Matthew 21:34-40 "What You Want" Scott Hoezee

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, "Can you please just tell me what you want!" Your child barges into the den while you are trying to read a book, and so with a 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 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?" And suddenly this simple question asked by waitresses and car salesmen 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 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.

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. What do you want? Sometimes something touches us, startles us, and we face the ultimacy and urgency of that question. But 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 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.

To see that, we need to review the immediate context. Commentator Dale Bruner thinks that Matthew 22 creates a 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 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 says something treasonous. They strike out, and so next the Sadducees step in with a clever question about marriage in heaven. Jesus neatly sidesteps also this trap. So then, in this tag-team effort, 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. Naturally, Jesus knows what they are up to and so he knows just what to say. 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. 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.

But Jesus' reply was actually more clever than just 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 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." So also for Jesus: he charmed and just so disarmed his haughty opponents. If even a child knows the answer to the Pharisees' question, why didn't they themselves seem to know it!?

But in Matthew's version of this incident, Jesus subtly changes 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. As Neal Plantinga once said, if at bedtime some night your child prayed, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my brain to keep," well, you'd take note of this departure from the usual phrasing!

It's difficult to say why Jesus made this substitution. Just possibly, however, this also was a 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! Morality of especially the legalistic kind tends to focus on what we do with our bodies. Jesus says honoring God involves also how you think, how you wield the powerful gift of your intellect. God should have something to do with everything. And this maybe brings us full circle back to where we began.

What do you want? Our Christian answer must be that what we want above all is to consider the things of God. Today is Trinity Sunday. If ever there were a biblical and theological teaching that requires the good exercise of our minds, the Trinity is it. Of course, as we've been pointing out to our Jewish sisters and brothers for 2,000 years now, we have not abandoned the truth of the Shema just because we speak of God in triplicate. We do still worship just one God. The Lord our God is one. But we now understand him to be also three in that magnificent community of verve and zest and holy love that just is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This is the God we desire and yearn for. This is the God whose very nature stretches our thinking and makes us love God with also our minds. Everything in life depends on love for this Triune God and then love for one another. The communal nature of the three Persons in God reminds us that all love leads to community; that how we love each other in this life must mirror the love that exists among the three persons in God.

What do you want? Earlier we pondered those times when life's deeper questions come to the foreground. And suppose you resonated with what I said. Suppose you are in a midlife crisis, questioning what you've been doing and pondering what's next. Suppose you do lie awake at 2am, feeling 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 but you're not getting anywhere. Suppose, in short, that you feel vaguely desperate.

Maybe you manage to bury your fondest yearnings pretty deep most days. But then some Tuesday morning as you are flying to your kid's school to bring the lunchbox he accidentally left behind, suddenly on the car radio you hear a few moments of a Mozart sonata and it makes you ache for the beauty that could so fill up your life but mostly doesn't. Or you're cleaning out a closet and muttering under your breath about the way junk accumulates in every corner of the house. Suddenly a photo wafts down from the top shelf. It's you and your spouse and your oldest child when he was just a baby. You look into the eyes of that young couple and remember what you thought life would be like only to realize how little resemblance your actual life bears to the one you dreamed about once upon a time. And your heart breaks a little. Does Matthew 22 have anything to say to such longings, to the question, "What do you want?"

I think it does but not simply and not in some trite way of pretending that if only we think about God a little more often on the average day, all our troubles will melt away like the morning mist. No, it's not that simple. But still our Lord says that whether we know it or not, the first thing we must do is also the first thing we must want: and that is to love our Triune God with everything we've got. The discovery of purpose and of hope begins here.

Of course, that's pretty typical pulpit talk, isn't it? Preachers like me talk freely about the need to love God and half the time we make it sound as though everyone already knows what such love would look like. Deep down, though, we all know that loving God is going to be different than loving a best friend or loving a spouse. Still, at the heart of all love is a certain enthusiasm for the beloved one. When you love someone, you do so for lots of reasons you could list: you love how she makes you laugh, you love how thoughtful he is, you love much she enjoys nature. Yet over and above such specifics, there is at the core of it all a fundamental delight that this unique person is there at all, is alive, is undeniably available for you to enjoy.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson shows her narrator, 76-year-old Rev. John Ames, pondering the enormous love he feels for his little 7-year-old son. At one point Rev. Ames writes to his son, "There's a shimmer on a child's hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny, soft beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes. Your hair is straight and dark and your skin is very fair. I suppose you're not prettier than most children. You're just a nice-looking boy, a bit slight, well scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined."

Maybe loving God is like that--it begins with the sheer delight we take in the fact that God exists at all. It begins in the wonder we feel when we try to wrap our minds around that Trinitarian mystery of three who are somehow still just one. It begins with having enthusiasm for the God who created such a galaxy of wonders and who then loved us enough to plunk us down smack in the middle of it all. God arranged it so we could enjoy the splendors of a juicy Bartlett pear, taste the oakiness of a sparkling Chardonnay, have our hearts quickened by the lyric, liquid melodies of the Wood Thrush. We begin by loving the sheer existence of God and we go from there.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." That's what Jesus said. And Jesus is the same One who taught us to call that God "Our Father." And how we yearn to love and be loved by Father. Few things plague us more than the sense that things are not right between our parents and us. That's a motif throughout literature. In many stories there is the figure of the ne'er-do-well, the son cut off by his father. Maybe they had words. Maybe their split was bitter. 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?"

Some while back I told a 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 wanted to show the popularity of the Spanish name Paco, but at a more wrenching level, this reveals the universal hunger to connect with our origins, with our parents, with our Father. What do you want? You want to go home to love and be loved.

The Eastern Orthodox wing of the Church has long pictured the inner life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a kind of dance. From all eternity the three persons have twirled in and through and around one another in a divine choreography of life and light and joy. God invites you to join the dance. He wants you to share the joy of his life. He's waiting for you. He loves you. He wants you. Once you discover how much God wants you, you may find what you've been wanting all along. Amen.