Teasing riddles
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 22:34-46
Like most things, questions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Questions can ask for information, needing a yes or no answer, or they can ask for specific details like the name of your first pet. Questions can also continue, seeking further clarification. Open questions, on the other hand, allow the responder to answer as they wish. Questions can be leading questions making the desired answer very clear. Questions can sometimes just be a way of saying hello, as in “How are you?” not really expecting to be really answered at all. Questions can be rhetorical, not demanding any answer at all. And questions can be trick questions, as is “when did you last beat your wife?”.
There are fewer varieties of answers: they can actually answer the question, simply or more extensively; they can be true, they can be an exaggeration or a downright lie; or they can use the question as a jumping off point for what they really want to say – as we so often hear in political debates, for example.
Today in our gospel passage, those pesky Sadducees, Herodians, and Pharisees are still trying to entice Jesus into saying something that’ll get him in trouble with the authorities. This time, it’s the Pharisees’ turn. It’s perhaps not so clear what they’re up to, right? Jesus’ beautiful response is so familiar to us that perhaps we don’t give it a second thought: but of course it’s the right answer.
Not so then: it was a trick question with serious consequences if Jesus got it wrong. They are not asking for Jesus to choose one of the ten commandments. In the Torah of the Hebrew Bible, the Pharisees recognized 613 laws, divided into a number of different categories of different significance, but, and here’s the important thing, all equally important because each had been commanded by God. Had Jesus chosen any one of these 613, he would have been saying that the other 612 were of lesser importance, and that would have got him into trouble.
Instead what he did was boil down all those laws into two foundational and related commandments: love God with all your heart, soul and mind; and love your neighbor as yourself. And what a gift those two have been to all of us ever since – all of us that is, except for the Sadducees, the Herodians, and the Pharisees…. For them, the immense canon of the law was what their faith was all about. Replace 613 splendid gems with just two? They, as the preeminent interpreters and gatekeepers of the law, would be out of a job, rendered redundant by a pip-squeak preacher from Nazareth!
For Jesus, these ‘gatekeepers of the law’ were idolaters. They had made an idol of the law, and enforced it, crushingly, on the people. The enforcing of these laws crippled the lives of ordinary Israelites, keeping them in a constant state of impurity, separated from God in their sinfulness.
Jesus preaches love. It wasn’t a new idea, but the righteousness obtained by obeying of the law over the ages had become more important than the righteousness obtained through love: love of God, and love of neighbor and self.
What a gift Jesus gave and continues to give to us. I have often been in conversations with people who have argued that there was no need for Jesus to give two commandments: surely loving your neighbor as yourself would sort out all the world’s problems. And I recognize the appeal of that argument. If I am able to open my eyes, ears, heart and mind to all in the world around me, and respond with the generosity of love, then surely that is what living a life of faith is all about?
It doesn’t go far enough though. I think of Jesus’ teaching about whoever doesn’t hate (otherwise translated as love less) mother, father, brother, sister, can’t follow him. And that problematic passage earlier in Matthew where he tells a man that he can’t bury his father if he wants to follow Jesus.
It’s not that we can’t love our families, or attend to their needs, alive or dead, but rather that everything should come from loving God first and foremost. That our love for God should be the frame in which and from which we live our lives.
It is where we start, and everything else follows from there. And yet, how do we recognize and settle into our love for God? I think it is by recognizing and getting comfortable with another foundational, not commandment but truth that in our human brokenness, we may have more trouble with. It is the truth that God loves us, each one of us, in an incomprehensibly immense way. The moment when I first got an inkling of how God loves each one of us, indeed, the whole of creation, I remember being both overwhelmed and terrified. Was that what I was being asked to do? I couldn’t, I just wasn’t able to love in that totally unconditional way. My purest love, where I would give everything even my life, was still tainted by wanting a little love back. God doesn’t ask for anything back. We do not need to earn God’s love. We have it. Each one of us. From before time and for ever. As Mary Oliver says in her poem ‘Wild Geese’,
You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You just have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.
It is by accepting with gratitude God’s love that our love for God can grow. And day by day, we can increasingly open our hearts, minds and souls to live into that love with all its implications for our lives. There will be teasing riddles and questions that undo our certainty all along the road, and yet:
with a heart of passion,
a searching mind,
gentle strength of body
and unseen depths of soul.
we can come to love God wholly and our neighbor as ourself. Through Jesus Christ the law of grace. Amen.