Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
Just as a reminder, I plan on continuing our exploration of four big topics: Deification, Participation, Imitation, & Desire, for the rest of the liturgical year and beyond. Hopefully, by now, we all are getting a better grasp of what Deification, Participation, Imitation, & Desire are, as well as how we may regularly and intentionally appropriate these realities. By appropriation, I mean our intentional, intelligent, and responsible taking hold of these realities. “Taking,” is the personal act by which one “takes hold of,” grasp, appropriates, God’s reality (which is the only really real reality) for yourself, your family, your parish, and the world. All of the Sacraments either outright direct you to “take” or they presuppose your taking. “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, given for thee…Take and eat.” “I take thee for my wedded wife…” The only Sacrament that does not presuppose your taking is Holy Baptism and the reason that it does not presuppose your taking is because it is the Sacrament that bestows upon you the ability to act, the ability to take.
We begin our exploration of the Gospel for today, first by noting that Matthew’s context begins with Chapter 21, which is the beginning of the end of our Lord’s earthly journey. Standing there on the Mount of Olives, the King of the Universe was about to invade the City of David:
they drew near… to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent out two of his disciples saying to them, Go into the village and you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me…
Our Lord was hoisted onto a donkey, not a war horse, and upon her strong back he triumphantly rode into Jerusalem. God invaded the City of David, riding a donkey, mocking the puny powers of earthly kingdoms and their armies. He marched straight to the Temple and began cleansing it of the crooks and felons who were robbing the people. The blind and lame in Jerusalem came to him and he healed them. King David would not allow the blind and the lame to even enter the Temple. Moses prohibited the blind and the lame from offering sacrifice to God, but Jesus offers up his own life as their sacrifice. The people and the children of Jerusalem were delighted:
Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he that comes in the Name of the Lord…
The Chief Priests were enraged. “Do you hear the little children calling you the Son of David? Tell them to hush!”
Jesus responded, I hear them. You should read the Bible more. It is written:
Out of the mouths of babes God has brought forth perfect praise.
After dismissing these big shots at the end of Chapter 21, Jesus continued to teach the people about his Kingdom. The first part of Chapter 22 is the parable about a king who gave a wedding feast, which the invited guests just brushed off. When the Pharisees realized that all his parables were aimed at them, Jerusalem’s political machinery went into overdrive. The priests, the lawyers, the Pharisees were so infuriated that they made common cause with the Herodians to bring an end to Jesus. The remainder of the chapter is constructed around four questions. The first three questions were attempts to trick Jesus into saying something that they could use against him with the Romans or, if that failed, maybe he could be tricked into saying something they could use to turn the people against him. Here they are:
Question # 1:
Rabbi we know that you are true and do not regard the position of men. Tell us then, what do you think? Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
When Jesus stood there on the Mount of Olives he watched his men lead the donkey and her colt up to where he waited. This was very political. As I have already said, the Triumphal Entry was a political act. His cleansing of the Temple and his healing of the blind and the lame were political acts. Jesus’ politics is about power, but it is power that is life giving, healing, redemptive, and loving because it is the power of God and God cannot be manipulated. The Temple, not Pilate’s palace, was the most political cite in Jerusalem. Do you know why it was the most political cite in Jerusalem? Because that is where they worshipped God. Worship is political and often subversive; the true worship of God is the only source for true politics.
Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
The Pharisees had joined with the Herodians against Jesus. The Herodians were Jewish partisans loyal to Herod whom they claimed to be the “King of the Jews.” Together they tried to catch Jesus either supporting taxes to Rome, thus undercutting his popularity or challenging Rome and opening himself up to being charged as a revolutionary who threatened the peace. Jesus said, “Show me the tribute coin.” Neither he nor his disciples were carrying one. The Pharisees produced a coin.
And Jesus said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’
They said:‘Caesar’s.
Jesus said: Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.
