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Sermon for Trinity 18
1 Corinthians 1:4-9 + Matthew 22:34-46
Today’s Gospel touches on the themes of Jewish Law, moral law, love, and the person of Jesus Christ—all of which the world understands wrongly, all of which the Christian faith alone teaches rightly. As we consider together the exchange in today’s Gospel between Jesus and the experts in the Law of Moses, we’ll see how all those themes fit together. We’ll see that the greatest commandment in the Law is to love Jesus.
First, to the Jewish Law. Now, understand that to be “Jewish” can be understood in a purely biological sense, as simple as having a single drop of blood from the genetic line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which probably includes a whole lot of people who don’t even know they’re Jewish and would never define themselves that way, because they have a much greater percentage of some other ethnicity in their family history.
But being a Jew, being considered Jewish, is normally tied to one’s submission to the Law of Moses, whereby God brought the children of Israel into a formal, covenantal relationship with Him—everything from circumcision, to the Ten Commandments, to the rituals and ceremonies outlined in the Law. According to the Law of Moses, anyone who didn’t submit to the Law of Moses, anyone who worshiped other gods, or who willfully disobeyed any part of the Law of Moses, was to be cut off from his people, either by death or by banishment. That’s how important the Law was to the Jewish people, by God’s own command.
Well, by the time our Gospel took place, during the early part of Holy Week, Jesus had been saying and doing some things that those who were considered experts in the Jewish Law found to be unlawful. They could see that His preaching was “threatening” to liberate the Jewish people from the Law of Moses, to graduate them from the Law, which was, as St. Paul once referred to it, a “tutor to lead us to Christ.” By the time Holy Week came around, they felt so threatened by Jesus’ preaching that they were already planning to kill Him. But to make themselves look better, they were trying desperately to trap Jesus in His words, so that they might have a public justification for executing Him. And so one of them asked, Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?
Jesus said to him, “’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 it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Instead of pointing to Jewish laws concerning Kosher foods, or circumcision, or resting on the Sabbath Day, or the sacrifices they were to make, which were all part of what we call the “ceremonial Law,” Jesus said that the greatest commandments, the ones on which all the rest depend, are not the ceremonial laws, but are what we call the “moral law,” summarized in love for God (the true God) and love for one’s neighbor. The ceremonial Law was given only to Israel under the covenant God made with them through Moses at Mt. Sinai. It wasn’t for any other nation. God wasn’t angry at the Gentiles because they didn’t get circumcised, or because they failed to rest on the Sabbath Day, or because they ate pork. But He did condemn the Gentiles for violating His moral Law, which was for all people of all time. For example, when the Israelites went in to conquer the land of Canaan at the time of Moses, God revealed His anger at those Gentiles in Canaan for violating His moral law: for their idolatry and their witchcraft, which is a failure to love the true God above all things, and for their violence toward one another, which is a failure to love their neighbor. Love for God—the true God, not the false gods of the Gentiles—and love for one’s neighbor. Those are the greatest commandments in the Law.
Now, as you know, “love” is a concept that the devil has completely twisted in the minds of men. “Love,” as most people define it, is attraction. “Love” is doing or saying whatever makes someone else feel good about themselves. And “hate,” by contrast, is doing or saying anything that makes a person feel bad. You see, the devil has taken the moral Law, which God has written into all our hearts by nature, and has (awfully successfully) redefined “love” (and “hate”) in people’s thinking, and, frankly, also in the preaching of that comes from many pulpits that pretend to be Christian. What is love, really?
Love is commitment. Love is devotion. Love is genuine, heartful attachment. The Lord God—the true God who has revealed Himself to us in the Bible—is to be the primary object of our commitment, devotion, and attachment. Nothing is supposed to be more important to us than knowing the Lord God, worshiping the Lord God, serving the Lord God. And since the Lord God has commanded it to come next, after loving Him, our second-place commitment, devotion, and attachment is to be to our neighbor. This is what God expects from every human being.
The Ten Commandments themselves reflect this moral Law, though they also contain some ceremonial laws that were only for the Old Testament people of Israel. How do we know that? Because the Word of God explains it that way. The Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, guide us to understand what love actually looks like, toward God and man.
