October 25, 2026
Pentecost 22 / Proper 25, Year A
Rev. Deacon Lee Febos
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Deuteronomy 34:1-12 ~ Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17 ~ 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 ~ Matthew 22:34-46
We have had a few weeks of hanging out in Matthew 22, and Elaine and I could keep saying this, but what a rich and textured portion of the gospel filled with challenging questions. One aspect that this week adds, as an escalation in the stakes of the expertise of Jesus’s audience, is that this time, the Pharisees send a lawyer; my Harper Collin’s Study Bible defines a lawyer as someone who is particularly good at interpreting the law. The Pharisees themselves are experts in interpreting law, so invoking a lawyer is being sent to the superintendent’s office rather than the principal’s. There is an institutional order of magnitude being crossed.
The lawyer asks Jesus, “Teacher, What is the greatest commandment in the law?”
To this, Jesus has a plethora of options: The Taryag Mitzvot, the 613 commandments in the Law of Moses have everything from skin disease to marriage and divorce. These commandments are about existing in communities and existing in bodies. As Bishop Ahrens spoke about in her homily this Friday evening during Convention, these laws are about asking: Where am I putting my body?
The greatest law, might be then, one that allows us to be at the highest highs, at the level of Moses seeing the Holy Land and handing off his authority to Joshua at the end of Deuteronomy; while also experiencing the lows of Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians, disgusted at how he has been treated and quite angry and bitter still at the Phillipians. To capture a greatest commandment is to capture human nature while calling us to something better. It is what can make Paul saying, “We care for you” and “You are dear to us” sound less like the patronizing cajoling of an inappropriate authority figure and sound more like someone who actually cares and actually wants this community to be better. The greatest commandment can capture how Joshua ushered in a new historical era for Israel. So what is it?
Here is where Jesus relies on some scholarship that had been around in his time. He is not the first to acknowledge the centrality of the commandments from Deuteronomy to Love God and from Leviticus to love your neighbor. Ancient texts that predate Jesus cite these commandments as a way to distill the breadth of law. Many had been involved in a project of creating clarity and simplicity, a project into which Jesus participates.
Reference to the teaching of these two commandments as primary to the lives of Christians were found in texts about discipleship from early Christians. The Didache is a late first or early second century document about those who are being baptized into the faith, catechumens. It begins with spiritual guidance that references broad swaths of scripture. This text begins: “There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways. The way of life is this. First of all, you shall love the God who made you. Second, love your neighbor as yourself.” Centralizing these tenants for those early catechumens transforms from a rhetorical tool in a conversation with authority figures to a way of living one’s life in the radical transformation of the baptism.
In the Gospel of Matthew this morning, one gets the sense that with this act of naming these two commandments, Jesus has performed his role in this conversation. He has given a clear and relevant answer to a lawyer: A miracle. Praise him.
Jesus asks the Pharisees a question in return: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”
Just as coherently, the Pharisees reply with the standard answer one might expect from a scholar of Jewish law in this period: “The Son of David.” Isaiah and Jeremiah both make reference to The Son of David. And as we spoke about in our Bible Study on Monday, Matthew has already drawn the lineage from Jesus to David, via Ruth. This is surely a correct enough answer. What a civil repartee.
This is not the answer, though, that Jesus sees as most correct. Jesus asks, what in my experience of high school would have been called a DBQ, a document based question. Pull up Psalms 110 and Psalm 8 and explain in 3 paragraphs why or why not David’s Son would be equivalent to God’s Son if David calls God “Lord” in these texts?
Look, it’s the end of Matthew 22, Jesus is starting to feel a little punchy after all this questioning.
David says “The Lord said to my Lord,” and in the context in which Jesus is using it, it sounds like David is saying God said to the messiah. And this matters because here is David showing a level of humility that becomes an example to the Pharisees. Live this out. Know this. Even David could imagine a messiah who was not only a human born of his lineage, which Jesus is, but the Messiah is the Son of God and while being fully human is also fully divine. There is an inequality that David respects in his address of “Lord.”
It is this mystery that we celebrate when we know that the Lord is God. When we ground ourselves in this commandment, we that much more easily can live our love of our neighbor. We are humble before God, and we become more humble to one another, more ready to be surprised, to accept that our answers serve us but can be challenged. We can model ourselves off of David to see what God is making in our neighbor that can be celebrated and lifted up outside of the narrow confines of our selves.
We are practicing these commandments every Sunday in our fellowship and worship, and we seek nourishment so that we can continue this practice through our daily lives. We can live into our baptismal vows when we notice and love the humanity in someone who we might turn away from too quickly. A frustrating phone call can be just that, and Paul’s letter this morning is a beautiful example of expressing that discomfort, but beyond the comfort is another person who we can try to love, and insodoing, we come to recognize that the lord is God and all is possible through a divinity that expands beyond the expectations of humanity.
Yesterday, we had our second day of Convention for ECCT, and I think of Convention as being a time where we get to make some claims about who we are. It is exhausting and exhilarating, and it is what we are about as a church. When we leave that space, us each atomized again to our cars and our commutes, we can continue to allow that work to become grounded again in humanity.
At the stop light, merging onto the highway, with the world seeping back in, the question rises, “What do you think of the Messiah?” And we say, “My Lord, I’d really like to know.”