When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 22:34-46
Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
until I put your enemies under your feet” ’?
“If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
My sermon from Reformation Sunday (October 25, 2026) on Matthew 22:34-46.
So earlier this week, something extraordinary happened: the internet didn’t die. Now I’m pretty sure the internet collapsing wasn’t on any of your to-do lists and there’s a possibility you have no idea how this almost happened. But on Tuesday, nearly 70% of all websites in the world were suddenly in danger. These websites were programmed in a language known as PHP and PHP is a major workhorse for our modern digital world. Recently a group of cybersecurity researchers discovered a major issue with a fundamental part of that language itself. And if this vulnerability was exploited, hackers could gain full control over any webserver they wanted. Any information stored on a website using PHP could be read and everyone using anything with PHP could have their keystrokes manipulated and changed. The foundation in charge of PHP immediately began work on developing a fix before the problem became widely known. It didn’t take long, however, before word about this security flaw began to spread. In only a few hours, millions of websites all around the world were suddenly being ruthlessly attacked. And what they needed was a tool that could be easily uploaded and applied to any kind of webserver. Those patches, though, aren’t easy to make and there just so happens to be one guy in the entire world who creates and maintains these kinds of tools. His name is Ondřej Surý. He lives in Czechia. And his work with PHP is something he does in his free time since he only considers himself to be a volunteer.
Now our reading today from the gospel according to Matthew contains one of Jesus’ most famous lessons. A group of religious leaders asked him which commandment was the greatest and he answered by pointing to two. Jesus wasn’t, necessarily, saying anything new since other Jewish religious leaders and rabbis at the time said similar things. Rabbi Akiva, who lived a generation after Jesus and helped codify which Hebrew books make up our Bible, “called the Levitical command to love your neighbor the great principle of Torah.” Rabbi Hillel, who lived a generation before Jesus, summarized the entire law as “that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow—this is the whole [law/ the] Torah; the rest is [just] commentary.” It’s holy – and incredibly faithful – to ponder how these words should shape our actions in the world. But before we tackle the first thing Jesus said, I wonder if it might be helpful to start with the question Jesus asked instead. Jesus, who was being tested by those who disagreed with him, gave them a pop quiz by wondering whose son the Messiah might be. The word messiah, at its core, simply means “the anointed One” and was originally treated as merely a title for royalty. But by the time of Jesus, the word “Messiah” had grown to include all the hopes and dreams of a people who wanted God’s kingdom to finally come. Over the years, the Messiah was connected to those who liberated God’s people which is why the Persian Emperor, after defeating the Babylonian Empire and allowing the Jewish community to go home, was named “the Messiah.” Later, Jesus’ own disciples and others assumed that, like the Persian Emperor, any future Messiah would need an army to make the realm of God real on earth. The Messiah, they assumed, should be strong, mighty, powerful, and a royal figure anyone would recognize. So when Jesus asked the Pharisees who the Messiah might be, it makes sense they would pass the quiz by proclaiming the Messiah to be a son of David.
Jesus, though, wasn’t done and he used Psalm 110 as a way to poke at our understanding of hierarchy, authority, and control. Psalm 110 is an ancient royal psalm originally performed at a king’s coronation. But when there were no longer any kings left to crown, the psalm became a promise for who the future Messiah might be. Psalm 110 begins with “The Lord said/says to my Lord” which could be interpreted as God speaking to the king or a king speaking to whoever might come next. Jesus and those around him, however, read this Psalm as David talking to the Messiah. And in the words of Rev. Zina Jacque, “David, the king, the giant-slayer, the man from whose line the Messiah would come, looked at his own descendant and said: ‘My Lord.’ He bent the knee to someone he could have claimed superiority over. He oriented his will toward the greatness of another rather than protecting his own precedence.” David, in other words, did the hard thing of not letting his life, power, authority, wealth, or even his sense of self be all there could be. He, instead, made space for something else to be at the center of it all. And this, I think, is a good description of the kind of love Jesus wants for ourselves and for our world. Love isn’t meant to be sentimental or remain as a warm fuzzy feeling we hold in our hearts. Love happens when we accept that the other person matters just as much as we do. This often requires us to create space within ourselves where we aren’t all there is. And that, in our current digital age, isn’t always easy to do. On one level, websites and apps tend to reinforce our likes, biases, wants, and desires, so we don’t click away towards something else. These algorithms, however, are controlled by large companies trying to maximize all the wealth and power that they can. They, in their own ways, dictate who has value and who has value based on whatever can generate them the most dollars. In an environment where what we see, think, and focus on is shaped by trillion dollar companies, the urge to find a way to secure our own future makes a lot of sense. We feel compelled to keep the focus on ourselves so that we can craft a tomorrow that feels safe, secure, and comfortable for ourselves and for our families. It’s why we sometimes separate Jesus’ words about loving God and our neighbors into two distinct things since it’s easier to look up towards what we know is bigger than ourselves rather than look out at those who embody all our fears. We then, I think, assume the purpose of life is to craft our own kind of kingdoms that end up mimicking the hollow and self-centered places tech companies are trying to build too. I wonder, though, if Jesus is inviting us into something more. Rather than trying to secure our own kingdom, Jesus pushes us to notice how God has a kingdom that already includes you. And if God’s kingdom instead of our own really is the point of it all – then our assumptions about power, strength, comfort, and security get to change too. When Sury first heard about what was happening on the internet, he could have recognized that moment as an opportunity to strengthen a financial future for himself and his family. He could have monetized his expertise by asking all kinds of companies to pay an incredible amount of money to fix an issue they didn’t create. Sury could have also decided to turn aside since, as a volunteer, his job, his family, and his time were a priority he couldn’t ignore. Sury, though, did something different by choosing to center everyone else’s future instead. Not all of us will have the opportunity to basically save the entire internet. Yet we each have the power and the capacity to live in ways that show how others matter too. That kind of work isn’t easy since it requires grace, peace, compassion, and mercy rather than power, wealth, and might be the focus of who we are. But since God, through baptism and faith, has decided that you have a place in God’s future – the least we can do is show others that they have a more life-giving future too.
Amen.