Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Jesus was always being tested by people. They were always trying to catch him in a loophole, to prove him wrong, to make him look bad by discrediting him. He was, after all, a new teacher of sorts. He knew God’s Word better than any of the teachers in the synagogues, and he was saying different things than they were. But the people listened to him, because he spoke with such authority. And rightly so, he was, after all, the Son of God. And it wasn’t just all of that. He said things that the teachers didn’t understand. He alluded to things in parables that the common people got, but that left the wise men at a loss. This went on throughout his ministry. It’s what finally led them to begin plotting against him. Since they couldn’t stop him with words, they would eventually resort to violence.

We get just another example of this in Matthew 22. A Pharisee, in particular one who was a lawyer, goes up to question Jesus. Now there was one time where a Pharisee came to speak to Jesus with good intentions, but this is not that time. The bible tells us, this man came to test Jesus. His question? How do I inherit eternal life? He was taking quite the risk, going up against Jesus. Like as not, he was going to come away with an answer that he didn’t understand and so couldn’t respond to. That was his risk, but it’s not what happened.

Jesus told him exactly what he thought was right. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself.” There was a surprise. Jesus didn’t pull any punches. No tricks. Straight out of Deuteronomy. The ten commandments in a nutshell.

This didn’t happen all that often – that He and the Pharisees agreed. That ought to make us stop for a second. The Pharisees believed that they were saved by their good works. They thought that they were good enough to get to heaven. And Jesus just gave them the go-ahead on that. How can this be the same message as the one we hear most of the time – “for by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is a gift of God, not by works lest anyone should boast?”

Could it be that Jesus was lying to the Pharisee? Not likely. Could it be that there are different ways to heaven? I don’t think so. Could it be that the rest of the New Testament has it wrong? Well…that’s not very appealing either. We’d find ourselves in an awkward situation, pitting Jesus’ words against the Holy Spirit’s inspiration.

Let’s place ourselves in the position of the Pharisee and see what Jesus words would have meant to him. Most of us won’t want to admit it, but we may find that there’s more Pharisee in us than we thought.

The Pharisee agreed with Jesus, and knew that he loved God. He knew it, and knew that he showed it, because he kept God’s commandments. As a matter of fact, he had made a life out of studying God’s commandments. He knew exactly which they were, and exactly how to keep them. And that’s what he did. And furthermore, he taught other people to do the same. By all accounts, he was a pious and God-fearing Jew.

Now, putting ourselves in His shoes, we need lay a few ground rules. First, we’ll assume that the rules have changed a bit over two thousand years. Jesus has removed the ceremonial requirements of the law. We don’t have to be careful not to take too many steps on the Sabbath. As a matter of fact, we have the freedom to worship God on any day, and call it the Sabbath. We don’t have to worry about unclean animals, or eating blood, or any of that that sort of stuff either. You could fairly say that the meaning of “love the Lord your God” has been simplified a bit. Second, we’ll assume, like the Pharisee, that we’ve more or less been following the rules that we’ve been given. This will be easier for some of us than others to assume, but bear with me. Even the Pharisee wouldn’t probably have claimed perfection, just being well above the bar.

Ok, so Jesus tells us, the way to heaven is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Well, admittedly sometimes one of these takes precedence over the other, but again, we’re assuming that we’ve been doing a pretty good job. So, there we are, with the Pharisee, pretty satisfied.

There’s that other story, from Matthew 19, though – the one about the rich young man. He had the same question, but Jesus elucidated the answer a little bit more for him. This time, Jesus listed the commandments, but just a few from the ten commandments, to make his point. And the rich young man had the same response as we and the Pharisee. I’ve pretty much got that down. I’ve always done those things. Never killed anyone, never stolen anything, and so on. But then Jesus tells him one more thing that he should do. “Go,” he says, “and sell everything that you have, and give the money to the poor.”

