"Peace, Love, and Focus”

A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Hilary J. Barrett

Preached at Pleasantville United Church of Christ, October 26, 2008

Matthew 22:34-40 & 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

The political signs littering the landscape; the awkward moments with friends; the fiery conversations with family over dinner; the provocative e-mails which everywhere abound; the incessant robo-calls; the requests for contributions; the pundits; the spin-meisters; the late-night talk show hosts; the posturing; the strategizing; the awfulizing -- I’ll be glad when it’s all over!  And you know what I’m talking about.  Despite the historic nature of this year’s presidential election, I will be glad when it’s all over because, for all the ways that politics is about very important issues, it can also bring out the least desirable qualities and characteristics in each of us.

Apparently it has always been so.  This morning’s lesson from Matthew’s gospel reminds us that even Jesus had to dodge the trickery of his opponents; those who were trying to catch him in making a statement that would alienate from one politico-religious party or another.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees both wanted Jesus to fall into their trap when they asked him a series of three questions which appear in the twenty-second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel.  These three questions concern, first, taxes owed to the government; second, questions about life after death; and third, a question about the greatest of all God’s laws.  (There is a fourth question as well, but it is not asked of Jesus.  It is asked by Jesus.)  They are good questions which have stood the test of time and continue to be of concern to modern people: 

How much of ourselves should we give to our country?
Is it reasonable and responsible to believe in life after death?
In a world full of demands, which demands are paramount?

“The single most striking feature in each of Jesus’ answers is his special attention to God.”[1]

Let’s take a look at each of these three questions:

In Matthew 22:15-22, the Pharisees have a meeting about how they could trick Jesus.  They want to ask him a question that will cause him to slip.  They want to know if it is faithful to pay taxes to Caesar.  Now this was a slippery question in Jesus’ day because Palestine was a colonized satellite of the Roman Empire.  It was not independent.  And so, whenever there is colonization, the issue of taxation becomes a dilemma.  In our own nation’s history this has been an important issue: taxation without representation being a cornerstone of our fight for liberation from the English monarchy.

But in the Roman Empire, it was not solely an issue of economic justice.  It was also a theological issue.  Because the coin of the realm was a silver denarius especially minted for the payment of the tax and it bore the image of Tiberius Caesar on one side and his mother Livia on the other.  And around the circumference of the coin read these words: 

“Tiberius, Caesar,
worshipful son of the divine Augustus.”[2]

The coin promoted the notion that Caesar, the head of the Imperial State of the Roman Empire, was divine and therefore worthy of worship.  It was, in fact, a portable idol, and it distressed the faithful in Israel.

If Jesus was to answer in one way, he would provoke the radical fundamentalists who believed it was a sin and a crime to pay taxes to the state -- thereby supporting the cult of emperor worship.  If Jesus answered in another way, he would provoke the patriots into calling him a traitor and making him an enemy of the Roman state.

Jesus was too smart to get tripped up by either of these groups.  His answer reflected the focus on his life: God was the decisive reality.  Jesus said, “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and give back to God the things that are God’s.”  In this way, Jesus acknowledges that there are some things that are due to the state.  But “the only reality with a total claim on [our] conscience is God.  Jesus’ Caesar-God formula means that we are to give to Caesar a great deal, but not an allegiance that knows no bounds.  God is the boundary of the state.”[3]

On the same day, the Sadducees tried to trick Jesus with another question (Matthew 22:23-33).  This one regarded the resurrection, and they wanted Jesus to agree with them in their perspective that the resurrection was folly.  They wanted him to promote their sophisticated notion that the resurrection was just an illusion; just something that uneducated people liked to believe in because it made them feel better.

So they brought to Jesus a question about a religious practice that was already waning in Jesus’ day: that of Levirate marriage.  And there’s a clue in the text that their question isn’t serious; it’s really over-the-top.  Levirate marriage was practiced early in Israel’s history to protect the line of male inheritance.  If a woman married a man and he died before he could father a child, his brother was obligated to marry the widow and sire a child who would then be considered the child of the man who was deceased.  The Sadducees wanted to trip Jesus up by asking a question that included not two men and one woman, but rather seven men and one woman.  Whose wife would she be in the resurrection?  Or would she be promiscuous?  This kind of question was patently ridiculous and therefore intended to mock Jesus.

