To begin, let’s hearken back to Fr. Chris’ sermon from last Sunday.
There he noted the sparring match going on between the different groups and Jesus, how each of them tried to trap Jesus and get him to perjure himself.
It is a very graceful, and very intense encounter, like boxing or fencing, each moving about the other, keenly observing their opponents movements, looking for the weak spot to score a hit, or to parry a thrust and counter strike.
Last week Fr. Chris noted that the Pharisees and the Herodians came together as a tag team to joust with Jesus.
The Herodians held political power, submitting to king Herod, the Roman Empire’s appointed ruler in the area.
But this support of Herod compromised Jewish law and independence in the minds of the Pharisees. It was therefore difficult for the Herodians and Pharisees to unite and agree on anything, except opposing Jesus. Opposition to Jesus made for very strange bedfellows.
This morning we witness another round of this bout between Jesus and his opponents.
The Pharisees, defeated in their allied thrust at Jesus with the Herodians over paying taxes, and noting the defeat the Sadducees suffered in their encounter with Jesus over the issue of resurrection (23-34), go on the attack alone, swinging at Jesus with a question, which, if not parried and countered would certainly discredit him, and undermine his ministry.
With the intent to trap him, an expert in the Jewish law asks Jesus: “Teacher which is the greatest commandment in the law?”
The Jewish law was made up of some 613 individual laws commanding things you must not do, and things you must do, if you were to be righteous, to be holy, to be in a right relationship with God.
But to be righteous, one must keep the entirety of the law. To break one law was to break it all. And so, he is asking Jesus; which one law, if I keep it, will fulfill all the others and put me in a right relationship with God? And Jesus’ answer to this question would mark him either as a faithful Jew, or a heretic.
Jesus’ parry to this jab has two dimensions. One is vertical, dealing with the relationship with God, the other horizontal, dealing with the relationship with others.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like unto it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Neither of the two assertions Jesus makes in his answer are new. Love God with the entirety of your being, comes directly from Deuteronomy 6:5 and is part of the Jewish daily prayer known as the Shema. Love your neighbor as yourself comes directly out of Leviticus 19:18, defining relationship with others in the world.
They remind his listeners of God’s covenant law given to Moses on the two stone tablets on Mount Sinai, one tablet directing attention to their relationship with God, the other tablet directing their attention to their relationship to one another.
These moral and spiritual prescriptions define the uniqueness of the people that God calls his own. They define holiness, God’s character, and it is to be part of their very identity.
The Pharisees hear Jesus answer and say nothing, and unknowingly convict themselves.
Convinced of their own righteousness before God, they thought they were keeping the law, yet here, they were ironically, breaking both commandments; neither loving their neighbor as they tried to trap Jesus to discredit and destroy him, nor loving God, for he was there standing before them unrecognized and unacknowledged.
One scholar described the sinister and self-deluding nature of sin. He says: “Man as sinner actually hates God, hates man, and hates himself. He would kill God if he could, he does kill his fellow man when he can. And he commits spiritual suicide every day of his life.”
The power of sin as a condition is such that even when one is confronted with the truth, one can choose not only to recognize it, but rage against it to tear it down and submit it to one’s own desires. A powerful and dangerous thing is sin—as evidenced by the witness of these Pharisees.
Jesus then takes the offensive, to throw the knockout punch, to thrust home the reality of their spiritual blindness. he asks them: What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?”
That is the question! Aa question that comes up in other places as when Jesus asks his disciples: Who do you say I am? It is the question that separates light and dark, wrong and right, life and death, depending on the answer.
The prophets foretold that the Messiah, the anointed one, would be the son of David.
Jeremiah prophesied the Lord would “raise up to David a righteous branch; a king who would do what is right and just –in his day he will save Judah and Israel will live in safety.” (Jer. 23:5)
Nathan spoke to David relating God’s promise that: “I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body and I will establish his kingdom…and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam.’ 7:11-16)
The expected Messiah would indeed be a direct human descendant in King David’s line. so the Pharisees rightly respond: the Christ is “the son of David.”
But here Jesus uses Psalm 110 to confute their understanding.
The most quoted psalm in the new testament, Psalm 110 is described by one scholar as the greatest and clearest of the messianic psalms.
Referencing this psalm, Jesus asks them: “How is it then that David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, calls his son Lord?
In the psalm, David states that almighty God said to David’s Lord—the Messiah–sit at my right hand till I put thy enemies under thy feet. If David refers to the Messiah as his Lord — Lord –a title implying divinity, –and Almighty God affirms David’s Lord by having him sitting at God’s own right hand how can the Messiah, this divine person, be his son?
It could only be if the Messiah, David’s son, David’s Lord, was more than a mere human descendant, more than a mere man.
The irony is, that the answer to this theological quandary stood before them, posing the question to which he himself was the answer,
but the Pharisees were stymied. Their spiritual blindness would not allow them to conceive the idea that God would become man. Nor would they allow, regardless of the messianic proofs demonstrated repeatedly, that this Jesus would be him.
Scripture says: “This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son, as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
Jesus said: “As I have loved you so you must love one another. All men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.”
it all starts with the question what do you think about the Christ? Who do you say Jesus is?, because only Jesus, through his work on the cross, destroying the power of sin, can empower us to love God with all our heart soul and mind, and to truly love our neighbor.
But let’s not make out the Pharisees, or the Sadducees, or the Herodians, to be the cosmic bad guys because, if we are honest, many of us at times, can be like them dancing around Jesus, fencing, sparing with him with the truth he has given us in scripture, with the intent to have our own way, rather than his.
We can rationalize our behaviors, make excuses for our sins, to justify ourselves. We can compromise with the lesser standards of the culture wherein we construct a worldview, a spirituality, a form of religion, that even though it may acknowledge Jesus, does not give him complete sway in our lives.
I just recently read a heartbreaking article in Christianity today that evidences this very danger, entitled : What to make of Karl Barth’s steadfast adultery.
Karl Barth, the most important Christian theologian of the 20th century, is considered to be one of the greatest thinkers in Christian tradition. He was the principle author of the Barman declaration, the foundation of Christian resistance to the Nazis in Germany. His church dogmatics grounded generations of protestants and evangelicals in the objective reality of Jesus Christ of scripture.
A series of letters he wrote to his female assistant reveals that they had conducted a life-long adulterous affair. In those letters this great Christian theologian justified his affair with her using the subjective defense that it feels so good, so right, that it must be from God so it cannot be wrong. If Barth could fall prey to sparring with Jesus, anyone can.
Jesus says: If you would save your life you will lose it. But if you lose your life to Jesus, you will find life.
if we win the bout, we lose, if we lose to him, we win.
Jesus is either the Lord, son of David, Messiah, or not. He is either the personal Lord of our lives or not. We make the decision.
If so, wherever in our lives we might find ourselves sparring with Jesus and the truth of scripture, let us cease, let us lose the battle to him; it’s the only way to truly win at life.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Richard C. Marsden
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
21st Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday 29 October