Bible Text: Matthew 22:34-46 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Trinity 2023 | It’s easy to blame the Pharisee here, as usual, and the text invites us to do it – he came to test Jesus. That’s bad. And we should judge the Pharisee, obviously, because the Bible judges the Pharisee – “you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” But judge not lest you also be judged. That doesn’t mean don’t judge at all, but it does mean that when you judge you’d better apply the same standard, the Bible standard, to yourself. Look at the Pharisee. At least he’s asking a question that matters. At least he’s wondering about what the greatest commandment is. Do we talk this way? Do we think this way? Or do we just wonder about things that don’t matter? “Who do you think is going to win the Packers’ game tomorrow?” Or, “Did you hear what Jane said about Suzy’s husband?” What if we actually asked the question the Pharisee asked? What is the greatest commandment? Look at your country, at your family, at your community, what is the commandment that, if people put energy into obeying it, would make the most difference? Isn’t this something to think about, to talk about? Is it the fourth commandment? Honor your father and mother, respect God-given authority? God literally attached a promise to this commandment – if you do it, you’ll have a good life. What will happen in a society where kids are told to challenge the authority of parents and church and God? Or is it the fifth? you shall not harm your neighbor in his body, you shall not murder? Did you know abortions have increased since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, they’ve increased in our state, they’ve increased in our city. God has always wiped out kingdoms that sacrifice humans to their false gods. I just listened to a history of the conquest of Mexico. And Cortez, when he first landed on Aztec shores, was horrified to find them demanding human sacrifice from the tribes they ruled over, murdering thousands of humans and cannibalizing them. So God destroyed their kingdom, as He did to the Canaanites, to the Jebusites, to the Greeks, to the Romans, before them. So obeying the fifth commandment is pretty important. How about the sixth commandment? Is that the greatest? You shall not commit adultery, you shall lead a chaste life and husband and wife love and honor each other? The family is the foundation of all civilization, the place where children learn how to live, what to think, what their duties are. If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? God grant us faithful families. What about the seventh commandment? That at least needs to be considered. You shall not steal. This establishes the fact that God gives us property to own. What happens if we don’t own our own houses anymore, our own churches? Will we be able to raise our children as Christians, teach them as God tells us to, worship here as God commands us?
What is the greatest commandment? It’s a good question and we should ask it. Notice, by the way, that I qualified the question. I said, for your country, for human society. What’s the commandment that affects your country the most. The Pharisee doesn’t qualify it. He simply asks what is the most important commandment, period, of all, in every respect. And Jesus gives the unqualified answer, and it’s not the fourth or the fifth or the sixth or the seventh, it’s the first, which is to say, it is the fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth and ninth, but only because of the first. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is where you start. This is most important. Why? Because it tells you who you are. God made you. He is your Creator. You exist because He spoke. And He spoke because He loves. He is why life matters. Why it is precious. To love Him and to know Him is all of man. He is why you obey authority, because all authority comes from Him. He is why the life of every man, woman, and child is precious, because He made it and He loves it and He values it. He is why marriage between one man and one woman is beautiful, because it is an image of Him and His love and His faithfulness and the life He creates, He’s why private property is a necessary thing, because He rewards hard work and industry.
It is easy to look past the words Jesus uses, “with all your heart and soul and mind,” pass over it as so much repetition. But no, this is all of man. You are not only material, not only body. And you are not only soul or mind or spirit. You are body and soul and with all of it, you are to love your Creator. This is first of all beautiful. We saw how unbeautiful and unfulfilling it was during the Covid Crisis when so many stayed away from the body of Christ in church and instead listened and saw through the internet, separated by space and time from the words of Christ’s ministers and from the body of their Savior. For those with ears to hear, the obvious and beautiful lesson was to see how good and wise our Lord was to institute His Church with real people, with real voices, with real body and real blood, and with the real presence of our Lord. This is what we need. Just as grandparents doing Zoom with their grandchildren know very well it is not even close to the same, not the same that you don’t get to hold them, hug them, smell them, see them in real space and time. We are body and soul, and if we are to show love, we show it in both, and when this happens, whatever speck of it we get to experience, it is simply beautiful.
