The Heart of Scripture (Proper 25A)

 

The Heart of Scripture

29 October 2023 Proper 25A

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Medford 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 foreigners or the poor, or debasing the dignity and worth of gays, lesbians, or gender non-conforming persons. 

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 claiming to base their teaching in the Bible and contradicting each other at one time or another 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: `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 a rabbis generation 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 obedience, not sacrifice.” “I hate your sacrifices because you mistreat the widow and the orphan.”    “All I really ask of you is to treat the poor 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.” 

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 uses a text right from the middle of the Holiness code itself (Lev. 19) to counterbalance the over-emphasis that he saw being placed on holiness at the expense of justice.  

 

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. 

 

In the name of Christ,   Amen