The Heart of Scripture
25 October 2026 Proper 25A
The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin Oregon
Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
I once was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in a Washington DC rush hour behind a dirty pickup truck with West Virginia tags that prominently displayed the bumper sticker, “GOD SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT.” At the time I was a Ph.D. student at the Catholic University of America in Biblical Languages and Literatures, wrestling on a daily basis with the difficulties and intricacies of figuring out what various passages of the Bible meant when written, and, more difficultly, how they could be applied to us today. After an hour behind that truck, staring at that bumper sticker and wondering about what the truck owner intended by pasting it there, what had been on my part a mild intellectual disdain for and amusement at fundamentalist approaches to scripture, religion, and society had morphed into a visceral rejection of all that fundamentalism at any time stands for. Often, it is about boosting vile positions, taken from a few misconstrued and isolated “clobber passages”: the subordination of women, rejecting people of religious opinions or ethnicities different from ours, or debasing the dignity and worth of gays, lesbians, trans-gender or gender non-conforming persons.
I understand why it is so hard for most people to leave fundamentalism—it hurts. It has a cost. When you no longer have an absolute certitude about what God said and what God expects, you can find yourself adrift. When the foundation you’ve based your life on crumbles, it is hard to pick up the pieces and put them back together, since there is no more picture on the box of the jig-saw puzzle that is your life. And when you come to learn that at least some of what you were told that God expects is just so much horse manure, you can find yourself wondering at times whether there even is a God, or right and wrong. This can be particularly sharp if you are one of those people that fundamentalists use those clobber verses on.
The Holy Bible is a rich, diverse collection of all sorts of writings: legal
codes, religious history, genealogical tables, tales of one’s tribe and family,
as well as myths about the earth's origins. In the Psalms, you find
poems clearly meant to be recited in rituals. There are also personal laments
and prayers. There is even an erotic poem, albeit one that the compilers of the
collection later took to be religious allegory, the Song of Solomon. This
diverse collection, gathered together over a thousand-year period, contains a
great diversity of morality and faith. Frankly, we can on occasion be
shocked at what we sometimes find there. But there also are moments of
bliss and ecstasy in this collection as well, and great moments of unswerving
and unsparing moral clarity, in both Testaments.
Some people say that true doctrine can only be established by proving it from the Bible. But this misses a major point. Because of the diversity of the Bible, you can prove almost anything from it if you are interested in just trotting out proof texts. Witness the huge variety of denominations all claiming to base their teaching in the Bible and contradicting each other on almost every single point of doctrine.
Today’s Gospel addresses these issues of Biblical diversity, authority, and
interpretation probably better than any other passage of scripture.
The Pharisees send a student of the Law to ask Jesus an important question of what later rabbis would call halakhah, or legal interpretation: “Of all the 613 commandments in the Torah, (365 'Thou shalt not's' and 248 'Thou shalt's’), which is the most important? What is the heart of the Scripture?”
Jesus answers as many other rabbis did. He quotes from the Shema‘ , the credo of Judaism that is recited every morning and evening in prayers: “ Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus says that this is “the first, the most important commandment.”
But then Jesus, without being asked, adds, “and a second commandment is just like this first one, on par with it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments depend the entire body of scripture.”
He is quoting an obscure portion of the Leviticus Holiness Code: “You shall not take vengeance against, nor bear any grudge against your kinspeople, but you shall love your neighbor as you do yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18).
This juxtaposition was first made by Jesus, something completely new. Though rabbis generations later would identify what we would call the golden rule as the heart of the Law, they do not quote Leviticus 19, link its use of the verb "love" with the use of the verb "love" in the Shema', and say that this second commandment is on par with the first.
Jesus puts these two commandments on the same level, and in so doing bridges a great divide in the tradition of the Hebrew scriptures.
Walther
Bruggemann, in his magisterial Theology of the Old Testament, points out
that throughout the Hebrew scriptures, one finds two great thematic threads. On
the one side, there is the holiness of God, the separateness of God, calling
for a striving for purity and ritual holiness by God’s people, for being
special and set aside for God’s service. “You shall be holy for I am
holy,” we read in Leviticus, and there follows hundreds of detailed rules
setting boundaries and defining categories to help achieve
holiness. On the other side there is striving for justice,
for treating people, especially the marginalized, decently and fairly.