But then there is the devastatingly unbeautiful thing. That we are utterly incapable of loving God with all we have and our neighbor as ourselves. That we fail literally every day. That we complain when we should be thankful. That we care about the silliest things and fail to care about what matters. That we are so disgusted with the sins against marriage and life all around us and then we commit our own sins against husband and wife and body in our thoughts and with our words. The greatest commandment is the most beautiful commandment, but the more beautiful it is the more it shows our own ugliness, until we cry with Paul, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
And this is why any talk of the greatest commandment, any talk of serious things, has to come to the question Jesus asks next, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is He?” You notice that Jesus doesn’t ask, “Who has obeyed the greatest commandment?” Or even, “When the Christ comes, will He obey this greatest of commandments?” Because not even that would matter unless we know who this Christ is. That’s how important Jesus’ question is. On it everything hangs. Who is the Christ?
The Pharisees get it right. He’s the son of David. He’s a man. But this is totally incomplete and Jesus proves it, and He proves it, not simply to win an argument, not to engage merely in an intellectual academic debate with them, but to address them, and you, whole, body and soul, completely, and to answer our greatest need, the greatest need that corresponds directly with our failure to keep the greatest commandment.
If the Christ were only a man, what good could it do you? What kind of a kingdom could he bring, even if he did love God with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind? Maybe he could usher in a worldly kingdom, where abortion is illegal, and marriage is the norm, and private property is respected, and kids are once again taught to honor their father and their mother, but what then? What of your sin, what of the sin of everyone around you, what of the fact that his holy life and his great virtues still couldn’t put an end to all the atrocities, not without putting an end to the human race, because the evil is within us, not simply in the systems we created, but deep within us? What of the horribly glaring fact that his great love would only prove the lack in you, that while he has loved, you haven’t, and no mere man can redeem his brother?
So Jesus asks the question that matters more than any. 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.” He calls Him Lord. He calls Him God.
The Christ has to be both God and man. This is not a merely Jewish question. It’s not just a question the Old Testament asks. It isn’t parochial, cultural, confined to the concerns of this time or that nation. NO. It is the universal concern. It is your concern. Just as the Law is universal, and the Creator is universal, He made each one of us, and we are all bound to love Him and yet cannot do it, fail to do it, and so are under judgment and death. So this is the universally applicable news, the good news that should be in our hearts and minds and souls every single day without fail, that the Christ, the Savior, is both God and man, the Lord who has become our brother, the eternal Son of the Father and at the same time the child of the Virgin Mary. He at one and the same time can obey the law in our place, because He is one of us, and His obedience, His love, can avail, can be powerful, for you, for every sinner, because it is eternal, infinite, divinely wrought by the God-man Jesus Christ.
So here stands Jesus before them and before us. And the question, the question of the greatest commandment, finds its fulfillment in Him. He loves His Father with all His heart and soul and mind and loves His neighbor as Himself. He did it then and He does it now. He did it then when loving His Father and loving you demanded everything from his heart and soul and mind and body, required Him to give His soul to the torment of being abandoned by His Father, required Him to give His body to the torture of the cross, demanded the deepest sighs of His spirit and the very blood of his veins, and He gave it, He gave it all, because He loved God and He loved you wholly and completely and fully.
And He still loves you, still loves His Father with all his heart and soul and mind. Completely and fully, as only the God-man can. So He speaks His Word to you. So He forgives you. So He sets His body and blood before you. And tells you take eat, take drink. The Lord’s Supper is the pledge of His love. It embraces body and sprit, heart and soul and mind, all of Him and all of us, in a communion that directs our love to God and to one another, because we receive His love, His forgiveness, His body and His blood, all of Him, the full keeping of the greatest commandment.
We see Jesus obey the greatest commandment, and the beauty is that the only time the greatest commandment is obeyed, the only time in human history, since the fall of our first parents, the only time it is obeyed perfectly with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the mind, it is done for you, by your God who has become your brother. And you see it again today. He loves you perfectly today and so gives you Himself. And so every question of commandment, what we should do, how we should live, why it all matters, finds its answer in Him and in His Church, where you are, where you belong, and where you begin to love your God with all you have and you neighbor as yourself, until, by Christ’s great love, by the power of His Spirit, and by the will of His Father, you do it perfectly in the resurrection, world without end. Amen.