Sermon preached 4 October 2026
Reading: Matthew 22:34–46
Tr Pastor Lawrence McCatty
In our Gospel text for today, Jesus uses a confrontation with the Pharisees to teach them, and us, the answer to two crucial questions
First, what is the purpose of the Law? Second, who is Christ?
Conflict with the Jewish leaders
The events reported by Matthew in our text really start in verse 23 of the previous chapter (chapter 21).
It is three days before Jesus’ arrest and trial, and He had again come to the temple.
I say again, as this is the pattern that Jesus had followed since His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
He enters the temple in the morning, teaches and heals, and then withdraws with His disciples to spend the night in Bethany a few miles to the east. It is now Tuesday, the third and last day that Jesus followed this routine. He had entered the temple in the morning and there follows a series of confrontations with every major group to be found among the Jews.
Round One
First up, in verse 23 of chapter 21, we hear that the chief priests and elders immediately came to Him to challenge His authority as He entered the temple. He answers them with a question about John’s baptism that they refuse to answer, and then teaches them and the crowds listening, through a series of parables, that there is no place in God’s Kingdom for the corrupt and hypocritical religious leaders.
Matthew reports that this Round One of the confrontations ends with: 15 the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words.
Round Two
In Round Two, the second of these confrontations, they send their disciples to question Him with what they think is a clever trap, about whether it’s lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not. Jesus delivers a knockout blow:
“render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” 22 When they heard it, they marvelled. And they left him and went away.”
Round Three
In Round Three: The Sadducees come to him and ask a complicated question about the Law and its application to a highly theoretical situation where a woman whose husband dies and marries his brother, who then dies and she marries his brother, who, in turn, dies and marries his brother and so on, and so on.
Jesus silenced them – He delivered a metaphorical punch to the gut by telling the Sadducees in verse 29:
“You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.”
Ouch! That must have hurt.
Round Four
And round four of these confrontations brings us to our Gospel text.
The Pharisees, hear that Jesus has defeated and silenced their hated rivals. They gather in a huddle. “Those idiot Sadducees have been shut up, as they should. Now it’s our turn again, this time we’ll bring this upstart “Rabbi” down.”
They send in one of their best and brightest, not only an expert in Old Testament theology but a specialist in the Law. Their spokesman comes to Jesus as though sincerely seeking truth. He asks:
36 “Teacher, which is the great(est) commandment in the Law?”
The question seems innocent enough, but they have no interest in the truth. Their intent is to “entangle him in his words”, to discredit him and destroy the faith of those who believe and follow him.
The trap here is that if Jesus selects a single part of the Law and places it above the rest, they can accuse him of relegating the other commandments to a lower position and denying their validity.
The religious leaders counted hundreds of laws in the first five books of the Bible, not just the Ten Commandments, and they added many more regulations of their own. Lost in the details, they missed the purpose of the law.
The Law is Love
But Jesus’ reply, as always, is perfect and cuts to the hardened hearts of the Pharisees and this lawyer. He tells them that “The Law is love”.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
The Law informs us how we should love God and how we should love each other.
The Pharisees and scribes knew the letter of the law but not its spirit, they did not understand that the Law isn’t about outward following of prescribed rules, for it must be kept with the heart and be spiritually comprehended.
God warned His people about precisely this pitfall in our Old Testament Lesson from Deuteronomy when, through Moses, He told His people to:
16 Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn
God is not demanding simple outward obedience to His Law. The Law has always been about the heart, about God’s love for us and how we love Him and others. We see this again in v15 our Old Testament Lesson:
“15 Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day.
God saw straight into the heart of the Pharisees and the lawyer. He sees into our hearts. And what do our hearts look like to God? What does the Holy and Perfect God who cannot tolerate sin see when He looks into our hearts?
