Summary of the Law as Messianic Living

20 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 25, October 26, 2014

Deuteronomy 34: 1-12 Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 Matthew 22:34-46

Lectionary Link

   We live under the conditions of a general and powerful freedom in our world and because of this we can with Charles Dickens always say, “it is the best of times and it is worst of time.”  Our faith life has to do with learning to adjust to being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time in a right or wrong condition of being.  The conditions of the present create the moment of faith; if things are good in our pursuit of health, well-being and the pursuit of happiness then we want to bottle the formula to extend and perpetuate those conditions which seem to be conducive to our happiness.  If the current life presents us with great obstacles to our health, well-being and pursuit of happiness, we have to deal with the disappointment, the delayed gratification, the disgust toward what we think is causing our crisis and in some cases the fear of sheer cruelty.

  The best of times and the worst of times creates the conditions for us to idealize the past or to wishfully create a rescuing future in order to deal with or survive the present or simply to preserve what we think works for our current well-being.

  Faith could be all about coping with the freedom of life in the now.  The Holy Scriptures are a record of the coping power of faith and the creation of stories and narratives to give us evidence of what was used to inspire salvation as the event of having faith to cope with the diversity of conditions which freedom brings to us in life.

  We might think that those biblical people were those who spun myth to deal with their pain or their success.  They looked back to the great man Moses and a time when the law and living was pure and simple and informal and obvious.  They idealized their King David to be a hero, God’s chosen instrument in a Golden Age for God’s people.  When Jesus came the times had been so bad for so many of the Jewish people, they took more comfort in idealizing a better future with a better hero person.  When one needs a rescue one looks for a hero; one looks for a superhero.  You and I can judge how bad we feel about the problems in our world today by the incredible proliferation of mythical superheroes of every sort.  They are high tech transformer or old fashioned guys wearing blue, red and yellow spandex under their street clothes or have a bat cave to go to make a change in their persona.  The biblical people had their superhero, the messiah.  They had the messianic expectations to help them get through their worst of times.

  We today, are just as human as biblical people.  We idealize the past; oh if we could get back to just the basic American Constitution, in all of the Jeffersonian and Madisonian purity.  Now there are so many laws and regulations; would that it were all simpler.  And wasn’t life better when Ike was president, or Reagan, or Clinton.  Each person from one’s own socio-economic situation idealizes a certain past to help survive the situation now.  Each person is vulnerable and may take comfort in superheroes to idealize a personal way to a better future.

  We are still mythical thinkers today as much as the biblical people were in their own time and it does no good to be dismissive about biblical motifs while we are superiorly blind to our own.

  Jesus came to people in the best of times and the worst of times.  He came to some who wanted legal purity.  If only we could get back to living by all of the 613 commandments in the Torah, we could have a better life.  And isn’t it a shame that so many people don’t know the 613 commandments and are willing to dismiss living by them.  So Jesus, if you are dismissing the 613 commandments, which commandments would you keep as being necessary to your life?

  So here Jesus was like a chief steward on the Titanic which is going down and his crew is wanting to know if they should set up the shuffleboard game and on which side of the deck should they put the deck chairs.  And Jesus, like a chief steward is thinking, “Guys, we only need to attend to the life boats right now, because this ship is going down. It time to think about basic salvation.”  And in the sinking ship of life in the present time salvation is basic: Love God with all of the heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.

  Moses is gone, David is gone and the Romans possess the land.  Don’t confuse the people with legal details of your nostalgia for a different world.  Get to the basics of accessible moral thinking.  Give every man, woman and child accessible criteria for them to judge the actions and thoughts of their lives:  Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

  Jesus made ethics and morals accessible to everyone.  He gave people the basic judging criteria of life.  We clergy like to add lots of other rules on top of the basic because our jobs depend on it.  We would like for you to think that the eleventh commandment is: Thou shalt get your pledge card in on time.”

  The time of Jesus was like our time; it had enough of the worst of times about it to create the need for a superhero, an imminent savior and rescuer.  If we ever needed to be saved it is now.  Apocalyptic thinking is “quick fix” thinking.  Life is so bad for the good guys that God needs to stop all of this right away.  The Flood Story was apocalyptic thinking.  The people of the world were so evil and bad that God had to destroy everyone except Noah and his family and start over.  What is true about this is not that such a story could be verified; what is true is the apocalyptic impulse.

  People respond to loss and crises with the apocalyptic impulse as they express the need for an interventionist superhero in different ways.  In our world we can find ISIL and Boka Haram and Taliban as apocalyptic violence cults with the simple solution to kill everyone who differs from them.  Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot and a host of others have subscribed to apocalyptic violence as a way to usher in the peace of their controlling realm.  The Caesar was declared the “Savior of the World” who brought about what was called the “Pax Romana” or the Roman Peace, peace as the result of killing out all opponents to the type of order that the Caesar imposed.

  Jesus is presented as one who had to live within an environment which included much speculation about a Messianic superhero.  People of all sorts had many different opinion about the superhero.  The superhero motif is our creation to survive now by hoping for the intervention of a better tomorrow in the form of a personal power that shows us that we are cared for.

   What the record of history shows is that Jesus was not received as the messiah for those who continued in the synagogue and who excommunicated the followers of Jesus.  What the record of history shows is that non-Jewish people took over a completely unfamiliar notion, the notion of the messiah from the Jewish story and adopted it as the winning motif within the Roman Empire.  This is one of the most baffling ironies of human history.

  And I think this elevation of Jesus as a superhero messiah to people who did not even originate the notion of the messiah happened because Jesus was a suffering servant messiah.  Jesus was a hidden messiah.  Jesus was the one who was saying, if you want to know the messiah and the impact and the success of the messiah just, love God and love your neighbor as yourself, and do it one moment at a time.  And suddenly you will find that messianic takes over one’s life.

  Today we are deluged with so many laws and regulations we can let ourselves be divided by countless requirements and loyalties.  Today, there is incredible public stalemate to accomplish common good.  There is violence abroad in our world at home and in places far away.  And Hollywood catering to our fear has generated hundreds of superheroes to provide us with a catharsis for the need of a “quick fix” to our world.

  But what is the Gospel?  The fix is not quick.  The fix is the kind and quiet and private application of this: Love God with all your heart; love your neighbor as yourself.  If we abide in this principle we will find the messiah and the messianic within our lives.  Amen.