But Jesus wouldn’t take the bait.  He responded by saying, “you are getting way off” or “you are being led astray.”  He teaches that the resurrection is not “as though life in the kingdom were simply this life slightly or considerably elevated.”[4]  He teaches that in the resurrection believers will become “like the angels,” “that is to say, the faithful will become very different from what they now are; they will be wonderfully transformed human beings.”[5]

And Jesus doesn’t just stop there.  He returns to one of the central tenets of Judaism to prove his point: God’s self-revelation to Moses in the burning bush.  “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” – this is how God identifies himself to Moses.  God doesn’t say to Moses that He was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  He says that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

The point that Jesus is making by referencing the story of the theophany at the burning bush is that God does not lose Abraham at death.  Abraham still belongs to God.  God is not the God of dead bodies but of living persons.  Abraham must be a living person because he is part of God.  Through his argument, Jesus shows that if God’s great self-revelation at Sinai is to be taken seriously, there has to be survival of death.[6]

Then we come to the third question in the Temple and our text for today: What is the greatest commandment?  And “For a third time we are struck by Jesus’ centeredness in God.”[7]  “As in his three temptations in the desert (4:1-11), so now in his three questions in the temple, Jesus stands before us as the God-centered man…God towers in sovereignty above the state (22:15-22), above death (vv.23-33), and now above all other human responsibilities (vv. 34-40): God is the main reality of Jesus’ life.” [8]

“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

The purpose of living, Jesus says, is the adoration of God and the cherishing of human beings.[9]  Jesus is unique in fusing these two commandments above all the rest of the law. 
For Jesus, the supreme command is love.  Love of the God who first loved us, and love for the neighbor that God has placed in our midst.

It’s important to remember that Jesus is not asked which two commandments are the greatest.  He is asked which one is the greatest and his answer instructs us that the question posed is too narrow.[10]  In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Frederick Dale Bruner points out how important maintaining that balance of loving God and loving neighbor is.  He writes:

The religious piety of the September 11, 2001, attackers, discovered in the frequent reference to Allah in their papers, warn us of the great danger of a love of God unprotected by the ‘just as important’ love of neighbor.  Love of God, all by itself, can lead to heinous fanaticism (see the Christian crusades against Islam) ?.  Love of God, therefore, must always be accompanied by love of neighbor, as in Jesus’ creative combination, in order to be responsible love of God.[11]

A more everyday example comes from someone in our own congregation who shared with me that when they are getting ready to hire someone at their workplace, they take them out to dinner and they watch how they behave with the wait staff.  The candidate for employment is unaware that this test is just as important as all the other parts of the interview.  The company believes that how you treat people who wait upon you in a restaurant speaks volumes about character.  No matter what you profess.  This is the litmus test for “love of neighbor.”  “Thus the greatest kind of commandment in the whole bible is broken down into two kinds and into two commands: Love the God who loves you, and cherish the person who meets you.”[12]

Remember some years ago the “What Would Jesus Do” movement was fairly popular?  Well, this passage is the equivalent of “How Would Jesus Interpret Scripture?”  And the answer is: through the lens of these two commands – love of God; love of neighbor.

The Christian community has long been characterized by the quality of its love.  In fact, the quality of love within the Christian community so impressed itself upon surrounding non-Christians that it became a point of conversion and curiosity.  Paul speaks of it in his letter to the church in Thessalonica:

So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

How much of ourselves should we give to our country?
Can we reasonably look forward to life after death?
What, of all the laws of God, is the most important to follow?

They are questions with relevance yet today and Jesus’ answer to them is as important now as it was 2,000 years ago: the center and purpose of our lives should be the adoration of God and the cherishing of people.  Do these things and all the rest will follow.

            As we live and move and have our being, striving to live as Christians in a complex and challenging world, may we keep these twin commands ever before our eyes, so that we might live the life that Jesus so taught and lived.

May it be so.  Amen.