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 Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Six
My mom and sister are here visiting from Kansas City this weekend for Sadie’s birthday this weekend, so this seems an opportune time to share with y’all the…let’s just say wildly varying approaches my sister and I took to the rules when we were children.
So fastidious was my devotion to rule-following as a kid that among my more frequently-recounted antics were the following:
-Creating my own consequences chart outlining the punishments I should face for breaking rules
-Watching the speedometer in the car and writing my mom speeding tickets when she went over
-And, after issuing my mom multiple speeding tickets, asking, “Why doesn’t daddy break the law?”
Meanwhile, my sister’s approach to the rules my parents laid down can be summed up in one legendary preschool-aged quip from her: “This is America, I make my own rules!”
Can you spot which of us was maybe fated to grow up to be a pastor, and which of us wasn’t?
I share these stories not just out of nostalgia or as a sop to my visiting family, but because today’s whatabout question, “What about the rules?” is a particularly fraught one when you combine the ethical expectations Jesus Christ makes of His followers as their teacher with the quintessentially American impulse to, as my sister exclaimed, make your own rules. We all have rules, even very likely the most libertarian among us, and whether and how we adhere to them does indeed say much about us.
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.
Today’s whatabout question is, “What about the rules?” And this is a question that has a lot of unspoken expectations and experiences behind it. We in the church are very capable of talking a good game about the grace God offers, but we have a tendency to attach strings to that grace.
Consider, for instance, the miles-long statements of faith that congregations will expect new members to sign as a condition of church membership—and the expectation, whether spoken or unspoken, that membership in a church with that narrow of a worldview equates to salvation. It’s ironic, because to be able to understand everything in such a statement, all the theology and jargon, is a tall ask of a brand-new person who hasn’t had much opportunity for discipleship and enrichment. In those scenarios, it really isn’t about the discipleship and enrichment so much as it is about power, of gatekeeping and the power of trying to make that gate as narrow as humanly possible.
That scenario represents on paper the opposite pole of a purposefully noncreedal denomination like ours, which expects no such gesture from its members, but that does not immunize us from having our own arbitrary expectations, whether spoken or unspoken, over our siblings in Christ. Whether it is an unspoken dress code on Sunday mornings, or an expectation that women limit themselves to food- and child-centric roles at the church, each congregation has its own culture of expectations-that-are-really-rules that are not always easy, or even healthy, to try to navigate. And these rules can, for some Christians, do more harm than good in their own relationships with God.
The opposite tack to this isn’t the theological equivalent of anarchy, though—it’s what Jesus is teaching us here in Matthew 22, and what I worry we may have forgotten about here in the church.
As a note up top about this passage, it is critical to remember that Jesus is a rabbi—His followers address Him as such—and throughout this chapter, He is participating in a longstanding Jewish tradition of debating with other rabbis—in this case, Pharisees and Sadducces, two differing sects of rabbinical authorities. These other rabbis present Jesus with a question intended to be very difficult to answer—after all, there are 613 total commandments in the Torah, how is Jesus to pick out just one call it the most important and not overlook a whole bunch of other vital commandments?
Jesus’s answer here is entirely within the ancient Jewish mainstream—there is a famous story of the ancient Jewish rabbi Hillel the Elder, who slightly predated Jesus. Hillel was confronted by a questioner who told him that he would convert to Judaism on the spot if the rabbi could recite the entirety of the Law while standing on just one foot. The rabbi stood up on one foot and replied, “That which is hateful to your neighbor, never do. The rest is commentary, now go and learn.”
This is the essence of Jesus’s reply to His fellow rabbis in Matthew 22, although He puts it differently. He says that upon two commandments—love of God with your whole self, and love of your neighbor as yourself—hang the entirety of the Law and the prophets. These two commandments are themselves from the Law—love of God with your whole self is Deuteronomy 6:5, and love of neighbor as yourself is Leviticus 19:18.
What Jesus is emphatically not saying—but what I think many of us Christians have come to believe, and which I once believed, but no longer do—is that the Law is irrelevant to us as Christians because we have the New Covenant of the Gospel. The fancy seminary word for that is supersessionism, and a lot of our Jewish neighbors rightly take offense to it, because we are claiming their sacred texts as part of our sacred texts while simultaneously declaring those texts null and void.
But what Jesus is offering is an interpretation of the Law for how we are to uphold the Law. He is saying that unless you follow these two commandments of love of God and love of neighbor, it does not matter a whit how good you think you might be at following the other 611 rules in the Law. And there, there is a real lesson for us as Christians.
Think of all the spoken and unspoken, written and unwritten expectations we put on other Christians, whether it’s expected gender roles, especially of women in the church in ways that keep them from positions of authority, or whether it’s expecting adherence to a litany of beliefs that have little to do with Scripture but which conveniently create a theological echo chamber within the church. Jesus is looking over all of that and saying, “None of it matters.” These sorts of rules aren’t a reflection of our love of God so much as a reflection of our own love of personal status and power roles, and they certainly aren’t a reflection of love of neighbor in stifling their own faith in God as revealed through Jesus Christ. Far from allowing for the flourishing of faith, these expectations and rules we can have end up driving people away from faith.
So, what is the way forward? How do we avoid both the theological equivalent of my childhood habit of writing my mom speeding tickets for going five miles per hour over the limit and the theological equivalent of my sister’s “This is America, I make my own rules!” pronouncement?
Go back to what I said about supersessionism—about the tendency for Christians to simply discard the Law as irrelevant to the Gospel. It isn’t. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater here not only gives offense to Judaism, it waters down our Christianity. Jesus’s response to the question of which commandment is the most important is not, “None of them.” His response is, “These two commandments, and following them is my interpretation of how best to fulfill the Law.”
We recognize that the Law is of God when we acknowledge that freedom in Jesus Christ doesn’t mean a Scriptural free-for-all in which we get to just zero out entire books of the Bible. Jesus is calling us to take the Law seriously here. The way we do that is not by either erasing it or adding to it, it is by understanding and appreciating its core the way He does, and the way Hillel the Elder did.
What Jesus is really offering us here is a mirror to hold up to our own faith, and to our own actions. Last week we heard Jesus’s brother James tells us that faith without faithful works is dead, and this is a natural follow-up, because Jesus asks whether our works are indeed faithful: do they come from a place of love of God and love of neighbor, and do they result in love of God and love of neighbor?
So, what about the rules? It’s important we have them, and it’s important we don’t have them unnecessarily. We have a deeply unfortunate tendency to look down other faiths and their rules while we have plenty of arguably unnecessary rules ourselves, rules whose contributions to love of God and neighbor are dubious at best. But if we can free ourselves from this tendency, through Jesus Christ who liberates us from all sin, we can live not merely in freedom, which is rich enough, but in truth. That as He said in John 8, we shall know the truth, and the truth shall set us free—the truth about who we are, whose we are, and how we are meant to be as a result, that will free us!
And what a glorious way of being that can be then, of following and living for our Lord and Savior.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
October 18, 2020