Homily For The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity 2025
Our Gospel for today centers on questioning - the spirit of asking - not for clarity for obedience sake but an inquiry for the purpose of avoiding. The first question in the Bible came from the lips of Satan - it came in the spirit of denial, it was conceived in unbelief. Satan came to Eve and asked her “Hath God said, ‘Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’” (Genesis 3:1,) The line of questioning led to unbelief and distrust.
We read in St. Matthew’s Gospel that the Pharisees tried their hand at entrapment after Jesus had put the Sadducees to silence. In the previous section, the Sadducees tried to point out the absurdity of the belief in the physical resurrection - they posed to Jesus the question of a woman who married and was widowed by a series of seven brothers and was childless at her own death.
They asked Jesus - “Whose wife would she be in the resurrection for she was the wife of them all?” For the Sadducees were the liberals, the modernists of their day. They imbibed in Greco/Roman philosophy and embraced a completely pagan view of death. They denied the physical resurrection, they denied the existence of angels; they denied evil spirits existed. As one commentator has noted they shared the perspective of the modern skeptic, which he describes this way: “the trifling and beggarly wisdom of the world is busied chiefly with ‘denying.’ Interestingly enough, they believed in the first five books - the Pentateuch. They insisted that there was no evidence in these books to support a claim for the resurrection. Jesus tells them that they are ignorant of the Scriptures about resurrection and uses Exodus 3:6 - part of the Sadducee canon - to silence them. For Jesus says that the call of Moses in that Exodus passage, when the Lord called to Moses out of the burning bush - declared, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob proves that God is a God of resurrection.
The Lord identifies himself as the one who is currently the God of the Patriarchs, in doing so Jesus says that they must still be living; but since they have physically died then there must be a new resurrection life. His argument silenced the Sadducees and this brings us to our Gospel for today.
One would think that people would avoid trying to trap Jesus. Yet, on the heels of silencing the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the radical conservatives of their era, try their hand at debating with Jesus with the purpose of trapping Jesus. One of the scribes asked Jesus, “Teacher, what it is the greatest commandment?” Calling Jesus Teacher is a signal in St. Matthew’s Gospel that the question is insincere. Here it is used as a term of empty flattery, as if the questioner is saying, “So, since you’re an expert, what do you say to this?” Moreover, the Pharisees viewed all of God’s commandments as being equally great.
They ask Jesus which is the greatest in hopes that Our Lord may elevate one above all others and then they can expose him as the liberal they believe him to be. For if Jesus declared the first, the most important commandment, then all others would have been placed lower. In the mind of the scribe, the discussion might lead anywhere and give the best opportunity to damage Jesus’ reputation.
Jesus confounds them by directing them to the importance, the holy impetus of not only the Law but the Prophets. Our Lord merges Deuteronomy 6:5 with its command to love the Lord with every aspect of your person - to give yourself completely to love Him and Leviticus 19:18 with the Lord’s commandment to love one’s neighbor. In effect, these are two aspects of the same greatest commandment of love.
Jesus links these commandments because the first commandment without the second is impossible - for St John reminds us that in I John 4:20
“20 we are told, “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” 21 “And this commandment we have from him, That he who loveth God loveth his brother also.” The second command to love one’s neighbor as oneself cannot stand without the first because altruism to another is not the same as love. For love demands one give themselves completely to God and directs all other loves to the same. One cannot truly love their neighbor if they do not love God completely. Love must be at the root of all obedience for sterile religion is never adequate no matter how disciplined it may appear to be. Jesus not only summarizes the Law, he sums up all the Hebrew Scriptures - Love the God who loves you and cherish the person who meets you.
St. Matthew tells that it was Jesus' turn to ask some questions. Who is the Christ? Whose son is he? Jesus asks them about the sonship of the Messiah. Whose father is he?
The Pharisees thought the question easy enough - He is David’s son. This was common knowledge to the whole community of faith. All lived in eager expectation of the coming of the Messiah “Great David’s greater Son.”
Jesus follows up with a question that is rooted in the opening words of Psalm 110 - how David the author of this psalm could speak of His Lord, the eternal God, as also David’s son. How can David call the Messiah - one of his physical descendants “Lord”, a name that God Almighty reserves to Himself. How can David’s son also be called the Lord?The Pharisees are asking this because a son is never in a superior relationship to a father in their society. To be both son and “Lord” makes no sense to them. The church’s later doctrine of the two natures of Christ answers the riddle Jesus poses by saying that Jesus is both truly man and truly God, so explaining how Messiah can be simultaneously David’s son and David’s Lord.
The questioners, the schemers could not answer him. Wisely, they decided to stop asking him any more questions. The Pharisees couldn’t answer fundamental questions about their Messiah while the Messiah stood before them teaching them the fundamentals of the Hebrew Scriptures. They wanted to deflect through questions, they wanted to control the conversation and trap our Lord. They fell into the very pit they dug for Him. They tried to trap with questions and they were entrapped, silenced from then on by Jesus' questions.
Today, we are confronted with the heart of questioning. There is nothing wrong with asking questions. Yet, the spirit, the presuppositions, that undergird the question are really what is at issue. Do we want to know more facts before we obey? Are we seeking exceptions? Are we trying to avoid the clear commandment of God by looking for a way out?
Do we want to be the ruler and judge of our own lives? Jesus is confronting this mindset of questioning. Do we really WANT to believe? Do we really TRUST that Jesus is Lord? We see clearly that Jesus presents the evidence of His Lordship but many refuse to believe the evidence. They simply want confirmation of what they want to believe about HIm. Love is to be the primary motivation of our theological questions. How can we love God more? How can we obey more? How can we practice better obedience in what we know so as to be given greater light in areas that aren’t quite as clear? Let us apply our hearts to the wisdom of loving God and loving our neighbors. Let us seek clearer applications of both aspects of loving God and our neighbor and let us not abuse or hide behind questions or seek an escape from what we know to be God’s will. Amen.
