Proper 25A
In this corna! Weighing in at a paltry 135 pounds of emaciated flesh, Jesus of Nazareth! And in this corna! Weighing a combined 1,600 portly pounds, the Pharisees! [Booooo!]
For the last few weeks, we’ve been dealing with this sequence in Jerusalem in which Jesus is tangling with the Jewish leadership. He takes on the chief priests, the scribes, the Sadducees, and now the Pharisees come after him with their last best shot:
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Tricky! Another trap! But Jesus turns it around on them. Of course the Shema would be good, but then he tacks on “the golden rule”. In Mark’s version of the story, it is a scribe asking this question of Jesus. This is how I imagine a modern retelling of that exchange:
Scribe: OK, I’ve got a tough one. Which commandment is greatest?
Jesus: Love God with all your heart, mind, and strength. But also love your neighbor as yourself.
Scribe: Huh! That is some serious Jedi $#@! Wow! There wasn’t actually supposed to be an answer, but you made one! Do you have any room in your posse for me?
So Matthew doesn’t quite have such an exchange. He has Jesus respond then give it back. It is something like a quick jab followed by an uppercut that knocks them flat on their backs. If the Messiah is the Son of David, how can David call him Lord? That shuts them up pretty well.
Over at the Hardest Question, Danielle Shroyer deals with the time/space conundrum in Jesus’s rebuttal query. If he is before David, how can he come after him? And why didn’t we see that coming?
Jesus’s question was
“Whose son is he?”
Of course, this raises for many all of the theological soft tissue, dealing with Jesus as the divine Son of God and the human Son of David. But that is all 2000 years of theological extrapolation. I’m intrigued by how they would have heard this suggestion. If we were to answer the question, we wouldn’t say David’s son, we’d say God’s, right? But they are thinking about David, divine ruler of the chosen people. They are thinking about lineage and promises to the people and a forgiving and splendid God of theirs and their ancestors. The Messiah would no doubt come from that family line.
The power for me in this message comes from their expectation and Jesus’s enunciation. They expected the Messiah to be a divinely aided human ruler who would liberate the Jewish people from Rome. Jesus enunciated our human relationship to God and one another. That our own expectations are to avoid these principles, instead focusing on a divinely-created spiritual ruler, leaves us in strange theological turf.
Questions
In asking the Pharisees about the Messiah, was Jesus intending to shut them up, or did He have something else in mind?
Is it possible that we, like the Pharisees fail to understand that Jesus’s question was meant to illustrate His answer to their question?
Could it be that the lesson about Christ’s nature is not physical, but a very reflection of the great commandment?
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