord. How then can the Messiah be both David’s son and David’s Lord? The religious leaders had no answer.

So the text contains two important questions. Which of them matters most? That’s what we need to find out. Let’s read it in Matthew 22.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “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.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,

If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

In light of the questions in the text, I want to ask two questions of us today. The first question is simply, how are we to love? I say “simply” but it is actually a very complicated question because love is complicated.

It’s complicated, for one thing, just because we use the word in so many ways. I love God. I love my wife. I love pizza. I don’t think those are all the same kinds of love but the word is the same. What in the world does love mean?[3] The Oxford English Dictionary, that monumentally defining compilation of the English language, lists 15 major meanings of the word love and cites many dozens of examples expressing love’s countless nuances. And since language shapes behavior, when even the word love is so complicated, it’s no wonder that the doing of love is complicated too. How are we to love?

Jesus’ teaching about the greatest commandments aims to help us here. It helps us, first, by stating that the commandments are inseparable.[4] When Jesus said the second is “like” the first, he meant it was cut from the same cloth. The second commandment to love the neighbor focuses the way in which the love of God finds practical expression. Elsewhere in the New Testament the writer of 1 John says it more explicitly: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4.20) We can easily have warm, fuzzy feelings about loving God but Jesus teaches that we only love God when we connect that specifically to loving neighbor.

The second way Jesus’ teaching helps us is to make clear that while the commands are inseparable, they remain distinct and the first is still the first. Many people, including atheists who purport to have no love for God at all, can and do love the neighbor, sometimes better than we do. The first commandment establishes the priority of the vertical dimension of the life of faith. We begin our faith with a relationship to God.[5] In other words, God remains the ultimate point of reference for human life and we love God when we are guided by the compass of prayer, public and private worship, and scripture.[6]

How are we to love? We love when we connect our lives first to God and then live that out in relation to others.

Now I want to jump to the second part of the text and ask a second question: who saves us? That’s really the issue when Jesus questioned the Pharisees. He got at them with what amounts to a scripture riddle from Psalm 110.[7] If you look it up, it is called a psalm of David and in the first verse David says this: “The Lord says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’”

The psalm uses two different words which we translate into English with the same word lord. But I want you to notice something. Turn in the pew Bibles to Psalm 110 (page 562). Notice verse one where it says “The Lord says to my lord.” The first Lord is capitalized with small capitals because it translates the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh. The second lord which is not capitalized at all translates another Hebrew word for God, Adonai. So David is using two different words for lord. But even when we know that, we have to figure out what King David had in mind when he said, “The Lord (that is, Yahweh, God) said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” Who is the second lord (Adonai)? That’s what Jesus was asking the Pharisees.

Remember that the Hebrew people insisted with their very life blood that there was only one God: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” That is from Deuteronomy 6.4 and the very next verse is what Jesus cited as the greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all you heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (6.5) There is only one Lord whom we are to love without reservation.

But David’s psalm tells us that God said to another lord, “Sit at my right hand.” That may not mean much to us. But remember when at court, a king would sit on a throne so no one else could be at his level. For a king to seat someone at his right hand was to seat someone who was his equal. Who could be equal to God?

God’s people have wrestled mightily with that question. The early Christians wrestled mightily with it too and the answer they came up with was this: the second lord was the Messiah and the Messiah was equal to God. The Pharisees rightly understood scripture where it taught that the Messiah was David’s son, that is, a blood-descendant of David. What they did not understand or accept was what Jesus taught: the Messiah was also God’s Son, one equal to God who sits at the right hand of God in a way so powerful and mysterious that God is still one.

Here’s the point of all this. The Messiah, the Savior, is descended from David. We say “like father like son,” but the Messiah — that’s what the word Christ means — is not like David. The king ruled by military power; the Christ rules by suffering love. The king created a nation with geographical boundaries; the Christ rules the hearts of people with no boundaries of geography, race, gender, economics, or even time.[8]

So to ask who saves us is to ask who is our Messiah and if Jesus Christ is our Messiah then we follow him in the manner in which he saved us. Jesus Christ saved us by love and we follow Christ by love: love of God without reservation and love of neighbor as ourselves. That’s why the second question about the identity of the Messiah matters most. Who the Messiah is makes all the difference.

So I’ll conclude today by asking another question. What happens when we, in the manner of our Messiah, love God and neighbor?

