Matthew 22:34 - 40
Today’s gospel is taken from the section of Matthew that describes Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and his confrontation with the leaders of the people. It would seem that as long as Jesus stayed up in Galilee, he didn’t trouble the chief priests and the Pharisees and Scribes all that much. In fact Matthew makes it a point that during that part of his ministry Jesus had relatively cordial relationships with many of the Jewish leaders out in the provinces. But Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is a confrontation -- the leaders see it as hostile, and Jesus does nothing to dispel that. He begins with prophetic signs, the cleansing of the temple being the first. In addition to this action being a condemnation of the money changers, it’s indirectly a condemnation of the leadership who allowed this to happen. Jesus makes that more clear when he curses the fig tree for not bearing fruit. The next section contains more criticism. He tells them the parable of the two sons, of the faithless tenant farmers, of the wedding feast -- and the refrain is there -- “They knew he was speaking about them”. And doing it in front of a crowd of people who had come to Jerusalem for the passover, and seemed to be transferring their loyalty from the Jewish authorities to this prophet from Galilee. It was unacceptable.
So they test him. They ask him about paying taxes. They try to trip him up about the afterlife with the question about the woman with seven husbands. And finally they come to this, the last such question. To those of us who have heard it so often, Jesus’ answer seems straightforward and not very exciting; but when the people first heard this confrontation, it must have been mind-blowing. Because this was a question everyone had an opinion about. And for a devoted Jew, it was important to keep the commandments, but keeping all 613 was a real challenge. Everyone could see that there were greater and lesser commandments -- there was one that said if you came across a mother bird sitting on her eggs, you could take the eggs but you could not harm the mother bird. And there were a lot like that. And there were some that you kind of looked the other way about; there was one that said if you had a son who constantly defied you, he should be executed. Or another that said every fifty years all the land that had been bought and sold had to be returned to its’ original owner. And to make matters worse, this seemed to be the whole work of the Pharisees -- how to carry out the commandments. How do you keep holy the Sabbath day? It doesn’t say, so using logic and precedent and really hard thinking, some Pharisees decided that it meant you didn’t prepare food on the Sabbath; others, that you could only walk a certain distance. If you read the gospels you can see how some of these rules irritated Jesus. So for their confrontation, the leaders thought they had a bombshell. Which is the greatest commandment? Because there was no right answer; Jesus was trapped.
And Jesus neatly slips the trap. He simply quotes the prayer that every good Jewish man recited in the morning -- the first thing out of his mouth -- Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord with your whole heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And he tosses out the second one, like the first, straight out of the book of Leviticus - you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And the last point is why he won the argument -- those were real commandments, and all the other commandments were particular examples. Honoring your father and mother had to do with loving your neighbor. Avoiding pork had to do with God’s rules, and if you loved God, you kept his rules. And so forth.
But these two commandments contain three, and the three are really one. Because we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, which must mean we are to love ourselves. And if we are to love ourselves, we need to love God with our whole being, because the greatest thing that can happen to me, or to my neighbor, is to be taken up into God’s self, to be united with Him; and if we are to love God with every fiber of our being, we must love our neighbor, because God loves him.
And one final note; the Greek language has four different words that could be translated into English as love. But Jesus uses the word, “agapios”. It means the kind of love that empties itself out, that gives until there is nothing left, the kind of love Jesus showed on the cross, the kind of love that leads to resurrection. Are you and I capable of that? I hope I never have to find out. But as Saint Paul remarked in more than one place, it’s a goal, it’s something we have to constantly measure ourselves against. And if we keep working to love with that self-emptying love, Jesus has promised that he will make up what is lacking in our efforts.
So this week look around and see whether there is an opportunity to practice the kind of love Jesus is talking about. There will be if you and I open our eyes. Will we be up to the task?
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