Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost
“The Greatest Commandment” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 22:34-46/NRSVUE)
“The doctor had a cancellation for Monday morning at eight. Can you be here?” the receptionist asked me.
“Sure,” I said without thinking through all the implications of my answer, though I did consider the most immediate ones: my tooth really hurt, I needed a root canal to fix it, and I suddenly had a chance to have it addressed way sooner than I thought I would have been able to.
What I didn’t consider, though, was that I already had something else on the calendar for later that Monday — namely, my final meeting with the Committee on Ministry, at which a group of twelve people (mostly minsters) would decide, after grilling me for however long they felt necessary, whether I could move on to the next step in the ordination process.
It would have been tough to imagine a worse day for me to have oral surgery, but deferring my dentist appointment would have meant living with an achy tooth, and rescheduling with the Committee on Ministry would have set me back months career-wise, so I had no choice but to do both on the same day.
Thankfully, my root cancal went okay, and luckily I regained control of the left side of my face and the ability to speak about a half hour before the ministerial interrogation started. It wasn’t exactly the most pleasant experience of my life — the questions were tough and once the novocaine wore off the pain set in — but I muddled through somehow. And while I felt an incredible sense of relief on my drive home after that very long day, that relief was rather short lived.
I say this because my next step towards being ordained, which was schedule for a weeks later, was what’s known in the United Church of Christ as an “Ecclesiastical Council.” This is basically church speak for “yet another round of questions from a different and bigger group of people.”
The way this worked back in Massachusetts where I did it was that delegates from each of the thirty five churches in our Association were called on in alphabetical order — from Abington to Weymouth — and given the chance to pose a question to me. This would have been tough enough, but it was actually lot harder because there were no restrictions (other than common human decency) with respect to what folks could ask.
“What Bible passage resonates most with you?”
“If God is all-powerful, then why does God let evil exist in the world?”
“Why did Jesus have to die on the cross?” Someone always asked that question.
“What’s your go-to breakfast food?”
Okay, I made the last one up, but the rest of them were real — and yet it also wouldn’t have surprised me if someone had asked me about my breakfast preference (the answer to that is “donuts,” in case you’re curious) because these things were kind of a free-for-all.
Thankfully, I somehow managed to make it through that inquisition too. And while I thought I might have completed the bulk of my question answering at that point, it was incredibly naive on my part to think that.
I mean, after you’ve run the aforementioned gauntlets, you get questions in the search and call process as you’re looking for a congregation to serve: “What do you think is the future of the church?” Look, I’m a pastor, not a fortune teller; besides, I couldn’t even tell you for sure what shoes I have on right now without looking down at my feet;
And you get them from kids in Sunday School class: “Do our pets join us in heaven?” Yeah, I believe they do (and Pope Francis agreed with me on that one, by the way).
And you get them from people who are looking for answers amidst the darkest nights of despair: “Why does the world have to be such a dumpster fire” or “Why did I have to get cancer” or “Why did my loved one have to die?” I’ll be honest with you (as I always strive to be), I don’t think I’ve ever had great answers to those kinds of questions — either for other people or for myself.
But the questions just keep coming. And then at some point — I don’t recall exactly when — it dawned on me that this is really a good thing because questions are what keeps faith alive.
It’s important for us to understand that this was a thing long before Christianity was a thing — indeed, the back and forth between the Pharisees and Jesus that we see in today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel had been an integral part of Judaism — the tradition from which Jesus himself came — long before Jesus arrived on the scene and continued to be so long after he was crucified. This practice was simply how the rabbis did the work of interpreting the law in light of the realities of life.
But it’s not clear whether these Pharisees are trying to engage Jesus in an earnest debate by asking what they ask here — and, in fairness, there’s good reason for us to be suspicious. I say this because the previous questions posed to him by the powers that be, represented by the elders and the scribes and the Sadducees and the Herodians and the Pharisees — questions such as “By what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you this authority?” and “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” — are clearly intended to get Jesus to say something that will incriminate him.
Today, one of the Pharisees, a lawyer — not the kind of lawyer we think of today, but rather an expert in religious doctrine — asks Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” And while he may be asking because he really wants to know the answer, it can also be seen as kind of a loaded question. The Torah contains six hundred and thirteen different commandments, so picking just one could be construed as a statement about the relative unimportance of all the others. And choosing to say nothing would make it look as though Jesus were simply dodging the question.