Sigh. Jesus loved that man, Matthew tells us. Why make it so much harder for him? Why make him the one who has to give up everything be him, the one who had so much. In truth, Jesus’ command here was nothing different than what He told us with the Pharisee. If you’re fulfilling all of those commandments out of true love, then you’ll love God so much that this is what you’ll do. You’ll give up everything for Him, absolutely everything. The man went away in despair. It was too much. But what about us and the Pharisee?

Even though he didn’t say it, it was meant for us too – it’s the answer to the same question, how to inherit eternal life. The Pharisee might have responded by saying that everything that he had belonged to God, so that he had nothing to sell. Or he might have been quite a bit more belligerent, accusing Jesus of giving a different answer than what was in the scriptures. And that may well be, on the surface, but Jesus understood the spirit of the Law and the Prophets, and this was the truth. Anything less is not true love. Let us pray that at this point we gladly part ways with the Pharisee and join the rich man. Better to despair in our inability to keep the law than to take away from it until we have.

St. John words Christ’s command differently. “Believe in the name of Jesus Christ, His Son, and love one another,” he says. The latter part is the same, but all of a sudden he’s replaced the impossible “love the Lord your God” with “believe in the Name of Jesus Christ.” That’s the thing that makes the impossible possible, for us and for that rich young man whom Jesus loved. It really is no different from the command given to the Pharisee, but at the same time, it makes all the difference in the world for us.

What can it mean for a Christian to love the Lord his God except to believe in His Son? Our love for God is shown in trusting him. He has made us promises, of forgiveness of sins and eternal life, and to love Him as our Heavenly Father is to place our trust in those promises, which is so much as to say to believe in Jesus Christ as their source. It is entirely because of faith that we keep Christ’s commandment. So much so, that without faith we cannot keep it for a moment, and with faith we cannot fail to keep it, even for moment. And we cannot fake this faith, for it is the gift of the Holy Spirit created in us by God’s Word, the sole good thing, created from the outside and placed in the disgusting pit that we call our heart. It is by this faith that we love the Lord our God by believing in His Son.

This does, however, leave us still the second part of the commandment, which is the same in 1 John for us as it was for the Pharisee – Love your neighbor. And we know that even with faith we fall far short of loving our neighbor. But there again, God’s word to Christians instead of the Pharisee leads us into the light. He says, “whenever our heart condemns, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything.” It’s true, unless you are completely dead to Christ, your heart will condemn you for not loving your neighbor as you are called to do. Your heart will see all the times when you passed by a stranger clearly in need of help, because you didn’t want the distraction. Your heart knows every time that you’ve gossiped about your neighbor when she wasn’t there, even if she doesn’t know. Your heart knows that your love is nothing like Christ’s unconditional love of all men. But, God is greater than your heart, and He knows that He sent His Son to die for you, and for Jesus’ sake, He forgives you. So you may with that fact console your troubled conscience. It’s a very good sign that it is troubled, but it cannot condemn you, only God can. And He will not. He loves you and has freed you from that condemnation.

Because of all of this, then, we know that we are in Christ and He is in us. He loves our neighbor through us, and though we do not love our neighbor perfectly, we may be confident that God reckons us as having kept his commandments. You are righteous, because your sin has been washed away in the waters of baptism. You are a sinner, but in God’s eyes a saint, and no one can tell you otherwise, for God has given you to trust in Him alone.

What then, of the Pharisee, though? Why did He not despair of salvation in himself, so that He might find it in Christ? This is no easy question. He had closed himself off to Jesus. He did not want to know the way to heaven, he wanted only to defeat Christ and show himself to be wise. Jesus told him the same thing that He told us, only with words that he in all of his wisdom failed to understand. The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are called, it is the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor 1). Jesus tells us, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13). The blessings of the kingdom of heaven are pearls, not to be cast before swine. (Matthew 7) To have preached the gospel to that Pharisee would be like offering a homeless man a house, and him refusing it, thinking that he has one. First he must come to realize that he is without shelter, only then will he receive what is given.

Thanks be to God, he has allowed us to see our poverty, so that he might make us rich.

Amen.

Now may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.