The 23rd Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture
Hebrew
Scriptures – Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18[1]
1The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:
2Speak to all the congregation of the people
of
15You shall not render an unjust judgment; you
shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your
neighbor. 16You shall not go
around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood
of your neighbor: I am the LORD.
17You shall not hate in your heart anyone of
your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt
yourself. 18You shall not
take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love
your neighbor as yourself: I am the
LORD.
Gospel
– Matthew 22: 34-46[2]
34When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced
the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer,
asked him a question to test him. 36“Teacher,
which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37[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.’ 38This is the
greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40On these two commandments hang
all the law and the prophets.”
41Now while the Pharisees were gathered
together, Jesus asked them this question: 42“What do you think of the Messiah?
Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” 43He said to them, “How is it then
that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, 44‘The Lord said to
my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet” ’? 45If David thus calls him Lord,
how can he be his son?” 46No
one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask
him any more questions.
“What's Love Got to Do with It?"
Some time ago a message appeared on a billboard
proclaiming, in letters over a foot high, Christ
is the Answer! But some graffiti
artist had written beneath that announcement in smaller, impertinent
hand-lettering, the line: "But
what's the question?" Slogans on
the level of visual shouts from a billboard cannot carry the weight and
significance of a faithful life well-lived – such as the one that Jesus of
Nazareth gave us.
People came to Jesus with all kinds of demands and
requests: a leper came pleading
"make me clean;" an army officer demanded "heal my boy;"
and Peter's mother-in-law just lay there, sick to death, until Jesus came to
see her. He always seemed to respond in
love, whether it was to a stated request, an urgent demand, or a desperate need
made more eloquent simply by its silence.
But some, the record tells us, came to him with questions that weren't
calculated to get help or advice, but to trip him up, to try to diminish this
country rabbi's growing influence with the common folk. To these crafty plotters, Jesus wasn't the
answer and never would be; to them Jesus is the question. Of course he can give the correct response
from the Jewish catechism:
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.[3]
That's the Shəmá[4] –
the very essence of Torah. If you want to
know the whole point of religion, then that's it! Now you have your answer. So what?
How are you going to process this information for the living out of your
life?
Here in the autumn of the year, as the green of summer
fades across most of this country and the bright colors of the early fall are
beginning to be seen, the church calls us to the harvest. Here in the autumn of the year, as days grow
shorter and the evenings cooler, as we dig out the sweaters and begin raking
the leaves, the church calls us to compassion.
Here in the autumn of the year, as we wind down and settle in, Jesus
demands an accounting of our lives – in a stewardship campaign as well as in hands-on
ministries – to work on behalf of justice and
shalom: to care for the
poor and the dispossessed, the unemployed and the dying, the lonely and the
weak, the criminal and the victim, the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
Have we done these things?
Do we continue to do these things?
Is the 1st United Methodist Church of Napa a model for all of
the rest of the believers in this valley?
Where others have remained silent in the face of injustice, have we
spoken out with courage? Most important
of all, have we loved? Have we known, as
Jesus knew, that the greatest thing and the first thing demanded of us is that
we love?
Tell me how contemporary you think that this sounds:
Today,
powerful forces continue to set neighbors against neighbors. Fear divides, and each one is set apart by the
force of fear, by anxiety about the future.
Will the neighborhood remain the same?
Will housing values remain strong?
Who are these new people?
[Some
time ago], a brilliant young Frenchwoman, Simone Weil, reflected on the forces
that divide…[She said]: "Only he
who has measured the dominance of force, and who knows how not to respect it,
is capable of love and justice."
Could we who claim to be the people of God become, in our neighborhoods,
the people who are realistic, who measure the "dominance of force"
and yet know how "not to respect it"?[5]
The year in which those words
were written was 1941, as the whole world fell into yet another war.
"Which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
the lawyer asked. What question would we
ask today, do you suppose? What is the
"heart of Christianity"[6]? What do you believe – what do I believe – is
the essence of our religious life together?
