Readings (Track 1)

Like an editor who knows a good story when she sees it, Matthew has followed Mark’s account of Jesus’ confrontation with the religious leaders with little change. It started with Jesus entering Jerusalem in triumph, with the crowds shouting messianic slogans and Jesus promptly cleansing the temple. The religious leaders challenged him: “By what authority are you doing these things…” (21:23) and Jesus’ response, pointing to John the Baptist and their failure to respond to John’s call to repentance in turn challenges their authority. Jesus tells parables: two sons sent to work in the vineyard, the vineyard owner whose tenants don’t even respect his son, the king who hosts a wedding banquet only to find that the guests refuse to come. The Pharisees and Herodians try to trap him with a question about taxes. The Sadducees try to trap him with a hypothetical about the resurrection. And then there’s today’s text.

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (22:36) Matthew—in contrast to Mark—hears this question as another test. Jesus responds by putting together two commandments from the law: “You shall love the Lord your God…”, the commandment that’s the immediate continuation of the Shema (Dt 6:5), and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” which occurs at a pivotal point in Leviticus’ description of what it means for Israel to be holy as the Lord Himself is holy (Lev 19:18).

“Love the Lord your God…love your neighbor as yourself.” In a longer sermon we could look at the ways Moses in the first reading and Paul in the second reading show us what this looks like. Instead, I’d invite you to take the insert home and make the connections yourselves during the week. And this, in turn, sets us up for our celebration of All Saints this Wednesday (November 1), in which we remember the saints who have shown us this double love in a breathtaking variety of ways.

We’ll return to Jesus’ summary of the law, but let’s first attend to the rest of the Gospel reading. After all the leaders’ questions, Jesus has a question for them: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

The Pharisees, predictably, respond that the Messiah is the son of David. Jesus responds with this: “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet”’? If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” (vv.43-45). In the psalm the language is typical of a royal psalm: “The Lord (God) said to my Lord (the king).” And—everyone there assumes—David is the speaker, and speaking under the inspiration of the Spirit. So David, speaking “by the Spirit” is calling one of his own descendants “my Lord,” which is not the expected language of a father to a son. Take that psalm seriously, Jesus says, and you discover that the Messiah is qualitatively more than a son of David. As St Paul puts it at the start of the letter to the Romans (written considerably earlier than Matthew’s Gospel): “the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead” (1:3-4a). These texts are from the first, not the fourth century, but they point the Church in the direction of the 4^th century Nicene Creed: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God.”

Now, whatever else the Messiah is, the Messiah is the paradigmatic Israelite, the Israelite who models how to love the Lord God and one’s neighbor. So what has Jesus the Messiah shown us about loving the Lord God and loving the neighbor?

Not surprisingly, an important part of loving the Lord God is obeying the Lord God. So Jesus in the wilderness in conversation with Satan does not “wing it” but by means of Holy Scripture discerns the obedient response to each of the temptations. And obedience turns out to be the entrance to a whole world: “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (6:26) That sort of invitation isn’t spur-of-the-moment; it’s the product of sustained attention, letting God’s reality shape experience. Often Jesus’ most challenging words flow from this transformed imagination: “Love your enemies…” Why? “so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good…”

And so we’ve slid into what Jesus the Messiah might show us about loving the neighbor. We might start with the healings and exorcisms, remembering Matthew’s comment “This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases’” (8:17). These healings and exorcisms come, Matthew suggests, at some personal cost to Jesus. Or we might think of the feeding of the five thousand, which again, with its Eucharistic overtones, suggests something of what it costs the Messiah to love the neighbor. In these and other cases Jesus’ love is easiest to recognize when it encounters those who recognize their need (that phrase being one way of translating the first beatitude’s “poor in spirit”).Jesus’ love is less obviously recognizable when it encounters those who are self-sufficient, those who have it together. Jesus loves them too much to leave them undisturbed, which disturbances finally lead to Jesus’ cross.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” God can give that command with integrity because that’s what God does, “[making] his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and [sending] rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (5:45). In a daring metaphor, an old spiritual uses the bosom of Abraham for that divine love:

So high, can’t get over it.
So low, can’t get under it.
So wide, can’t get round it.
O, rock my soul.

“Love the Lord your God; love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s an invitation into a new world. More precisely, it’s an invitation to join the Lord in birthing that new world. Now, if we can just remember that come Monday morning…