Regardless, Jesus doesn’t miss a beat before giving his answer, “‘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.” This is actually a brilliant reply on Jesus’s part. I mean, if microphones had been invented at that point and if Jesus had had one, he would have dropped it for sure.
You see, while this “Greatest Commandment” that Jesus lifts up here was (and still is) a really big deal, it’s also nothing that these Pharisees (and Matthew’s first readers) hadn’t heard before.
It is, of course, two commandments for the price of one. The first part (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”) comes from the prayer known in Hebrew as the Shema that appears in Deuteronomy. The second part (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”) comes from the passage in Leviticus that Scott read earlier. And each of these commandments had been integral to Judaism since the time of Moses. There were even factions within the larger group known as the Pharisees that believed the commandment to love God was the foundational principal for all creation, that it was, in fact, the greatest commandment.
Combining the commandments to love God and to love your neighbor into one overarching commandment was definitely a more recent phenomenon, but Jesus wasn’t actually the first one to do it. Indeed, there are several instances from Jewish writings, both during and slightly before Jesus’s time, that say the same thing.
This is all a long way of saying that the lawyer’s question here is not necessarily provocative, and that Jesus’s answer to that question is not obviously controversial. That being said, there’s a lot going on between the lines here.
The opening of today’s passage, in which the Pharisees huddle to plan their next steps in their attempt to discredit Jesus, makes their ultimate intentions pretty clear. And the speed and accuracy with which Jesus quotes from both the Torah and the rabbinic tradition in response to the lawyer’s question are, at some level, his way of serving notice to the powers-that-be that he knows and can interpret scripture at least as well they can. In citing these two commandments from the Torah, is Jesus also implying that these Pharisees aren’t actually abiding by them? Yeah, he probably is; but it’s tough to say for sure.
And then things get a little weird as Jesus counters the lawyer’s seemingly straightforward question with a far more complicated one (well, technically two): “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he? he asks. Snd the Pharisees give the textbook answer: “The son of David.”
And then Jesus, being Jesus, throws a wrench in the works. Quoting from the 110th Psalm, which was thought to be written by David, Jesus points out an inconsistency that appears there — namely, that David refers to the Messiah as “Lord,” as his superior. And so, Jesus then poses a follow-up question: “If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” The point Jesus is making here is that the Messiah (you know, him) both descends from David and transcends all human lineage; he aligns with certain expectations about who the Messiah is and deviates from a whole bunch of others.
And yet the Pharisees don’t even try to answer Jesus, they just walk away from the conversation. Now, I won’t speak for you but I probably would have had some other stuff I’d want to ask Jesus at that point.
I’ve read this passage many times and preached about it on several occasions but, as is the case with so many of these texts, something grabbed my attention this time that hadn’t before — and now I can’t help but think that a single verse in this story is one of the most important in all the Gospels, which is this: “No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.” It’s not only a pivotal point in the story but also a profoundly sad one. Because when we cease wondering, when the questions end and when we stop caring enough to even risk answering them, what do we really have left?
Are the questions we ask about big things — like who we are and whence we came and why we’re here and where we’re going next — difficult to wrap our minds around? Yes. Can they challenge what we believe and cause us to wonder why we believe it? Sure. Might they bring into uncomfortable focus the disparity between what we say we believe in theory and what we do in practice? Yup. Do they compel us to consider how these ancient writing apply to life in our place and time? You betcha. And these are the reasons why they matter.
Because without the questions and the answers, without the back and forth, without the people being in an ongoing dialogue with their faith and with each other about their faith, it all just becomes a static list of rules to be followed mindlessly in perpetuity — and it’s hard (for me at least) to understand why that would be compelling to anyone, or to understand why the God who created us and gave us the capacity to think and to feel and question would actually want us to do that.
For a little over a quarter century now, the comma has been the symbol of the UCC’s “God Is Still Speaking” campaign, which is a clever articulation of the theological premise that God still has truth to reveal to the world and continues to do so; it’s a belief that’s essential to our collective identity as a church — the implication, of course, being that we should never place a period (to end something) where God would place a comma (in order to continue it). And that’s pretty compelling. Yet, I can’t help but believe that, when it comes to punctuation, the question mark is an important part of who we are too.