What's Most Important???

At the church where I serve, we are spending the next four weeks in a sermon series entitled “Won’t you be my neighbor”. During this series our hope and our prayer is to answer three specific questions. Our hope and prayer is that we would answer the question “Why should I be a neighbor?” “Who is my neighbor?” and “How should I be a neighbor?” Our hope and our prayer is to answer these questions in a way that enables and empowers us to live our day to day lives as a follower of Jesus in a way that is a neighbor to those that God has already placed in our spheres of influence who are far from God in a way that reveals and reflects Jesus to them.

Now you might not buy the whole Jesus, Bible, church thing. You might not be sure about whether or not there is a God, let alone whether you should follow Him or live for Him. If I have just described you, I am so glad that you are reading this, because here’s the thing. What you will discover is that there is a reason why followers of Jesus are to be a neighbor to you. And there is a way that followers of Jesus are supposed to be neighbors to you. And my hope for you is that you would see what Jesus calls His followers to do when it comes to being a neighbor to you so that you can see how Jesus feels about you and what He calls His followers to do when it comes to engaging you.

So, as we jump into this series, I would like for us to spend our time together answering the first question that we are going to look at during this series, which is “Why should I be a neighbor?” In other words why should followers of Jesus be a neighbor to the people around them?” To answer these questions, I would like for us to spend our time together looking at a section of an account of Jesus life that is recorded for us in the Bible called the gospel of Matthew.

The gospel of Matthew was written by a man named Matthew, who was a Jewish tax collector that worked for the Roman Empire, who was the dominant military and political power in the world during this time in history. Now Jews who were tax collectors were hated by their fellow countrymen for two reasons. First, these tax collectors were hated because they would often charge higher taxes than necessary in order to make a profit.

Second, Jewish tax collectors were hated and were viewed as traitors because they were working for the enemy, which was the Roman Empire that had conquered and was ruling over the Jewish people. Jewish people so despised tax collectors that they had a separate category for them. There were tax collectors and there were sinners. There were those who sinned and then there were tax collectors. However, one day, as Matthew sat as a traitor tax collector at his tax collection booth, Jesus approached Matthew and extended the invitation for Matthew to follow Him. This required that Matthew quit his career as a tax collector and instead follow Jesus as He traveled proclaiming God’s good news of rescue through His message and teachings.

And that is exactly what Matthew did. Matthew left family and friends and his career and followed Jesus in order to know what Jesus knew and to do what Jesus was doing. For three years, Matthew followed Jesus. For three years Matthew followed Jesus and watched His popularity soar as He taught as no one had ever taught. 

For three years Matthew followed Jesus and watched His popularity soar as He did the miraculous. Healing the blind, the lame, the lepers. For three years Matthew followed Jesus and watched His popularity soar as He engaged the outsiders and challenged the insiders. And as Jesus popularity grew, there were those who began to oppose Jesus. As Jesus popularity grew, there were those who became jealous and threatened by His popularity.

And it was not just the popularity that fueled their opposition. Jesus had the audacity to call God His Father. Jesus had the audacity to claim that He was equal to God. Jesus challenged the Jewish religious system and its misguided and corrupt leaders and proclaimed that He was able to rebuild and restore that broken system in three days.

And after following Jesus for three years, Jesus and His disciples entered into Jerusalem at the height of His popularity and in the midst of increased opposition, during the week leading up to the Passover. And it is in this context that we are going to jump into an event from history that Matthew recorded for us and that has been preserved for us in a section of an account of Jesus life in the Bible that bears his name. And it is in this event from history that Matthew gives us a front row seat to that we discover the timeless answer to the question “Why should I be a neighbor?” So let’s take that front row seat together, beginning in Matthew 22:34:

But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. ³⁵ One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, ³⁶ "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?"

Now to fully understand what is happening here, we first need to understand what had just happened prior to this event from history and define some terms. At this point in Jesus life, Jesus is in His final week of life on earth, which is called the Passion Week. Jesus had entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, where large crowds were proclaiming Jesus to be the Messiah that God had promised to send to bring the Jewish people back to God and back to prominence in the world.

In addition, the large crowds that surrounded Jesus as He entered Jerusalem were proclaiming “Save us now!”, asking Him to save them from the Roman government. After receiving a red carpet welcome from the crowds as He entered into the city of Jerusalem, Jesus headed straight to the Temple Courtyard, where He turned over tables and drove out of the Courtyard those who were financially exploiting people who came to worship God by charging fraudulent exchange rates on the currency that would be used for worship.

However, as the self righteous religious experts observed Jesus stirring things up in the city by turning over tables and by miraculously healing those who had no hope of healing; as the self righteous religious experts heard the children of the city of Jerusalem shouting “Save us now you who are the Son of David the Messiah” they became indignant.

In other words, these self righteous religious people were aroused with anger over the wrongdoing that they believed that they were witnessing. And in their anger over the wrongdoing that they believed was taking place, these self righteous religious people confronted Jesus. The self righteous religious leaders began to confront Jesus as they believed that their power and positions of authority were threatened by Jesus.

And as a result, these self righteous religious leaders began to question Jesus and His authority in an attempt to undermine His growing influence. The first group of religious leaders, the Pharisee’s, attempted to trap Jesus with a question about paying taxes to Caesar. When Jesus avoided their trap of offending either the crowds or the Roman authorities, the Sadducees, the other leading religious group of the day, took their shot at discrediting Jesus and His authority.

The Sadducees tested Jesus with a theological question about the resurrection. Jesus quickly answered their question and exposed their lack of understanding of the letters that made up the Bible and their faulty views regarding the resurrection. At this point, the religious leaders plan to discredit Jesus was backfiring, as the growing crowds were amazed at Jesus teaching.

Upon seeing the Sadducees silenced by Jesus, the Pharisees decided to make one more attempt to discredit Jesus. As the crowds continued to gather and grow in the temple, an expert in the Law approached Jesus to test Him with the question “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law? This expert in the Law, a scribe, was a professional student of the Law who often served as a judge and defender of the Law in the religious courts of the day.

 

In essence, Jesus was asked “Of the 613 commandments in the Old Testament of the Bible, which is most important?” Now I want us to imagine ourselves in the crowd watching this confrontation take place. Can you imagine what this scene must have looked like? However, Jesus response would once again catch the religious leaders off guard and without a comeback.

Tomorrow we will look at Jesus response…