Hang the Law and the Prophets!


Sunday, October 23rd, 2005
Pentecost + 23
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Matthew 22:34-46

34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 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.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” 41 Now 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.” 43 He 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”’?
45 If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” 46 No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Have you ever been witness to or been involved in a paradigm shift?

There’s another term that might be more familiar to you; a sea change.

There are several that have occurred over the last 40 to 60 years: the way and frequency with which we travel for pleasure. Used to be, pleasure travel was reserved for the wealthy. In the last 4 or 5 decades it has become commonplace for anyone with an automobile or the means to purchase an airline ticket to travel just about anywhere they want.

The way we communicate has probably seen one of the most drastic changes. It has evolved in our lifetime, from mailed letters and expensive shortwave radio equipment to phone calls to faxes and emails to instant or text messaging on your cell phones. If you have one particular company, you can now use your phone as a walkie-talkie throughout the United States, Canada, and several South American countries. The part in our congregational benediction about the world now being “too dangerous for anything but truth” is becoming truer and truer. In the middle of campaign season, I think it is great that there’s a website, factcheck.org, which dedicates itself to the sole purpose of confirming or correcting what politicians say in the course of interviews, speeches, and campaigns. It keeps people on their toes. I wonder if there’s one for preachers. J

Jesus came to Jerusalem to check the facts that the Sadducees and Pharisees had been dishing out for hundreds years. And, to put it mildly, they didn’t like it.

As we’ve seen happen over the last few weeks, the religious leaders are at it yet again. Trying to trap Jesus and discredit him – undercut the authority with which he had been preaching and teaching for the previous three years. So they send out a lawyer – the person described in the text as a lawyer would today be known as a religious scholar – also called a scribe, and a member of the Pharisaic sect.

Let’s digress for a minute. This passage – The Greatest Command, is found in all three of the synoptic Gospels – here in Matthew, Mark, which I quoted from last week, and Luke. There are slight differences in the wording in each of them, The Gospel according to Mark – 12:28 and following – presents the exchange in an almost-conciliatory way – first Jesus states the commandments, then the scribe repeats them back to him, affirming what Jesus said, then Jesus says to the man ‘you are not far from the Kingdom of God”. Not exactly the same emphasis that Matthew places on the exchange, though they do both end with the same ‘no one dared ask any more questions.’

The Gospel according to Luke has the passage in an entirely different place in the ministry of Jesus. We find it in Chapter 10, beginning in verse 25. The intent is still the same, to test Jesus, but the question is posed differently. The question is ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus’ answer is to ask the scribe to quote to HIM what he finds in the Law that is required to inherit eternal life. The scribe quotes the passages from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 as a single piece. Jesus affirms the response, but the conversation keeps going, in response to the second commands’ ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ the scribe asks Jesus to define for him who his neighbor is.

I know we’ve spoken about how the term ‘Christian’ was originally a pejorative term – a term meant to actually make fun of those who followed Jesus Christ, and accepted him as their Lord. Did you know that the Pharisees received their name the same way? The term ‘Pharisee’ means ‘Separatist’. As they became a movement of their own within the Jewish faith, their purpose was to maintain their holiness and righteousness, but in order to do that they had to pull away, to withdraw, and to separate from those who were ritually unclean, in order to establish an order that maintained its ritual cleanliness – and they did it zealously.

Just as the term ‘Baptist’ was originally a way to make fun of those who practiced immersion baptism, so were the terms ‘Pharisee’ and ‘Christian’.

Jesus answered the scribe’s question about who his neighbor was with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The name Pharisees called themselves was another word: ‘Haberim’.

Would anyone care to venture a guess as to what that word means?

It means ‘Neighbors.’

Imagine calling yourself a ‘neighbor’, and asking a question with a very specific, very restricted set of people in mind, and having the very term you use to define yourself turned inside out like that … would YOU be able to come up with another question for Jesus?

What is intended in each passage is the whole self given to God and to others. Mechanical precision was not a goal important to biblical writers.

****
The Pharisees had quantified the Law of Moses into 613 commandments: 365 prohibitions (DON’T do this) and 248 positive (DO do this) commandments. Though they allowed for an occasional summary statement in one or a few commandments here and there, Pharisees held firmly to the principle that each commandment was as important as the others, the ‘light’ commandments being just as important as the ‘heavy’ ones, hence, the strictures to follow each and every law to the letter.

Jesus redirects them to the spirit of the Law: Love. Jesus makes love not only the great commandment, but also the essence and fulfillment of the law and the prophets – our Old Testament. The earlier version of the Revised Standard Bible translated the word ‘Krematai’ as ‘depend’, and it DOES apply. It DOES get the point across.

But the word, literally translated, is what the later, New Revised Standard has; ‘hang.’ It paints a more vivid picture. The image is of two hinges, and a door. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Hang the law and the prophets on that, and you’ve opened the door to everything it is that God expects of and can do through you.

The expectation is not lightened when we interpret the law through Love. It is heightened and deepened. It is a heavier demand, much more so than legalism. Love both liberates and binds. It freely gives and yet requires the whole of oneself for God, neighbor, and oneself. Jesus didn’t come to do away with the law, but to fulfill it, and it is in this passage that we see what that fulfillment involves. Jesus began a sea change in how people perceived God. It is a paradigm shift that continues to this day.

We are still caught in a mindset that we have to please God in order to attain salvation, that we have to DO something to make ourselves better than we were, somehow make ourselves acceptable to God, when in truth, Jesus is the only way we can be that.

The Gospel doesn’t end there. It doesn’t stop at ‘Love God.’ It continues through ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

We are called to love God, of course. That is a given. But how that love is expressed is critical to how we truly believe what we say we believe. How we live out what our faith IS.

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means that we should constantly be reevaluating what the term ‘neighbor’ means to us. Have we settled into thinking of ourselves only as ‘Haberim’?

Do we, consciously or subconsciously, stratify our community, divide people into categories, those who are okay to help, those who are not, those who are worth spending time with, and those who are not, those whom we would greet readily if we saw them on the street or in the store, and those we’d not go out of our way to greet?

It’s an easy trap to fall into. We are wired that way. There are always going to be people that we feel less comfortable around, people who suck away our energy, people who don’t seem to respond the way we’d like them to. But a paradigm shift means that the basis for how you view the world shifts, so everything shifts. Jesus is calling us to not only think outside the box, but to think outside ourselves. To see the world through God’s eyes, to hear the world through God’s ears, to hold the world in God’s own heart, and make his heart our own.

That is what makes the expectation heavier. That is what makes the task one that we cannot do as individuals, but must do as community. We must come together in purpose and in spirit.

And that spirit, that unity, can only come through the law of Love.

Let’s pray.