The Trouble with Jesus
by Constance Hastings
After today, they are done with him. No more trick questions, plots, traps, attempts to bring him down. They won’t even try. He’s won every round. Get out of this fight before he destroys what’s left of your credibility.
But the lead priests, the Pharisees as they are known by their position and theological thought, give it one more try. Get him embroiled in a useless argument on a small point of law. Sooner or later, they figured Jesus would say too much in just slightly the wrong way. Then they could at least raise doubts about him even if they weren’t able to sink him.
“Teacher, (as the people thought of him) what is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” It was equivalent to drawing him into the argument of how many angels can dance of the pin head of a needle. Make the useless seem important and see the people walk away in boredom. This guy’s religion is pathetically going nowhere.
Foundational
He won’t fall for it. Jesus doesn’t deliver any new insights or even approach the legalism that tripped up so many. Cutting through their bull, he hands back what all Jews knew as “Shema”, that which they were called to hear and teach to the next generations. “Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind.” Right out of their own holy scripts, Deuteronomy 6:5, Jesus declares it the greatest commandment. He doesn’t stop there. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Leviticus 19:18. Everything else, all of the Big Ten and all the other teachings find their foundation on these principles.
Full Surrender to Love
Anyone with half a brain sees where it starts. Love. But the road Love takes is way beyond liking or warm affection. It’s dedication that burns the soul with the divine. Heart, soul, and mind means it takes everything from you. Nothing you wish for, desire, believe is right, even what you think you need is permissible in position before God, this power and being which calls unto you and yet ultimately is beyond full understanding. Love’s essence is trust in placing whatever you think you are to God’s will and purpose.
Full Sharing of Love
Love your neighbor as yourself. Necessarily, you need to be in touch with your own needs in order to be fully available to another. Again, nothing new here. Jesus was not the only wise one to suggest it. Except for this: Love of neighbor has no limitations on its object. His preaching had emphasized if you only love those who love you or who are like you, the very exclusivity of it demonstrates a lack of love. Loving neighbor is expanded here to love those you might perceive as someone with whom you have no commonality all the way to those against whom you have been conditioned and race-d. (Matthew 5:43-47) Call them your enemy, but you’ve got no excuse in God’s realm not to extend love.
It’s bigger than huge; it’s colossal. It’s costly, beyond holiday serving the poor or generously giving to places and programs that proclaim God and help others. It’s a total reorientation and rearrangement of priorities that will sacrifice one’s core self. Yes, Godly love demands a steep price.
Jesus’ questioners have no response. What’s to argue? He speaks right out of what they teach themselves. Stop. Wait. Pause. He doesn’t condemn them here as he’s done before. No challenges of being hypocrites. Let it soak in for what it meant then as well as now.
Return the Punch
He knows what they/we need. It’s his turn, and Jesus asks his fundamental question. “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” That’s what this was all about, why a grasp of the law and commandments was so crucial. Their understanding was the Messiah would not come until they were ready. These questions were meant to prepare the people to receive the one they would know as Savior.
What follows is rather foreign and confusing to modern readers, but the Pharisees and crowd around were familiar with its background. The Messiah was to claim heritage from the ancestry of King David. Yet, in one of the Psalms attributed to David and considered to be a prophecy of the coming Messiah, there’s this statement: “The LORD said to my Lord, Sit in honor at my right hand….” (Psalm 110:1) LORD was understood to be Yahweh, God of the Hebrews. The passage indicates God was speaking to the Messiah, and David refers to the Messiah as his Lord.
So? Carefully follow this. If David refers to the Messiah as Lord, and basically does so in a present tense, how can the Messiah be David’s son or ancestor?
A Decisive Blow
Well, if you have no answer, neither did they. That’s when they shut up. The struggle was in the wrestling and relinquishing what they hoped God would do. If the Messiah was in the ancestry line and followed King David, it indicated a Messianic triumph over the oppressors, the enemies of Israel. The hope was ultimately that Israel would be restored to the greatness it had known with David’s rule. Nationalism was the god they worshipped.
But if the Messiah was present and one to whom Yahweh spoke as equal and worthy of divine honor and worship, that’s a different ball game. Now you had a Messiah that was the embodiment of these great commandments, the essence of Love. To know this Messiah, to be in this new kind of kingdom, is to become the expression of Love entailing the forgiveness, mercy, and grace extended to all who claim a new kind of Savior.
This Savior’s purpose in Love of God and Neighbor would enter the world through those whom Love seeks and allow themselves to be transformed by it. Jesus’s life stands as supreme example of that. His coming execution on a cross was an act of Love, and that Love brought the hope of change and a new way of living.
That day the last bell rang in the ring of their final round in the Temple. Jesus had within him the power to deliver a knockout punch to squelch the challenges to his teaching and ministry. Instead, the Love he drew from the ancient writings Jesus extended to his challengers. They leave with the possibility of realizing God had for them a bigger design than they in their limited deliberations could fathom. Mercy and Grace in new thinking and living was available.
In a way, it was anticlimactic. It has to be.
God’s story of Love does not have a deadline to meet. It does not end.
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