Matthew 22:34-46 "What Do You Want?" Scott Hoezee

What do you want? What do you want? That question is such a commonplace. The waitress comes up to your table and asks, "Do you know what you want?" and you reply, "The chicken salad on rye, please." The telemarketer whose phone call has interrupted your dinner drones on and on until finally you break in to ask, "Can you please just tell me what you want!" Your child barges into the den while you are trying to read a book and with a slight hint of irritation in your voice you ask, "Honey, what do you want?"

Most of the time when that question gets asked, we don't blink at it. We answer it easily. But that same question can be taken in more than one way. In the movie Field of Dreams, there is a humorous moment when Kevin Costner's character has taken a crotchety, famous author, played by James Earl Jones, to a baseball game. On their way to their seats, Costner casually asks, "What do you want?" to which the author snaps, "I want people to leave me alone. I want people to stop asking me things. I want people to stop believing that I have all the answers to life's questions." "No," Costner replies pointing to the nearby concession stand, "What do you want?" The man then orders a hot dog and a beer!

What do you want? That simple query can pack a punch. Perhaps you are having a counseling session with a therapist. You've talked for who knows how long about the things in your life that upset you, that bring you down, that seem out-of-joint. Finally you get to the point where even you don't know where you are going with all this, and so the therapist asks, "Well, what is it you want? What do you want out of life?" Or perhaps you're having a conversation with your spouse. Perhaps it's the proverbial "midlife crisis." You talk about feeling restless in your work. The job is no longer challenging, the whole field of work no longer seems to fit you like you once thought it did. You think maybe you need to make a change. Your spouse patiently listens for a long time until you run out of things to say and then breaks the silence with, "What do you want?" And suddenly this commonplace question asked by waitresses and car salesmen and realtors gains a weighty poignancy.

What do you want? What is the deepest longing of your heart? When the lights go out and the busy world is hushed and the curtains are drawn and the blanket is pulled up under your chin as you lay in the palm of the night at 2am unable to sleep, what do you want? What do you think about, pine for, wish for, hope for, want? Somewhere in the deep recesses of our hearts we all have what C.S. Lewis so often wrote about: Sehnsucht, longing, a restless yearning for . . . something.

In his most recent book, Engaging God's World, Neal Plantinga approaches the entire matter of education from the starting point of our fondest wishes and deepest longings. Most of the time we maybe are too busy, too preoccupied, too distracted to be in touch with such ponderous matters. In the rush of the everyday on our way to work, fighting traffic on the Beltline, fielding the umpteenth phone call in a row that has kept us from our work, perhaps in the midst of all that we focus only on the momentary.

Whether by accident or by design, most days are hectic enough that we can keep ourselves from listening to our deepest yearnings. But every once in a while something may call us up short. A piece of music stabs at our hearts and reminds us of such a profound beauty that suddenly the mundane nature of our work-a-day world seems tawdry by comparison. It reminds us that beyond this particular moment, we pine for something else.

In the novel and movie The Shawshank Redemption, a lifelong convict nicknamed Red, keeps telling his fellow prisoner, Andy, to stop talking about hope since in prison, hope is a dangerous thing. It's better to live without hope than to have a hope that will torment you by virtue of it's not being fulfilled. But then at one point in the story Andy barricades himself in the warden's office, flips on the Shawshank prison P.A. system, and plays a portion of a Mozart opera, bringing the entire prison to a standstill as each prisoner listens to the aria. And even Red, the one who resisted all talk of hopes or dreams, could not resist this spot of beauty. And so Red muses, "I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singin' about. I like to think they were singin' about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. For the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank was free."

What do you want? Sometimes something touches us, startles us, calls us up short, and we face the ultimacy and urgency of that question. By now you surely must be wondering what all this has to do with Matthew 22. After all, neither Jesus nor anyone else in these verses touches on anything remotely like the question, "What do you want?" Instead the talk is of law and commandments. But seen from the right angle, this passage is ultimately about what it is we want in life, or what it is Jesus suggests we should want in life. The question we face today, and always, is whether or not what Jesus points to really does constitute also our deepest longing.