A lot of Christians of the so-called "mainline Protestant
denominations" (like United Methodism) would answer that they're
Christians because they believe in God, that they treat others the way that
they'd like to be treated, and that they try to live a "good
life." And yet love of God and love
of one's neighbor is more than just a passing definition of what it means to be
a Christian. It's a radical way of
living in the world! We are to pledge
allegiance not first to ourselves, not to our work, not to our wealth, not even
to our country, its flag and the pursuit of the American dream. We're being asked to find our identity in
something much, much bigger – in love of a profound, indefinable Mystery, and
in loving, as our sisters and brothers, people we've never even met.
Jesus was not a Christian.
He was a Jew who observed the customs and traditions of the Jews. Some Christians have serious problems with
that fact and with a lot of its implications.
Most just don't think about it.
We've learned and – some of us to our shame and sorrow – have taught
completely false and hurtful nonsense about the Jewishness of Jesus. We've heard, and maybe even said, that on the
one hand there's the "God of the Old Testament" – a God of anger and
vengeance, but on the other hand, there's the "God of the New
Testament" – a God of forgiveness and love. If we haven't taught this or said it, we've
at least listened to it without challenging it, even in the face of the simple
fact that Jesus was a Jew, for whom the central truth about Yahweh,
the Holy One of Israel, was that "The Lord is our God, the Lord
alone."
Now, maybe, it wouldn't matter a bit to you, this prospect
of two Gods, except for one thing: those
other Jews, with whom Jesus debated, didn't just fade away after some people embraced
Jesus as their Messiah, their Christ, the "anointed one."[7] What's more, in spite of the overwhelming
Jewishness of the early church in at least
So what's this got to do with the Jewishness of Jesus, you
might ask? In part it has to do with the
fact that more than just one museum, now, has been dedicated to the memory of
six million members of that community slaughtered in
For a country supposedly proud of its immigrant history,
there sure seems to be a lot of social and political rhetoric that demeans
immigrants and begs for the
That marvelous theologian, Howard Thurman, once noted that
it's been the custom of those who traveled across the deserts of the Ancient
Near East to leave a lighted lantern by the roadside at night, not only to give
comfort to the weary traveler, but to give him or her a message. Beside the lantern there was usually a note
giving detailed directions as to where its owner's cottage might be found; so
if anyone were in desperate need of help, the stranger might find it. It's a simple gesture, but one "full of
beauty and wholeness."[11]
I think of a quote from one of my favorite poets, T. S.
Eliot:
What life if you have not life together?
There is no life if not life in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God…
…now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor….[12]
Not long ago, after yet one more shooting at a school, some
in Congress wanted to pass a law saying that all public schools should be
required to post the Ten Commandments on their grounds. Why those ten and not these two? Wouldn't the "greatest commandment"
(and its corollary) lead to more tolerance, a greater appreciation of every
person's dignity, and the kind of mutual respect that's really needed in all of
our schools? Shouldn't the call for
discipline and order be tempered with compassion? Hardliners, however – champions of law and
order – are asking, "If God is so compassionate, why do children continue
to die, the innocent suffer, and the unjust go unpunished?"
I think the response of the author, Annie Dillard, says it
all:
God is
no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or
purifying them with spinal pain, or fiddling with chromosomes, than he is
jimmying flood waters or pitching tornadoes at towns. God is no more cogitating which among us he
plans…to kill by aids or kidney
failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant-death syndrome –
than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or
setting fires. The very least likely
things for which [God] might be responsible are what [insurance companies,
sadly, still] call "acts of God."[13]
Jesus is saying a very old thing here, something familiar
to everybody, in order to say an astonishingly new thing. First he says the old thing, a phrase that
every Jew would recognize as the fundamental confession of
But is that what Jesus
intended – to just give good but harmless advice, to offer words that won't be
any problem for us?
