Matthew Hester—Year A Proper 25

Anthony: All right, we’re down to the home stretch. One more pericope to go. Okay. We’re going to switch over testaments to Matthew 22:34–46. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 25 in Ordinary Time, October 25. Matthew, we’d be grateful if you’d read it for us, please.

Matthew: Absolutely.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, ³⁵ and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” ³⁷ 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 greatest and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” ⁴¹ Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: ⁴² “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” ⁴³ He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, ⁴⁴ ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’? ⁴⁵ “If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” ⁴⁶ No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Matthew: That’s Jesus right there. Oh, man. He’s a gangster right there.

Anthony: He is the OG, for sure. So how, what does this text disclose about the God revealed in Jesus?

Matthew: Ah, yeah, this … this is fun stuff. So, what strikes me first here is Jesus is actually being asked to prioritize Scripture. That’s what they’re asking him to do.

So, the expert in the law asks him, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” And Jesus doesn’t actually respond by saying, “they’re all equally important. So just read the Bible literally, do everything it says.” That’s actually not what he does. He interprets; he prioritizes. He gives us a center.

And what he does here the center is love God with your entire being, love your neighbor as yourself, and then he makes this statement: “On these commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Now I want to make sure we understand this here. Jesus is not actually establishing two new laws here, and we’ll unpack this here in a minute.

He’s being asked a direct question, and I believe what he’s doing is he’s summarizing the full intent of the law, and it all hinges on this. I’ve literally heard people say, “Yeah all those laws are not for us today.” And I say, “What is, what are the laws?” And they say, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.”

And I’ll pause and look at them in wonder, and I’m like, “Do you do that?” Like we recite that as if that is so much easier than just keeping those laws. And then if we’re all honest and we just sit for a moment, “Okay, God, today have I loved you with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength?”

And then we’ll look at that and say, “Yeah, I can keep that one.” I’m not going to answer for you, Anthony, but for me it’s like, “Nope, it’s not going to happen.”

Anthony: Yeah.

[00:58:26] establishing that now these are the laws, he’s answering a question, and then he shows us on these commandments is the entirety of the Law and the Prophets.

And so that tells me something very important about Scripture and God. What’s Jesus doing here? He’s actually giving us a hermeneutic. If we’re not careful, we miss it. This is the hermeneutic. Everything hangs on love. Everything. And so, we shouldn’t just be asking, “Is there a biblical text that says this?”

We also have to ask, “Does my interpretation of the text hang upon the love revealed in Jesus?” And for me, that’s huge. Because you can quote Scripture and you can still miss the God that Scripture is trying to reveal.

And the Pharisees themselves demonstrate that possibility. These are people who know the text extraordinarily well, yet Jesus continually challenges the way they’re interpreting this text.

And so, what does this disclose about God? It tells me that love is not peripheral to God’s character, that love is the interpretive center. And Jesus doesn’t merely teach us to love God and neighbor, he embodies what that love looks like, and then you actually have to move into a different book.

You have to move into John 13, and I believe that in John 13, Jesus shows us that there’s a singular law of the better covenant. The singular law is love one another as I have loved you. So that’s it. It’s not even … It’s not love God with everything you got. Good luck with that.

And then even love your neighbor as you love yourself. What happens on the days I don’t love myself? What happens on the days where I’m having a pity party? Does that give me the legal right to treat my neighbors like garbage? No.

But here, look at that. Love as I have loved you.

Oh, man. That’s, oh, that’s beautiful. That’s a gospel that demands embodiment right there.

And Jesus paves the way. He embodies what that love looks like. He loves the outsider. He touches the untouchable. He eats with sinners. He forgives enemies. He confronts oppressive systems. He lays down his life. He will lay down his life rather than taking the lives of those who are opposing him, which in itself we could have a whole episode on or more.

