Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost
“Servants and Saints” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 22:34-46/NRSVUE)
I loved the Bible classes that I took in seminary, but there was one part of them that I always dreaded and that was being called on to read a text out loud. It wasn’t because I was shy (even though I am); it wasn’t because I had a fear of public speaking (even though I did); it was because trying to pronounce some of those long and complicated names of people, places and things was absolutely awful. I’d be cruising right along through a passage and thinking I was doing a terrific job, when a Abiathar or an Abimelech would suddenly appear as if from nowhere and throw me for a loop. I still get stressed-out just thinking about it.
While most of the really tough words are contained within the Hebrew Bible, there are ones in the New Testament can sneak up on you too. Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel would be a case in point — I mean what on earth is a “phylactery” anyway? Wait — isn’t that one of those flying dinosaurs? No, that’s a pterodactyl. I definitely had to look up the meaning of this word in the notes at the bottom of the page in my study Bible after I stumbed through reading it in front of a classroom full of people.
In case you’re curious, phylacteries are actually small black leather boxes containing biblical commandments that were (and still are) worn by many Jews in ritual observance of the command contained in Deuteronomy to bind the words of the Torah as a symbol upon your hands and on your foreheads. They are typically attached to the left arm and forehead by means of long leather ties or straps.
The Greek word for these boxes — phylakterion — appears only once in the entire Bible, right here in today’s text from Matthew; it derives from the verb meaning “to guard or protect.” The Hebrew word for the same thing, tepellin, derives from either the verb meaning “to pray” or the one meaning “to separate from” — to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, believers from non-believers, insiders from outsiders.
It is interesting — and also kind of sad — that both the Greek and the Hebrew words used for this religious object and practice imply that it is, in some sense, a marker of difference. Faith, after all, is supposed to be something that unites rather than divides us. The Hebrew concept of something that “separates from” is straightforward enough. The Greek idea of something that “protects from” is less obviously problematic, but the implication that something that protects us means there is either something else or someone else that we need protection from, that we need to be kept apart from. In other words, it constructs a system of self and other without actually saying so directly. Words, rituals and other symbols can be sneaky like that sometimes. When they become familiar and comfortable to us — when they become rote — we can lose sight of what they’re meant to be doing, what they’re actually doing, and what we are choosing to do with them.
The command to the Israelites to bind the Torah to their arms and foreheads in perpetuity was probably not meant to be taken only literally. When Moses tells the people to do this, the gesture points at something bigger than itself — that’s part of what symbolic things are supposed to do. To bind the Torah to one’s arm is a reminder to live it out in one’s actions; to bind the Torah to one’s forehead is a reminder to keep it in one’s thoughts. That is why the ritual is important. There is nothing inherently wrong with such religious acts of devotion, but they shouldn’t be construed as ends in themselves. In other words, we shouldn’t pay so much attention to the symbol that we lose sight of what it actually symbolizes. And that’s the point that Jesus is making here.
It would be really easy for us to read this passage from Matthew and see it as a simple indictment of the “teachers of the law and the Pharisees” who “sit in Moses’s seat,” and their tendency not to practice what they preach. And it probably would have been just as easy for Matthew’s first readers to understand this text that way. There is an undeniable element of that here, of course — I mean, Matthew is obviously no great fan of the teachers of the law and the Pharisees — but his message here is not that simple or one-dimensional.
We need to remember that Matthew is writing his Gospel several decades after Jesus’s life, death and resurrection. And we need to acknowledge that his contempt for the Pharisee’s seeming hypocrisy — following the letter of the law but not its underlying spirit — is very real. Matthew’s decision to invoke Jesus’s argument with the Pharisees here years after it happened reflects the fact that the early followers Christ grappled with the powers of Judaism for a long, long time.
And because that was the case, it would be very easy to see our passage as a criticism of Judaism for adhering to the letter of the law, a celebration of Jesus for living into the spirit of the law and an invitation to Jesus’s followers to do the same.
Yet, you have to wonder whether Matthew’s indictment of the Pharisees here is intended to serve as a cautionary tale not only to the Jewish powers-that-be, but also to the earliest Christians, to us and, indeed to all people everywhere throughout all time. Because, let’s face it, us humans all too easily fall into the trap of wrapping ourselves in our practices and in our words in order to set ourselves apart from others, leading us to lose sight of what’s really important.
I used the word “Christians” to refer to Matthew’s first readers in order to make a point — because these people didn’t actually understand themselves as being “Christians.” That word isn’t used to describe Christ’s followers until the 26th chapter of Acts, which was likely written years after Matthew’s Gospel was. But such words and labels — like rules and laws and traditions of all kinds — are undeniably important to us, for various reasons.
In a positive light, they become a way of conveying and sustaining our core beliefs. At least that’s what they are supposed to do. Listen to the words from Deuteronomy, contained within the prayer known as the Shema that we talked about last week; this is the first passage in the Torah that speaks about what binding the Torah to ourselves actually means:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
The words and the ritual point towards what is of ultimate importance — namely, loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Jesus expands upon this in the prior chapter of Matthew when he adds the idea of loving our neighbor as ourselves. The two, however, are really one and the same — because if we love truly God with all our heart, soul and mind, then loving our neighbor is the most important way in which we do that. Our rituals and words matter because, when we live into what they mean, they allow us to carry the essential truths they represent into the world right now, and into the future.
What is dangerous is when the words and the symbols and the rituals of our religions become either ends in themselves or a means of reinforcing divisions rather than supporting unity. It is when they become a way for me to assert why I am better than you, or why we are better than them that they become problematic.
This is a really difficult and very fine line to walk. Jesus and Matthew clearly recognize this basic fact, and this is why this story was so important in the early days of the Jesus movement and remains so today. The struggle between the necessity for groups of believers to codify their faith to enable it to survive, on the one hand, and Christ’s call for universal fellowship, on the other hand, is very real. It affected Matthew’s community then and it continues to affect Christian communities even now.
As we all know, the early church would soon split into groups that followed Christ’s teachings as interpreted by Peter, by Paul, and by a variety of others. The Eastern and Western churches would go their separate ways, and Protestants would eventually stake-out a distinct path from that of the Catholic church which they’d been a part of for more than a millennium — and many continue to argue over which represents “true” Christianity.
In more recent times, Congregationalism, Methodism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism, Episcopalianism, Fundamentalism and a whole lot of other “isms” continue to compete in an ever-widening religious free marketplace. Let’s face it: It’s often easier to go our separate ways and start new communities consisting of people who agree with us than it is to work through our differences and remain in community. And, let’s be honest: when people ask us what church we belong to, do we tend to answer, “Christ’s Church” or “Holladay UCC”?
The truth is that it’s both, and this is where it gets tricky. Our distinctive traditions and theologies, practices and priorities contribute abundantly to the unique richness of our individual denominations and faith communities. This is their greatest virtue. But the ability for them to be used in order to divide us into competing factions is perhaps their greatest vice.
Jesus is warning his specific audience here about their hypocrisy, about not practicing — or perhaps even understanding — what they preach. But he’s also reminding us all that faith is not simply about being in the right with respect to matters of dogma or doctrine. We can affix whatever label to ourselves that we wish but, in the end, what we are called to do is come together in community to love God and our neighbor — a God whose very essence as Creator, Son and Spirit is community.
The whole point is that faith shouldn’t be about deciding who’s in and who’s out; it should be about fostering fellowship and relationship. And living into that practice is ultimately what will enable faith to thrive.