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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
American actor, director, and television host LeVar Burton more than two years ago served as a guest host of the television show Jeopardy!, and he presently is in the works to be the regular host of the latest T-V adaptation of the board game Trivial Pursuit. Burton apparently enjoys different categories of questions and their answers, or, in the case of Jeopardy!, different categories of answers and their questions. In today’s Gospel Reading, there arguably are two different categories of questions asked and answers given, and this morning, as we consider primarily today’s Gospel Reading, we direct our thoughts to the theme, “Questions and Answers about Law and Gospel”.
As we have been hearing for several weeks in our series of Gospel Readings of mostly‑consecutive portions of St. Matthew’s Divinely‑inspired Gospel account, Jesus has been asked and has answered different questions from a number of different groups of Jews in Jerusalem. For example, in last week’s Gospel Reading (Matthew 22:15-22), the Pharisees and Herodians asked Jesus a question about paying taxes, and His answer left them marveling. Then, in the intervening verses that our series of Gospel Readings skipped over (Matthew 22:23-33), St. Mathew tells how the Sadducees asked Jesus a question about levirate marriage, and His answer left the crowd astonished. Finally, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, in the dramatic climax of this series of confrontations, another Pharisee—a “lawyer” in the sense of an expert in Old Testament “Law” (NIV, AAT)—in order to test Him, asked Jesus about the “greatest” (NIV, AAT, NEB) commandment in the Law, and Jesus not only answered that question with two commandments, but Jesus also asked the Pharisees a series of questions about the Gospel that not only were they unable to answer but that also left no one daring to ask Him any more questions.
According to the Jews’ tradition, there were 613 individual commandments—248 of which commandments ordered something positive, and 265 of which commandments forbid something negative—and some people weighed the commandments’ “greatness” by the penalties given for breaking them. In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus gave two essentially equally-great commandments: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself, an apparent reference to today’s Old Testament Reading (Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18). We usually understand those two commandments as the summaries, respectively, of the first and second “table” or “tablet” of the Ten Commandments, however those Ten Commandments might be distinguished, numbered, and divided. Even if Jesus had answered with only one greatest commandment—for example, the commandment to “love”, as the Divinely‑inspired St. Paul gives in writing to the Romans (Romans 13:8, 10)—we still would be in trouble! For, we fail to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our minds, and so we fail to love our neighbors as ourselves. By nature we hate God, and we are not afraid of Him, and we do not trust in Him, so we do not and even can‑not submit to His law (for example, Romans 8:7; confer Apology of the Augsburg Confession II:8, 14). We may not even love ourselves, and so much less do we love our neighbors. Because of the original sin that we inherit and our actual sins that result, we deserve nothing but both death here and now and torment in hell for eternity. Except, God calls and thereby enables us to repent: to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust God to forgive our sin, and to want to stop sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives us. God forgives our original sin. God forgives our actual sin of failing to love Him as we should, of failing to love our neighbors as we should, or whatever our actual sin might be. God forgives us all our sin for Jesus’s sake.
As we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus told the Pharisees—and tells us—that on the commandments to love God and to love our neighbors “depend”, or “hang” (KJV, NIV, NKJV), all the Law and the Prophets. In other words, we might say that all of the Holy Scripture of at least the Old Testament is fulfilled in love of God and love of neighbor: not our love of God and love of neighbor, but Jesus’s love of God and love of neighbor. There on the cross is perfect love of God and perfect love of neighbor! Jesus seems to have asked the Pharisees about the identity of the Christ—the Messiah, the promised Savior—precisely in order to help them—and us—understand that only He, the Son of God in human flesh as the Son of David, perfectly loves God by keeping all the Commandments and perfectly loves His neighbor by paying for our failure to keep all the Commandments. The Holy Scripture of the Old Testament includes David in the Holy Spirit’s both calling his Son, the Christ, “Lord” and reporting what seems to be a conversation within the Holy Trinity, God the Father’s telling God the Son to sit at His right hand until He puts His enemies under His feet. And, after that humble Son of God and Son of David died for our sins, exalted He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, and He now sits at that right hand of God the Father Almighty. When we trust God to forgive us for Jesus’s sake, then God does forgive us, and God forgives us through His Word and Sacraments.
Like the Thessalonians whom St. Paul described in today’s Epistle Reading (1 Thessalonians 2:1-13), when we hear the Word of God, we receive it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the Word of God. That Word of God with water in Holy Baptism makes us dead to sin and alive to God in Christ (Romans 6:9-11), resolving the tension, as it were, between the law, which always and only accuses our sinful nature of sin, and the Gospel, which declares and so makes us righteous for Christ’s sake (confer Scaer, CLD VIII:55). In the mutual conversation of private confession, pastors help us sort out our “Questions and Answers about Law and Gospel”, perhaps examining and instructing us, before consoling us with individual Holy Absolution (confer Smalcald Articles III:iv, viii:1), the Word of God and the pastor’s touch, and then they admit us to the Holy Supper. There, in the Holy Supper, by the Word of God, bread is the Body of Christ given for us and wine is the Blood of Christ shed for us and so give us forgiveness of sins and so also life and salvation.
What flows from God’s so forgiving us is our at least wanting to keep God’s Commandments. God’s love for and in us creates our love for Him and our neighbors. God in us makes possible both our loving the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our minds and our loving our neighbors as ourselves. God in us also makes possible our loving ourselves! As we prayed in the Collect of the Day and will echo in the Post-Communion Collect, we think and do what is pleasing in God’s sight, that our faith in Him may never waver and our love for one another may not falter. And, when we fail to walk, as the Epistle Reading called it, in a manner worthy of God, as we will fail, then with daily repentance, we live in His forgiveness of sins.
This morning we have considered “Questions and Answers about Law and Gospel”. These are questions of eternal “life and death”. Our sins put us in real “jeopardy” and so our seeking and receiving forgiveness of sins is not a “trivial pursuit”, in the sense of something unimportant. But, when we repent, then God forgives us for Jesus’s sake. So, as we sang in the Introit (Psalm 9:1-2, 9-10; antiphon: v.18), we give thanks to the Lord with our whole heart and recount all of His wonderful deeds.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +