Trinity 18

Matthew 22:34-46 - Trinity 18- October 23, 2011 

  Christ's Love for Us Fulfills the Law

It seems like each generation laments that the next generation is the worst one yet.  While it is true that there is an increasing disregard in our country for any distinction between right and wrong, those old words of wisdom still hold true: “There is nothing new under the sun.”  It’s not that things keep getting worse with each succeeding generation; it’s just that there is more and more and more of the same – sin.  Sin begets sin, and so it goes.  The decaying moral character of the culture around us is nothing new in the history of the world.  It’s what has always happened when the Gospel is rejected.  When folks reject the doctrine of the Church which is taught to us in Scripture, it soon follows that decent morality is rejected as well.  When Christian teaching goes, so does Christian living.  

The solution to fixing the growing godlessness in our culture seems to be simple enough.  More law!  Now, of course, this works to a certain extent.  And indeed, it is the duty of the governing authorities which God has ordained to implement the law.  The law is good.  It keeps wickedness in bounds by coercing people to behave better.  Certainly our culture could benefit from a healthy dose of it.  But it won’t reverse the trend of unbelief.  The only effective weapon and armor that the Church has against the onslaughts of this wicked world is the doctrine which she has learned from Holy Scripture.  It is not only the distinction between right and wrong that the world needs in order to understand true godliness.  It is the distinction between the law and the Gospel.  Only Jesus teaches us this. 

Our Gospel reading this morning begins by mentioning in passing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees.  The Sadducees were a deviant sect of the Jews who didn’t accept any of the books of the Bible beyond the 5 books of Moses known as the Pentateuch.  Consequently, because they didn’t believe that Moses was clear regarding the resurrection of the dead, they rejected that there is eternal life in heaven for those who believe.  They had absolutely abandoned the central teaching of the Old Testament.  But Jesus refuted the Sadducees’ false doctrine by proving to them that the word of God recorded by Moses did in fact clearly teach the resurrection of the dead.  “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”  The unbelieving Sadducees had tried to silence Jesus, but Jesus silenced them. 

The Pharisees were happy about this – but not because pure doctrine had triumphed over false doctrine.  No, that didn’t interest them as much as the fact that their enemies, the Sadducees, had tried to stump Jesus and had failed.  Ah, but the Pharisees thought that they could stump Jesus because of their great knowledge of the law.  Not only did they have all the prophets that the Sadducees rejected, but the Pharisees had accumulated for themselves 613 extra rules in addition to the law that God had given.  These man-made rules were intended to make the law more manageable and possible to obey.  And they would frequently discuss and debate among themselves about which of these rules was the greatest.  Therefore, testing Jesus, just as the Sadducees did, they tried discredit Him by forcing Him to choose just one of these rules: “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” 

But Jesus did not get sucked into their petty debate about which is the most helpful rule.  That is not the task of theology, and it does no one any good.  Instead, Jesus summarized the law according to what Holy Scripture taught: “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” 

There is nothing new under the sun.  Even in our day, there are religious experts out there who prattle on about their rules that if we follow them promise success and happiness.  They present their moral superiority as the remedy for our fallen and sinful world.  They gather all sorts of people to listen to their fraudulent message by convincing them that such self-help advice is scriptural.  They talk about the Bible a lot, and even quote from it.  But their message is no more biblical than what the Pharisees pushed.  It’s called legalism.  And it is at its core a different religion than ours. 

By summarizing what the law required, Jesus also summarized what He came to fulfill.  Jesus said, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”  The Scriptures that taught exactly what the law required of us are the same Scriptures that taught who would fulfill this condemning law in our place.  That’s why the proper distinction between law and gospel is so important.  We cannot know what the Bible teaches if we do not know this: what the law requires is what the Gospel freely gives. 

We don’t listen to popular rules on how to live our best life now.  We don’t follow 12 steps to spiritual fulfillment and success.  We don’t do this because that’s not what the law is for.  Instead, we listen to Jesus who teaches us what the law truly requires.  It requires love – love for God above all, and love for our neighbor as ourselves.  It requires what we cannot and do not produce.  We can follow rules that circumvent the law’s demands.  But this is nothing but a Band-Aid on a much deeper wound.  We are much better off listening to Jesus who fulfilled the law’s demands by doing what we have failed to do.  This is love. 

Jesus silenced the Pharisees, just like He silenced the Sadducees.  He then followed their stunt with a test of His own.  He had just demonstrated that He understood the law better than they, but now Jesus would demonstrate that He understood the promises of the Gospel better as well.  “What do you think about the Christ?” He asked, “Whose son is he?”  The Pharisees got the question half right.  “The son of David,” they responded.  That’s true.   But then Jesus followed with another question that they couldn’t answer.  Quoting the words of Psalm 110:1, Jesus said, “[If the Christ is David’s son,] 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?” 

