In my previous church I was fortunate enough
to have my in-laws as members. My
father-in-law is an extremely bright man who never seems to let his mind go
idle. This was good for me on Sunday
mornings because the "cog's-are-turning" look on his face during the
sermon had me thinking that I was putting forth some pretty astute
insights. And so, I would look forward
to dinner later that evening in the hope that he might want to discuss the
sermon. Well, rarely did that
happen. It was usually the case that his
mind had been occupied with some other hobby related problem for which the
solution did indeed come to him during the sermon. His hobby is making furniture and for some reason
sermon time was good for him to be thinking on a project he had going in his
shop.
One of
those projects was a library cart for the church he was making out of local
Ash. He designed it himself to function
both as a cart and a display case. He
also had his own plaque engraved for it because he didn’t want somebody wasting money on a brass
plaque that said “This cart was
made and donated by____.”
He has strong opinions
about brass plaques and churches. His
plaque since it was the tree that had given the most his plaque read, “This cart is made of local ash.” He also
quoted Jesus here at Matthew 22:37, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your mind.” If I remember he put “mind” in italics because
he wanted to get the message across that the Christian faith wasn’t something for which we check our brains at
the door. Faith requires study. Faith seeks understanding and therefore must
be informed otherwise its nothing more than superstition.
Well, I don’t think my father-in-law is aware of it, but
that verse in itself is an opener to a ponderable question with which we like
him would do well to preoccupy our minds this morning during sermon time. In this verse Jesus oddly misquotes an Old
Testament verse that is the heart of the ancient Hebrew faith, a very familiar
verse to any Jew of his day and we must ask why. If we could say that ancient Israel had a
creed it is this verse from Deuteronomy that Jesus misquotes: “Hear, O Israel:
The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall
love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Dt. 6:4-5).
So, as important a verse as this is, why would
Jesus take the liberty of substituting “mind” for “strength” and why would he take
this liberty in the midst of what was a couple days worth of ongoing
interrogation and testing of him by the religious authorities? We would think that in the midst of all this
he would want to be dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s rather than taking
liberties with the text.
Well, let's set our minds to pondering. Why did Jesus substitute “mind” for “strength”? The
reasons are likely many but I would like to highlight one. I think it has
something to do with the relationship between doing and thinking. I say that because Jesus replaces the doing
word of the verse, “strength”, with the thinking
word, “mind”. What
we do with this life we’ve been given is profoundly shaped by our "thinking", the
preoccupations of our minds. What we fear,
what we worry about, what we dream, what we hope, what we believe about
ourselves, what we believe about other people, what we believe other people
believe about us, and so on, all these thoughts profoundly shape, indeed drive,
what we do.
To frame this more in the language of faith,
faithfulness is shaped by faith Which Whom or What we place our trust in and
what we believe about that Whom or What profoundly affects how we go about
being faithful. To say it more in
Christian terms – faithfulness or discipleship
is shaped and driven by a preoccupation with the question “Who are you Jesus?” So with respect to our question at hand I think Jesus replaced the doing
word with the thinking word because he’s leading these Pharisees rather craftily to seeing that if they want to
get their faithfulness right, they are going to have to get who he is. He is not just a possibility for the Messiah
to whom they give the title Son of David.
They must understand that he is their Lord, Son of God.
The course of Jesus’ last few days in Matthew’s Gospel demonstrates this. Just a couple days prior, Jesus did what the
Messiah King was supposed to do; according to prophecy he rode a donkey into
town. All along the way the crowds were
shouting: ““Hosanna to the
Son of David! Blessed is the one who
comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna
in the highest heaven!”
Then Matthew says
something that certainly helps me make my point. He writes, “When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was
in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” (Mt. 21:9-10) The next couple of days all the main cliques among the religious
authorities took turns interrogating him with respect to that question.
Moving on, the next thing Jesus did was go to
the temple and cleanse it of the big business of spiritual abuse that was going
on there. You see, if you were a
faithful Jew coming to Jerusalem on pilgrimage and wanted to make the required
peace offering at the temple by means of the sacrifice of a dove, you couldn’t just bring your own dove. You had to buy the temple-raised dove that
you could only buy with the temple currency that you could only get from the
moneychangers who were happy to exchange your Roman coinage for a price. So,
Jesus quite angrily overturns the tables of the moneychangers and the animal
vendors saying: “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers” (Mt.
21:13). Doing that Jesus just did something only the God of Israel had the
authority do and he also called the temple “My house”.
So, who is Jesus and what has he come to do,
the Jerusalem religious authorities ask.
Well, Jesus by his doings demonstrates that he is the God of Israel come
to put things to right starting with cleansing his own house of spiritual
abuse. By his teachings Jesus wants the
Pharisees to see that faithfulness isn’t the faithfulness of outward appearance that they had so astoundingly
mastered. Faithfulness begins with
loving the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul or being, and
with all your mind; which is preoccupying your inner self with wanting to know
who God is, and so then wanting to know who Jesus is. It follows from there that faithfulness will
manifest itself as loving our neighbour as we love ourselves, which is
something that cannot be done without knowing the steadfastly loving and
faithful way God is towards us each.
To give an example, several years ago I took
to the spiritual discipline of memorizing the Sermon on the Mount. I tried to do it a verse a day and it took
about 120 days. Every morning I would
memorize a verse and then I would attempt to just keep saying it to myself over
and over throughout the day as best I could during times of mental idleness. My purpose in undertaking this disciple was
to train my mind to ponder the things of God rather than the worries and fears
and judging and self-bashing with which I am so inclined to be
preoccupied. In those days I went for a
run almost everyday and it was during that time that I really worked at
focusing on that day’s verse. Well, lo and behold,
about halfway through the Sermon, more than fifty days in, Jesus gave me a
glimpse of who he is. He really is
non-judgemental, forgiving, and gracious.
I really know and trust that about him.
It was like learning something of who my wife is, not something about my
wife. I can figure out all kinds of
things about Dana, but sometimes it happens that I catch a glimpse of who she
is and it changes me and the way I am in our relationship. So, it was with Jesus that day. I caught a glimpse of who he is and changed
me and has been changing me ever since.
So, winding this all down, may I humbly make
an invitation to you? How about giving a
shot at preoccupying your minds with who Jesus is? Take up a spiritual discipline that will
involve the mind like prayerfully pondering the Scriptures, praying the Lord's Prayer
over and over. Take up a spiritual
discipline and I suspect Jesus will indeed reveal himself to you and it will
prove transformational changing the way you treat yourself and your neighbour.
Amen.
