To my western Michigan readers:  

I will be speaking at 10 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 26, at C3 Exchange, a well-known Sunday alternative that meets in the Grand Haven Community Center, 412 Columbus @ Fifth. Topic: "Beware the Believer."

Matthew 22: 34-46   

As soon as the Pharisees learned that Jesus had effectively silenced the Sadducees, they plotted against him. One of them, a lawyer, decided to test Jesus by asking, "Teacher, which commandment in Torah is the greatest?" He said to him, "'You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.' This is the most important commandment. And, by the way, the next most important is 'Love your neighbor as you love yourself.' Everything in Torah and in the prophetic writings depend on these two commandments." Then the Pharisees pressed in closer, and it was Jesus' turn to ask them a question, and this was it: "What is your opinion about the Anointed One? Whose son is he?" They replied, "David's son." Jesus said: "That being the case, how could David call him 'Yahweh,' while speaking under the guidance of the spirit, as in [Psalm 110:1] 'Yahweh said to my Yahweh, 'Sit down here at my right hand, until I make your enemies kiss your feet'? If David actually called him 'Yahweh,' how can [David] be his son?" No one present could develop an adequate riposte to that, so they just stopped asking questions.  

(Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

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The Revised Common Lectionary at this point omits Jesus' exchange with the Sadducees, which seems, at least on one level, to be about which former spouse can claim marriage in the resurrection after a multiplicity of marriages on earth. It is a quibble at best, but it does subtly suggest that the Jesuses of the synoptic gospels were understood to have had Pharisaical leanings. One of the important distinctions between the Temple Sadducees and the synagogue Pharisees (and probably their ideological descendants in the last third of the first century CE) was the matter of resurrection. The Sadducees' bible was Torah. The Pharisees embraced the  

Nevi'im and the Ketuvim as well as Torah, and espoused the idea of resurrection based on Daniel 12:1ff and maybe, for all we know, Ezekiel 37: 1-10. No clear or apparent mention of resurrection in Torah.

For Mark and Matthew, the exchange with the Sadducees is the context for the passage at hand. It occurs at sometime between Jesus' entry into Jerusalem and his arrest. Luke locates it much earlier, just shortly after he depicts Jesus "setting his face toward Jerusalem" at 9:51. The Lukan version of the exchange comes at 10:25 and yields the clearest lesson yet on what love of neighbor entails, i.e. the parable of the Good Samaritan. For Matthew the lawyer's question seems to have been prompted by the perceived put-down of the Pharisees' theological rivals. In Mark, a scribe overhears the Jesus-Sadducee colloquy and decides to jump in.

The question in both the Markan and Matthean passage is which of the 613 commandments of Torah is the greatest or the most important. We are told that the inquiry, innocent on its face, was meant to entangle Jesus in a blasphemous mess as he was expected to judge between or among the divinely given mandates -- second-guessing Yahweh, in other words. In Luke, the "innocent" question is how to attain everlasting life -- though the Greek at that place is ζωην αίώνιον, which means "eternal life," all right, but less in the sense of length than of breadth and depth. The question might be put this way: "What do I have to do to get as much fulfillment out of life as I can?"

In all cases the answer is "the first and great commandment" and "the second which is like unto it" -- love God, love neighbor: Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Now why that wasn't seen as God-like discriminating among commandments is not clear. Mark adds a whole section depicting the scribe's reaction (12:32-34) in which he praises Jesus for the astuteness of his answer, adding that the love of God and neighbor is "much more" than Temple sacrifices. Take that, Sadducees! There is no suggestion in the Markan text that Jesus so much as alluded to such sacrifices.

Matthew merely has the question answered with Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Mark has Jesus say to the appreciative scribe, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." Luke tells the lawyer, who was probably sorry he ever asked, who his neighbor was, that he should go and do what the Samaritan did. The lawyer may not have counted on all that work he had to do to attain ζωην αίώνιον. Maybe salvation does come through works.

All three synoptics continue the dialogue: Matthew with the Pharisees, Mark with the scribes and Luke with the Sadducees. The debate is the identity of the anointed one, whose son was he? "David" is the answer. Speaking of traps, Jesus is depicted as springing one of his own in asking how David, assumed in this text to be the author of Psalm 110:1, could say, "The Lord said to my lord . . ." The Jesus Seminar people suggest that maybe this was Jesus saying the anointed one was the son of Adam -- a more universal lord than David. Who knows?

This bollixed text brings to mind the sermon spoof in the 1960s British comedy routine "Beyond the Fringe" in which a right proper English vicar is depicted as wondering far off the point on the text of Genesis 27:11: "My brother, Esau, is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man."

* * * * *

The theologians of Christianity long since determined that whatever salvation would amount to would come of faith and belief and never through good works "lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:9b). Such theology is what set institutional Christianity on a path to valuing confessions of faith and devotion to liturgy and sacrament as the pearls of great price. Good works, it has often been said, can be done by heathens and pagans. Join the Rotary Club and save the world.

Such theologians seem to ignore the text at hand and especially Luke's handling of it with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Loving God and loving neighbor, especially as paths to that strange thing called "eternal life" (see exegesis above), have everything to do with kinetic action with respect to the needs of others. As John the epistler observed, "How can one say he loves God whom he has not seen, and does not love his brother whom he has seen?" (I John 4:20)

Love in that text is a form of άγαπη, which word came to convey an active giving of self to another without the counting of cost as opposed to love of the possessive or merely fraternal nature.

So whatever "salvation" means -- say, a planet that is kept hospitable to human life, or whose inhabitants have each and all equitable access to the good things of the world so that privation is not anyone's end -- it must come from what people do and refrain from doing.

Of course, Matthew thought Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 constituted the raison d'etre of life under the dispensation of Torah and the prophetic teaching of such figures as Hillel the Elder and Jesus of Nazareth. What else could be the point? If one believed that Yahweh was in some fashion responsible for the existence of human life, it would be a gross error not to honor that life in the neighbor, who, as Luke would point out in his Samaritan parable, was the person in need in any situation.

The Epistle of James had it and has it right: "Faith, by itself, if it has not works, is dead." "Dead," as Charles Dickens would say of Jacob Marley, " as a door nail."

Among other atrocities and annoyances that drive reasonable people from the doings of much organized religion is that its main and branch offices are engaged so seriously in the rituals and regulations of their individual denominational complexities that good works are afterthoughts. Yes, good works are thought of, "If we have the time and the money." This is not the case with all congregations by any means, but of enough of them that the religions of which they are representative are given a bad name.

Long live, then, salvation by works.