Trinity 18 Matthew 22:34-46 (2021)

The Christ Of The Scriptures

Matthew 22:34-46

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.

St. Matthew 22:37-40 Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the first and great commandment.   And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord…  Eight years ago, on September 15, 2013 I was installed as your pastor.  Before that I had “met” some of you on a long and wonderful phone call in early March of that year, and then the whole congregation in July when I came to accept your Call.  Through those interactions I knew that we had very much in common, and I knew clearly from your faith and faithful practices that you had been solidly lead and extremely well-catechized by Pastor Russell.   I knew then and I know even better now that I echo the words of St. Paul in today’s epistle where he writes, “I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Christ Jesus, that you were enriched in everything by Him in all utterance and all knowledge.”

The fact is, you have indeed been enriched in everything in Christ, in all utterance and all knowledge. Your knowledge and your utterance – your ability to articulate the truth clearly and to stick with it – go way beyond that of the smartest atheists on the planet, way beyond famous Bible scholars, most certainly way beyond synodical bureaucrats and renowned “Lutheran” theologians here in America.  And that is so because you know this basic truth: you know how Christ fits into the Scriptures, into Law and Gospel, into redemption and justification. You know how faith alone in Christ is God’s means of making His righteousness your righteousness, so that you are now no longer under God’s condemnation, but stand righteous before God and will be raised from the dead to spend eternity with Him in His heavenly kingdom.

That faith-knowledge, given to you as a gift of grace by God’s Holy Spirit through the preaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the Sacraments, also goes way beyond the knowledge of the smartest religious people in Jesus’ day.  And that brings us directly to today’s Gospel.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees were the articulators of the popular schools of thought on Scriptural interpretation at the time of Jesus.  They were always competing with one another, they were always reacting to one another, and they often ridiculed one another.  Without getting into too much detail, both parties got some things right and some things wrong in their interpretation of the Scriptures.  And both parties got so bogged down in their own interpretations and philosophies and traditions that they completely mishandled the main teachings of the Old Testament.  Rabbinical theology had basically become a two-party system that was hopelessly broken.

One of the main beliefs of the Sadducees was that there is no resurrection of the dead; they didn’t believe in life after death.  In the verses just before today’s Gospel, Jesus had silenced the Sadducees by proving them wrong on that point from Holy Scripture.  As He said, “But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mt 22:31-32).  It was one of Jesus’ Holy Week victories that often gets overlooked.  He demonstrated to everyone that the Sadducees were not to be trusted because they didn’t understand the Scriptures, that the Christ Himself must die and rise again.  And we too learn from that not to trust anyone who doesn’t understand the Scriptures.

In today’s Gospel, we see Jesus doing exactly the same thing with the Pharisees. The Pharisees actually agreed with Jesus on the Scriptural teaching of the resurrection. In fact, the resurrection was critical to Pharisaism.  So, why was it that they worked so hard at keeping all the Levitical laws and tithing and all the extra laws they placed around the Scriptural laws as a hedge?  Well, it was so that they would be counted among the worthy in the kingdom of God at the resurrection.

But, while the Pharisees were right about the coming resurrection and eternal life in the kingdom of God, they demolished the road to get there, which was faith in Christ!  And they rebuilt that road with their own works of outward obedience.

We see that right away in today’s Gospel reading.  The Pharisees turned, as always, to their tunnel-vision focus on the law.  One of them tested Jesus with this question: “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”

Love.  Love is the great commandment.  Love is the fulfillment of the Law.  “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  This is not some mushy-gushy emotional affection that God commands.  It is willing, joyful, heartfelt devotion and commitment, first to God, and then to your neighbor, informed and guided by the Word of God.

Everything else hinges on these two commandments.  Love for God and love for one’s neighbor was to be at the heart of everything for mankind; it was to be the motivation behind all works and the very foundation of man’s life on earth.  The rest of the laws in the Old Testament were about how people were to love God and their neighbor, whether it was the timeless moral laws that apply to all men, or whether it was the ceremonial and civil laws that applied only to the Jews.

But that is the opposite of what the Pharisees taught and believed. Love was not their motivation for keeping the Law. They tried to keep the commandments, not out of love for God, but in order to get something from God.  They endeavored to keep the Commandments in order to earn something for themselves and ultimately to escape punishment by their own works and self-righteousness.

