Raising The Bar (Matthew 22: 34-46) 10/23/11

 “It is the sentence with which every Jewish service still opens, and the first text which every Jewish child commits to memory.” 1   It is part of the Shema, meaning “to hear,” the basic and essential creed of Judaism, literally the Jewish confession of faith. According to Jesus, it is the greatest law of all. It is Deuteronomy 6: 5.  It says: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength.” It is the answer given by Jesus to the lawyer in response to the question “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

In the card game of bridge, it is 3 No Trumps, a closeout bid. In the game of baseball, it is a walk off home run. In the temple court before the religious leaders, it is the question designed to end the questions and indeed it accomplishes its purpose.  It is the question posed by our Savior to the Pharisees. Son of Mary? Son of Man? Son of the Holy Spirit? Son of David? Son of God? Whose son…is the Christ?

These questions, and the answers to them, are the subject of this

message as they were that day some twenty centuries ago. The first

1 William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, volume 2, revised p. 278.

answer is perhaps the most famous in the New Testament. The second may be the most obscure. Each has its own place in more clearly revealing Jesus’ identity and in setting the bar for not only who he is, but what he expects from us.

           In the time of Jesus, there were 365 negative Jewish laws. How convenient. A new don’t for every day of the year. There were also another 248 positive laws, for a total of 613. The Jews are not by themselves in over-regulating. For instance, South Carolina still has a law on the books that requires every adult male to bring a rifle to church on Sunday in order to ward off Indian attacks. And by the way, it’s still illegal in SC to keep horses in bathtubs. So while we pick on those religious leaders for their overindulgence in regulation, we are no less guilty or neglectful today. Jesus didn’t think much of such excess.   He reduced the number to 2. 

The second law—love your neighbor—was another Old Testament quotation, this time from Leviticus 19:18: “love your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus went on to say that these were not only the most important commandments, but that the whole of the Law and the Prophets hung on them and their application. There is a real question whether this is a reduction or simply a restatement, but let’s leave that question open for the moment.

In Matthew, Jesus has debated and silenced the Sadducees. The Pharisees then get together. The gospel of Matthew tells us that from their number, an expert in the law emerges with the question of the day. It would appear that this is simply a continuation of the attack of Jesus by the Pharisees. By contrast, the gospel of Mark would seem to paint a kinder picture. Mark tells us in chapter 12 that “One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, He asked him:  Of all the commandments, which is most important?” The Markan passage actually ends with Jesus saying to this unknown teacher; “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Which of these versions is the more accurate? We don’t know. We never will know. This is a story seen from two different lenses. What is the result of each version? Exactly the same. From then on, no one asked Jesus any more questions. 

The more important news is that Jesus has spoken as to which is the greatest commandment. Which of those 613 laws will Jesus recite? In Matthew 5, Jesus tells the multitude that he has not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfill them. Teaching and debating in the temple just days from his crucifixion, Jesus says to love God, and love your fellow man and do them both with everything that you’ve got. That’s it, No change in the law. Jesus condenses the substance of the existing law into two commandments. A.B. Simpson compares Jesus’ announcement to the law of gravity. The law was always there.  It’s just that it didn’t have a name for a long time. We had lots of little laws to explain planet rotation and orbits and tides and so forth, until one day we discovered the key to it all: gravity. It’s that way with Christian religion too. Love God. Love man. Do them both with all you have. Nothing changed. It just got made more clear.  No sacrifices, no offerings, no tithes, no bribes, no titles get you there. Just all your heart and all your mind and all your strength. You don’t get to save up to pay God. You have to ante up with the whole of yourself every time and all the time.

Then in verse 41, Jesus decides it is his turn to ask the question. “Whose son is the Christ?” He gets the Jewish answer, the expected answer. “The son of David,” they replied. Remember that Jesus continually refused to let his followers proclaim him as Messiah.  This was partly because he did not want the announcement of his real identity made prematurely.  It was also because calling him Messiah just didn’t identify him correctly. Messiah means Son of David. The expectation was that the day would come when a great prince in the line of David would rise up and defeat Israel’s enemies and restore it to earthly prominence among the nations. This was not what Jesus came to do. In the question he poses to the Pharisees, he does not ask whose son is the Messiah, but rather whose son is the Christ.  The word “Christ” means “anointed one.” An anointment, though made by someone on earth, comes from God Himself. Jesus quotes Psalm 110: 1 to show that David viewed Christ not as his son but as his Lord. The Pharisees marvel, not only at Jesus’ knowledge of Scripture but also at the depth of his understanding. The verse means that to call him Messiah, the son of David, is to use an inadequate description. According to the Psalm, Messiah is nothing short of David’s Lord. In a way that his Jewish audience can relate to, Jesus says that if Messiah, or Son of David, is David’s Lord, then it is not an adequate title; that the only adequate title for Christ is Son of God. In the same way that Jesus synthesized all the Law and the Prophets into two commandments about love, here he synthesizes the Jewish beliefs with the revelation of the coming Messiah. He is not only Messiah; he is divine Messiah!   

There is more than one lesson here. On the surface, we have two statements from Jesus. The first is the Great Commandments. The second is that Jesus came not for earthly conquest, but as the Son of God to usher in the kingdom of heaven. Read together, we get an almost complete revelation of both his identity and his message. Jesus is the Son of God, He stands before us as a man, a man without sin, no less, and tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God and that the second is similar and that is to love our fellow man. He tells us who he is and what it’s all about. In each case, there is simplification and clarification. In each case, he is  raising, not lowering, the bar. It is not enough to obey 613 laws and regulations carved out by man in an attempt to understand God. It is only enough when we have surrendered to God—when we are loving Him and our fellow man with everything we have. It is not enough to look for an earthly kingdom or some prince emerging from the Davidic line. The royalty which Jesus offers has its roots in the kingdom of heaven itself.

These statements from Jesus are a call to obedience and an understanding of His divinity like nothing he has said before. Here Jesus raises the bar once and for all. He tells the Pharisees, the crowd and all who will follow him from then until the end of the age that the standard could not be higher, the link to God more direct. Reducing the law to the commandments of love makes keeping God’s law harder, not easier.  Knowing Jesus as the Son of God is tantamount to knowing God Himself. Matthew says that no one could say a word in reply; that from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.

 There is only one thing left to learn, and the disciples are just days away from that last lesson. It is the lesson of the cross. It is the lesson of love. It is the sacrifice of God Himself to reconcile us to Him through the greatest act of love in all history. The cross makes clear the extent to which God’s love extends. There is no end. Only a man could live a sinless life that would therefore become a real role model for us all. Only God could go to a cross and atone for the sin of all mankind. The lesson of the cross is Jesus’ commitment to raise the bar.  In his obedience lay his reward. It is no different for you and me. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Know Jesus not as just another man, not as a great man, but as the Son of the living God. This is his message; this is who he is. The bar is high, but the reward is out of this world!