St. Barnabas-on-the-Desert, Episcopal Church, Scottsdale, AZ.

Last week, my colleague Robert+ explored the moment Jesus is caught in a pincer movement between Pharisees and Herodians. The Pharisees were the centrist, mildly progressive religious party. They would not have teamed up with the Herodians lightly. The Herodians were the Hellenized, cosmopolitan Jewish oligarchs. But desperation makes strange bedfellows. It tells us how anxious the Establishment was about Jesus, and how much he threatened their business as usual.

I’m always curious about how the Lectionary chooses its texts. Today’s gospel picks up at verse 34. It skips verses 23 to 33, where Jesus meets the Sadducees, the conservative priestly party.

Not wanting to be left out, the Sadducees show up that same day with a question about resurrection. This was a hot-button issue. The Sadducees rejected resurrection because the Torah never mentions it. The Pharisees embraced it as a natural development of Tradition. For all their literalism, the Pharisees understood that Tradition evolves.

So the Sadducees’ trap served a bigger purpose: discrediting their rivals. Jesus answers that God is God not of the dead but of the living. On resurrection, he sides with the Pharisees.

And when the Pharisees hear that Jesus has silenced the Sadducees, they think: “Good. Let’s have another go at him.”

Now, the Pharisees get bad press, especially in Matthew. So it’s surprising to learn how much they had in common with Jesus. They sat on the Sanhedrin, the central decision-making body that included both parties. But their strength lay in the countryside, in meeting houses called, in Hebrew, beit Knesset. By Jesus’ time, most people used the Greek name: synagogue. Many synagogues ran schools for studying Torah. It’s safe to guess that Jesus was educated in one of them.

Was Jesus formed by the Pharisees? I suspect so. But he was later drawn to John the Baptist’s more radical, outside-the-box movement. That helps explain the tension between a radicalized Jesus and tradition that most influenced his early development.

And notice: the Jesus’ quarrel with the Pharisees was not about theology. It was about exegesis, two different readings of one text. No arguments are fiercer than those within the family.

Jesus met the Pharisees’ centrist literalism with a radicalization of the heart. They hid behind legal definitions. Jesus looked for the compassion beneath the words on the scroll. We might even call his approach Episcopalian!

For Jesus, scripture was more than regulations to be bound by. In his hands, ancient words became living and breathing. They were meant not to bind but to liberate, to open his hearers to the divine compassion beneath the surface. He called out anyone who used scripture to harden hearts. When the Pharisees condemned him for healing on the Sabbath, he said: the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath (Mk 2:27).

That confrontation echoes down the centuries. It erupts afresh in our own day. It is the age-old confrontation between love and literalism.

Last Sunday, chatting with the bookshop team, Kay told me someone had asked whether we carry a Bible translation called The Message. I encouraged her to stock it. Its author, Eugene Peterson, was an esteemed Presbyterian pastor and scholar. His idiomatic translation makes a helpful companion to the familiar NRSV.

Listen to how The Message opens today’s passage: “When the Pharisees heard how Jesus had bested the Sadducees, they gathered their forces for an assault. One of their religious scholars spoke for them, posing a question they hoped would show him up.”

Asked for the greatest commandment, Jesus recites the Shema. “Hear, O Israel: love your God with all your intelligence, passion, devotion, and love others as well as you love yourself. Everything in the Law and the Prophets hangs on these two interconnected commandments.” The Pharisees must have been disappointed. It was a very orthodox response to what they had hoped would be a trick question.

Peterson continues: “As the Pharisees were regrouping, Jesus caught them off balance with his own question: What do you think about the Christ, that is, the Messiah? Whose son is he?” Taken aback, they give the stock answer: David’s son.

We largely miss the force of this exchange, so I won’t linger. But Jesus is questioning their small expectation: a Messiah who is an earthly king, restoring the glory days of David. By breaking that genealogical chain, Jesus shows that the Messiah has a far greater purpose than Israel’s political liberation.

Which raises a question for us. Like the Pharisees, are our preconceptions of authority too blinkered by expectations bound to history? So that we fail to grasp the bigger picture? Perhaps so!

