10-25-21 - For the Sake of Argument

You can listen to this reflection here.

Next Sunday’s gospel story opens right in the middle of an argument. Jesus has just successfully fielded a bunch of ground balls and pop flies (getting in my baseball metaphors right in time for the Fall Classic…) from Pharisees, Herodians and Sadducees about taxes, marriage and the afterlife. That seems to have emboldened a scribe loitering nearby to test Jesus with his own quiz:

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, "Which commandment is the first of all?"

Lest we think this merely a contentious culture, let’s remember that argument and disputation were how ancient Jewish leaders sought to mine the truth, the Torah. Scripture was not blindly authoritative in the way some today see it; it was full of nuggets to be pored over, looked at this way and that, approached from different angles, chewed over and digested. That process involved arguments and counter-arguments, comparison to other scriptures, imaginative retellings (midrash) that teased out other possible interpretations, and arguments and counter-arguments to those interpretations. Interpretations by known and respected rabbis might outweigh those of lesser lights, and the ones that came to dominate were those agreed with by the most people. Those with the most "shares" stood out.

All these questions lobbed at Jesus that we might see at as entrapment and interrogation – which they may also have been – were a sign of grudging respect, as leaders evaluated his wisdom and how it stacked up to others. And Jesus played by different rules – often, instead of giving an interpretation directly, he’d turn the question back on the interrogators. At other times he gave a definitive answer with an authority uncommon in this system of constant questioning and reinterpretation. In the passage we examine this week he will answer straight out, but combine a foundational passage of scripture with one that was little known and give them equal weight. Jesus made his own rules.

What questions do you have for Jesus? In imaginative prayer today, pretend you are that scribe, overhearing his conversations and daring to approach him with a really good question yourself. Where are you? What does he look like in this scene?
What do you ask him? What does he answer?

Sometimes we get answers to our hard questions, and sometimes we have to wait, maybe a really long time. But Jesus never seemed to mind the questions, and as one who invites us into the kind of relationship in which no topic is off limits, he welcomes our coming near with our own. That’s the most important thing that scribe did – he came near and asked. We can too.

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