When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had left the Sadducees speechless, they met together.
35 One of them, a legal expert, tested him.
36 “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 He replied,“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself 40 All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” (Common English Bible)
“The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers: Jesus Teaches at the Temple,” Week Four
The press conference was an astounding one. And no, I am not talking about the one that took place this week in Helsinki, although it was.
A month ago to the day, leaders from the Islamic Society of Tampa Bay held a presser to announce their offer to host, in their members’ homes, the child of every single immigrant family that had been torn apart by the White House policy of family separation. Every child.
They laid out their reasons for doing so—with a large Latino population, including a growing Latino Muslim population, in Tampa Bay, the Islamic Society felt they were in a place to bridge the cultural, racial, linguistic, and ethnic barriers in ways that many other places in the United States might not.
But also importantly, their faith dictated that they must. They cited the Qur’an—and not the proof-text verses you hear used against Islam, but the verse that says, “Whoever separates a mother from her child, Allah will separate him from his loved ones on the Day of Judgment.” And one of the Muslims shared something deeply personal: “How do we know that tomorrow, this won’t be our children or grandchildren looking for asylum?”
That question underscores the extent to which Latinx and Muslim communities find themselves in the same proverbial boat with the current presidential administration. Both are viewed with skepticism and disgust, even though on a global level, the cultures, languages, religions of Central America and the Middle East and North Africa are wholly unique things.
But they have one thing in common. Brown skin. And that has been enough to raise the question of whether or not tomorrow it will be them. They would want their children taken in by loving families rather than abusive ICE agents. And in that singular way, this is also a very Christian question, because it gets at the heart of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. If this is how you would want your children taken in if (or when) the government comes for you, then you must be willing to do the same.
And at that point, it matters not that it was Muslims, or Jews, or Christians, or atheists making such an offer of hospitality. To me, that is what makes up the basis of religious moral authority, for it follows the way in which Jesus instructs us not only to live, but to interpret our own religious texts.
But from whence does such moral authority issue? How is it later revoked? And how are we to respect any authority, if authority in turn does not respect the humanity of those who’re under it?
All of these questions, and more, form the basis of the sermon series that I have been spending these several weeks unpacking with you, which I have entitled “The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers.” Jesus teaching at the temple is a scene that happens twice in the chronology of His life—once when He is an adolescent, in the Gospel of Luke, and again during Holy Week when He is an adult.
The back-and-forth debate between the adult Jesus and the temple authorities as depicted in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is, at a glance, the sort of stuff that evangelical dreams are made of: a chance to publicly debate your theological opponents in the grandest square ever, and for all the marbles! It’s the entire basis of the God’s Not Dead franchise, and the premise behind so many other Christian stories, books, even radio adventures.
Naturally, there is quite a bit more to the picture than that, and the aim of this sermon series is, and has been, to try to paint a much more accurate portrait of what was being said, and why, when Jesus was teaching at the temple as an adult.
We have arrived now at what I think is the heart of the entire sermon series—and this entire section of Matthew’s Gospel. For me, personally, these several verses form the basis of pretty much my entire interpretive lens of the New Testament. If you recall from the first sermon of this series back on the 1st, I shared the story of Rabbi Hillel who, when asked to recite the entire Law while standing on one foot, simply got up on that one foot and said, “That which is hateful, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary, now go and learn.”
Do you see a bit—or a lot—of Rabbi Hillel in Jesus’s response to His questioners today? You should. Jesus, too, was seen as a rabbi, which means our own Christian tradition has rabbinical roots. Rabbis interpreted the Scriptures, and what Jesus represents, instead of replacing or removing the Jewish scriptures, is a *reinterpretation* of the Scriptures.
To frame this reinterpretation, I first want to give Jesus’s questioners credit: they make explicit what most Christians these days refuse to: that we all have verses that we see as more important (or most important) than other verses. We all have a “canon within the canon.” The temple leaders are asking Jesus to name His, likely in the hope that it will help them in their attempt to discredit Him.
