Trinity 18

A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her five and six year olds. After explaining the commandment to "Honor thy father and thy mother," she asked "Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?" Without missing a beat one little boy answered, "Thou shall not kill." Who would have thought a simple question about one of the commandments would become the occasion for temptation. That’s the problem with temptation. Enticement to do wrong often presents itself with people, in places and over issues we least expect. It comes when you least expect it. It doesn’t give a warning, even when it comes to a discussion about the commandments of God.

Take the case of our Gospel lesson today from St. Matthew 22:34-46. Jesus had the Divine ability to confound the greatest teachers. He was wiser than they were. In St. Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is presented as the true Solomon. He’s the ultimate wisdom. He has the answers to all of the riddles of life. His opponents were slow to accept Jesus as the true Son of David, Solomon. In the context of our Gospel passage we are told, “But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.” The Sadducees had tried to stump Jesus with a question about marriage in heaven. A woman had been married multiple times in this life. The Sadducees asked Jesus to whom she would be attached after the Resurrection. The Lord simply reminded them that there is no marriage in heaven. A wise answer to a tricky question silenced them.

But the Pharisees wouldn’t give up. They pressed further. They did the unthinkable. The Scripture says, “Then one of them, a lawyer, tempted Christ saying, ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” (24:36). Think of it, the Pharisees were so intent on resisting Christ that they were willing to tempt the Son of God. Their insidious approach was to force Jesus Christ to make an immoral moral choice. They attempted to seduce Him to turn one law against another by selecting one law over the rest.

The type of question the Pharisees posed to Him is kind of like the moral jeopardy type of situations sometimes presented to students at the university. A scene is presented to force students to question their traditional morality. For example, the most common one is some variation of a group of people on a life raft at sea. If there are eight in the boat, there is only enough food and water for seven. If the majority is to survive one person must die. Add to this scenario that they all have different occupations. I noticed in college that a teacher was never one of the occupations. It was always other professions represented in the boat.

The point of this apparent moral dilemma is similar to the one presented by the Pharisees to Jesus. It’s a matter of whether one law will take precedent over another. The goal is to drive a person to admit that there is no absolute morality. Laws are shaped by the circumstances. Presumably the boat scene provokes a student to justify murder in the name of saving the lives of others. On the surface, it’s like the Pharisees who try to get Jesus to admit that in certain situations one law has to take precedence over another. This is none other than an insidious way of arguing that some situations allow one law to be broken to be able to keep another.

In many ways, what the Pharisees do is precisely what Satan does. He tempts us by making us believe we’re in a moral dilemma. He tempts us to choose one moral standard over another. He usually doesn’t outright try to get us to disobey; that would not be subtle. The temptation of the so called moral dilemma is to justify doing wrong. Furthermore, the temptation to do wrong will always be for a so called noble cause. Satan will always try to dress up or make disobedience justified in the name of some apparent greater good. It could be murder to save another.  It might be a lie to accomplish something good. Maybe it’s adultery to find happiness.

The tempting moral dilemma that turned up so often in some of the old movies of the 1950s, which contributed to the moral collapse of the 1960s, was the story of the proverbial bad marriage. One member of the unhappy couple is tempted to commit adultery. The misery of the bad marriage is used to make the viewer sympathetic to justification of some form of adultery. It’s another variation of choosing one law above another to prove that there is no moral absolute. Ethics are defined by the situation.

Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees’ moral dilemma resolves the ethical riddle. He quotes the summary of the law stating the greatest commandment to love the Lord God with all your heart, soul and mind. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself. The point is that if one loves God more than anyone or anything else, and if he loves his neighbor as himself, the alleged conflict of moral choices is resolved. In other words, Jesus Christ is the resolution of the world’s moral dilemmas if we’ll only love Him above all else.

Not long ago, an unusual work of modern art was introduced by an artist. It was a chair affixed to a shotgun. It was to be viewed by sitting in the chair and looking directly into the gun barrel. The gun was loaded and set on a timer to fire at an undetermined moment within the next hundred years. The amazing thing was that people waited in line to sit and stare into the shell's path! They all knew the gun could go off at point-blank range at any moment, but they were gambling that the fatal blast wouldn't happen during their minute in the chair. Yes, it was foolhardy, yet many people who wouldn't dream of sitting in that chair live a lifetime gambling that they can get away with succumbing to temptation. It almost always comes in the form of justifying the breaking of one law for a greater good. The temptation is so enticing yet with the potential to destroy us, like that loaded gun before a chair. For this reason we need prayer against the temptation of Satan’s moral dilemmas. Let us take to heart the collect for today, “Lord, we beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations of the world the flesh and the devil; and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee, the only God; Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”