But I think the second half of that passage even takes it further because then he starts asking them, “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” And they answer correctly according to categories, right? But then Jesus pushes beyond the category. So, what I mean is, the Messiah can’t simply be contained inside of their existing expectations. Yes, Christ is David’s son, but he’s also David’s Lord.

Anthony: Yes.

Matthew: Yeah, your categories are right, but they’re incomplete. Let me bring the fullness of this revelation. And from that perspective of a New Testament, let’s say a fuller Christology, that’s enormous. So, the one teaching us how to interpret God is not simply another rabbi offering an interesting opinion.

No, he’s the image of the invisible God. He is the Word made flesh. He’s the radiance of God’s glory, the exact imprint of God’s being. And so, when Jesus tells me that everything hangs on love, then I’m going to pay attention because love himself is interpreting the Scripture for us. And I would say if there’s ever a moment …

I teach this in some of my scholastic studies. I’ve got a whole 10-week study on the Sermon on the Mount. I said, if there’s ever a time where Jesus begins to challenge your interpretation of Scripture, you have a decision to make in that moment. Will I side with Scripture or will I side with the Word?

And I would hope every time you would side with the Word before you would ever choose the Scripture against him. And so, Jesus is revealing all kind of things. There’s so much we could unpack. There’s this beautiful coherence of God, right? God’s holiness is loving. His justice is love. His judgment is love. His power is self-giving love.

John would eventually say and I’ve already said it, 1 John 4, it’s so breathtakingly simple, “God is love.”

And so, Jesus, he’s not even telling us what commandments God prefers. He’s actually revealing what God is like. What he’s like. And if I have to choose between commandments and who God is, you can keep the commands. I want to know him.

Anthony: Yeah. Amen and amen. And this is where I think the theological work of T.F. Torrance is really helpful when we think about the vicarious humanity of Jesus. Who has loved the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul?

It’s our Lord Jesus, and in him, this is what we’re doing, and that’s why when we don’t, it hurts. Because this is who we are now in Christ, in Christo. It is the reality. And yeah. So, we just, we lean on him. And yeah, I love what you said about how it takes an embodiment.

Then it works itself out in loving your neighbor. That we would love one another. That is the true commandment. So, if you were … Let’s just take it a little bit further. What else is here? What else … What … There’s a lot of meat on the bone. If you were preaching this passage to your faith community, what else would you want to proclaim?

Matthew: Ah, I would say everything hangs on love.

Everything hangs there. And you know what? I would emphasize that word “hangs” because that’s the language Jesus uses. So, if you remove the thing something hangs on, it falls. This is so loaded. If my theology doesn’t hang on love, then something’s gone wrong. It falls.

If my doctrine doesn’t produce love, then it has failed. If my interpretation of Scripture gives me permission to hate the person that Jesus commanded me to love then it’s going to fall. If my holiness makes me less compassionate, come on, if being right makes me cruel, then something has gone wrong, because Jesus didn’t say, “They’ll know that you are my disciples because you won all the theological arguments.”

No, he said they’re going to know us by our love. And, honestly, I would push it even further because I don’t think Jesus is giving us a religious assignment. He’s not like saying, “You people aren’t loving enough. Try harder.” Because again, that’s religion trying to echo that, towards that, and give us a goal to try to strive towards.

No, the gospel goes deeper than that. John says, “We love because He first loved us.” And so, Christian love isn’t something I manufacture to get God’s approval. It’s participation in a love that originates from God. So, before you ever loved God, God loved you. Before, before you even had a desire to pursue God, God was pursuing you.

Before you knew how to love anybody, you were already being held in the love of Father, Son, and Spirit. And that’s why I would preach this passage through participation. Jesus isn’t commanding us to imitate this external standard. Again, it’s so easy for it to become something like that.

“Oh love. Okay, how am I going to love more?” That’s not what is happening here. He’s inviting us to live from that divine life. He’s inviting us to live from that place of love. And then I would ask the uncomfortable question, “Okay, who’s my neighbor?” Because man, it’s easy to preach to love others until Jesus starts identifying who the others are, right?

