2023.10.29 | Final Exam
“Final Exam”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Twenty-second Sunday of Pentecost
Sunday, October 29, 2023
Matthew 22:34-46
When I was an English teacher, I used to dread final exams. It wasn’t just that I dreaded grading them, which was a huge task, since I almost always gave essay finals. That was a lot of reading at the end of the semester. But it was also the creation of the exam that was hard. Because in order to elicit the information you’re looking for from your students, you have to ask the right questions. Sometimes a poorly worded question will send students off in the wrong direction altogether. There’s a story floating around the Internet that is an example of this. It’s probably not a real story, but it’s a good illustration of this point: there was a geology professor who wanted his students to give some information about the difference between the minerals found on the Earth, and the minerals found on the moon on the final exam. So here was his question: “What are three things that are found on the moon that are not found on the Earth?” One smart aleck student answered it this way: Bruce Springsteen, roller skates, and the Republican party. It’s very important to ask the right question.
One thing to remember about questions, whether they’re being asked by a teacher on a final exam, or just by a lost person asking for directions, is that each question has an agenda behind it. That agenda might be trying to find out if the students were paying attention all semester, or it might be simply how to get to the museum. But every question carries an agenda with it and says something about the person asking the question.
Those agendas are on display in the questions that are asked in our passage from the Gospel according to Matthew. In order to fully understand this passage, it helps to have a bit of context. In the previous chapter, Chapter 21, Jesus enters Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, or a colt, or both, as Matthew seems to suggest, to the shouts of “Hosanna!” from the crowds. He goes to the temple and begins to heal the sick and teach his followers. His teaching prompts probing questions from three groups of leaders at the temple—the chief priests and elders, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. Whole books have been written about these groups of first-century temple leaders, and their exact historical roles are not totally understood, but we can, at the risk of over-simplifying things, equate the chief priests with senior ministers, the Sadducees with theology professors, and the Pharisees with Bible scholars—at least, that is the way they function in this section of Matthew’s gospel. These three groups were often at odds with Jesus, because Jesus is often critical of their hypocrisy and their strict interpretation of the law and scripture, and they felt threatened by him. As Jesus begins teaching in the temple, these three groups pester him with questions, giving Jesus a sort of first century final exam.
The first questioners are the chief priests and the elders, and they ask him this question: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” There is an agenda behind that question, isn’t there? The leaders of the temple are worried about Jesus and his authority. They’re worried that he’s a threat to their own authority. Rather than answering that question, though, Jesus asks a question of his own that they can’t answer, and they walk away, grumbling. Jesus continues teaching.
Next, in Chapter 22, the Pharisees—the Bible scholars, who are very concerned with strict adherence to the biblical law and commands—ask him an either/or question about paying taxes, hoping to trip him up and maybe get him in trouble with the Roman authorities. But Jesus deflects this question with the well-known adage: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s.” The Pharisees skulk away, defeated.
Next up, the Sadducees—the theology professors—come to him and ask their questions, and Jesus’s final exam continues. These theologians also have a particular agenda; for one thing, they don’t believe in the resurrection. So they try to trip him up with a resurrection question, by asking about a hypothetical woman who marries a man who dies. According to the law of Moses, she then must marry the man’s brother in order to have children and carry on the family line. What if she marries all the man’s six brothers, who all die one after the other. Whose wife is she in the resurrection? Jesus explains that God’s future kin-dom is not a patriarchal human system, but a whole new world altogether.
Finally, the Pharisees come back for the final final exam question, and a biblical scholar asks him, “Which commandment in the law is greatest?” This, too, is something of a trick question, because according to Jewish tradition, there are 613 commandments in the law. This is like, the worst multiple-choice test ever! It’s not exactly clear what the agenda is behind this question from the Pharisees. The scholar asking the question may think that this will trip Jesus up, because it’s impossible to answer a question with 613 possible answers. It could be that the scholar is showing off for the Sadducees and others listening, that the Pharisees are the ones with superior knowledge of the Torah. It could even be that this one Pharisee asks this question from the heart, genuinely seeking to discern what the law requires of him. In any case, Jesus does answer this impossible question, and his answer gets at the heart of what really matters in life.
Before I talk about Jesus’s answer to this question about the greatest commandment, I want to skip ahead for a moment and look at how Jesus turns the tables on all his questioners as Chapter 22 ends. In verses 41-46, Jesus gives his own little final exam to the Pharisees, these learned biblical scholars, and asks them his own question about the Messiah. “Whose son is he?” he asks. “The son of David,” they reply. Well then, Jesus suggests that if the Messiah is David’s son, how come David calls him Lord—and he quotes Psalm 110, which tradition says is written by David himself. This stumps the Pharisees, and they are unable to answer. Pencils down; the exam is over. The agenda behind Jesus’s question is, of course, that he is suggesting to the temple leaders what his disciples have already discerned: that Jesus himself is the Messiah.
Returning to the first question about the greatest commandment, when Jesus answers it, he proves that his knowledge of scripture is unassailable. Instead of throwing this trick question back at the Pharisee, he answers by quoting scripture: “You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is from the book of Deuteronomy, Chapter Six, verse five, and it is part of the Shema, the standard prayer that all devout Jews recite daily for morning and evening prayer, and that begins every worship service in the synagogue:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One
Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
And then he connects this commandment to love God with a second biblical citation, from Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
As an answer to a final exam short-answer question, this response is brilliant. These two passages of scripture interpret one another, and essentially provide a summary of Jesus’s entire mission and ministry. In essence, we can look back through the Gospel of Matthew (indeed, Mark and Luke as well, since a similar text appears in all three synoptic gospels) and see how Jesus embodies these two commandments. His entire ministry is itself an answer to the questions implied in the commandments: “How do we love God? How do we love our neighbor?” Jesus answers this in the beginning of his ministry, with the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount: we love God and our neighbor by hungering and thirsting for righteousness, by showing mercy, by being peacemakers, and by willing to suffer persecution for following the way of Jesus. Throughout his ministry, Jesus actively embodies loving God and neighbor by healing the sick, by lifting up those on the margins, by sharing fellowship with the outcasts, by calling to account hypocritical leaders of the faith who only give lip service to the commandments and do not act on them. He embodies the love of God and neighbor by subverting the status quo and offering a vision of the kin-dom of God, a realm ruled by love instead of oppression. Jesus shows us that loving God means loving who and what God loves—everyone and everything. Jesus shows us that loving God means loving the way that God loves—indiscriminately.
One of the joys I had in my decision to return to ministry at Eden Church was knowing I would be part of the remarkable expressions of the great commandment that Eden embodies in its ministries to the Cherryland community. Here we embody love of God and neighbor by feeding the hungry. We clothe the naked, especially with diapers. We accompany the refugee and asylum seeker. I feel so humbled to be part of this vital work in our community. By being part of this congregation and supporting it with our time and talent, and treasure, we are helping to create a bit of the kin-dom of God, right here in Cherryland.
Still, the work of the great commandment is never finished. I can hear Jesus still asking me that final exam question: “What have you done today to love God and love your neighbor?” I’ve been pondering this question all week as I’ve been living with the scripture text and wrestling with its meaning. And now I offer it to you as your very own final exam question: “What have you done today to love God and love your neighbor?” Write it on a post-it and stick where you can see it. It’s a question with a thousand answers. May we answer it anew every day. Amen.