The Law is a Gift from God
I remember how my grandmother suffered for years with cataracts, her eyesight getting worse week by week. After several years she managed to get to the top of the list for eye surgery and they were removed. Her joy at being able to see clearly once more, at being able to see colours, textures and detail that she had forgotten existed was brought crashing down when she looked in the mirror. Her joy turned to shock and she sadly wailed “I look so old. I didn’t realise how old I look.”
That is the Law. Our cataracts are removed by the Holy Spirit and in the mirror of the Law we clearly see what we really look like to a Holy and just God.
The Law shows us a heart that is hardened and shriveled by sin, that is unable to love God or each other, that is hostile to God and at war with Him.
What would we know of sin if there was no law to reveal it to us?
How would we know that love for God is the fulfilment of the Law? And that the entire heart, the entire soul, the entire mind must be His.
How would we know that the second commandment is like the first since it brings our love for God into a visible, tangible form, in our love for our neighbour?
As Paul, in his letter to the Romans, says when talking about love for our neighbour:
8 Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
Romans 13:8–10
Then we begin to understand how far we are from fulfilling these commandments. When things are going well it’s easy to convince yourself that you love God sufficiently to qualify for a free pass into His Kingdom. After all, you must be doing something right for God to make life so easy breezy.
It’s also easy to look after your neighbour’s welfare when you’re doing well and your neighbour’s problems are much bigger than yours.
But as soon as challenges and adversity come into your lives, it becomes all too easy to no longer consider God to be a loving God or a true perfect Father. Or that the neighbour who’s now a bit annoying and a pain doesn’t understand that your problems are much bigger than theirs.
Whenever you consider your life, your reputation, your wealth, and whatever you have, more important than God’s will, then you have fallen short.
Loving God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind? Loving your neighbour as yourself?
Impossible. Impossible without Jesus, that is why the Law is a gift from God.
In its mirror we see how much we need Jesus. We see our hearts as they truly are: selfish, vain and conceited.
We need Jesus to stand in our place so that when God looks at our hearts He sees them clothed in Christ’s righteousness, not ours.
That is why Jesus in our Gospel text today goes on to say to the Pharisees:
“What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?”
He knows they need Christ, they need Him, He is their one and only hope of the salvation they seek.
It is impossible to know God, much less to love God, unless one knows His Son.
As Jesus tells us in Matthew 11:27:
“27 All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.”
God the Father and God the Son know each other perfectly. Jesus Christ has chosen to reveal the Father to us, by sending the Holy Spirit to bring us to faith in our Triune God.
But the Pharisees’ reply to Jesus’ question “Whose son is the Christ?” shows they are blind.
They said to him, “The son of David.”
They believe Christ is a mere earthly descendant of David, a political and militant King who will restore the nation of Israel as a mighty military, political and religious power.
So Jesus draws their attention to the Scripture that they apparently know so well, to Psalm 110, written by their beloved hero David through the Holy Spirit, through the pre-incarnate Jesus, in which David calls Christ his Lord.
The LORD says to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.”
How can David call his son, his descendant, his Lord? And how can the Christ simply be an earthly descendant when he is sitting at God’s right hand?
The Old Testament plainly teaches the twofold nature of Christ, as man and God. Look at our Psalm of the Day, Psalm 2, that we sang earlier, and the other many wonderful prophecies about his coming. But the Pharisees, the experts in the Law and the Prophets, should have known this but had hardened hearts, their minds and eyes were veiled.
They did not understand that Christ is the King of kings, the great comfort for believers of all time, and that all scripture points to the Christ standing before them.
Praise God that through His Word, God’s Son is revealed to us in the faith He has freely given us.
Thank God that our salvation is not through the Law, not through our works, but is entirely by the goodness and mercy of God, that His only-begotten Son died on the cross for us, so that we are freed from the bondage of sin, and through his glorious resurrection will have eternal life with Him.
That is the boundless, fathomless, endless love and mercy, we receive from the only Son of God and Lord of David. Our eternal and wondrous Saviour, Jesus Christ who is the True King.
Amen