In Matthew 22:23-40, Jesus is in the middle of addressing a series of questions from different quarters. In those particular verses, he starts of addressing a question by the Sadducees and ends up dealing with a different question from the Pharisees. But both suffer from the same problem.
The Sadducees, as I’m sure you know, only believed in the first five books of the Old Testament and – partly on that basis – did not believe in resurrection from the dead. Their question to Jesus is effectively one that says, if your position on resurrection is right Jesus, what is your answer to this absurd situation that must ensue in the resurrection based on what the law itself demands?
Jesus answer to them is telling. He says, ‘you are mistaken, because you don’t know the scripture or the power of God.’ In other words, you reject half of what God has revealed to us so it is hardly surprising you don’t know the answer. He goes on to underline that they don’t even pay proper attention to the bits of scripture that they do accept in vv31-32: ‘haven’t you read what was spoken to you by God’. He then goes on to quote from Exodus 3. In other words, you reject most of God’s revelation so don’t understand what he reveals about glory and you don’t even properly understand the bits of the Bible you claim to believe.
v34 is an interesting little turn in the passage. It seems throwaway, ‘when the Pharisees heard that he silenced the Sadducees, they came together. And one of them, a teacher of the law, asked a question to test him.’ The Pharisees disagreed with the Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead. They, contrary to the Sadducees, accept all the scriptures. Jesus has silenced the Sadducees based on their refusal to accept bits of scripture as authoritative. So, they think, let’s ask Jesus a question about the whole of scripture instead. Specifically, what is the greatest command?
But the Pharisees suffer from the same problem as the Sadducees here. Wait a minute, you’ll say, they accept all scripture, so how are they doing the same as the Sadducees? Well, what are the Pharisees doing here? They are parsing, nitpicking over which is more important than others, and effectively suggesting some bits of scripture are more important than others. Now, there are certainly lesser and greater commands. But Jesus’ answer is there are two great commands because ‘all the Law and the Prophets depend on these two.’ God’s commands are concerned with love for God and for his people. The Pharisees’ nitpicking between different commands ignores the very heart of the Law. The law is driven by love for God and love for people and one only fully does what the law requires when they don’t split hairs to keep the letter of the law, but apply it out of love.
The Sadducees literally ignored whole chunks of scriptural writings. The Pharisees ignored the heart behind God’s commands and the purpose for which they are given. Jesus is saying to the Sadducees and the Pharisees they need to submit to all of scripture, not just the bits they prefer. It is all binding and they will misunderstand God and his power by selectively keeping and hearing from certain bits. To the Sadducees, he says all the writing matters. To the Pharisees, he says the purpose and intent of the law matters. Both ignore something of the law and consider elements of it not to be binding. Both ended up going wrong.
The lesson is simple enough: ignore bits of scripture at your peril. All scripture is binding. All of it reveals something about God. All of it points to Jesus. All of it tells us something about how we love him and how we love others. All of what is written matters and it is the heart behind what is written that matters as much as the doing of what it says.
More specifically, we’ll be wonky if we don’t consider it all binding and authoritative. We will end up landing on bits we prefer and ignoring the bits we don’t. If we do that, we will both misunderstand God, misunderstand what glorifies him, misunderstand how to honour him in our lives and even end up doing what actively displeases him. Minimally, we’ll be those wonky Christians who so over-focus on one thing, or certain things, that we ignore much of what God reveals about himself, his will and his demands on our lives. We’ll hold to weird things, we’ll act in weird ways and we’ll think we are honouring God when, it turns out, we are actually displeasing him.