The Message says Jesus’ question “stumped them, literalists that they were.” Unwilling to lose face again, they quit asking questions for good (Matt 22:46).

So far, I’ve been setting the scene for the crucial question: what do we hear in the commandments to love God first, and then others as ourselves?

Perhaps many of us hear the first commandment as a call to faithful, holy lives focused on love rather than blind obedience. So far so good. But the second commandment is thornier. Who is my neighbor, and who isn’t? Those questions echo today’s political manipulation. And there’s a harder question still: how can we love others when we don’t seem to love ourselves that much?

Each of these questions deserves its own sermon. So let me end with a few thoughts on how the two commandments hang together.

There’s an old story about Hillel, the great Pharisee teacher from the generation before Jesus. A would-be convert challenged him to teach the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel replied: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and learn.”

Notice: he didn’t say “go and obey.” He said “go and learn.”

Jesus stands in that same Pharisaic tradition. He gives his own answer on one foot: love God, love your neighbor. Everything else is commentary.

So, in a nutshell, what does it mean to love God? Compassion rooted in self-acceptance.

We tend to hear “love God” as a demand, one more thing we’re failing to do. But I wonder whether it is first an invitation to be loved. To love God with all our passion, devotion, and intelligence is to stop hiding from the one who already knows us. The one who meets us as we are, not as we think we should be.

Most of us carry a long list of reasons we don’t measure up. We rehearse it so faithfully that it becomes a private scripture. And like the Pharisees’ legalisms, it binds rather than liberates.

So how do we love others when we don’t love ourselves? Perhaps we can’t, until we’ve been loved unconditionally by God.

Empathic compassion is learned the way a child learns a language: by being spoken to in it. Someone sits with us in our grief and doesn’t try to fix it. Someone hears our failure and doesn’t flinch or judge. In that moment, we receive something we could never earn. And once we’ve received it, we find we have something to give.

Compassion is the glue in every relationship worth having. It is how the love of God becomes love of self, which makes possible the love of neighbor.

But if the story stopped there, we’d have a gospel that is tender and private. Jesus’ teaching is often personal. It is never private. The second commandment takes love out of the sanctuary and into the street. Here, love takes its social form. It becomes justice.

We like to set love against justice, as though love were warm and justice were cold. Scripture won’t allow it.

The second commandment comes from Leviticus. That’s the code that tells farmers to leave the edges of their fields for the poor and the stranger. It forbids withholding a laborer’s wages. It commands one law for the native and the immigrant alike. “Love your neighbor as yourself” was never a sentiment. It was a policy for our common life. Justice is love given a legal framework and practiced with impartiality.

And here is the truth. None of us is safe unless we all enjoy the law’s impartial protection. None of us flourishes unless everyone can flourish. When one group’s safety is negotiable, everyone’s is.

That’s why those who manipulate the question “Who is my neighbor?” for political ends do such damage. They are not asking a theological question. They are drawing a line to decide whose suffering counts and whose doesn’t.

Jesus refuses to draw that line. When a lawyer asks him that very question, he answers with a story about a hated outsider, the only one who stops and helps (Luke 10:25-37).

Last week, in our Baptismal Covenant, we promised to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being. We promise it for the newly baptized and for ourselves. That is the second commandment in liturgical dress.

So what does justice look like, as the divine expression of love in a society? It looks like a world where basic human rights are honored. The right to love and be loved by whomever we choose. To live in safety and security, with a roof over our heads. To have dignified, life-sustaining work. To receive education and healthcare free at the point of use.

These are not luxuries. They are not partisan slogans. This is what it looks like when a community takes seriously that every person is loved by God, and lives accordingly.

Love God. Love your neighbor.

Compassion that holds us. Justice that holds everyone.

The rest is commentary. Now go and learn.

Notes

• The Hillel story (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a) supports your argument that Jesus and the Pharisees were close kin, and it gives the ending its refrain.
• The Leviticus 19 details (gleaning, wages, one law for native and stranger) are in vv. 9–16 and 33–34. The good Samaritan reference is Luke 10:25–37.
• The baptismal covenant wording is from the Book of Common Prayer.