Sermon - Trinity XVIII, 2026 - Matthew 22:34-46

Christ Among the Pharisees, Jacob Jordaens, 1670

What do you think about the Christ?

1. He is no mere worldly king, but He is the Son of God

2. He is no mere lawgiver, but He is your God who has fulfilled the law

“What do you think about the Christ?” In a way this is a huge question that could take many hours to answer, but in another way this is a very simple and straightforward question and that is the genius of this question for us to consider today. Because the way in which you answer this question reveals quite a lot about your faith. So that is the question I want you to chew on today: “What do you think about the Christ?”

Among the Jews the Christ was a worldly king. Immediately preceding today’s gospel reading Jesus dealt with the Sadducees, a group of powerful Jews who were largely responsible for the temple. The Sadducees were the theological liberals of their day, since they rejected some basic tenets of the faith, most notably the resurrection of the dead. Jesus put them to shame when He said that the Lord is God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. The Sadducees were entirely focused on this life since they rejected spirits and the resurrection, they thought that the Christ must be an entirely worldly ruler, successful in this life, since they were unconcerned with the life to come.

But Jesus is not merely a worldly king. He made this clear in John 6 after the miraculous multiplying of loaves and fish. People sought Him out because they were looking for more food for their bellies. They intended to take Jesus by force and forcefully make Him their king. They wanted a king who would fill their bellies. They wanted a king who would overthrow the oppressive evil Roman empire and set up a Jewish empire on earth. They were tired of losing on earth, and they wanted to win. That’s what the Christ was for them: a bread king.

So when Jesus asks whose son the Christ is, the Pharisees say David’s son, and I suspect the Sadducees would’ve agreed. They just wanted a worldly king who would fight the bad guys like David defeated the Philistines. But Jesus makes clear that David called the Christ his Lord, and therefore the Christ is not merely one like David, but He is David’s Lord. Jesus is a son of David, but He is also the Son of God. Jesus came not to rule the earth in the same manner as David, setting up a temporary worldly kingdom, but to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. 

While the Sadducees went totally off the rails in their rejection of a spiritual existence beyond this life, the Pharisees had issues of their own. Now, the Pharisees and the Sadducees were theological rivals, and so when the Sadducees got bested by Jesus they thought the playing field was a little more open and now it was their turn to beat Jesus. But Pharisees had their own problems. While the Sadducees only held the first five books of the Bible (the Torah) as authoritative, the Pharisees were great proponents of the unwritten oral law passed down by other Jewish rabbis over the years, this oral law is called the Talmud.

The Pharisees were lovers of the law. They had distinguished 613 commandments written in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). But then in the oral law, the Talmud, they added a whole bunch of other laws designed to keep you from breaking the 613 laws, resulting in over 1,500 additional laws. For example, the biblical law about not working on the sabbath resulted in the Pharisees creating an additional 39 laws about how to not work on the sabbath. For example, the Bible uses the phrase “a sabbath day’s journey,” but that was actually a technical term because the Pharisees had determined how many steps you were allowed to walk on the sabbath day before it was considered work.

Modern orthodox Judaism is essentially just modern Phariseeism, because modern Jews likewise have created a bunch of these extrabiblical laws. For example modern orthodox Jews can’t rip toilet paper on the sabbath or turn on or off the lights on the sabbath. For the Pharisees the heart of God is the law, and God loves them when they keep the law, and therefore when they thought of the Christ they thought of the law.

The Pharisees thought they were being clever, they thought that they could trap Jesus by asking Him questions about the law. Controversies about laws have been the issues the Pharisees have had with Jesus all along. Jesus is healing on the sabbath. Jesus’ disciples are plucking grain on the sabbath. Jesus’ disciples don’t wash their hands before they eat. Jesus touches sick and dead people. Jesus spends time with sinners. According to their thousands of laws, Jesus wasn’t keeping the law, and as such they confronted Him by asking Him about the law. They thought that the Christ must be all about the law, since that was all they were concerned with.

But the law is not Christ’s exclusive concern. The Pharisees had it all backwards. They thought the heart of God was the law, but instead the heart of God is love. So the heart of the commandments, the summary of 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. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” We keep the law not in order to be loved by God, but in order to love God and to love our neighbor.

God doesn’t primarily love us through the law, but He loves us through His Son, Jesus the Christ. While the Pharisees primary thought was about the law, Jesus directs them to the actual question they need to be considering: “What do you think about the Christ?” The Christ is the Son of God. The enemies He defeats are not merely of this world, but sin and death. Man cannot defeat these enemies of sin and death by the keeping of the law, but Christ fulfills the law and He suffers the punishments of our breaking the law in His crucifixion.

The Pharisees thought that their salvation was a matter of them keeping the law of God. This led them to add manmade laws to God’s law in order to ensure that they could keep the law of God. Thus, good Jews were saved by their righteous observance of the law. It wasn’t about faith in God, it wasn’t about loving the Lord or their neighbor, it was self-centered self-righteousness.

The Jews had and have their temptations and their problems, some of which at times are our own problems, too. But we seem to have our own set of problems along these lines. The Pharisees were legalists, they believed that their salvation was contingent upon their adherence to the law, and particularly to their man-made laws. They cast aside the love of God and neighbor in order to strictly keep their laws.

We seem to go in the opposite direction today. We equate love with niceness, and we tend to ignore all of God’s law in favor of being nice to others. We think of the law and love as being two separate principles, and so we forsake the law because we think that loving people with niceness is more important. But this also misses the point that Jesus is making.

The law of God isn’t meant to save us; certainly not! But the law of God is how we love God and our neighbor. You can’t love God and your neighbor by abolishing the law; rather, you love God and your neighbor when you keep the law, because God’s law is meant to teach us how to love. For example, the first three of the ten commandments teach us how to love God, and the last seven teach us how to love our neighbor. It is therefore unloving to not follow God’s law.

When we equate niceness with love, and we thus abolish the law in favor of being nice, we reveal what it is that we think about the Christ. Namely, we think that Christ is nice, and we turn the gospel into niceness. But the results of this are horribly destructive to souls! Because if Christ just came to be nice, then we are left in our sins, and we remain unforgiven, and the gospel is lost. Nevertheless, the Christ did not come to fulfill all niceness, but to fulfill the law.

Keep asking and answering that question: What do you think about the Christ? The Christ is the Son of David, and the Son of God. He came not to be nice, but to fulfill the laws demands where we have failed, and to carry the burden of our sins where we deserve to be punished. The Christ is not merely a bread king who makes me feel nice today, but He is the King of heaven and earth who redeems me from death and hell and unto paradise. The Christ is not merely a lawgiver or a law-taker-awayer, but He is the fulfillment of the law, and in fulfilling the law He loves me.