Hard or Simple?
Matt. 22:15-22
A university research wished to study the differences in perception that are related to ones vocation. So, they devised a simple test in order to detect how a person’s professional vocation influenced their answer to a simple question.
The first to be tested was a brick layer. The researchers asked him: “What does two plus two make?” The engineer simply said, “Why, four, of course.”
After making their notes and dismissing him, they summoned an artist. To the same question, he responded, “Well, there are several possibilities: two and two make four, but so does three and one -- or two point five and one point five -- they also make four. So, what are you really after: the answer four? Or, the various ways of arriving at the answer four?”
They dismissed him and called for a mathematician. “What does two plus two make?” they asked. He responded, “How can I tell if you haven’t first told me what it is that you have two of. Two zeros plus another two zeros is zero. Two negative sixes plus two positive sevens is two. Or, if you add two squares of 2 to two halves of the square root of 16 you’ll get twelve. I can’t really answer your question until you get more specific.”
The researchers thanked him and made their notes. Finally, they called an attorney. When he heard the question, he first looked around the room to check out who might be listening. Then he asked the researchers if he could close the door. Finally, he drew his chair up close to the researchers, leaned forward, and said very quietly, “Well, tell me now – what would you like it to be?” [hat tip: greg yount, with modifications]
The researchers in this story might just as well have gathered a bunch of Christians together and asked them a simple question such as this: “what is the gospel?” or “How may a sinner be saved?” The answers you’d get to those kinds of questions might be all over the map. The differences wouldn’t necessarily vary according to the vocation of the one giving the answer (though, I suppose it’s likely that a Christian lawyer might give a different sort of answer from that given by a Christian ditch digger).
In today’s gospel lesson we see yet another session of Jesus sparring with the religious leadership of the nation Israel during final days before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. And, in this episode, Jesus is asked a simple question, and he gives a simple answer. After that, Jesus asks his interrogators a question which utterly stumps them. As with all such encounters between Jesus and his persecutors, there are a great number of profitable lines of meditation we might take. Today, I wish to stand back a bit and draw a lesson for ourselves about God’s revelation of Himself in his Word, and the right and wrong ways that we relate to what God has told us.
For, it is God’s word that is the subject of this particular sparring session in today’s gospel lesson. In this chapter of Matthew the religious leadership has already challenged Jesus about paying taxes to Caesar, and about the nature of the resurrection. In the previous chapter, the Pharisees and Sadducees had challenged Jesus’ authority to teach and to drive the money changers out of the Temple. Here, they endeavor to ensnare Jesus in a trap, to get him to trip himself up as to the meaning and the purpose of God’s word. And, it is probably significant, that they make this attempt through the agency of a lawyer.
34 But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” In the New King James version which we are using, the lawyer asks what is “the great commandment” as if there was one commandment which was great and all the others were not so great, and he wanted to know if Jesus could identify which commandment this was. Actually, as most other translations indicate, the question the lawyer poses has to do with which commandment the GREATEST commandment.
Matthew tells us that the lawyer asked this question in order to test Jesus. It doesn’t look like much of a test to us, but that’s because we don’t have the lawyer’s perspective on the Law of Moses. The Pharisees had decided, after careful examination of the Law of Moses, that it contained exactly 613 separate laws. Three hundred sixty five of these laws were prohibitions; and another 248 of them were positive directions for living.
They also believed that some of these laws were more important than others, and many arguments among the Pharisees revolved around putting all 613 laws in order, from the greatest of them to the least of them. And, with 613 laws to work with, you can see how much controversy was possible in how you arranged them. As usual, it really didn’t matter which commandment Jesus said was the greatest, since they were going to use whatever answer he offered as a pretext to embroil him in a fight with some specific party among the religious leadership.
As usual, Jesus turned the tables completely on his interrogators. The premise to the lawyer’s question had two parts: that the law was a complex network of 613 different statutes, and that all of these had some sort of ranking relative to all the others. The lawyers among the Pharisees had taken God’s law, which was actually quite simple and straightforward, and made it into an intricate and complicated mass of statutory legalities and relativities.
But, in his answer, Jesus showed how something that men had made very difficult and complex is actually very simple and straightforward. Jesus compacted all 613 laws into two: love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.
As many teachers over the centuries had pointed out, this two-fold summary of the Law is found in the ten commandments. If you love God with all your being, you will have no other gods but him, you will not reduce him to an image made with your own hands, you will not take his name in vain, and you will remember to keep the Sabbath holy, because he told us to do that.
If you love your neighbor as much as you love yourself, you will honor your father and mother, you will not murder, you will not commit adultery, you will not steal, nor will you lie, and you will not covet your neighbor’s property.
Do you remember what you heard read in the Old Testament lesson appointed for today? It was not complicated at all. “21 “You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. 22 “You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child. 23 If you afflict them in any way, and they cry at all to Me, I will surely hear their cry; 24 and My wrath will become hot, and I will kill you with the sword; your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless.”
What’s so complicated about any of that? What’s obscure about that? It’s all part of what Jesus later taught his disciples: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Someone – possibly an attorney – will say, “But, Father Bill – that is part of a treaty between God and a particular nation in history. It’s not part of the New Covenant. Indeed, everything about the Old Covenant is fundamentally irrelevant to us Christians.”
My friends and family, listen up – when you hear this kind of talk, I recommend you smile politely, make as gracious a disengagement as you can, and get out of the way before lightening strikes. It is most certainly true that the Old Testament lesson for today is part of a treaty to which you and I are NOT a party. And, it is most certainly ALSO true that this contract gives us very compelling evidence about the – what shall we call it? – the “values” of the Strong Man in this contract.