The two themes often seem in opposition. The priests and the Law tend to
talk a lot about purity and holiness. The prophets tend to talk about
dealing with others justly, especially those most in need. For Samuel,
Amos, Isaiah, Micah and others God says things like: “I expect you to be
good, not religious.” “I hate your
sacrifices because you mistreat widows and orphans.” “All I really ask of
you is to treat the poor fairly, the foreigner fairly, and to walk humbly with
me.” For the priests and teachers of halakhic law, however, God say
things like, “You will be Holy for I am Holy, says the Lord.” “You shall
not pollute the land with impurity, or I will destroy you.” “You shall drive
out pollution from among your midst and separate yourself from
uncleanness.” Priests said “Don’t mix with pagans and sinners.” “Divorce
your foreign wives.” But other people told
stories about people like Ruth, a foreign woman married to an Israelite who
dies, and then out of love follows her mother-in-law back to her home in Israel
and there, through dubious means at best, catches herself an Israelite husband
and becomes the grandmother of King David.
Bruggemann says that the two traditions are both important and mutually
corrective. The boundaries established by the Law are what define and preserve
the People of God, and allow ethical monotheism to flourish. But if
holiness is not tempered with the call for social justice, it becomes empty
ritual, a mode of oppression, and dies. On the other hand, calls for
social justice in the absence of an authentic call to holiness rapidly
degenerate into the most obvious self-serving form of interest-group
politics.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says the heart of scripture is both faithfulness to a holy God and taking compassionate care of one’s fellow human beings.
And he sees that the thing that can link these two opposites, is love. “Love the Lord your God,” not “believe in the One True and Only God.” “Love your neighbor,” not “find a true and proper definition of who your neighbor is.” The Psalm had said only fools say there is no God, but for Jesus, what matters is not the content of your beliefs about God, but the disposition of your heart. Leviticus had gone on and on to define who was an Israelit and who wasn’t, who your neighbor was, and who wasn’t. But for Jesus, that’s not the issue. It’s what your heart makes of those about you and how you act on that. “Love” means focusing your concern and hope on the beloved, and putting that into real actions, not picking and choosing whether they exist of who exactly they are. Note to us recovering fundamentalists who doubt maybe the existence of God or of any moral framework: what matters is your hope and aspirations for God and the Good. If you get that right, everything else will follow!
It is important to note that in the Gospels, whenever social justice is placed in conflict with ritual purity and Jesus is asked to decide between them, in every single case he opts for social justice. For him, justice trumps purity and holiness every single time.
Martin Luther talked about the need for a “canon within the canon,” a recognizing of the core message of scripture so we can place all its diversity in context. Jesus’ use of these two passages as the heart of scripture shows he too believed in a canon within the canon. He knew that scripture could be abused, and that there were some nasty bits in it. He is constantly going up against Sadducees, Pharisees, and lawyers who quote scripture at him to prove points he knows are wrong. Usually he quotes other passages, often obscure passages that reveal attitudes and feelings about the universality of the loving kindness of God, to correct these claims of “GOD SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT.”
Using scripture to beat up on people is just plain wrong. Using it to affirm others is nothing but right.
After identifying love as the heart of scripture, Jesus then underscores his
approach to scripture by asking the Pharisees a very inconvenient
question. They both believe that David was the author of the Psalms, and
Jesus contrasts the commonly held believe that the coming ideal king who would
set things right was a "son of David" with the fact that the Psalter
itself refers to the ideal king as "my lord." Jesus' point is
that there are contradictions and inconsistencies right within scripture as we
traditionally understand scripture. The authority and mystery of
scripture is too great to reduce it to proof-texts, to "clobber"
passages.
In others words, don’t use the Bible to interpret love, but use love to interpret the Bible. Does an understanding of a passage advance justice and fairness, broaden the inclusion of the excluded, or does it just serve simply as a stick with which to beat up on those different from us?
Scripture is not so
much God’s thoughts written down, as it is the field notes of God’s people over
the ages. As such, it is a treasure and must serve us as a guide.
But whenever someone argues some odious position by saying “the Bible says…” we
should reply at once, “and what else does the Bible say?”
It is in this sense of the Bible as a work of the believing community inspired
and led by God, despite weakness and occasional detours, that we can affirm our
faith is a biblical faith. We, the Church, are the believing community that
produced and is also the product of the Bible. Only when we take as
the heart of scripture the equal need to love God and love our neighbor does
the book begin to cohere and serve as a guide for faith and life. Only
then do we begin to see the deep unity it is message, despite all the differences
on its surface.
In the name of Christ, Amen
