Sermon for October 29, 2023 – The 22nd Sunday after Pentecost

I’m now seven weeks into my retirement, after over thirty-six years in full-time ordained ministry. Of course, the thing is that in our tradition one might retire from stipendiary ministry, but one never retires as a priest of the church. That’s something essentially imprinted upon me; something that is central to my entire identity. And the task of preaching has been, for me, a key part of this vocation. In fact, this is the second of three consecutive Sundays on which I have been called to preach; last week at St Paul’s Fort Garry, this morning here in the very familiar environs of All Saints, and next Sunday at St Michael and All Angels, where I have been licensed as Honorary Assistant to your rector’s wife, Lauren Schoeck. And I am most definitely not complaining here!

We are faced with an interesting Gospel text this morning, and one that seems to go from clear and straightforward to what can feel a bit obtuse. The setting is during the final week of Jesus’ life, in which he and the disciples have finally arrived in Jerusalem. The arrival had been notable—it is the story we tell on Palm Sunday, in which people wave branches and herald Jesus as the “Son of David” who comes in the name of the Lord. That’s immediately followed by the story of the cleansing of the Temple, in which Jesus seems to make a clear statement about his authority. After that, though, things settle into a pattern which finds him teaching with parables, engaging various Jewish groups in debate—which is what we have today—and then offering a rather scathing critique of the scribes and Pharisees in the chapter that follows today’s reading. This latter critique is tough, but hardly deserving of his eventual arrest. Still, the tension in Jerusalem is high, with groups like the Pharisees doing their level best to not tip the precarious relationship they have with their Roman Imperial overlords. To their minds, Jesus, could be the sort of figure who might just tip that balance in the wrong direction.

And so in this Gospel, they come to see if they might test him more effectively than had the Sadducees. One of them, a lawyer Matthew tells us, asked him this question: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” The question is benign enough, and might actually have been asked of anyone who had studied the torah. Maybe that lawyer was just warming up with a line of questioning, or maybe he was just wanting to test Jesus’ orthodoxy with a most basic question.

Jesus answers well, and in way that is very much in line with the rabbinical tradition. “He 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 greatest and first commandment.” In Judaism that is an incontestable statement. He’s citing Deuteronomy 6:5, which was included in a daily prayer called the shema, well known and well-used by any member of the Pharisees. To this Jesus adds, “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” That added commandment to love your neighbour—which cites Leviticus 19:18—was also extremely well-known in Judaism.

For instance, in the words of the biblical scholar Nicholas Schaser, “According to the Jerusalem Talmud, Rabbi Akiva—who was born around fifty years after Jesus—says that the Levitical command to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ is the ‘great principle of the Torah.’ A famous story preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (circa 600 CE) states that the renowned first-century sage Hillel once paraphrased Leviticus 19:18 for a non-Jew, saying, ‘Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; that is all the Torah, the rest is commentary. Go study.’”

So, there’s nothing in Jesus’ answer with which any of them could possibly disagree. And then he turns things around, and asks the Pharisees a question. And this is where the reading might have put a bit of a crick in your neck, because to just hear the dialogue read aloud can feel a bit obtuse. “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” And they come back with what would have been a completely acceptable answer, saying “The son of David.”

“How is it then,” Jesus says, “that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet’? If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?”

To which Matthew concludes, “No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.” Now when I was first ordained and serving as curate at St Paul’s Church in Fort Garry, I remember sitting with David Pate saying Morning Prayer in the small chapel when this reading came up, and after David read it he got this utterly mischievous look on his face and said, “they weren’t able to give an answer, because they had no clue as to what he was talking about”! Which might have been true for some of us here this morning, with these lines, “The Lord said to my Lord” and “If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?”

But we’re two thousand years away from the original setting, using an English translation of a Greek text which in turn was citing the Hebrew original. Specifically, Jesus is citing Psalm 110, which would have been well known to those Pharisees. Let’s have another go at the text, this time using Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message: “What do you think about the Christ?” In Peterson’s translation, he has opted to use the word christos rather than “Lord,” which is completely in line with Matthew’s original Greek, and means “anointed one.”

“What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said, “David's son.”—that’s good, solid, 1st Century Jewish thought, pure and simple—Jesus replied, “Well, if the Christ is David’s son, how do you explain that David, under inspiration (in Psalm 110), named Christ his ‘Master’? “God said to my Master, ‘Sit here at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’”

Now again, this can seem a bit of an odd line of reasoning to modern ears, but it is opening up a line of thinking that was very challenging for the Pharisees. Here is how N.T. Wright treats the passage. He writes,

Is the Messiah David’s son or David’s master – or perhaps both? They’d never asked that question before, and they certainly didn’t know the answer, even though it was standing right in front of them in flesh and blood.

And further, “If David’s son is also David’s master, then the warlike Davidic Messiah of popular Jewish imagination will be, after all, one who will bring the saving, healing rule of this creator God to the whole world. And the enemies that he will put under his feet, as Psalm 110 insists, will not be the nationalist enemies of an ethnic people of God, but the ultimate enemies of the whole human race, and indeed of the whole world; in other words, sin itself, and death, which it brings.”

And you know, it isn’t as if Jesus is teaching this without some serious precedent from the Hebrew scriptures. The prophet Isaiah in particular—with his imagery of the suffering servant and his high theology of Israel’s story as being for the whole of the world—very much loom in the background of Jesus’ own teaching, and in fact of the deep tradition of the Christian church.

What the Pharisees as a group couldn’t quite grasp was the degree to which the entirety of Jesus’ life and teaching was shaped by his Jewish identity.

Again, from Nicholas Schaser, “Jesus and the biographer we know as Matthew were nourished by the rich root of Jewish thought and theology, and their convictions about the commandments, messianic expectation, and the necessity of neighborly love found affirmation from others in their own time and beyond.”

We, as 21st Century Christians living half a world away from the original setting of these stories do well to remember that… and to continue to strive to love God and to love our neighbour, now and ever.