“He had answered them well”
An intriguing and difficult Gospel, it signals the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one who is the fulfillment of the Law, the one in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour is perfectly realized. But that turns on another important point, namely, the idea of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the anointed one of God. Both are the strong truth claims of the Gospel about Jesus as Lord. It is worth unpacking them a bit in relation to one of the scribes who engages with Jesus respectfully and intelligently, so much so that Jesus will say that “thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”
One of the scribes “having heard them reasoning together” perceives that Jesus “had answered them well.” Who was reasoning together about what and with whom? The “reasoning together” is really a disputation, an examination of matters of contention. Jesus is engaged in a dispute with the Sadducees about marriage and resurrection. The idea of resurrection was a matter of debate within late Judaism. The Sadducees were a group within Israel who, as Mark puts it, “say that there is no resurrection.” They undertake to entrap Jesus about the law regarding “levirate marriage” in the Law of Moses: the idea that the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow and raise up children for him. The term “levirate” simply means ‘a husband’s brother.’ The concern, I think, is about a way of providing for the care of the widow and for the continuation of the family line. The Sadducees manufacture a complicated ‘what-if’ scenario of a series of seven brothers who one by one take the first brother’s wife after his death only for each of them to die without a child. The question they put to Jesus is “whose wife will she be in the resurrection since the seven had her as wife?”
At issue is an understanding of the Law and a question about the resurrection. Jesus’ response catches the attention of one of the scribes who has overheard the exchange. Jesus says rather bluntly the Sadducees are wrong because they “neither know the scriptures nor the power of God.” He points out that in heaven they “neither marry nor are given in marriage” so the whole scenario is moot. He reminds them about the burning bush where God says to Moses that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, patriarchs whose lives and deaths are noted in Genesis. His point is that the revelation of God to Moses assumes that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are raised up and are alive. “He is not God of the dead but of the living” Jesus says and, once again, adds “you are quite wrong.”
The quality of the argument moves the scribe to say that “he had answered them well,” meaning the Sadducees. This echoes the exchange between Socrates and Agathon in Plato’s Symposium. Socrates interrogates Agathon’s speech about love and brings him to the realization that he didn’t know what he was talking about, for if love is love of something then it can’t be divine, immortal, and beautiful since it is looking for those very things it doesn’t have. In recognising the truth of this logic, Agathon remarks that it is hard to argue against Socrates. Socrates replies, no, “it’s the truth you can’t argue against, my dear friend Agathon. It’s not at all difficult to argue against Socrates.”
Sometimes we learn through dispute and argument as challenging as that can be. The scribe is moved in a positive way to ask the greater question, “which is the first commandment of all?” Jesus again answers well with his magisterial “Summary of the Law” which the scribe appreciates and understands. The greatest commandment is the love of God and the love of neighbour, “none other commandment greater than these,” Jesus says; “better than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices,” the scribe adds And yet such statements are profoundly provocative and even controversial. Why? Because of their clarity. This clarity about charity puts everything into perspective. It cuts through all the clutter and confusion of history and experience. It crystallizes the whole of the Jewish Scriptures. It is a kind of distillation of the teachings of the Old Testament, almost, we might say, a kind of Old Testament Creed, and certainly one which challenges many perspectives about that remarkable collection of books and stories and poems. Is it really all about love? How can law be love?
Because the Law is nothing more than the expression of God’s will and truth for our humanity and if it convicts us of our own shortcomings, as it most surely does, especially from a Christian understanding, then it does so only to recall us to truth. Such is repentance and prayer. But only because such is love, the love of truth.
We turn back to God in two ways, one in thanksgiving, the other in repentance. Both acknowledge the truth of God which measures us and not the other way around. That measure ultimately redeems and sanctifies our loves and our experiences. How? By bringing them to the truth of God without which “all loving [is] mere folly,” as Shakespeare suggests.
Jesus goes on to challenge certain ideas about the Messiah, saying to the contrary of the scribes that the Messiah of Israel is more than just a son of David, that is to say of the royal Davidic lineage, and therefore more than a political saviour. He has a more transcendent, indeed, eternal origin, namely, God; as we say credally about Christ, he is “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.”
Jesus is the Messiah who is God with us, true God and true Man. This lies at the heart of the Catholic Creeds. The focus is on the utter uniqueness of Christ as one with the Lord God of the Old Testament to whom David, Shepherd and King, Poet and Warrior, is also subject. “Jesus is Lord” is the earliest form of credal statement that we have in the New Testament; a statement which we can only say, as Paul puts it, “by the Spirit”.
We return to the Scriptures credally understood, that is to say, understood through the primacy of the categories of creation, redemption, and sanctification, and, even more, through the primacy of the love of the living God revealed and understood as Trinity. In the primacy of these categories and in the embrace of the Trinity, we find the objective determinants of our humanity, and not otherwise. We confront truth with clarity and in charity.
We need the clarity of the gospel to discover again the charity of God without which we are nothing and nothing worth, especially in the folly of our self-assertions. There is one who has answered well.
“He had answered them well”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVIII
October 20th, 2019