But really, it is not an unfair question to ask of someone in a position of spiritual authority, or of someone who offers a spiritual dimension to their presence in your life. Especially when so many Christian pastors teach abusive things or minister in abusive ways, it is not wrong to ask what is most important to them—because the answer may well end up being “themselves.”
That is not the case for Jesus, though, and that is partly revealed in His choice of most important laws: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Those come from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, respectively, and Jesus chooses them with the precision of a surgeon armed with a pair of tweezers, for they are, He says, what the entirety of the Law and the Prophets hangs upon.
Already, Jesus issues a disagreement with one of the groups questioning him, the Sadducees, who only hold the Torah—the first five books of the Tanakh—to be holy Scripture. It is important to remember that on this question, Jesus actually comes down on the side of the Pharisees! As I have noted each week of this sermon series, ancient Judaism is rich and complex. (So perhaps consider that the next time we think about using the term “Pharisee” derogatorily?)
But what Jesus says here is that it really does not matter how well you think you follow the other 611 laws of the 613 in the Torah—if you are not loving God with all your being, and if you are not loving your neighbor as yourself, then your piety is largely for naught. And that is what should be a mighty word not simply to Jesus’s questioners, but to Christians today.
In this regard, what we are reading is not so much a passage on Christian ethics--though it is--but a passage on Christian interpretation of the Bible, because we could use this passage to interpret our own Scriptures. We could use it to say that we must interrogate our faith on the basis of whether we are loving God and loving our neighbor, but instead we come up with bumper sticker mentalities like "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it," or "it's all meant to be taken literally, cover to cover."
So set aside for a moment (or for much longer) whatever you may think that this response represents as a rebuke to Jesus’s questioners, and let’s talk a little bit about what it means as a rebuke to, well, us. This passage should be a rebuke to us on a personal level, as Christians but also as the other things that we are in addition to being Christian.
This has meant that on a personal level, one of the things that has been most hurtful, most painful to see over the past two to three years are the fellow diaspora Armenian Christians of mine who have embraced this xenophobia of the current White House. We know exactly what it is like for a government to remove us from the protection of the law, and what happens afterward, when we were put outside the law by the Ottoman Empire and saw three-quarters of our population extinguished in the Armenian Genocide of the First World War.
What would we have wanted our neighbors to do for us? To save us, harbor us, offer us safe passage from harm and to safety? Then why do we insist on not treating our neighbors from Central and South America, and the Middle East, thusly?
Such refusals to do so are not merely an affront against people. Jesus ties love of neighbor to love of God. One cannot exhibit the latter without also exhibiting the former, which is what makes the display by the Islamic Society Tampa Bay, for instance, so important for a Christian audience to take to heart. We cannot exhibit love of God without also love of neighbor, and we cannot claim to uphold all the rest of our own Scriptures without also upholding love of both God and neighbor.
As an Armenian Christian, I have seen what happens when it is us who were next, because along with the Assyrians and the Greeks, the Ottoman Empire came for us. Yet today, I fear many in my diaspora has forgotten that as they now come for the Latinx, for the Muslims, for...whoever is not them. Which is how white American Christianity writ large has grown to behave.
And as white American Christianity increasingly cuts itself off from its neighbors, as we increasingly focus inward and upon right doctrine rather than right action, as we increasingly subordinate Paul’s teachings to Jesus’s teachings, we similarly cut ourselves off from our God. God is revealed through our neighbors.
And who is my neighbor, the lawyer asked of Jesus in Luke 10.
Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan, and then reflects the lawyer’s same question back at him.
“The one who showed mercy,” the lawyer correctly answers, noting the "good" member of the community that was so despised to the extent that John the Evangelist remarks in John 4 that Judeans and Samaritans would share nothing with the other.
By that metric, then, the Muslims of Tampa Bay are our neighbors.
By that metric, all others whether inside or outside the church who wake up every morning prepared to do right by the oppressed and the marginalized are our neighbors.
By that metric, the oppressed and the marginalized themselves are our neighbors.
May we love them as we love ourselves and, in so doing, love the God who first loved us.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Olympia, Washington
July 22, 2018