Honestly, who can possibly love God and his neighbor so completely in every action, every word, every thought that flows from it, all the time, without any thought to oneself, what’s good for me, what feels right to me, and what I want to do?  The entire history of the world, the entire personal history of every one of us cries out that the answer to that is, “No one!”  Every law that has ever been broken is evidence that no one loves God enough.  Every law that has ever been broken is evidence that a person wasn’t devoted enough to God to obey His commandments.

This is what the Pharisees failed to grasp and completely ignored; they never understood it.  They didn’t understand that all their tithing, all their extra Sabbath laws, all the attention they paid to the intricacies of Levitical ceremony and instruction – ALL of that was utterly and completely useless in bringing them into God’s favor and for buying themselves a place in the kingdom of heaven.

It was useless because all the while they had failed to keep the first two great commandments: love God and love your neighbor.  None of their outward obedience to the Law flowed from pure love for God or their neighbor.  You foolish Pharisees!  The law is not your Savior.  The Law is your judge, your jury, and your executioner.  As St. Paul writes to the Romans (3:20), “Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”

You, dear fellow redeemed, have been given this knowledge from above.  You have been given to know that the chief purpose of the Law is not to tell people what they have to do to be saved or what they have to do to enter the kingdom of God.  The Law is there to show you that you fall short of love and therefore deserve the condemnation that the Law pronounces on all people, on all sinners – on you.  The Law, as our Lutheran Confessions clearly state, does three things only: it kills, it condemns, and it destroys.  The Law is there to frighten you to run away, looking for shelter, which then, after hearing the Gospel leads you to seek refuge in the Christ, the only Man who has ever led a perfect life of love.

Jesus presses that very point with the Pharisees and then silences them up with His question: “What do you think about the Christ? Whose Son is He?”  Ah, the Pharisees knew the answer!   He’s the Son of David!  OK, then.  Jesus asked further, “How then does David in the Spirit call Him ‘Lord,’ saying: ‘The LORD said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool”?”

What?  How can David’s Son be David’s Lord?  They were baffled.  They had no idea.  All these years they had read Psalm 110 (and other similar Scriptures) and had never comprehended this key teaching about the identity and the mission of the Christ – that He would be true Man, the Son of David, but also the Lord, true God from all eternity, for the purpose of saving sinful mankind from his sins.

This is how Christ fits into the Scriptures: He would be true man, who would live a perfect life of love under the law; and true God, so that His obedience might count for all men, for you.  He would be true man, because human death is the wages of sin; and true God, so that He might receive those wages in the place of sinful mankind, so that you and I might receive the gift of eternal life through faith in Him, the perfect and only intercessor between God and man, Christ Jesus our Lord.  Christ’s suffering and death on the cross paid for all of your sins and the sins of all mankind, from Adam and Eve until Christ returns.

It is as simple as Martin Luther states it in the meaning to the Second Article of the Creed: “I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord; who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned person, purchased and won from all sin, death, and from the power of the devil not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and His innocent suffering and death, that I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. Just as He is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.”

You know that.  You hear it all the time now, and you heard it for 30+ years before I came.  You have been “enriched in everything in Him in all utterance and all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that you come short in no gift, eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end, that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

You have been given to know Christ rightly, to know how He fits into the Scriptures and into your justification.  Rejoice in that knowledge and hold onto it for dear life, even as you have stood for it in the past.  The Church in any one place may grow or not grow, it may thrive or barely hang on.  But you are not waiting for the Church to grow and thrive.  You are, as Paul says, “eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  

And you know that He is revealed each and every week right here in the Divine Service through the preached Gospel, through your remembrance of your Baptism, and through the delivery of His forgiveness in Holy Absolution and Holy Supper.  All of these things are most certainly giving you Jesus in all the ways He wants you to have Him in this life, and they will sustain you until He calls you Home to Himself where you will see Him in His fullest revelation in heaven.

It is Christ who will keep you; it is Christ who will preserve you by His Spirit through Word and Sacrament, through the preaching of Christ crucified for sinners and by Christ feeding you with His holy body and blood in Holy Communion.  And, dear friends, He will also confirm you to the end.

 By God’s grace and through His gift of faith, you remain faithful in hearing His Word and in supporting its proclamation.  He will see to it that His Spirit gives the knowledge of Christ to still more people through that proclamation, until His Church is built and you and all His saints stand victorious at the side of David’s Son and David’s Lord, even as His enemies are placed under His feet, including the last enemy, which is death. 

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.