Preaching Paths 29 October 2023

Sally A. Brown, Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary

The two pericopes in today’s gospel reading are best treated separately. First, a lawyer’s question about the greatest commandment (Mt 22:34-40) prompts a response from Jesus that grants equal priority to love of God and neighbor. Then Jesus poses his own question about the identity of the Messiah (22:41-46), leaving his interrogators to ponder the “riddle” of Ps 110:1. Which of these pericopes one chooses to take up in a sermon depends on a congregation’s immediate context. The cycle of the lectionary will lead us, at some point, to preach each of these.

Rabbis in Jesus’ time regularly debated which of the commandments were primary and which secondary. A lawyer (whose aim, Matthew indicates, is not to learn from Jesus, but to test him) ups the ante, demanding that Jesus name “the greatest.” Jesus detours around this convoluted thicket of debate, bypassing Jewish law and going straight to the heart of Jewish worship, quoting its central affirmation, the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Dt 6:4-5). Jesus adds that “a second is like [equivalent to] it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Leviticus 19:18b). Jesus declares that the rest of the Law and prophetic writings derive from these affirmations. The Pharisees spent considerable effort defining more precisely who counts as “neighbor,” thus reducing the breadth of the command. Jesus’ quoting of Lev 19 is strategic; there, love for the Other includes the resident alien and even the enemy. Jesus’ listeners know that, in both word and deed, Jesus has interpreted the term “neighbor” in the broadest possible way, including outcasts and Gentiles. Further, he forges here an unbreakable link between worship and ethics.

We might explore with our congregations how well our worship practices reflect this linkage. Often, contemporary “praise song” lyrics focus only on the love and grace of God “for me,” with scant mention of God’s embrace of the “othered”—marginalized ethnicities, resident aliens, and refugees.  We must find ways to praise the God to which the scriptures testify, not one of our own making.

In vv 41-46, Jesus is the one to raise a question. He brings into the open a query that has lingered at the edges of every public confrontation since his recent, messiah-like ride into Jerusalem amid praise to the “son of David.” What, indeed, will be the nature of the Messiah? Jesus poses a riddle: In the opening verse of Ps 110 (considered, then, to be a psalm of David) David appears to testify to a vision of God’s coming agent of redemption: “The Lord says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” The psalm goes on to celebrate the righteous triumph of Messiah. Jesus’ opponents anticipate a military, purely human son of David; yet David himself addresses the Anointed One as “my Lord.” Jesus leaves his interrogators pondering a disturbing messianic possibility, one that explodes the boundaries of their narrowly nationalistic calculations.

Now, the danger to Jesus is greater than ever. Jesus’ opponents will do whatever it takes to silence him and entomb the disturbing mystery of his identity. But that achievement won’t end this. An hour is coming when one of Jesus’ disciples will touch the wounds of a crucified, risen man and exclaim, “My Lord and My God!” (John 20:28). God comes into the world incognito and cloaked in weakness. God’s love exceeds our imagination, and God’s redemptive ways are not ours to predict or control.