Today’s Gospel continues the sequence of readings from Matthew’s Gospel that we’ve been following this year. Today’s reading comprises The Great Commandment and The Question about David’s Son. These two selections follow the questions about paying taxes and about the resurrection, which we’ve heard in the past few weeks, and precede Jesus’s denunciations of scribes and Pharisees, the same people who have been questioning him. This arrangement is not accidental.
“One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.” It is said of lawyers in court, that they don’t ask questions to which they don’t already know the answers. That’s certainly true in this story. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Now, the lawyer knows the law, and Jesus knows that he knows it, but he answers anyway: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and so on. Jesus and the lawyer know that in the book Deuteronomy (which means Second Law, or Second Giving of the Law) in chapter 6, it says, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one! Therefore, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and so on. But Jesus doesn’t stop with the quote from Deuteronomy; he adds a quote from Leviticus. He says, “And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The source of this is in Leviticus, chapter 19, which lists dozens of rules of conduct, all of them concerned with regulating life in a tough subsistence economy. Jesus selects this one and puts it on the same level as the great commandment; indeed, he adds it to the great commandment. Apparently this passes the lawyer’s test, since he doesn’t ask Jesus any more questions. But it gives us an opportunity to think about questioning itself, and its role in the spiritual life. I said that the arrangement of this reading is not accidental; putting the question about David’s son right after the question about the great commandment is revealing.
Jesus comes back to the Pharisees with a simple question, to which they know the answer, of course: “‘What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David.’” Simple question, simple answer. Why ask? Well, it gives Jesus the opportunity to present the Pharisees with a paradox. He quotes Psalm 110, taking for granted that David is the author of the psalm, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand.” How can the Lord say this to the Lord? How can the Messiah be both son and Lord at the same time, both superior and inferior, mortal and eternal at once? No one in the gathering is able to answer, “nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”
This puzzling question reminds me of what our Zen Buddhist friends call a koan, a story in paradoxical form meant to lead anyone meditating on it to an awareness, an insight into reality beyond the limitations of logical contradictions and superficial meanings. Reality in itself is not contradictory or illogical, but is a unity that can be perceived directly. It is this perception that Jesus is pointing to, when he asks the Pharisees his questions about David and the Messiah. Jesus is leading the Pharisees, the lawyers, beyond their organized, logical, written law, their system of thought, to a perception of the unity of God and neighbor, Lord and son, David and Messiah, the unity that we, and Jesus, call Love. Jesus is not trying to frustrate the Pharisees, but to point them in the direction of the real meaning of the great commandment, the unity of God and neighbor. Jesus’s denunciations, which follow this chapter, are meant to waken the scribes and Pharisees to the reality which their own teaching points to.
As Christians we meditate on, and we proclaim, the greatest paradoxical teaching of all, that Jesus is divine and human, God and man, the firstborn of all creation and at the same time a mortal like all of us, now resurrected and living both in eternity and in us, his body in the world, the church. That is what his questions about David and the son and the Lord are about, the resolution of all contradictions in the Incarnation, in which we participate sacramentally, and to which our Lord is leading us, both now and in eternity. Amen. (28-29.X.17. Adv.)
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