The first thing that happens is that we have something more to base our actions on than feelings or whatever is politically correct or culturally popular in the moment. I read about a college that not long ago had a faculty discussion group about cultural diversity on campus. Several professors affirmed that it was important to challenge sexist, racist, or homophobic language. There was quick agreement that such language was out of place on campus.

But then a new faculty member asked the disturbing question, “What reason do you give when a student responds, ‘why not say those derogatory things’ and evokes the right of free speech to say them?” The faculty struggled for more than two hours to come up with this namby-pamby answer: “It seems obvious that we should not allow language that makes anyone uncomfortable.”[9]

That was it. No rooting of morality in anything but “comfort,” no acknowledging that sexist, racist, homophobic, ageist, or any other derogatory language is wrong because it offends the dignity of humanity given each person by God. We know better than that college when we, in the manner of our Messiah, love God and neighbor.

I’ve mentioned before that at my previous church we had youth program on Wednesday nights called Logos. Logos was for children and youth from preschool through senior high. We gathered for three and a half hours of Bible study, music, crafts, games, and dinner. And every week when we all gathered at table for dinner we all recited the number one rule at Logos. “Everyone here is a child of God, so we treat each other with love and respect.” That was our rule because that is the manner of our Messiah.

Loving this way is how we both critique and witness to the overly sentimental and abidingly lost culture in which we live. Don’t underestimate loving God and neighbor in the manner of our Messiah. When we really love this way it makes a difference. Even Christian worship challenges the culture. One writer put it this way. “Any group who dares to sing ‘Praise God, from whom all blessings flow’ is engaging in a strenuous argument with a culture that sings ‘Praise the celebrities and the powerful and the rich, from whom everything the rest of us is after flows.’”[10]

Early in the last century, an agricultural missionary named Dr. Golter spent most of his life in China.[11] Essentially he was a gardener who loved God and people and went to China to do that. While he was there he taught people how to grow more vegetables and feed their children better. He told stories about Jesus and translated some of them into Chinese. He even adopted two Chinese children he found in a trash can.

Dr. Golter couldn’t hurt a fly; he was a man incapable of violence. But they said he was dangerous, and he was. It matters who our Messiah is and Dr. Golter was dangerous because, in the manner of his Messiah, he loved God and neighbor.

[1] “The lawyer may be attempting to draw Jesus into this debate and get him to make some statement that could be interpreted as disparaging toward (some part of) the Law, such as declaring the ‘moral law’ more important than the ‘ceremonial law.’” M. Eugene Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew” The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. VIII (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995) 424. Also, Lewis R. Donelson, “Exegesis,” Lectionary Homiletics 10.11 (1999): 23.

[2] “Jesus actually riddles the Pharisees into speechlessness.” Marion Soards, Thomas Dozeman, Kendall McCabe, Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A After Pentecost 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992) 107.

[3] Boring, 425, makes the point that agape is not as “special” as we’ve often thought and taught. “In Greek as in English there was and is no single Greek word with an inherent meaning that refers exclusively to the kind of love with which God loves the world and with which Christians are commanded to love God, each other, and their neighbors. Let it be clearly said: agape was not such a word.… Such love is not a matter of feeling, which cannot be commanded in any case, but of commitment and action. It is at the farthest pole from sentimentality and is related to the OT word for ‘covenant love’ (dsh).”

[4] Walter Brueggemann, Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, James D. Newsome, Texts For Preaching, Year A (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1995) 542. Boring, 426, says: “It is striking that Jesus is asked for one command but responds with two. Matthew alone specifically adds that the second is ‘like’ (omoia) the first. This does not mean merely that it is similar, but that it is of equal importance and inseparable from the first. The great command to love God has as its inseparable counterpart the command to love neighbor. One cannot first love God and then, as a second task, love one’s neighbor. To love God is to love one’s neighbor, and vice versa (25.31-46).”

[5] Soards, 106.

[6] Brueggemann, 542.

[7] Boring, 428, makes the point that Psalm 110.1 is the most often cited text in all of the New Testament, appearing in some form 37 times.

[8] Brueggemann, 543. “The ways in which the Messiah is different from David make his reign unique, threatening, and ultimately victorious.” Soards, 107. “The ‘bottom line’ is that the Christ turns out to be more than anyone expected.”

[9] Rick Brand, “The Fight Goes On,” Lectionary Homiletics 10.11 (1999): 28-29.

[10] Boring, 428.

[11] John F. K. Dowds, “Preaching the Lesson,” Lectionary Homiletics 10.11 (1999): 27.