According to Scripture, it’s love (not hate) to call all unbelievers to repentance and faith in Christ Jesus, even though it means hurting their feelings and telling them that they’re not okay as they are, because, as they are, they’re perishing, and our commitment to them doesn’t allow us to remain silent. It’s also love (not hate) to say that abortion is wicked, because God calls it wicked. That homosexuality is wicked, because God calls it wicked. That adultery in all its forms is wicked, because God says it is. That crossing a border illegally is wicked, because God has commanded all people to submit to the governing authorities. Our society embraces all these things and calls those who don’t “loveless” and “hateful.” But that’s because they’ve turned away from God, and His definitions, to make up their own beliefs about right and wrong.
In the same way, it’s love (not hate) to tell a Jewish person—one who rejects Jesus as Lord—that he has forsaken the true God and has gone after an idol who has stolen the identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that he has no part in the people of God, and that his Christ-less religion is a sham, one that will take him straight to hell, if he doesn’t repent. That’s not anti-Semitism to say that. We denounce every form of true anti-Semitism, where people assume the worst about a person or mistreat a person because of that person’s Jewish heritage. There is no teaching of Christianity that promotes or permits violence, hatred, mistreatment, ridicule, or even arrogance toward anyone, including those who are called Jews. If someone mistreats a Jewish person, in any way, in the name of Christianity, he is liar. Christ does not permit any such thing. But to tell the truth, that the Jews are lost in their current state of unbelief, is not hate. We say it in love, to bring the one who is perishing to repentance and faith in the only true God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But what if the Jews love the Lord their God with all their heart, as commanded in the Law? Ah, but they most certainly don’t. For two reasons.
The first is explained by Jesus Himself in the second part of the Gospel. “What do you think about the Christ?”, Jesus asked the experts in the Law. “Whose Son is he?” They said to him, “The Son of David.” He said to them, “How then does David, in the Spirit, call him Lord, saying, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet?”’ Now, if David calls him Lord, how is he David’s Son?”
The experts were speechless. They couldn’t answer. Because they didn’t know the answer. How could David’s Son, the Christ, also be David’s Lord? You see, the kingship in Israel passed down from father to son. The father was king before the son was. The son received his kingship from his father. So the son could never be greater than his father, much less the Lord of his father. The Jews thought that the Christ, as the promised Son of David, would receive His kingship from David, His “father,” his ancestor. And yet here David calls his Son his “Lord.” That’s because the Christ would be both descended from David, according to His human nature, and eternally descended from God the Father, according to His divine nature, making Him Lord of all. The Christ was with God in the beginning. All things were created through Him. Without Him, nothing was made that has been made. And the Christ is Jesus. Jesus is Lord, of David, and of everyone.
That means that, when the greatest commandment says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” Jesus is included in “the Lord.” The Lord includes Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And the experts in the Law most certainly didn’t love Jesus as their Lord. So they were doomed from the start.
But there’s a second reason why we can say that the Jews didn’t love the Lord their God with all their heart: Because no one does. That’s the problem with the Law of Moses. It’s the problem with the moral Law. It commands perfect love for God and man, God-defined love, but because of the weakness of our sinful nature, the twisted nature we inherited from our parents and they from theirs, the Law is unable to save anyone or to point anyone to a path that leads to salvation. “Oh, well, you just have to love God with your whole heart, and love your neighbor!” Thanks a lot. I haven’t done that, and even if I could start doing it from now on, that doesn’t make up for all the selfishness I’ve indulged in up until now, or all the meanness, or all the laziness, or any of the sins I’ve committed. The Law reveals and commands love, which is good and right. But the Jews were sinners, as are we all.
That’s why we need Jesus, the Son of God, the Son of David. He, the Lord God whom we were to love with all our heart, but didn’t, took on human flesh in order to fulfill the law of love in our place, to suffer on the cross for our failure to love Him and our neighbor, as His Law demands. Jesus’ love for us, for all people, led Him to the cross, so that we might put our faith in Christ crucified for the forgiveness of sins. And now that He has risen from the dead, His love still leads Him to send forth His mighty Word, to expose our natural lovelessness so that we don’t perish in it, to call us to repentance and faith in Him who loved us and gave Himself for us.
The greatest commandment in the Law has always been to love God, which means also to love Jesus. And the beauty of it is that it was our very failure to keep that greatest commandment that gave God the opportunity to show His love for us in the most unimaginable way possible, by giving His Son into death for His enemies, in order that we might finally love Him as we ought. As St. John writes, In this is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, if God loved us in this way, we also should love one another. Amen.
