Law and Gospel

A reading from the Gospel according to Matthew.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

Chapter 22, beginning at verse 34.

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.

Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?

And he 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 great and first commandment, and a second is like it.

On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

Now, while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, What do you think about the Christ?

Whose son is he?

They said to him, The Son of David.

He said to them, How is it then that David 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 then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?

And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Put half a dozen people in a room and ask them what the best diet is.

Between the herbivores and the carnivores and the omnivores, you can expect that the conversation will be lively.

Probably even more than lively, because you know there's going to be some heads budding between, say, the carb lovers and the carb haters, and so on and so forth.

It seems that asking a what's best question is an easy way to get people to speak their mind.

And sometimes when the conversation gets spicy, someone will say a silly thing that others in that conversation will latch on to.

Mock, maybe, ridicule, but not let go.

And I bring this up because there was a lawyer who came to Jesus and asked a what's best question.

Now he wasn't asking Jesus about food.

Instead, his question ran like this.

Teacher, he said, which is the great commandment in the law.

Now it seems to me that when we hear this, we probably kind of yawn and roll our eyes and imagine that he's trying to get Jesus tangled up in some esoteric hair splitting over a fine point of dogma.

But before you roll your eyes, at least think about this.

All of us are really interested in those kinds of questions that have to do with how we are to live.

We know that, given all of the choices available to us, for example, it it is a significant and important question to ask.

What should I eat?

But we also know that there are even more important and bigger questions than diet.

Questions like, how should I live?

What is this life all about?

And what am I supposed to do and get out of my time here on this earth?

How do I prioritize it?

Those are significant questions indeed.

And it seems to me that that's the way that we today would ask this lawyer's question.

In other words, even though he's trying to test Jesus, even though this lawyer is hoping that Jesus will get all tangled up in answering the question and wind up saying something, blurting out something that's indefensible, that they can latch on to and hold against him, still, that doesn't mean that the question is a frivolous one.

Actually, it's quite a significant question, and we know that it is because Jesus treats it as such.

And to a significant question, he gives a significant answer.

Jesus says, if you wish to know what life is all about, how you are to live, and what you should do and spend your time in while you are here on this earth.

Well, it can be summed up in just one word with two applications.

That one word is love.

And Jesus says this love is directed in two ways.

First of all, you are to love God, and you are to love God with the entirety of your being, with all your heart and soul and strength and mind.

However, you want to say it, the point here is that you are to love God above everything else, that is more than anything else, including yourself.

God calls for that kind of love.

But then Jesus says, there is also a love that you should show to your neighbor.

And this is a lesser love, not to the same degree as your love for God, but nevertheless a significant love because you are supposed to love your neighbor in the same way that you love yourself.

That is, whatever you do for self-care, you are also to do for neighbor care.

And Jesus says, in this command to love, love God, and love neighbor, you can tie together everything that the law and the prophets say.

So if you want to know the answer to the question, what's best?

What's the best way to live?

Here it is, neatly packaged for you by Jesus.

Jesus, in other words, is summarizing one of those basic messages that runs throughout the scriptures, the one that we call, in shorthand, the law, especially when we speak about law and gospel.

Here, Jesus is summarizing the law.

That is the eternal and unchangeable will of God.

The law is every command that God gives to us, in which he tells us what is good for us, what is best, and in which he forbids everything that is not good.

He says, This is what you are looking for if you want to know the best possible way to live.

And the thing of it is that we are all by nature law creatures.

We all have in our hearts this desire, this drive to do better.

We all assume that if we can just get the right insights or somebody can tell us the secrets to life, or at least if we just put in the sweat and effort and do our best, we ought to be able to become more than we are right now.

And even though we probably don't often think about this when it comes to the little kinds of self-improvement projects we undertake, actually this line of thinking is profoundly theological.

Behind it is this desire in our hearts to get back what we lost.

In other words, behind it is a line of thinking and human striving and effort that goes all the way back to the very beginning.

Because you see, Adam and Eve, when they were created, they had the best.

They had the very best in life.

They were created to be in communion with God.

They were created with perfection and holiness and righteousness in which to live.

They had it.

And of course, they lost it when they fell into sin.

So ever since we human beings have been trying to get back what was lost.

We've been searching for the best.

We've been striving, we've been trying.

And when Jesus puts the law before us, it puts before us what exactly it is that we are striving towards.

This picture of perfection.

We know that there truly is no better way to live than to love God with the entirety of your being and to love your neighbor.

And ultimately then also to love yourself in the way that God has made us to live.

That's what the law says, but there's a problem here.

The problem isn't with the law itself.

The law is good and perfect.

The problem is with us.

The problem is try as we might, we cannot attain it.