I mean, ugh, again, I live here in the Deep South and you start talking about I’ve got to love people that vote differently than me? Yeah. What about people that believe differently? Yep. Worship differently? Well, how about this? Do I have to love people that don’t even believe in God? Yeah.

Do I love immigrants? What about people in jail? Yeah. I don’t see anywhere in this text where Jesus excludes anyone.

Can my neighbor be the LGBTQ community? Oh, pssh. Yeah. What if my neighbor they have theology that I find deeply problematic? Yeah. How about just your enemies in general? Yeah. Yeah, because if we’re not careful, we miss this, that Jesus continually destroys our attempts to shrink the definition of neighbor until love becomes manageable. And then we’ve circled all the way back to our beginning conversation about idolatry.

Because if I can try to only define my neighbor, only relate to my neighbor as with a type of love I can manage, then even the way I love has become a golden calf. And for me, that’s why Christian love is so radical, because I’ve discovered over all these years, and it took me long enough and I still am discovering it daily, make no mistake, love doesn’t mean agreement.

It doesn’t … It doesn’t mean the absence of boundaries. It doesn’t mean refusing to confront injustice. But it does mean that I never have permission to dehumanize any person standing in front of me because I know that every human being I encounter is someone Christ has entered humanity for.

And so, my proclamation would be, we can have impressive theology, we can build successful ministries, we can defend the biblical orthodoxy, sing the beautiful worship songs, understand the Hebrew and the Greek. We can have all of our arguments buttoned up about eschatology, atonement, ecclesiology, whatever, and then Jesus just tells us, “Okay, that’s all fine. Knock yourself out.” But what holds it all together and what it all must hang on is love.

Anthony: Amen.

Matthew: And then if that love disappears, then Christianity ― it may remain as a religious institution but it’s no longer that thing upon which Jesus said everything hangs.

And so, I stopped asking a long time ago, “Is my theology correct?” I don’t ask people that anymore. What I ask myself is this: Is it teaching me to love?

Anthony: Yeah.

Matthew: And if it’s teaching me to love, then I feel like at the very least I’m heading in the right direction because according to Jesus everything hangs there.

Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if I find I’m not merciful, I’m not understanding God’s mercy. If I’m not gracious to my neighbor, I don’t understand his graciousness toward me.

And one of the things we talk about in our local church, Matthew, is you know it is easy to hide behind loving your neighbor, because everybody is my neighbor. But we talk about loving our literal neighbor and that brings in to bear all the things you just spoke about, people that when it comes down to it, I just don’t agree with, but I love them because Christ first loved me and loved them.

And I just love the fact that you’re leaning into participation. We can only do it because Christ has first done it for us, in this double movement of grace. We get to join him in it. Hallelujah. Praise God.

Matthew: Amen.

Anthony: Man, Matthew, and I say this tongue in cheek, if you ever learn to get excited about the Lord, you’ll go places.

So, thank you for the joy that exudes out of you when you talk about our Lord Jesus Christ … and the written word which points us to him. It’s a beautiful thing. You’re a beloved child of God, so thank you for your time.

And I want to thank the team that helps make this podcast possible. You know who you are. Michelle, Dids, and Elizabeth ― thank you.

And Matthew, as is our tradition here at Gospel Reverb, we like to end with a word of prayer, so would you pray for us, please?

Matthew: It would be my honor, and thank you again for inviting me on. It’s been a blast.

Father, thank you for making yourself known to us in Jesus Christ. Thank you for, ah, your presence that never leaves us, your mercy that’s richer than our failures, and your love that holds everything together. Holy Spirit, awaken us to where you are already moving, and give us the courage to participate. Teach us to see your image in our neighbor, to choose love over fear, to choose mercy over judgment, and communion over distance.

May the life of Jesus become visible in us, and may everything we say and do bear witness to the beautiful goodness of God. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.

Anthony: Amen.