Does Jesus Twist Scripture?
THE TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
PROPER 25A
Matthew 22:34-46
One advantage of preaching to a zoomed in camera is that I can show off one of my prized possessions at close range. I’ve heard of people who buy fancy cars when they go through a mid-life crisis. This is my mid-life crisis Bible.
It’s a new translation and boxed set of the Hebrew Bible. The first volume, sometimes called “the Law,” has the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy. The biggest volume, “the Prophets,” has Isaiah and Jeremiah, but also other books, like the ones about the prophet Samuel and King David. The third volume throws together poetic books like the Psalms and later books like Ruth, Esther, and Daniel. These books are called “the Writings,” and in Jesus’s time, “the Writings” didn’t have the same authority as “the Law.”
I brought this Hebrew Bible because it helps us see how bold Jesus is when he reads ancient Scripture in today’s gospel.
Our gospel actually starts with reference to a previous debate. The Pharisees are maybe a little smug after hearing how Jesus had shut those Sadducees right up. The Sadducees had challenged Jesus over this new-fangled teaching about “the resurrection of the dead,” which wasn’t mentioned here, in “the Law.” Support for the resurrection of the dead can be found only here in the book of Daniel—the last book of the Hebrew Bible to be written. The Sadducees didn’t get why people would put stock in a book barely 150 years old, when they could rely on material that was between 500 and a thousand years old. (Episcopalians often wonder the same thing.)
But Jesus defended this whole resurrection thing with a quote from all the way back here in “the Law” that he reads in a new way. According to Jesus, when God calls himself “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6), it shows that the long-dead patriarchs are very alive to God. Therefore, there must be a resurrection.
To be honest, I think that’s kind of a stretch. But apparently Jesus doesn’t mind the stretch of connecting a teaching way over here in Daniel to something in “the Law” that he’s willing to see differently.
Jesus keeps up this stretchy attitude toward Scripture in today’s gospel, when one of the Pharisees, an expert in “the Law,” asks Jesus which of the commandments he’d single out as “great.” At first glance, Jesus appears to recite perfectly Deuteronomy 6:5, as if he’s read the whole Law, memorized every word, and identified the most all-encompassing line. In reality, Jesus tweaks his quote. Deuteronomy says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength” (or power or might). But Jesus changes that last item from “with all your strength” to “with all your mind.”
Why change “strength” to “mind”? Maybe the Torah scroll used in Jesus’s community had an error. Maybe Jesus just misremembered its words. Or maybe Jesus purposely adjusted his faith tradition. Maybe he thought that holistic love of God could rest in the heart and soul and mind, or that exertions of strength and power were foolhardy under Roman rule. Maybe for Jesus, Scripture wasn’t something to memorize, but something to live and to adapt alongside his people’s history.
It’s also a bold touch that Jesus concludes his answer by saying, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The lawyer wanted Jesus to pick the greatest commandment in “the Law,” but Jesus claims that in the face of the Law and this massive collection of prophets, he can synthesize, simplify, and prioritize.
But Jesus isn’t done showing all he can do with Scripture. In the next part of today’s gospel, Jesus asks the Pharisees a hot-button question: Where would the Messiah come from? Whose son would he be? The Pharisees give the most biblical answer available: the next great Messiah or “king” would descend from King David. This Messiah would fit right in to all the history and some of the prophecies preserved in this massive volume here, “the Prophets.”
But Jesus decides to challenge the biblically comfortable view that the Messiah or king they needed most would be basically David 2.0. Exactly how Jesus uses an obscure verse of Scripture to challenge a more dominant biblical strain is difficult to follow. Let’s break it down.
Maybe as much as 900 years before Christ, an anonymous court poet wrote a song about how awesome his king was. In Hebrew, the song went something like, “Yahweh said to my master the king, ‘Sit at my right hand until I turn your enemies into your footstool.’”
Then, around 500 years before Christ, religious leaders collected many centuries’ worth of Hebrew songs and poems into the anthology we call “the Psalms.” This royal psalm is number 110.
Less than 300 years before Christ, most Jewish people stopped speaking Hebrew, so the whole Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. The Greek translation of this Psalm, very confusingly, uses the same word to translate both “Yahweh” and “my master (the king).” In Greek translation, the Psalm reads, “The Lord” (meaning Yahweh) “said to my Lord” (meaning the king), “‘Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.’” That’s the version Jesus quotes today.
Around the time of Jesus, people started reading royal psalms like this one not as songs by anonymous poets about ancient kings, but as predictions by David himself about the coming Messiah.
And that’s exactly what Jesus does in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus argues that in this particular Psalm, David calls the Messiah “Lord”: “My Lord said to my Lord.” But David would never call his own offspring “lord,” because ancestors were always greater than their descendants. Therefore, the Messiah isn’t David’s own great-great-great-great-and-so-forth grandson; the Messiah must be something much greater, worthy of being called “lord” by David himself.
Jesus’s argument requires a lot of leaps. You have to be willing to read this Psalm not as the work of an anonymous court poet, but as the voice of David. You have to accept it not as a song about an ancient king, but as a prediction about a be-all end-all Messiah. You even have to regard the Greek translation, rather than the original Hebrew, as authoritative, because that’s the language that uses “lord” for both Yahweh and the king. And last of all, you have to let this verse override all the other biblical reasons to believe that the next great king would revive David’s line.
In today’s gospel, Jesus does the very things that Christians love to accuse other Christians of doing with Scripture: picking and choosing the verses they like best, and twisting—or at least bending—Scriptures away from their original context.
We could accept Jesus’s selective misquoting and historical misunderstandings as part of his human limitations. Today, we have tools that even Jesus himself didn’t have for understanding the original context, wording, and meaning of the Hebrew biblical text.
But Jesus also had an attitude toward Scripture that we sometimes lack, but badly need. He accepted that the ever-growing library of Scripture would at times disagree with itself. And he developed his own secure habits of picking and choosing, of adapting and changing, rather than demand from his Scriptures unchanging and total truth.
Biblical texts today still contain internal conflicts and textual puzzles that baffle editors and translators. In today’s gospel, though, Jesus reminds us that, whatever our limitations, ultimately we’re responsible for the choices we make within Scripture, and for the directions that we bend or twist it—toward love of God and love of neighbor, or further away.
© 2020 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas