Trinity 18

Good Shepherd

2004 Pass Rd, Biloxi, MS 39531

Draft Deut 10:12–21; 1 Cor 1:1–9; Mt 22:34–46; Ps 34:8–22; antiphon: v. 19   –     10/19/25

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

Luther sets our Gospel text in order thus, “This Gospel consists of two questions. In the first the lawyer on behalf of the other Pharisees asks Christ: Which is the great commandment in the law? In the second the Lord asks the Pharisees and the lawyer: Whose son is David? These two questions concern every Christian; for he who wishes to be a Christian must thoroughly understand them. First, what the law is, and the purpose it serves; and secondly, who Christ is, and what we may expect from him.” (The Sermons of Martin Luther, Baker, V.170–183, 1).

First, regarding the two great Commandments: Luther says, it is “As if the Lord would say: He who possesses love to God, and love to his neighbor, has all things, and therefore fulfils the law; for the whole law and all the prophets point to these two themes, namely: how God and our neighbor are to be loved.” (ibid. 4)

How do we keep the law? First, Jesus says we must do it with the heart, that is it must be understood spiritually. If we do not lay hold of the law with our heart and with the Holy Spirit, we cannot fulfill it. God Himself looks at our hearts, which is why He said this to Samuel: For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (1.16:7). Keeping God’s Law is fruitless if our hearts are not in it, and they cannot be in it without the work of the Holy Spirit equipping us.

To illustrate this, we must consider how we are meant to understand the Ten Commandments: Typically, people will hear any of them as just the base command: I am the Lord your God; You shall have no other gods. Mostly, people will think this first command means simply that they do not bow down to pagan idols, and that is enough. But what does God mean by this commandment? Moses explains: You shall fear the Lord your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear. He is your praise. He is your God. From Deuteronomy 10, among many passages, we understand that the first commandment includes in it that we are to fear, that is to revere, be in awe of, worship God alone; that we are to serve God alone as in all that we do in work and life we do as if it were for God;  that we are to cling fast to God alone as a husband and wife are supposed to cling to one another and forsake all others; and that we are to make our yes yes and our no no in the truth since we bear God’s name. Further, Jesus explains this command in even more depth when He tells the lawyer, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. All our being is to be wrapped up in loving, fearing-revering God. The First Commandment is not simply about idols of wood, stone, and metal.

Yet who is able with all his being to love, serve, cleve to, and swear by God perfectly? Our hearts are by nature easily distracted, and they love the pleasures and pleasantries of the world. Who is able consciously to do every deed and speak every word as if the deed and the word were for God? Luther is right that if we do not do every work and say every thing as if for God, then the labor and the speech are of no value in God’s eyes and therefore no value to us either. I know I am always deficient in this commandment, and all the others.

Luther again says, “From this arises another question: Since works are of no profit to a man, why then did God give so many commandments to the Jews? To this I answer, these commandments were given to the end that we might become conscious whether we really love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and in addition our neighbor as ourselves; for St. Paul says in Rom. 7:7, that the law is nothing but a consciousness and a revelation of sin. What would I know of sin, if there were no law to reveal it to me?

“Here now is the law that saith: Thou shalt love God with thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself. This we fulfil if we do all that the law requires; but we are not doing it. Hence he shows us where we are lacking, and that, while we ought really to do something, we are doing nothing.” (ibid. 6) So then, what is the purpose of the Law? Itself? No. Luther notes, “all the works of the law are not commanded merely for the purpose that we simply just perform them; no, no; for if God had given even more commandments, he would not want us to keep them to the injury and destruction of love. Yea, if these commandments oppose the love of our neighbor, he wants us to renounce and annul them. Take the example of this, …: Moses brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, leading them for forty years through the wilderness, and not one of them was circumcised, although it was commanded them. Where was their obedience to the commandment? Was God not angry with them because they did not obey his commandment? No, there was a higher commandment in force at that time, namely, that they were to obey God who commanded them to come out of Egypt in haste to the promised land. By their marching they daily obeyed God, and God accepted it as obedience; otherwise he would have been angry in that they did not keep his commandments. Both the need and the love were at hand, which set aside all commandments, for it would have been unbearable to endure the pain of circumcision and at the same time the burden of the journey.” Therefore love took the place of the command of circumcision, “and thus should all commandments be kept in love, or not at all.” (ibid. 11)

Or we might look to the example in Matthew 12, when the disciples pluck and eat grain on the Sabbath. Jesus defends their work on the Sabbath by pointing to David and his men: Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath (12:3–8). In the case of the Third Commandment, God did not make man for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man, that is, He did not make the law for the sake of the law, but for the sake of man; furthermore, we must eat to live, even if that technically breaks the Sabbath law. The priest acted in love feeding David and his men; God also acts in love toward us.

