His Obedience and Death - Our Great Comfort in a Life of Sacrificial Love
(Matthew 22:34-40, Preaching: Pastor Stephen Magee, April 13, 2008)
Matthew 22:34-40 34 But 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 is the great commandment in the Law?" 37 And 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 great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."
Introduction – A Series of Questions
“Many are called, but few are chosen.” This was the conclusion that Jesus made at the end of the first episode in this chapter of Matthew’s gospel. He had just finished telling a story about a king who gave a wedding feast to his son. In that story, the lawbreakers who were supposed to come to the wedding feast killed some of the servants who were delivering the invitations. Others who seemed less worthy perhaps actually made it into the wedding feast. Just before that He had told them a parable about a King who had a vineyard, and in that story the tenants killed the king’s son. The chief priests and the Pharisees knew that He was telling these parables against them. They wanted to arrest Him, but they feared the crowd. They pursued instead a variety of efforts to trap Him in His words.
First the Pharisees, accompanied by the Herodians as witnesses, asked Him this: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” He said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” Then the Sadducees tried to make Him look foolish with a story of seven brothers. They asked, “In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?” His answer: “You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” Today we have another question, by a scribe of the Pharisees. Some important people want to be rid of Jesus. Though He is willingly making His way to the cross to give up His own life, He will do this without the aid of any of their evil strategies. It might seem as if any question asked in this hostile environment must be judged entirely insincere, but I wonder.
The Law and “lawyers” (34-35)
The passage begins with a plain statement that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees. On this news the Pharisees gathered together, and one of the scribes asked him a question. The scribes are called lawyers, because they are experts in the Old Testament Law, particularly as it has been interpreted by the traditions that the Jews have received. One of their great problems with Jesus is that He does not hold to their interpretation of the Law of God. The right understanding of the Law of God is not an easy matter. This is not primarily an intellectual problem, but a moral and spiritual issue. People can understand most of the several hundred laws of the Old Testament easily enough, just as children really do know what their parents’ rules are on one level. Our sin nature does not want to obey, so we come up with interpretations that allow us to have our own way while we still pretend to be obedient.
On one hand we hear certain commands of the Law, and we could easily say to ourselves, “I can do that.” There are certain foods that we can eat. There are other foods that we cannot eat. There are festivals to attend on certain days where we are to do certain things. There is a cutting ritual that is to be performed on a baby boy on the eighth day of his life. This all can be done. On the other hand we hear sweeping and uncompromising commands like these: Leviticus 11:45 “I am the LORD who brought you up out of the
The thing that makes the Law most difficult for us is our accurate sense that we have not kept it. We know that the Pharisees sent this scribe to Jesus in order to test Him. Jesus clearly accused the Pharisees of being serious law-breakers. They thought of themselves as the purest law-keepers. If the Pharisees were to be critiqued regarding their hearts and their lives, who could be saved? There was another half to this dilemma. Prostitutes and obviously irreligious people were befriended by this Miracle Man. Clearly someone was wrong here. Jesus and the Pharisees did not think the same things about the Law. What could Jesus be thinking about the Law? One of the scribes asks Him a plain and fair question.
The Great Commandment (36-38)
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” We get used to the idea that all sins are equal. This is actually not the case. All sins deserve God’s wrath and curse, but some sins are worse than others. That also means that it may be helpful to think of some structure to God’s law. The things we think of as the worst possible sins are those things that would make us ashamed around other people, things that might be especially disappointing to our parents, or our children, nightmares that we could imagine happening that would destroy us.
Notice that when this man asked Jesus about the great commandment, Jesus did not say, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” or “Thou shalt not get drunk.” Drunkenness and adulterous affections and actions are serious sins. He answers with a phrase that every Hebrew child was instructed to memorize from Deuteronomy 6, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” There are various forms of this commandment quoted in the New Testament. As it is originally given in the Hebrew in Deuteronomy, after stating heart/mind, and soul, it says that you are to love God with all your “muchness.” You are to love God with all your everything. This is the great commandment. In that sense it is the first commandment. It is not in that category of laws where anyone should quickly say, “I can do that.” It should never be softened into something less than it is. You and I have not kept this commandment for a moment. And we ought to take a moment and reflect upon the tremendous weight of guilt that we have because we have not kept this great law.
A second is like it. (39)
What Jesus has already stated is a lot to think about, but He adds something that is brilliant. He says that there is a second that is like this great commandment. There is some way in which this second one goes with the first. The man who would truly love God with all His everything would have to live out this love for God in this way, and the man that would not do this second command perfectly, certainly has not kept the first commandment either. The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is from Leviticus 19:18, and it is a summary of all the duties that we have before God in our relationship with one another as fellow inhabitants of this planet.
Many people imagine that they hate themselves, but you will not find support for that idea in the Bible, so I wonder whether we need to think about this more precisely. When people claim that they hate themselves, they are most likely saying that they hate something about themselves. They hate that they are socially uncomfortable. They hate their appearance. They may even hate their sin, and they do not know what to do about it. They may hate their pain, or their family relations, or their life. It is not a normal thing to actually hate yourself.
The Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 5:29 “No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” We need to take God at His Word on this, since obsessions of apparent self-hatred may only be a distraction keeping us from dealing with real sin. People don’t hate themselves. You don’t hate yourself. You actually have a natural regard for your feelings and for your person more broadly. What God is commanding you to do, flowing out of Your love for Him, is to love others as You love Yourself, to care for their feelings, their person, their eternal well-being as you do for yourself. Again, no one should quickly imagine that he obeys this commandment.
All the Law and the Prophets (40)
The entire message of the Old Testament, all of the Law and the Prophets depend on these two massive commandments. It is essential for us to see that we do not keep these commandments, but that is not enough. Our failure is not the whole story of the Old Testament. The 39 books of the Old Covenant all tell the story of a coming Messiah, and this one Messiah fulfilled the Law and the Prophets. One of the ways that He did this was by keeping the Law of God for us. He loved God with all His muchness, and there was much muchness in His muchness. This love for His Father perfectly overflowed into a love for His neighbor as Himself, as He willingly suffered pain for us on the cross, pain in His flesh, pain in His whole person. The extent of His obedience is the reason why He could say that He has given us a new commandment, that we would love one another “as I have loved you.”
This is the way for us, and it is very powerful. It laughs in the face of sin, death, and the grave, and springs up again to everlasting life. It is a power of obedience that is so great, that even the vilest offender (even a scribe) who truly believes in this Messiah can find a new and powerful life in Jesus Christ. A scribe came to test Jesus regarding the Law. What he found was the most wonderful simplicity and beauty in the Lord’s answer to his question. His answer came from the One who is Himself the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets and our Helper in obedience.
Questions for meditation and discussion:
1. What are the events that seem to have happened on this same day, both before and after this question?
2. Why would the Pharisess have asked this question?
3. In what sense is the answer of Jesus an elegant summary of the most wonderful ethical system ever known?
4. What are some of the lies concerning man that could distract us from true ethical progress as followers of Christ?
posted by Pastor Magee at 10:00 AM
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