The Pharisees fancied themselves experts in the law, but when it came to the Gospel they were satisfied with the minimal amount of knowledge.  David’s son? Sure.  David’s Lord?  Who knew?  Who cares?  They hadn’t bothered to take Jesus’ own advice to search the Scriptures in order to find salvation, because they thought that they had already found salvation in their own works.  Because the Pharisees were so woefully ignorant about what the law truly required, they were also woefully disinterested in what the Gospel taught. 

As for us, we are not so disinterested in what Jesus teaches us about the Gospel, because we know what the law teaches us about ourselves.  The lawlessness in the corrupt and dying world around us finds its source in the very sin that exists in each one of our hearts, and that manifests itself in our own thoughts, words, and actions.  You shall love God.  But what do we find more lovely, but the things of this world that flatter us and falsely promise to fulfill our fleshly desires?  You shall love your neighbor.  But how do we serve our neighbor, when our own needs come first, and when we so often treat our parents, and our friends, and our enemies alike – merely as means to the end of serving ourselves?  Yes we know what the law reveals in us.   

David knew it too.  That is why he rejoiced to confess the Gospel that he learned from God and that he needed so dearly, as he sang by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “The Lord said unto my Lord,” that is, my God in heaven said to my God on earth, veiled in the very flesh and blood that He assumed in order to bear my sin away.  “Sit Thou at My right hand until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool” that is, win for David, and for his children and for all sinners in this wretched world, freedom from guilt and blame and from a bad conscience before the thundering demands of the law.  Make their enemies Your enemies.  Make their sin Your sin.  Make their death your death, and conquer it as their God and brother by treading everything that separated man from God beneath Your feet!   

While the world perishes in its unbelief and sin, it regards the doctrine that we have learned from the Bible to be foolish and irrelevant to our needs.  Doctrine?  How dry and unconnected.  What we need to stress is love.  “Love is all we need,” the world sings.  But as Solomon said in his great wisdom, “No man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is [set] before them.”  We need Jesus to teach us what love is.  For “herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” 

Jesus teaches us the love of God by teaching us about His own Incarnation as the Son of God.  When we who have been properly instructed and duly crushed by the law that teaches us our need for divine mercy, then it is that we rejoice with David to sing of how divine love became human love when David’s Lord became David’s son in the Person of Jesus Christ.  The very love that the law required took on human flesh and blood in order to make us lovely, adorning us, by faith, with His own righteous obedience that He rendered to His Father in our place.  Jesus is true God, begotten of His Father from all eternity, and true Man, born of the Virgin Mary.  These are not just distant theological facts.  This is no dry doctrine.  It is what Scripture teaches us, and it is our life. 

The world remains sinful.  And we continue to find sin in our own lives as well.  Unbelief often seems to become more and more prevalent, and the vanishing moral integrity of our culture seems to follow swiftly behind its tragic rejection of the Gospel.  There is nothing new under the sun.  Just as it was a sinful world that God once entered when He came to teach us what true love required, so it was a sinful world that God loved when Jesus bore its sin away on the cross.  And it is to a sinful world today filled with sinners like you and me that God continues even now to teach what true love has done for us.  “Greater love hath no man than this, than that a man lay down his life for his friends.” 

Christ who came to serve us in all humility is our Lord God who laid down His life as a man.  And this Lord rules our hearts even today not through the coercion and threats of the law, but through the full and free forgiveness of all our sins.  This is not David’s kingdom of earthly power.  It is God’s almighty kingdom of grace and mercy.  For He who died for us also rose from the dead for us.  And He continues today through His precious means of grace to share with us His victory, so that by faith in Him alone, we also may tread death and hell and all the enemies He conquered beneath our feet forever.   

This is the Gospel which we have learned and which we hear.  And through this alone God teaches us what true love is.  By teaching us to love the Gospel, God teaches us to love Him.  It is as we just sang from that beautiful hymn, “Lord Thee I love with all my heart.”  We can say this and mean it, not because of some power or determination in us, but because God has purchased our dead and darkened hearts and won them back from fear, death and slavery.  And so through the Gospel alone our hearts are also freed to love one another.  This does not happen through helpful rules and manageable steps toward success.  No, we fulfill the law of love completely and fully only through faith in Him who in loving us fulfilled it in our place. 

In Jesus’ name, Amen.