Have you ever seen that television show, “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” Every once in awhile at seminary we play a version of that game where people ask biblical and theological questions. And most of the time the questions aren't too hard. "Who was Melchizedek?" "Who will be in heaven, and who won't?" "What does the Bible say about plastic surgery?" Stuff like that. But once in a while people are intentionally tricky. "Who were Edad and Medad?" "How much is an ephah?" "Why can’t the Brewers ever win the World Series?
I feel a little like the Rabbi Shammai, who lived in Jesus' day. The story goes a man came to Shammai and said he would be his disciple for life if Shammai could only summarize the whole Torah while standing on one leg. Shammai had a good pastoral response: he grabbed a stick and beat the man for asking such a stupid question! Believe me, I understand that temptation. But the other principal rabbi of Shammai's day was Hillel. This same man went to Hillel and asked him to summarize the whole Torah while standing on one leg. And Hillel answered, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah, all of it. Go and study it."
According to the gospels the Sadducees and their sworn enemies, the Pharisees, and their sworn enemies, the Herodians, joined forces for once in a political strange bedfellows game of "Stump the Messiah" with Jesus. They didn't believe he was the Messiah, of course, because they had all kinds of glorious expectations of what the Messiah would do, like obliterate the Romans and hand them paradise on a silver platter. But Jesus had attracted a crowd with his “easy access to God message, which cut them out and eroded their power with the people. And some of them were saying Jesus might be the Messiah.
For the Jews of Jesus' day, faith was
all about knowing. "This is the entire Torah, all of it!" Hillel
told the inquiring mind. "Go and study it." And study it, they
did, at least the religious among them. The Jews remembered the exile, when the
The rabbis responded with renewed emphasis on the study of Torah in the synagogue, because you couldn't obey God's laws if you didn't know God's laws. They counted 613 commandments. They interpreted them with every nuance they could imagine because they didn't want to go into exile again, because they wanted to be worthy of the Messiah who would obliterate the Romans and hand them paradise on a silver platter. Now here was this Jesus, teaching the common people that God loved them and would forgive them, and some were saying he was the Messiah when he was exactly the kind of person who would bring the Romans down even harder upon them, or worse, send them into exile again.
Jesus had been very successful
drawing crowds and building a reputation out in the boondocks of
First, the Pharisees and Herodians tried to catch him with a question about paying taxes as they were required, with coins that had Caesar's face on them, a graven image prohibited by the ten commandments. You all remember that story from last week’s gospel. Next, the Sadducees had their crack at him with the law of levirate marriage, which required a man to marry his deceased brother's widow to protect his family and inheritance. They raised a hypothetical question about a woman whose husbands had all died until she passed on to the seventh brother in the clan. "Who's wife will she be in heaven?" they asked him. The Sadducees loved to stump the Pharisees with this one, because the Sadducees didn't believe in a glorious afterlife, while the Pharisees did. They argued endlessly about it. Jesus handled their ridiculous scenario with ease. He said marriage is not an issue in heaven because heaven is of a different order altogether, of course. And just for good measure, he threw in a logical proof in their own rabbinic style for why heaven must exist.
Matthew says, "The crowds were astonished at his teaching." Their plan was backfiring. Instead of humiliating Jesus, they were improving his image with the people. So they tried one more trick. They asked him a question which had already been answered by the rabbis, probably already widely preached to the popular response of the people. If Jesus answered correctly, he would appear to be just another one of the rabbis. If he answered incorrectly, he would show himself to be out of step with the entire Torah tradition. In essence, they asked him the same question the inquiring disciple wannabe had asked Shammai and Hillel: "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" (Matt 22:36). Jesus didn't reach for a stick at their impertinence. He gave the traditional answer similar to Rabbi Hillel's. Jesus said to him, "`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is identical: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matt. 22:37-40).
So Jesus gave the "right answer," and then he turned the tables by asking them a question about the Messiah they could not answer, which not only left them with egg on their faces but showed the people they didn't know beans about the Messiah and could not possibly judge who the Messiah was or was not. He showed them up, showed the people they weren't the experts on God they thought they were.
