Homily upon Trinity 18

[Deuteronomy 10:12-21 / 1 Cor. 1:4-9 / St. Matt. 22:34-46]

Our Lord had been to Catechism Class and learned his lessons well. In today’s Gospel He has just silenced the Sadducees with proving from the Scripture that the dead will indeed rise again. The Pharisees would have thought that mega-cool. They taught that too and so they gather around Him to quiz Him a bit further, to “test him.” That needn’t be heard as trying to entrap Him. They might honestly have been intrigued and so wanted to know how orthodox His teaching was. His practice certainly left them scratching their heads at times. Hence the question about the big commandment in the Law.

The Lord supplies the stock answer, the one that every little Jewish lad learned at his father and mother’s knees. “Love the Lord your God with all your being.” And He adds without being prompted the second that is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands - says He - depend all the Law and the Prophets.” In Mark’s account the Scribe answers in delight: “You are right, teacher. You have truly said that He is one and there is no other besides Him. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole-burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (Mark 12:33)

So puzzled as the Pharisees were by the way Jesus could disregard their traditions and the shocking way He treated Scripture as His very own, they couldn’t argue with His orthodoxy. He was teaching the same truth that they themselves held and taught. Out of all the myriad laws that fill the pages of Torah, the command to love God with one’s all and the neighbor as one’s self simply tower as the twin peaks of God’s revelation of His will for mankind.

But our Lord now takes His turn in asking a question, and His question, when understood, illumines the inner connection between the two great commandments. He asks the Pharisees: “What do you think about the Christ? Whose Son is He?”

The Pharisees looked at Him like He was mentally deficient. EVERYONE knew whose Son the Messiah would be. God had promised Him to the House of David. He was David’s Son. They said as much, wondering what on earth He was up to, asking such a simple question. Comes the second question: “How is it that David, speaking in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying: ‘The Lord said to MY LORD, Sit at my right hand, until I put Your enemies under Your feet.’ If David calls Him Lord, how is He his Son?

Now there’s a puzzle for them to think through. To us who know the answer, it seems so obvious. But they were still grappling with WHOM they were talking to. An orthodox rabbi or was there more there than met the eye? I mean, what other rabbi did the things this rabbi did? Who is it that meets us in this man, Jesus of Nazareth? Who IS HE?

We sing it: “Son of God and Son of man.” That is, God’s Son and yet David’s descendant too. Both together. For Jesus is not one or the other, but our Lord is both God and Man in one person. As we confess in the Athanasian Creed, God of the substance of His Father begotten before all ages, and He is Man, born from the substance of His mother in this age. Perfect God and perfect man, composed of a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father with respect to His divinity; less than the Father with respect to His humanity. Although He is God and Man, He is not two, but one Christ.

And so the deep inner link between the two great commandments. The God who is to be loved with one’s all shows up as a neighbor whom we are to love as ourselves. But that’s still to leave the towering peaks of the twin commandments running from us to God. The shocker is when you realize that they also run from God to us.

God loved us with His all. He loved us by giving us His all. That is, He sent His Son into our flesh so that He could love His neighbor as Himself. He came among us who had categorically failed in keeping either of the twin commandments - for it is one thing to know the right answer to the catechism question and quite another to live it - but He lived those commandments and lived them perfectly. He showed them to us to be the way of life.

This was His conviction: a life that was total love was a life over which death could have no power. “The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the Law.” And when there is no sin because the life was wholly love, the sting of death is drawn and death itself crumbles. Thus His death on the cross is the highest manifestation of His love, as He loves His neighbor even to the point of letting all His neighbor’s sins be His and this is how He loves God with His all - and so from His death on the cross, death itself loses its claim for any who are placed into Him.

When you were baptized, that happened. He reached out to you and wrapped you up in that love that is His - that perfect love that at no point failed or fails. And so it is, as Paul said in the second reading today, that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. YOU, guiltless. Because you have been wrapped in Christ, whose perfect love fulfills the twin commandments, and you have been called into the fellowship of Christ, our Lord.

The fellowship, the koinonia, the communion of Christ. That is, to the communion of His body and blood, where He in perfect love goes on loving you, being neighbor to you, giving you forgiveness and the guaranteed promise that in Him God has loved you with His all. And so He sets you free to love God ever more and to learn to love your neighbor as yourself, freed to learn to love under the forgiving blood!

This is the grace that God has given us in Christ, the Son of David, the Son of God, who alone keeps the towering twin commandments and who keeps them perfectly for you, as your righteousness before God, and who causes you to grow in them as His Spirit lives in you. And for such grace we give to Him all glory and praise with His all-holy Father and life-giving Spirit now and ever and to the ages of ages! Amen.