Some questions are not meant to be answered… or… if answered, the answer is a trap.
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The date is November 19th, 1999. A man named John Carpenter, an IRS agent, is making an appearance on the gameshow Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, hosted at the time by Regis Philbin. In a way that no one had in the history of the show, he easily answered all the questions up until he reached the $500,000 dollar level. He had not used any of the lifelines: 50/50, Ask the Audience, or Phone a Friend. After he is asked the million dollar question, he does decide to Phone a Friend, in this case his father. Once his father is on the phone, he says, “I don’t actually need help with this question, I just wanted to let you know I am about to win 1 million dollars.” And before Regis could ask “Is that your final answer?” he answered the question correctly and won the million dollars.
We come this morning to the end of Jesus’ engagement with the most important religious leaders of his day.
As we approach the end of our liturgical year in a few weeks, we will not follow to the end of this Gospel for now, when Jesus is betrayed and sent off to be crucified. And we will not hear more about the Scribes and Pharisees again for the time being.
But as we leave the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Chief Priests, let us not forget about them; because as we have seen, their story here has been preserved down the ages for our benefit. And so before we watch them exit stage left, let’s take a closer look at why they finally turned away from Jesus why we must resist the temptation and the real possibility of doing the same.
As we have seen week-by week lately, these leaders have asked Jesus many questions:
By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority? They asked when Jesus entered the temple and drove out the people making it a place of business.
Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
If a woman becomes a widow 7 times and remarries each time, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?
And today, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
They asked him this last question, we are told, in order to test him – and this is how.
Jesus had developed a reputation for eating and drinking with moral outcasts and failures. Even some of his disciples and some women like Mary Magdalene who followed him had come from that kind of background.
In trying to understand why he did this, one of the Pharisees thought that Jesus was simply not smart. When he saw Jesus allowing a former prostitute to kiss his feet and wash them with her tears and dry them with her hair, he said, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman is touching him – that she is a sinner” (Luke 7.39)
In our story today, it seems the theory is this: he does know that they are sinners, but he hangs out with them (and they seem to want to hang out with him) because he is working with a distorted version of the commandments.
And so in asking him, “which commandment in the law is greatest,” they are expecting him to expose himself as a false teacher.
In their minds, if they can get him to place a value on one of the commandments over another, they can then point out the hole in his holiness. If he comes out and says that the sins of his friends were not a big deal, this would be an immediate dealbreaker for the crowds (Jesus’ friends, we remember, were outcasts from the crowd).
If they can get him to come out and start freestyling on the commandments of God, then they will have the ammunition not only to discredit him with the crowds (who deep down are conservatives like them) but also to get him into legal trouble with the High Priest and religious establishment.
However, Jesus is again aware of their schemes and answers them directly from the Old Testament: “Love the Lord your God…” he quotes from the Ten Commandments in Exodus and “Love your neighbour…” from Leviticus. Jesus draws these two Scriptures together in order to teach the Pharisees that these two commandments are not in opposition to each other; in fact, he says, they are very much alike.
The Pharisees, we see in the Gospels, understood loving God as somehow in conflict with loving people. To them, loving God’s word meant following it and applying it rigidly even when it cuts across the lived experiences of people.
Jesus’ radical and challenging response to them is that their teachings actually show the opposite: that they do not love God.
What the commandments really teach is that loving God truly should open up for us a whole world of opportunities to apply that love to every difficult situation around us. Loving God gives us the will and the courage to go to those in need, to speak the truth in love, and to offer all we have to support them. Loving God is not the end but rather the beginning of our concern for the world around us.
In the next chapter Jesus says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.”
They were picking and choosing which laws to follow, and the ones which appealed to them the most were the ones that did not involve humbling themselves to care for other people.
Any attempt to separate these two commandments or to confuse the relationship between them, Jesus says, will cause us to fall short of the glory God intends for us.
Now, Jesus turns to them and asks them a final question.
“What do you think about the Christ (or Messiah), whose son is he?”
They answer immediately, because the answer must be obvious. Of course, anyone who has read Second Samuel 7 and other related passages knows that the Messiah will be a descendant of David.
But Jesus shows them they have missed something. One of the passages speaking about the Messiah, Psalm 110, refers to the Messiah, in the voice of David, as Lord. “The LORD says to my Lord – to David’s Lord.”
When Jesus says this, we read that they couldn’t give him answer, and so what they had already said turned out to be their final answer. From this time on none of them dared to ask him any more questions.
And in so doing they walk away for the last time from their Saviour.
Jesus’ question to them and their response goes back to their initial question to him about authority. In chapter 21, after he chased the money changers out of the temple, the blind and the lame came to him, right there in the temple, and he cured them.