This entire scene reminds me somewhat of seminary, where we spend endless hours asking hard questions about God and the Bible and the faith. Many of these questions simply have no satisfactory answer. But the whole project of theological study is helpful in three ways. It introduces us to the sum of knowledge and reflection humankind has given to these ultimate questions. It teaches us how to think with our faith, that is, how to ask the right questions. And, perhaps most importantly, it shows us the limitations of our knowledge where it comes to God. I learned that humility is the mark of the true scholar. Beware any person who presumes to be an expert on God. Humility is the beginning of all learning, because you can't learn anything if you already think you know it all. I have learned that study is only one component of the faith and not its substance. I learned, to use Augustine's famous phrase, that "faith seeks understanding." In other words, we do not study God in order to believe but because we believe. I also learned that faith is not simply an intellectual exercise in knowing about God. You remember Hillel's response to the inquiring disciple? "This is the entire Torah, all of it! Go and study it." But in Luke's version of the greatest commandment, a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks what the Torah says, and the lawyer gives what everybody knows is "the right answer:" "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus says, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live." Notice the difference? Hillel says, "Go and study it!" Jesus says, "Go and do it."
A lot of people have a faith that's all in their head. A lot of people have a life that's all in their head. And study is good, study is important, but it's not the same thing as doing. Where it comes to our faith, if study becomes an end unto itself, if study becomes an excuse for not doing, it's as useless as an umbrella in a hurricane. We can't get our head around God. We can't even understand the universe. Thomas Edison was right: "We do not know one millionth of one per cent about anything." We can't put our faith in what we or anybody else thinks about God.
From time to time the church gets bound up in its orthodoxy, or should we say God gets bound up in the orthodoxy of the church. The church is always trying to institutionalize God; but God breaks free! The issue is less about theology than life. The academics will always ask hard questions that are difficult to answer. But life asks even harder questions while also beating us with a stick from time to time. If you don't learn it in seminary, you learn it the first time you stand at a hospital bed: there are no easy answers to those hard questions, and you are either an arrogant or an insensitive fool if you try to offer any. There are no easy answers to human suffering and the silence of God or the loss of the young and the failure of our prayers. God simply does not obliterate our enemies and hand us paradise on a silver platter. So if your faith depends on you having all your questions answered and knowing everything about God, it won't even stand up to a seminary examination, let alone to the test of life. But if you want a simple answer to the question of who is God and what does God want of us, who are we and what is the meaning of our existence, God has given it to us in no uncertain terms through several spiritual traditions including straight from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth: "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." Do this, and you can forget about the rest because you will fulfill the rest if you do this.
The love of God, the love from God is the simple answer to the hardest questions. Only it's not an intellectual answer; it's a relational answer. Love God. Love others. It doesn't take much study to understand what that means. It's accessible to every person regardless of their I.Q. You don't have to read a lot of books or go to seminary to figure it out. You don't have to know the Greek word or the Hebrew root or compare a hundred translations. You simply need to do it. You need to love.
Ah, there's the rub. I think it's
easy for us to love God, at least partially. We love God with our emotions
in foot stomping, hand clapping worship. Well, maybe we don't. I suppose
we probably love God more with our heads, we love the ideas of God. But
we're supposed to love God with our whole being! And people, too. Why is it so
hard to love them? Why can't we love the people of
I think this is why we are put on this earth, to learn how to love, to learn what it takes to connect with partner and family and church and community and humanity in a way that brings life, to learn finally that only what's good for all of us is right for any of us, and to do it, to do it. Love is not a warm and fuzzy unrealistic idea in our heads, but a costly, active, interactive engagement with God's other trainees. And we answer the ultimate questions not with our words or our thoughts or our study or our heads alone, but with our feet and hands and hearts and pocketbooks, even our whole lives. We answer with our love.
I have learned to say three words which have stood me in good stead when people ask me impossible questions. "I don't know." I don't know why. I don't know how. I don't know when. But I do know who. God is who. And I do know what. The love of God is what. Which brings me to the three other words which have stood me best of all: "I love you." And I can say, with all honesty, to each of you that "I love you with the love of God."
May we pray?
Holy Source of all that is, living and loving God, teach us to love not only in our heads and with our words, but in our hearts and with our deeds. Teach us who you are by helping us to love the way you love, in Jesus name. Amen.
Mary Anne Biggs, Pastor
Nekoosa United
Nekoosa