But first we need to look at the passage itself. Commentator Dale Bruner thinks that Matthew 22 contributes to a kind of frame around the ministry of Jesus as Matthew has presented it. Jesus' ministry began when he faced three temptations from Satan in the wilderness. Now, as Jesus is only a day or two away from being arrested and killed, the ministry concludes with three other tests that come in the form of three questions. The Pharisees first ask about paying taxes to Caesar, hoping to get Jesus in trouble with the Roman IRS in case Jesus comes out and says something treasonous. They strike out with that question, and so next the Sadducees step in with a clever question about marriage in heaven. Jesus neatly sidesteps also this trap. So then it's the Pharisees' turn again and so they ask him about the Law of God. "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment?"

It's an innocent-looking question but really it is a stealth attempt to make Jesus look like a theological liberal. If Jesus picked out any of the Bible's commandments and elevated it to the status of #1, that would imply that he was treating everything else as second-class. If you are the father of five children and one of them asks you who your favorite kid is, a wise father says, "I love you all the same." No good parent wants any child to feel like he or she plays second fiddle to the other siblings.

So also here: if they can trick Jesus into picking a favorite commandment, he'll be guilty of downplaying other commandments. But since every commandment represents the very word of God, picking and choosing among them would be heretical. Imagine your reaction if some Sunday I informed you that although I really enjoy Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Gospel of John just doesn't do much for me! When it comes to God's Word, we're not supposed to play favorites. God's Word is God's Word. Period!

Jesus knows what is going on. An easy way to get off this hook would have been for Jesus to say, "Every Word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord is great. Each commandment is great." That would have been an effective way out of this. But instead Jesus begins to quote a Bible verse, and at first the Pharisees maybe thought they had him. They didn't. Because Jesus says that love of God is the greatest of all commandments.

After all, if you don't love God, you won't be much inclined to keep any commandment. If, however, you do love God, then the rest follows naturally. And just to make the point, Jesus throws in the second commandment about neighbor- love. Between these two loves, Jesus manages to catch every single commandment you could ever name. Every commandment in the book has something to do with either God or neighbor.

But Jesus' reply was actually more clever than even that. Because in Jewish circles the single most famous verse is the so-called Shema from Deuteronomy 6. "Shema" is the Hebrew word for "hear" or "listen" and it comes from that verse, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." The Shema was traditionally recited by every Jewish child and adult at the start of each day and at the conclusion of each day. In other words, there was no single verse from the entire Torah that the average Jew knew better than this one.

So when Jesus responds to the Pharisees' tricky question by quoting a portion of the Shema, he was throwing back in their faces something they took to be exceedingly basic, something that was second-nature to even the youngest Jewish child. Many of you no doubt know the famous anecdote about Karl Barth, who was probably the twentieth century's greatest theologian. Someone asked Barth what he thought was the most profound of all theological truths. But instead of giving some jargon-laden, academic answer that used words like perichoresis, kenosis, or the insuperable transcendence of God's prevenient grace as it comes through the vicarious supererogation of the Son, Barth simply said, "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

That answer was charming and disarming. Barth said, "The greatest truth is the one you already know, the one all Christians know, the one a three-year old can sing about." In Jesus' case, he was slyly insulting the Pharisees, demonstrating to everyone there that the Pharisees were not really interested in seeing if Jesus could answer their question since even the youngest person there knew that answer already. This was not a difficult question. It was like asking Albert Einstein, "Do you know what 2+2 is?" This was basic, elementary.

As we have noted together before, Matthew's version of this encounter with the Pharisees shows Jesus subtly changing the original version of the Shema. The Shema of Deuteronomy 6 asks us to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength. Jesus alters it to heart, soul, and mind, and surely the Pharisees and everyone else there noticed the change. To quote Plantinga again, if some night at bedtime your child prayed, "Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my brain to keep," well, you'd notice!