This should have been significant to them, if they knew their bibles as well as they seemed to think. In Second Samuel 5, when King David was securing his kingdom after the death of King Saul, he approached Jerusalem with an army. The inhabitants of the city said, “You will not come in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back.” This did not stop David, and he told his soldiers to climb up the water shaft into the city and attack the blind and the lame, “those whom David hates.” Because he said this, from that day on no blind or lame person was allowed into the house of God. We see even in Jesus’ day that they are often begging just outside the temple or on the road leading up to it.
When Jesus enters the temple, however, and heals the blind and the lame, the children start singing, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” and the Pharisees got very angry. They did not see the connection between what Jesus was doing and the prophecy about the Son of David. But what did the prophecy actually say? “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (2 Samuel 7.12-14)
The true Son of David will be called the Son of God. David, as we heard just now, was a warrior and a killer, and because he was a man of bloodshed, he was not the one to build the temple of God. The temple would be built by a Man of Peace, but his natural son and heir Solomon (which means peace) also proved to be unworthy.
Jesus welcoming the blind and the lame into the temple and healing them is revealing before their eyes the kingdom God had in mind – the Kingdom of Heaven. His parables had tried to tell the Pharisees more about what the Kingdom of Heaven was like, but they didn’t get it, and they weren’t interested.
In appealing to them in this way, I believe Jesus was saying something like this:
“You think that I have invaded your turf, but the truth is I came here today to be with you. I have made myself available to answer any questions you have, but you think I am only trying to humiliate you. I have used my authority to make the temple a better place, but you think I am trying to upstage you. You think I am here just for the love of the debate, but I came here to tell you the truth that will set you free.”
Or, as Jesus said to the woman at the well, “If you truly knew who is standing in front of you, you would be asking a different question.”
Jesus sees that all the self-important remarks and deceitful questions are symptoms of a heart problem, a blockage somewhere that is preventing the love of God from flowing through them as it should. He has made his one last attempt to remove this blockage before it becomes spiritually fatal. But as a spiritual director once said to me, Even God cannot change some people’s minds (which, by the way, should give us some perspective on our own ability to do so).
What they have chosen for themselves is to spend the rest of their lives away from the presence of God, and this is what Jesus is referring to when he talks about hell. There is nothing worse than turning away from what our heart, soul, and mind are desperately longing to love. That is why it is the first and greatest commandment – it is what we were made to do.
What makes separation from him so terrible (and described in such fiery and devastating images) is the contrast with what we are rejecting when we walk away from Jesus.
What the Pharisees and others in this story have done can be compared to this:
It is like having a terminal disease and when a cure is found and brought to you, you take the vial and throw it out the window.
It is like finding just the amount of money lying on the street that you need to pay off your impossible debt, and simply stepping over it and walking away.
It is like saying “I don’t” while standing at the altar about to marry the love of your life, whom you’ve found only after many years of searching
Surely the purpose of all their study, and self discipline, and debate was so that they could get closer to God. But when God came closer to them, they didn’t want anything to do with him.
And, you know, I think this has something to say to us as well. We also can get caught up in pursuing so many things and even pursuing God in so many places, that we fail to see he is right in front of us. Like the Pharisees we may choose to ask him all the wrong questions and in return give him all the wrong answers.
I know from my life – and I believe I am not alone in this – that often what I am so anxious or unhappy or dissatisfied about not having, is something that God has already given to me but I am not receiving.
God has doors waiting open for us that we will not enter.
He has placed opportunities before us we didn’t even know to ask for, and we will not grasp them.
He has put people in our lives to be with us and accompany us, and we push them away.
He has given us not only what we most need but also what we most want, but we insist on needing and wanting something else.
We so often feel unfulfilled and incomplete, but we do not come to the one who can and who wants to fulfil us and complete us.
The condition to all of this is that we must receive all of these blessings God’s way, and the little Pharisee in our hearts only wants to do things our way.
But in all of this there is tremendous good news. Jesus has not closed the doors for us, he has not withdrawn the opportunities, he has not taken back the blessings. They are still available to us.
All we have to do is to come to him. As we said in one of the prayers at morning prayer this week, the good news of Jesus is full of wholesome medicines by which all the diseases of our souls may be healed.
If today you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as the Pharisees did.
Jesus’ ministry to the Pharisees ends here, but it is not over for us.
Peter says that he is patient, and that Jesus has not yet returned because he wants us to have more time to accept him and all that he offers.
This is not a time to remain skeptical, questioning everything Jesus says, and being on the fence about whether he is worth your time or not.
Today and everyday, we are invited to walk through the door to joy, to hear Jesus knocking at the door to our hearts and open up for him. He says, “If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” May it be so, both now and forever.