OF COURSE, we’re not part of that old covenant. But, we are in a covenant with the same God who tells us in that abolished covenant what He thinks about this thing and that thing. And, what we learn from this is that the God who told the Jews “do not afflict any widow or orphan, or I will kill you with a sword” is the same God whom we Christians trust for our salvation. To suppose he has changed his mind about widows and orphans is pure legalistic insanity. This is why a thorough knowledge of God’s ways with Israel is so important for New Testament Christians. As Paul said about the Jews in 1 Corinthians 10: 6 Now these things became our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted.”
If you want to know how and why people make Scripture complicated and intricate, it’s often because they are attempting to justify their ignoring of parts of it. In Jesus day, the Pharisees ignored caring for their elderly parents (which would have been a fulfillment of the command to honor father and mother) by saying that what they would have used to help poor old mom and dad had already been dedicated to God.
You know, Christians can make the opposite mistake from what the Pharisees – especially the lawyers – were making. Jesus’ interrogators were taking very plain and straightforward teaching in God’s word and making it arcane, complex, and intricately confusing. The opposite error is to take things in God’s word which are difficult, or even impossible, to understand and to insist that they are really quite simple.
Jesus points to just such a place in the Old Testament, the 110th psalm, which begins with these words:
1 The LORD said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
In the Hebrew text, that first word LORD is translating one of God’s “proper names” – the tetragrammaton, which was probably pronounced YAHWEH. The second word Lord is translating the Hebrew word Adonai, which means “my lord” in the sense of my regal superior. Jesus puts it to them this way:
Whose Son is the Messiah? Of course, they answer, He is David’s son. Everybody knew this. So, next Jesus cites David’s opening lines in Psalm 110, noting that “David said this in the spirit.” In other words, it is by the Spirit of God that David uttered these words. David, then, says this, “YWHW said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool.” On one hand, most Jews would understand this Psalm to be speaking of the Messiah. In other words, YHWH is saying to the Messiah, “sit at my right hand.” And, yet, no father would ever address his own son by the term “My Lord.” Instead, it would be the son who addresses his father by the term “my lord.”
And, so Jesus puts the riddle to them from the Scriptures: How can the Messiah be both David’s son and David’s Lord?
To the credit of Jesus’ interrogators, they not only did not answer Jesus, they decided it was best not to ask him any more questions!
If only Christians had the same response with the teachings of Scripture that are, quite frankly, Very Puzzling Indeed! Psalm 110 was a puzzle for the Jews, and they could not understand how David could be the father of Messiah and at the same time own the Messiah as his own Lord. But, there it is in the text of the Scripture. In light of the incarnation, WE can understand what for the Jews was an impenetrable mystery.
But, guess what, we have our own set of impenetrable mysteries. We spoke of one of them last night in the parish Bible study: the Real Presence. Here are bread and wine – very ordinary things, what our liturgy calls “these creatures of bread and wine.” And, yet, when we offer them to Christ and they are consecrated to become for us his body and his blood, the Scripture tells us – in places like John 6 and 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, and Luke 24 – that they are more than bread and wine, while remaining bread and wine. How can this be? Our liturgy calls it a holy mystery. But, not satisfied with this, Thomas Aquinas attempted to explain how this was so. Or, not satisfied with this, Ulrich Zwingli denied that this was so.
We can multiply these kinds of things. The church was split asunder by theologians who should have held fast to what the Bible tells us – that by faith we are justified, and that by our works we are justified, and that by our words we are justified (that is straight from Jesus’ mouth) – all these affirmations are in the New Testament. But what do Christians insist on doing? So many times they treat these affirmations as the Pharisees treated the 613 statutes of the law – by trying to put them in the proper order, and priority, making this affirmation the greatest, and this affirmation less great.
Or take the ample teaching in the Bible that God is utterly sovereign; that everything that comes to pass is by his good pleasure and purpose. Put this alongside the equally ample teaching of the Bible that man is utterly responsible for his deeds, that he has real choice in a real history, that there is a real judgment. It were far better to be like the Pharisees in today’s gospel lesson -- to say no more and no less than what the Scripture says – than what we actually have in Christ’s Church: some claim the flag of John Calvin and make the Christian faith a sock-puppet production with every teensie detail as fixed and certain as a theorem in geometry. Or, some claim the flag of Jacob Arminius and make the Christian faith a into a melodramatic soap opera whose emotion-charged final conclusion even God does not know.
We do ourselves no favors – and we certainly render to God no glory – when we take these admittedly mysterious aspects of God’s revelation and try to make them so simple that they could be communicated to five year olds in an episode of Veggie Tales. And, yet, there are vast areas of God’s word to us that are even LESS complicated than an episode of Veggie Tales.
What shall we say, then? When we approach God’s word, let us start as little children. Jesus says this is the way to start. Accept everything in it that a child can understand. But, do not remain a child. The author of Hebrews found himself frustrated with those to whom he wrote – for they could take nothing from him except what he called “milk.” And, milk is good and proper for babes; but the goal is to grow in grace and stature so that one can digest meat as well as milk.
May God grant us to avoid the finagling of the Pharisees, which makes the simple things of God’s word complex, mostly to avoid the obligations God’s simple Word puts upon us. And, may God also grant that we avoid rendering the truly complex and mysterious parts of God’s word into banalities that also deny what the Scriptures insist is the truth about ourselves, about God, and about the world he has created. Let us take the milk of the word and not despise it because it is milk. And, may we thrive on it as we grow to the full stature of our destiny in Christ, when we may feed on holy mysteries, and glory in the unsearchable wisdom of our Creator.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