Jesus isn't just speaking about being nice, here, as if the
essence of being a Christian in the world can be reduced to an attitude of
hospitality and just being friendly. He
says these things in a world that's marked by the clear presence of suffering,
violence and sickness. He says these
things in a world where fearful people are desperate to cut their losses and
protect what they have left. He says
these things in a world where our neighbors may call out to us in need, or
drive us crazy with their irritating and strange behavior. To love a God that we cannot see through
caring for our neighbor, isn't a matter of advice; it's a matter of necessity.
The added twist for us is coming to know that we too are
the neighbor. We are the ones in
need. We are the people who are well
acquainted with suffering and fear. We
know what it's like to be weak and sick.
We know what it's like to be scared.
And we know this as well: that
the one who spoke these words and has drawn us closer together, is the same one
who cared for the sick, shared food with the hungry and outcasts, gave even the
worst near him a second chance, and not only gave his life to God, but gave his
life to us as well. It's in this kind of
behavior that we see how the love of God and the love of neighbor came together
in the life of one Jesus of Nazareth.
Here in the autumn of the year, as the green of summer
fades and the days grow colder, we gather close together to listen for a word
from God. What we hear is a groaning
deep from within creation itself. It's the
call for shalom. It's the call
for justice. And it's a demand that we
return to being faithful disciples who know – as Jesus knew – that the greatest
thing, as well as the first thing, is love.
* * *
[1] This portion
of the book of Leviticus is from what's called the "Holiness
Code." Its name comes from the fact
that it was meant to remind the people of
[2] Matthew's gospel (as well as the parallel accounts in Mark and in Luke) presents these particular sayings in the context of Jesus' ongoing debate with other teachers of Judaism and the religious leaders of his day. It is important for us to remember, though, that in many cases Jesus' own teachings align very closely with the writings of his contemporaries (my reason for choosing Leviticus as our first reading for today). So while his criticism of groups like the Sadducees and the Pharisees is consistent with his disagreement on the finer points of their arguments, it's not an outright rejection of the Torah and the heart of its message .
In the last
six verses of this particular pericope, Jesus shows his questioners that he can
be as shrewd as they are at the debating game – in his somewhat playful little
riddle here about David and his son.
Ultimately, though, the Torah, the commandments, in fact
religion itself, is not about cleverness in splitting hairs in debates, nor is
it about winning points in arguments.
Compassion toward the defenseless, and love shown to one's neighbor as
well as to God, are what distinguish the true believer from the self-righteous
hypocrite.
[3] Deuteronomy 6: 4-5.
[4] That's the first word in this quote which, in Hebrew, literally means "Listen, you!" (a demand that all who heard it would understand). These verses became, in effect, Judaism's confession of faith.
[5]
"The Iliad or The Poem of Force," a Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Number 91,
Pendle Hill,
[6] So my
invitation to this congregation has been to gather around a dialogue about
Marcus Borg's book by that title: The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a
Life of Faith or How We Can Be
Passionate Believers Today, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.,
[7] This phrase, of course, is all that the word "Messiah" (or its Greek equivalent "Christ" – and it is not his surname!) means: "the one anointed by God."
[8] The
"Diaspora" is the Greek word (now commonly used in English) to refer
to that "dispersion" of Jews outside
[9] I
learned, from a Jew, that the word "holocaust" literally means
"burnt offering" – as if the deaths of six million were some kind of
noble sacrifice and a way to explain away its meaning. She has preferred, then, to use the word shoah,
which means "calamity" or "crushing burden," and, I would
agree, it seems a better term to use in describing the horror of any such cruel
and senseless act of "ethnic cleansing."
[10] Take a
look at least one article about this phenomenon at
[11] Howard
Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, Friends
United Press, 1976, and reprinted in Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spiritual Literacy (New York:
Touchstone, 1998).
[12] T. S.
Eliot, Selected Poems (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), p. 107.
[13] Annie
Dillard, For the Time Being (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 167.