Matthew 22.34-46
·
Thanks for the 24-7 Prayer Room experience. Hard to
explain unless you were there to experience
the context and interpret the
silence. A very positive experience of a rich silence, filled with faith
and love and the presence of God.
·
Silence also begins and ends our Bible reading, but
a different kind of silence, thick with
tension. There’s a lot of
unspoken emotion – a bit like a couple
who are angry with each other and heading for a big row. Different groups are
trying to discredit Jesus in front of the crowds. Verse 34 tells us he has just
silenced the Sadducees. By verse 46 (read
it out) he has also silenced the Pharisees and all his other opponents.
·
On the surface, not much happens. Two fairly
standard questions are asked; the first by a Pharisee to Jesus, the second by
Jesus to the Pharisees. Each question
receives the normal, expected reply and it all seems quite low key. Yet
the tension clearly escalates, setting up Jesus’s lengthy denunciation of the
Pharisees in ch 23 and paving the way for the events leading to Jesus’s arrest,
trial and execution a few chapters
later.
·
So what is
going on? Is it possible for us to understand the context and interpret the
silence which ends this pivotal passage of scripture? Let’s take a look…
Question 1 “Teacher,
which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
·
From the Pharisees’ point of view, Jesus was both a
lawbreaker and a maverick teacher with no qualifications or authority. Yet the
crowds of common people loved him and followed him. How frustrating that must
have been for the Pharisees and other experts in religious law, especially when
Jesus told parables which turned the crowds against them! So their question is
designed to expose and undermine Jesus in front of the crowds.
·
But the question is not a hard one. And the answer
Jesus gives, linking the commandment to wholeheartedly love God (from
Deuteronomy 6.5) and the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself (from
Leviticus 19.18), is the exact reply which any respectable Jewish teacher would
give. We see this in Luke 10, when the same question was posed by Jesus, and a
Legal Expert gave the same answer.
·
Jesus answered correctly; so what’s the problem?
What is going on in this uneasy silence? Well, perhaps Jesus is implying a
criticism of the Pharisees who, as he will spell out vividly in the next
chapter, did not practice what they
preached. Many in the crowd would have experienced the lack of love and
mercy which marked the way that the Pharisees imposed the Law on their fellow
Jews.
·
And of course their definition of who counts as a
neighbour was not very wide. In the Luke 10 passage, the Lawyer wanted to limit
the extent of his responsibility for others, but Jesus
·
challenged him, through the parable of the Good Samaritan,
to see that all people were his neighbours, especially those in need and even
including sworn enemies.
Question 2 “What
do you think about the Christ (or Messiah)? Whose son is he?
·
The question Jesus puts to the Pharisees is also
quite straightforward and presents no difficulties. Whose son will the Christ,
the Messiah be? The son, or descendant of King David, of course. The standard,
text book answer comes back, quick as a flash!
·
The crowds and people hoping to be healed have
already been calling Jesus Son of David, and perhaps they are hopeful that he
will now directly claim the title for himself – opening himself up to arrest
for treason against the Roman occupiers.
·
He doesn’t do so directly, but indirectly he goes
even further, reminding them of Psalm 110.1 in which David is inspired to refer
to his coming descendant, the Messiah, as his Lord. Just as he did in the
parable of the wicked tenants, Jesus is claiming to be none other than God’s
son. This challenges the very foundation of the Jewish faith – “Hear O Israel:
the LORD our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6.4). It either has to be true
or the most preposterous lie ever told. The Pharisees understand the
implications of what Jesus is claiming and are stunned into silence.
·
If this is God standing in front of them, they need
to love him with all their heart, soul and mind. Well, you know how the story
ends…
Application
·
We need to know God’s love for us so that we can
truly love God and others.
·
God’s love for each one of us is unfailing but it is
not a soft love which just overlooks all our faults; it is a tough,
challenging, purifying love. It homes in on our deepest weaknesses and
rebellious character traits and heals us of them or burns them away, over time.
·
The best comparison I can come up with is that God
is like a Best Friend who we have known for a long time and trust completely. A
friend who can say “that hairstyle really
doesn’t suit you” or “you need to do something about your smelly feet”
or “You were rude to that teacher and you should go and apologise” or “you have
to stop using alcohol or people the
way you do” – Best friends can say these tough things to each other and still
be completely secure in their love for each other. Knowing the friendship will
never die even when tough, corrective things have to be said – in fact it will
get stronger.
·
If you have a best friend like that, you are very
lucky. But only God is willing and able to be the perfect best friend to each
and every one of us. To every person sitting here today. And
·
to Col Gaddafi … and to the man who fired the shot
that killed Gaddafi. God is the best “best friend” possible.
·
The Pharisees reduction of holiness to a rule-based
separation from others had actually taken them away from God’s friendship. To
the point where they couldn’t recognise God, even when he was standing in front
of them. I like a recent comment by an American Pastor called Steve Brown, to
the effect that “ The only people who get better are people who know that, if
they never get better, God will love them anyway.”
·
Maybe the Pharisees, and others like them (which can apply to any of us), just
didn’t trust God enough and came to trust themselves and their ability to
follow rules, too much.
·
But the commandments were never just a set of rules.
If you try and reduce them to that they become cold, harsh and empty. They can
only be understood in the context of God’s love. “I love you. Remember how I
rescued you from slavery,” says God, at the beginning of the commandments, “So
trust me, live my way. Be my people by living in a distinctive way in the world
– so that I can use you to rescue other people and make the world what it
should be.”
·
That is what holiness really means – not separating from the world but living distinctively
as God’s people in the world, as
salt, as light, as a hopeful sign and a healing presence.
·
Jesus loved his neighbours, the Pharisees and
Lawyers and all the rest, enough to challenge them and tell them the truth –
but they refused to accept his tough love. It seems that sometimes the only way
to show people how much you love them is to let them crucify you. And he loved
them and us enough to go even as far as that.
I want to end with a quote from Marcus Borg: “The
christian life is as simple and challenging as this: to love God and to love
what God loves.”
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