Thus Luther says, “Therefore, when the law impels one against love, it ceases and should no longer be a law; but where no obstacle is in the way, the keeping of the law is a proof of love, which lies hidden in the heart. Therefore ye have need of the law, that love may be manifested; but if it cannot be kept without injury to our neighbor, God wants us to suspend and ignore the law.” (ibid. 13) No doubt, it is by this reasoning that Jesus is able to condense the whole of the Law into, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…. and You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. To love God perfectly flows naturally into loving your neighbor and even your enemy perfectly.

St. Augustine adds “Since there are two commandments, the love of God and the love of our neighbour, on which hang the Law and the Prophets, not without reason does Scripture put one for both; sometimes the love of God; as in that, We know that all things work together for good to them that love God; And that because if a man love his neighbour, it follows therefrom that he loves God also; for it is the selfsame affection by which we love God, and by which we love our neighbour, save that we love God for Himself, but ourselves and our neighbour for God’s sake” (de Doctr. Christ., i, 26, 30). To do so is to keep the whole of God’s Law, yet remember that we can only keep the Law if the love of God dwells within us. We only receive that love of God when God has given us His Holy Spirit in the waters of Baptism through faith. Whoever does not have the Holy Spirit cannot love because he remains a child of the devil with the fallen nature of Adam. But the one who has been baptized into Christ is a new creature and has the Holy Spirit and therefore the love of God in him which then flows out of his heart toward desiring the well being, the prosperity, and the good reputation of neighbor and enemy alike.

What then of the question Jesus asks the Pharisees? St. Chrysostom thinks Jesus poses this question as a form of a call upon these stubborn men to repent. They have denied He is the Christ, hated Him from their hearts; yet now Jesus shows them their folly and offers them the chance yet again at repentance and the opportunity to acknowledge that He is God. He has performed many mighty wonders before them, though they did not believe. Since He is about to go to His death to pay for the sins of the world, He quotes David’s prophecy which plainly proclaims that He, Jesus, is the one true LORD, YHWH. Previously at the sight of His miracles “they had answered that he was a mere man, in opposition to the truth. Now he is overthrowing their mistaken opinion. This is why he introduces David into the discussion, that his true identity and divinity might be more clearly recognized. For they had supposed that he was a mere man, yet they also say that the Christ is ‘the Son of David.’ Hence he now brings in the prophetic testimony to his being Lord, and to the genuineness of his Sonship and his equality in honor with his Father.” (The Gospel of Matthew, Homily 71.2)

Jesus does not stump these men to show His greater rhetorical or logical skill, but rather because even these men who are His most ardent enemies He loves. Consider this argument from St. Augustine: “we ought not love ourselves for our own sake, but because of Christ who is due our love. Whoever, then, rightly loves his neighbor ought endeavor to urge his neighbor likewise to love God with his whole heart” (Quæst. Ev., i, 33). Christ is acting no differently here. He loves these enemies because He loves His Father Who is in heaven. And because He loves these stubborn unbelievers He wants them to repent of their pride that they may enjoy the forgiveness of their sins which He is going to earn for them on the cross. But now that Jesus has stumped these men and called them to acknowledge Him as their God, what is their response? St. Jerome tells us, “The Pharisees and Sadducees had been looking for an opportunity for deceiving him, looking to find some word that might be taken advantage of by the plotters. Yet they had been totally confounded in their conversations. So they asked nothing further. What did they do then? All they could do was turn him over to the custody of the Roman authorities” (Commentary on Matthew 4.22.46). That is, deliver Christ up to death, even the death of the cross.

Still, when Jesus surrenders Himself in the garden to the soldiers to be taken to the trial on trumped up charges this is not defeat, but Christ loving God His Father with all His heart with all His soul and with all His mind and loving His neighbor as Himself. St. Paul says, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name (Phil 2:6–9).

The point of the Law, then, is to show us our sin and inability to fear, love, and trust in God above all things. The point of the law is to drive us to despair because we find we cannot by ourselves love God and love our neighbor since our hearts would rather that we were god. But all does not end with our sinful nature triumphing, of our pride ruling. The Law does not have the final word; Christ, our Lord and Savior, King of kings and God of gods, saved us from the condemnation of the law when He took our sins and died in our place. Jesus paid the price of your pride, paid for your sins of not loving God or your neighbor. Furthermore, He gives us the Holy Spirit in Baptism, as I already noted, Who enables us to love God and love our neighbors. Though the devil fights against us, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Christ and the Holy Spirit will sustain you in the faith through every trial, will muzzle the devil as Christ muzzled the Sadducees, and the Holy Spirit will daily increase your love for God and love for your neighbor. This God promises.

In closing, hear again the promises of God which David wrote, What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. So He will do for you.

Now the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen