Bible Text: Matthew 22:34-46 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Trinity 18 | Five days before His death on the cross, when Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the crowds praise Him. They sing Hosanna to him, “Save us now, O Son of David!” The Pharisees and religious elite see this and they rightly understand that no one but God deserves this kind of praise. This is the first and greatest commandment, that man give God alone all the glory and praise. When a few years after our Gospel reading King Herod allowed the people to hail him with the words, “The voice of a god and not of a man!” what did God do? He struck him down, because Herod didn’t give the glory to God, and, as the Bible graphically details, he was eaten by worms and died. And when Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon gave himself and not God the glory for all his accomplishments, God took away his mind, his sanity, and had him roam around the fields on his hands and knees like a beast until he learned humility. It was with this in mind that the sainted Lutheran musician J.S. Bach wrote soli Deo gloria on every single one of his manuscripts. To God alone be the glory. As the Lord speaks through His prophet Isaiah, “I am the Lord. That is my name. My glory I give to no other.” So when the Pharisees see Jesus accepting the praise of the crowds and of the little children, they say, “Do you hear what they are saying?” And they expect Jesus to rebuke the crowds and the children who are crying out Hosannas to Him as if He were God. But Jesus doesn’t rebuke the children, he encourages them. He says, “Yes. [I hear what they’re saying.] Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have perfected praise’?” Jesus takes the praise. He quotes from Psalm 8 as if it were obvious that these kids should praise Him. He says that if the children didn’t praise him, the rocks would have to. He doubles down. And there is no mistaking it. The glory that the Lord gives to no other, Jesus takes for Himself.
This is why the Pharisees come two days later to interrogate Jesus, it’s to confront him on exactly this, that he receives praise as if he were God; and the question this lawyer asks is calculated to trap Jesus. That’s what the text says, he was testing him. What is the greatest commandment? He asks. Everyone knows what the greatest commandment is. It’s to love God above all things, with all your heart and soul and mind. And the implicit accusation against Jesus here is obvious. If the greatest law is to love God above all things, then Jesus has failed in the greatest part of the law, because he’s taken the praise that belongs to God and given it to Himself.
Now this is always what legalists do. They don’t know what the law is for. So they’re always using it to judge others. It’s how they make themselves feel religious. In trying to justify themselves, make themselves look good, they apply the law to others and see how others have failed, while refusing to apply it to themselves to see how they have failed. They find fault in others and never stop to think that the very thing they’re accusing others of is what they’re doing. If you’re asking what the greatest commandment is, know for certain that you’re asking the question that will condemn you. We just sang, “Lord, Thee I love with all my heart,” but you know very well that your heart has loved other things more than God, that you have put money and pleasure and reputation and pride above the honor of your God, that you have worried instead of entrusting your life to Him, that your prayers have faltered and you have daydreamed of mammon and earthly treasure while calling on the name of the Most High, that this is the miserable condition of our sinful nature. And so irony of ironies that the Pharisees would ask Jesus what the greatest commandment is as if to judge him. Have they loved God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind? And if they haven’t, if they stand like all sinners guilty before God, what do they need? They need a Savior. And here the Savior stands before them, the only man who has ever loved God with all his heart and soul and mind, the only man who has ever loved his neighbor as himself. He stands before them.
So Jesus asks them the question that they should have asked, that sinners should be asking, that we need to ask. When we see our failure to love. When we see our great need for forgiveness from our God. Then we have no business asking about the law. It will only condemn, expose our pride and our envy and our resentment and our apathy, and knock us further down. But this question, the question on which the history of the world turns, is what we need asked, “Who is the Christ?”
Jesus knows the answer the Pharisees will give. It’s again obvious. He is the Son of David. He is the One promised in all the law and the prophets, the entire Old Testament, to come from the line of David and rule over the people of Israel. The One to be born in Bethlehem, the city of David, (as the prophet Micah said, But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from everlasting.), the One to be born of a virgin in the line of David (as the prophet Isaiah declares, “Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.) And so the Christ is a man, he shares our human nature. He’s the son of David. But Jesus isn’t done. How then does David in the Spirit call Him Lord, saying, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool?” David calls his son his Lord. Fathers don’t call their sons lord. So if the Christ is David’s son, how does he call him Lord? And the Pharisees won’t answer. They can’t answer. But we know the answer. David calls his descendent Lord because Jesus is not only the son of David, He’s the Son of God. He’s not only a man, but God Himself in human flesh. This is why the children praise Him. Why the rocks would praise Him if we were silent. It’s why they cry out, Save us now! Hosanna in the highest!
Here is a Savior who because He is a man can be our substitute, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who are under the law. Here is a Savior who because He is a man can bear our sorrows and suffer for us the just wrath of God against our sins. Here is a Savior who because He is a man can sympathize with all our human woe and cares and pains because he has felt them in his own body and soul. But here also is a Savior who because He is God can pay for all our sins, one drop of whose blood is enough to wash them all away, because this is the blood of God Himself. Here is a Savior who is eternal, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, whose promise cannot be broken. Here is a Savior who is almighty and uses all His power for your sake. Here is the Savior we need.
Luther once said that whenever you hear talk of the Father and the Son in the Bible, you can always assume the Spirit is there too, there is the whole Trinity, three distinct persons in one inseparable God. But here we don’t need to make any assumptions. The Lord said to my Lord, David says, and He says it by the Spirit. And it is the same Spirit who convinces us to call Jesus, the eternal Son of the Father, our Lord, who has become a man for us and is seated now at the right hand of the power of our Father, still in our human flesh, which He gives us now to eat and to drink for our salvation.
And beauty of beauties, it is by His great love for us that we can finally talk about the law, about loving God and our neighbor, without judging others and without terror of conscience. It’s absolutely impossible to love a God who is merciless, who will throw you into hell because of your failures, and cast you away from His presence because of your unclean heart. But our Lord Jesus Christ comes to us in mercy, showing us the loving face of our Father who spared nothing to make us His own. He comes to us and loves God perfectly with all His heart, and soul, and mind, even obeying His Father’s will that for our sake He be forsaken on the cross and suffer in our place. He comes to us and loves His neighbor perfectly, all of us, even His enemies, with a love that lays down His life for us and puts us before Himself. And His perfect love saves us perfectly. There is no condemnation. There is peace, pure and free, between us and God.
And so we can sing and mean, “Lord Thee I love with all my heart.” We can love our neighbors for whom our Lord Jesus died. We can pray all heaven and earth would join us in praising the Lord who has bought us by His blood. The veil is lifted, the curtain torn, there will be no need for the rocks to praise the Son of God as we come today into the house of the Lord and join the babes and nursing infants in singing our Hosannas to the Son of David.
In nomine Jesu.