And in fact, the more that you strive, the more that you try, the harder you press towards fulfilling that law, the more obvious it becomes to you that you can't do it.

That your failures and sins and shortcomings stop you in your tracks every single time.

Now, do you see how this actually explains the kind of frustrations we feel on a much lower level when our plans and projects don't succeed?

You just see why setbacks are bothersome to us and why failures hurt.

In fact, this even explains why we spend so much time talking about other people.

All of us are always trying to convince ourselves that the food we're eating is better than the food somebody else is eating.

That's that law nature within us that's always striving and yet finds itself frustrated because we just can't arrive.

Of course, your algorithm knows this, right?

That's why it doesn't stop feeding you the plans to improve you.

There's always, always, always something more because there's always, always, always something lacking in you.

Now, because Jesus knows that this is the case, he continues the conversation.

Although now he turns the tables and it's Jesus' turn to ask the question.

He wheels on the lawyer, but he doesn't ask a what's best question.

Instead, Jesus asks a who do you know question.

Specifically, what he asks is this what do you think about the Christ?

And by that question, Jesus leads the Pharisees, the people who were gathered there back into this book, back into these scriptures to draw out of it there that other great message of the Bible that we summarize in shorthand by calling the gospel.

He's drawing them back to this promise that God made in the face of human failure and shortcoming, to send one who would be born of a woman, indeed, one who would be descended from the line of King David, a son of that man who was called the man after the Lord's own heart.

And yet, as you know, more than that.

For when the time had fully come, and God's infinity dwindled to infancy, the Savior was born of the Virgin Mary and came into this world.

The very one who was speaking these words was that greater son of David who joined God and man together.

And why did the Christ come into this world?

Well, he came into this world so that the Davids of this world could point to him and say, Here is my Lord, here is my savior, so that the Davids of this world could say, No matter how hard I try, I always fail, I never arrive.

But God has seen my plight and my misery, and so he has provided a savior for me.

In effect, what Jesus is saying here is you go ahead and try.

Go ahead and try to live the best possible life you have.

Go ahead and put that law of God in front of you.

Do your best to try to keep it.

And when you arrive at that point where your failures frustrate you, where you realize your own lack and need.

Well, then you will come to the point where you realize that the question to ask is not what's best.

It's who do you know?

And what do you think about the Christ?

And then you know that the answer to that question is that Jesus is everything to me.

Because when I look at Christ here, I see what it looks like, the perfection I long for, the holiness and righteousness that I wish were mine, but I cannot attain.

I can look to Christ and I can see what it means to love God with the entirety of my being.

And I can see in the life of Jesus what it is like to love neighbor perfectly as self.

And yet when I look at Jesus, I don't find condemnation.

Well, I guess I'm never gonna be as good as that goody two shoes.

Instead, when I look at Jesus, I see a Savior who is looking at me and who is saying, This perfection, this holiness, this righteousness is not something I attain for myself.

It's something that I came to give, to bestow, to credit to you so that you can claim it as your own.

For by faith, this is indeed what is yours and mine.

Everything that we lost, everything that we long to be, my friends, it is all ours in Christ.

And this is the basic message of the gospel.

That whereas the law says do, and yet it is never done, the gospel comes and says, it is done already, it is finished, your salvation accomplished by your Lord Jesus.

And so Jesus brings an end to all our ceaseless striving.

Jesus comes and invites us to rest, as in, come to me, you who are weary, you who carry heavy burdens, come to me, and I will give you rest.

Rest what we need.

Because you know what, it's really tiring to constantly be trying and always to be failing.

Rest because it's so, so demoralizing to never arrive.

Come to me, Jesus says, lay that burden down.

Come to me, and you have all you need.

Come to me and see my grace lavished upon you by virtue of your baptism, giving you this status as a holy and righteous child of God.

Come to me with your failures week after week as I give you my body and blood and say, It is finished, it is accomplished, you are right with your God.

You need not walk away under the burden and compulsion of doing, doing, doing more, more, more.

You walk away under the banner of forgiven, set right with your God, so that you have rest for your soul.

So it seems to me that today's gospel, even though on the surface it seems kind of like this strange argument that is maybe just engaged in theological hair splitting, actually neatly brings together the basic message of the scripture, the basic message of law and gospel.

These teachings that God gives us to keep us and our eyes ever focused on our Savior, Jesus.

And so I guess you could say that if you're searching for the best way to live, it's to live between law and gospel.

To live in these teachings which God gives to us so that throughout our lives, we won't put our trust and confidence in our own efforts, nor will we despair when we fail, but instead our eyes will be fixed on our Savior and He will draw us to Himself.

Because you know this.

Truly, there's no better way to live than to live in Christ.

Amen.