It's difficult to say why Jesus made this substitution. Just possibly, however, this also was a none-too-subtle rebuke of the Pharisees. They were good at using their minds to do legalistic hair-splitting of all kinds. They had just now focused their mental faculties on coming up with clever questions with which to trip Jesus up. Maybe this was Jesus' way of telling them that being tricky was not the reason God had given them brains in the first place! We are supposed to honor God in how we think and reason just as surely in how well we live in terms of other areas of morality. God, in short, has something to do with everything. Or at least God should. And this maybe brings us full circle back to where we began today.

What do you want? Our Christian answer must be that what we want above all is to consider the things of God. It's not just how we feel but how we think; not just the deliverances of our hearts but the fruit of focused thought. Everything in life depends on love for God and love for one another, Jesus says. In verse 40 when Jesus says that the entire Scripture "hangs" on those two commandments, he means that literally. Love for God and love for neighbor are like two strong nails pounded deep into a wall. If those two pegs are secure, then you can hang everything on them the way you hang a picture above your piano--all else in life dangles from and is suspended by this two-fold love.

What do you want? Our answer is that we want a love that is well-anchored, that has an overarching sense of purpose over and above the specificity of any given activity we happen to engage in. We want to use our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our emotions in ways that we sense go with the creation's flow, that color inside the lines God has drawn.

Earlier in this sermon I tried to be rather poignant in talking about those times when life's deeper questions come to the foreground. And suppose you are someone who resonated with what I said then. Suppose you are the person who is in a kind of midlife crisis, wondering what it's all about, questioning what you've been doing and pondering what to do next. Suppose you are the person who lies wide awake at 2am and feels baffled as to the meaning of it all. Suppose you are the person who feels like you are running just as fast as you can day in and day out but you're not getting anywhere. Life seems like an endless chasing after soccer games, piano lessons, groceries, trips to the mall, errands to the post office, dropping the kids off at school, staying ahead of the bills, and getting those leaves in the front yard raked up before the snow buries them until March.

Suppose you feel vaguely desperate. Maybe you do manage to bury your fondest yearnings pretty deep most days but suppose you now and again hear that snatch of music or sneak a glance into something more meaningful than your life sometimes seems like, and suppose it makes you ache with the desire to know what in the world life is all about. Suppose you are like that. For you, then, what in the world is Matthew 22 and this sermon saying? Am I trying to tell you that if you could only think more frequently about God in the course of the average day, you'd feel less tired, less worn out, less frazzled and at loose ends than you maybe feel right now? Am I saying that if you just try a little harder to pray more often that scrubbing the kitchen floor will magically come to mean more?

If you feel Sehnsucht, longing, yearning, the ache to feel purposeful, then what does the Spirit of God have to say? What do you want? Beyond the short-term answers to that question ("I want a vacation!"), what we were created to want is to love God with everything we've got. What we want above all is shalom--we want the right ordering of life, the sense that things are in their proper place and alignment, the sense that the way each thing is interacting with every other thing is contributing to a larger goodness and wholeness.

And if there is a God who created all that exists, then shalom begins there. Few things nag us or plague us more than the sense that things are not right between our parents and us. That's a motif throughout literature. In many great stories there is the figure of the ne'er-do-well, the son who was cut off by his father. Maybe they had words. Maybe their split was bitter. But the relationship persists. And then the day comes when the old man dies, and yet the estranged ne'er-do-well finds it impossible to resist the urge to ask, "Did Papa mention me before he died." We want that connection with our father to be right!

Some while back I told you the story relayed by Ernest Hemmingway. Once in Spain there was a personal ad that ran in the classified section of a newspaper. "Paco, meet me tomorrow at noon at the Hotel Montana. All is forgiven. Love, Papa." And the next day the police had to be dispatched to deal with the mob of 800+ Pacos who had shown up at noon at the Hotel Montana. Hemmingway maybe just wanted to show the popularity of the Spanish name Paco, but at a more wrenching level, this reveals that core desire to connect with our origins, with our parents, with Father.

What do you want? No matter just how this shows itself or applies itself to the varied circumstances of your many lives, what you want, my friends, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. You want God to be just that all-encompassing in your life because at some basic, elementary level, you know that God just is that all-encompassing in life. You already know the answer. But if you haven't done so before, then come home to Father now. He wants you, and in discovering that grace-filled fact, you may well discover just what it is you want, too. Amen.