Riddling Jesus

October 23, 2005 (Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 25)

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

• Exodus 22:21-27
• Psalm 1
• 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
• Matthew 22:34-46

(From The Lectionary Page)

For a while, these were the words I came to dread at 7:30 each night: “Mommy, I want to pick the book tonight!” These words prompted within me a silent prayer, “Please let it be something other than the riddle book. Please, please, PLEASE.” Alas, each night it would be The Big Book of Riddles. So each night I would read, “Why did the boy throw the clock out the window?” Cady would turn the page and carefully read the answer, “Because he wanted to make time fly.” On the fourth night, there was a pause, and then a question, “Mommy, why is that funny?”

It was a great question. I wanted to say, “It’s isn’t! It’s the stupidest riddle in a book of stupid riddles,” But instead, I took a deep breath and said something like, “Well, honey, a riddle plays with words. When we say something flies, we mean that it goes fast. But another meaning of the word is something that moves through the air. When the boy threw the clock out of the window, it moved through air. But what he wanted was for time to go faster.”

“But that isn’t funny,” Cady protested. “I thought riddles were supposed to be funny.”

I must say that 2 minutes into the book, I had given up ANY expectation of riddles involving actual humor. But in fairness, I will say that a week with the book and Cady’s questions got me thinking about riddles and about their value. All joking aside, solving a riddle involves setting aside preconceptions about meaning – especially about the meaning of words – and to be open to thinking in a whole new way. No mean trick when you’re 6 years old. No mean trick for any of us.

By this time in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has been asked 3 questions by 3 different groups of adversaries. Matthew makes no bones about the fact that these questions were intended to discredit Jesus publicly. The Herodians, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the legal experts each in their turn imagined that their clever questions would box Jesus of Nazareth into a corner. They figured there was no way that he could answer them and not get himself embroiled in theological trouble. Yet Jesus not only sidesteps their mean-spiritedness, he answers the questions with wit and with a level of intimate understanding of God that his adversaries lack.

Then Jesus asks a fourth question, “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

They give an orthodox answer: the Son of David. Certainly a correct answer. For 600 years, ever since the decline and fall of the Davidic Empire and the fall of Jerusalem, messianic expectations were fundamental to Israel’s identity. They were oppressed in the very land that God had given them, and it rankled. But the day would come, many believed, when God would set a successor to David on David’s throne. And as David gathered the warring tribes of Israel into a cohesive nation and established peace and prosperity in the land by conquering Israel’s enemies, so the Messiah, it was envisioned, would do the same. The Messiah would be a king – maybe of the royal line of David, or maybe in the manner of David – either definition fit the term, “Son of David.”

Their answer reflected orthodox Pharisaic thought. Then Jesus springs the trap with an intriguing riddle that quotes the first verse of Psalm 110. The psalms, of course, were popularly understood to have been written to by King David. How, indeed, could David refer to the Messiah as Lord if the Messiah was David’s son? A son could not be greater than his father, according to first century convention wisdom. They couldn’t respond. They were trapped by their own orthodoxy. Game, set, and match to Jesus.

Or maybe not. Actually, I’m not sure that Jesus’s goal was to humiliate the Pharisees and put a stop to the pesky questions. After all, one who claims love of God and love of neighbor as the fulcrum for all the Law and the Prophet is unlikely to subvert that claim with his own mean-spirited version of “gotcha.” I wonder if the point of the story is more about the failure of imagination of the religious establishment. They were consumed by correctness, which presumed a unilateral view of the world, the Law, the Messiah and God -- all figured out, neatly ordered, neatly systematized. But to paraphrase an advertisement from the Episcopal Church’s Ad Project some years ago, the problem with religions that claim to have all the answers is that questions aren’t welcome. As the remainder of the Gospel of Matthew will show, today’s passage is the last public discourse between Jesus and the religious establishment. They, alas, have made up their minds.

When we prefer certainty over wonder, dogma over questions, black and white over infinite shades of grey, when we are convinced that we are bearers of the revealed truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth we find ourselves re-enacting this tragedy. We are as prone to this tragedy in 2005 as the religious community was in the first century.

And so I find myself wondering if we perhaps might to do well, ourselves, to ponder anew what we think of the Messiah. Maybe such reflection is something we might do before we slip on our What Would Jesus Do bracelets, or engage in smart-mouthed parodies of that question such as Who Would Jesus Evacuate. What do we think of the Messiah? What assumptions do we make about Jesus and about God whose Son we claim he is? Do we think we pretty much have God and his will all figured out? Do we make room in our hearts for a minority report, so to speak?

On the surface of things, it seems that the question asked of Jesus – What is the greatest commandment – is a more important question than the question posed by Jesus – What do you think of the Messiah? But is it? Fundamentally, I wonder if the question he asked and the riddle he posed invite us to relinquish our need to possess the truth in order that the truth might instead possess us, so that we might find within us wonder in place of certainty, awe in place of self-importance, and humility in place of arrogance.