The tax in question could only be paid with a Roman silver denarius. They were specially minted in Lyon and they directly related to the pagan Roman religion and the imperial cult. The side bearing Caesar’s image has the superscription “Tiberius Caesar, son of the Divine Augustus.” The flip side has a feminine image, an icon of the goddess Roma and it reads “PONTIF MAXIM” which refers to the high priest of the Roman religion. Tiberius controlled the production of these silver coins and they were officially his property, stamped in his image, and everyone knew that.
Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.
Give back to Caesar what belonged to Caesar in the first place. Why would you want to hold onto a vile object that promoted paganism?
But let me ask a question: What belongs to Caesar? What belongs to Caesar that does not belong to God? The Pharisees had not counted on Jesus turning their political trick into a theological dispute. They said nothing about God. Why? Because their worship was crooked, their politics was crooked as well. The fact is that nothing belongs to Caesar. Nothing belongs to me. Nothing belongs to you. Everything belongs to God.
There is much to say about the Church and her relation to the State, but that will have to wait another day. However, one thing I want you to understand is that Jesus is not calling us to straddle two loyalties — one loyalty to God and one loyalty to Caesar. We have seen sufficiently over the last few weeks that Jesus did not tolerate multiple loyalties. Back then, Jerusalemites would have preferred death to allowing Caesar’s image in the City of David. They despised the imperial standard – Roman eagle with wings spread. And yet they had these coins in their pockets. Money had to be extremely important to the Pharisees. By contrast Jesus taught that nothing, no wealth, is equivalent to the value of your soul. If you think that what you have is what you are, you are poor indeed.
Question # 2:
In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife?
This question came from the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection. They thought they had come up with a question that would prove the resurrection to be untrue. They posed a hypothetical situation. A man had a wife and he died without children. The Law required his brother to marry her. After they married, he died as well and so the next brother married her. Alas, he died as well. Before woman herself died she had married seven brothers:
In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife?
Jesus said that the problem with the Sadducees was that they were ignorant of the Scriptures and of the power of God. God is the God of the living and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Therefore Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must be living. Moreover, if they knew the Scriptures they would know that in the resurrection men and women are not married. The children of God, the Bride of Christ, will find her complete fulfillment, her finality, in her Spouse, Jesus Christ.
Question # 3:
Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
Here we are finally into the Gospel for today in which Jesus makes the Law of Love the greatest of the commandments:
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
Jesus combined these two as the greatest commandment and that has exercised authority over subsequent formulations in the Church ever since. St. Paul did not pluck his well know triad of theological virtues (Faith, Hope and Love) from thin air. Jesus’ moral authority over the Church has led his disciples from the beginning to focus our ethical life around this single theme of love — “the greatest of these,” Paul reminds us, “is love.” The primacy love in virtually all early texts, sermons, narratives, and theological papers, from Paul to Peter, to John, to the Fathers would not have been possible had the Christian not received “this primacy from the mouth of the one Teacher who united them.” Love unites worship, doctrine, and life. Love is the greatest of all virtues and Christ has made it our most accurate identifiable behavior. And the truth is, we may live lives of love because the heavenly virtues of faith, hope, and love have been infused into our soul through the grace of Holy Baptism. Because we really and truly participate in the life of the Shepherd of Love through the grace of baptism and the sacrament of the Altar, we really and truly can live a life of love in the Church and in the world.
Jesus uses three modifying phrases to the love of God. We are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind; that is with all our being, with all that we have and all that we are. Our love for neighbor is to be equivalent to our own self-love. The rich, the poor, the hungry, the blind, the other person whoever he or she may be is a person Jesus loves and died for and we are to remind ourselves of that fundamental fact of the universe:
So God loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…
The Law of Love brings a godly perspective to the first two questions. Our heavenly citizenship conditions all other citizenships; the authority of the King of Kings actually establishes the reality of any authority, and our heavenly Spouse conditions our participation in the temporal institution of Holy Matrimony; and the God of Love, the divine Messiah not only calls his spouse, the Church, to live according to the Law of Love with all our heart, soul and mind, but he has enable her so to do.