Sermon Tone Analysis

A couple of weeks ago, the subject of football came up in our house, as one of the ladies asked me when the Super Bowl was scheduled.

I mentioned that I thought it was Feb. 13, and Miss Lynn’s response was something I think I will always remember: They wouldn’t schedule the Super Bowl for Valentine’s Day weekend, would they?!

I suppose there’s nothing sacred anymore.

What you may have figured out from this story is that we’re not much into watching football at our house.

It wasn’t always that way.

In fact, I for several years I had the NFL Sunday Ticket package with DirecTV, and Annette and I would spend hours every Sunday, Monday and Thursday watching football.

At some point, I just decided that I wanted that time back, and so I decided to stop paying attention to it.

The fact that I’d been a Miami Dolphins fan made the decision easier, I’m sure.

Anyway, I understand there’s a big game on tonight, and we’ll probably wind up watching the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet.

Now, I might not be able to name the quarterbacks in tonight’s game or give you the teams’ records this year or even make an educated guess about who might win, but I do know one thing that will happen: The game will start with a coin toss.

This should be a simple thing, perhaps the simplest thing that takes place on the football field from one week to the next.

But you’d be amazed at how many times this simple coin flip has gone wrong.

As I was preparing this message, I did a little research, and I came across a 10-minute video on YouTube of NFL coin flip bloopers.

Some of you may remember the most notorious of those bloopers.

It was Thanksgiving Day, 1998.

The Pittsburgh Steelers and the Detroit Lions had played to a 16-16 tie at the end of regulation.

As per the NFL rules at the time, the captains of both teams joined a referee at midfield for the coin toss that would determine which team would receive the kickoff to start the sudden-death overtime.

As the visiting team, the Steelers got to call heads or tails.

Team Captain Jerome Bettis called “tails,” and that’s how the coin landed.

But the referee thought Bettis had said “heads” and allowed the Lions to get the first possession.

In those days, the rules stated that whoever scored any points first in overtime was the winner, and Detroit soon marched the ball downfield far enough to get into field goal position and won.

The whole thing caused quite an uproar, as you can imagine, and in fact, the NFL changed its rules about overtime because of it.

And NFL referees are also much more careful now to ensure that they’ve understood the call BEFORE the coin is flipped.

But the blooper reel that I watched showed players and referees confusing which side of a coin was heads and which was tails.

It showed the players forgetting the strategic advantage to getting first possession of the ball.

In short, if you can imagine a way to mess up something as simple as a coin toss, it has probably happened.

And that’s pretty amazing, since there really are only two ways for a coin toss to go.

After all, there are only two sides to a coin.

I tell you all of that to say this: When Jesus replied to the expert on the law who had asked Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law,” He was effectively telling this man that there is one commandment with two sides, just as a single coin has two sides.

You’ll recall that we looked at this interaction last week from chapter 22 in the Book of Matthew.

Go ahead and turn there in your Bibles.

Remember that the Pharisees and Sadducees had been trying to entrap Jesus.

And so, this expert on the Jewish law had asked Him, “Which is the great commandment in the law?” We’ll pick up with Jesus’ answer in verse 37.

Last week, we talked about the first part of Jesus’ answer, the great and foremost commandment, that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

This week, I want to talk about the second part of Jesus’ response, what I want you to think of as the other side of the coin.

The first thing to notice here is that the lawyer had asked Jesus what was THE great commandment.

And, like I said last week, when the Pharisees heard Him responding by quoting from the Shema, they couldn’t have helped but agree with Him.

These words in verse 37 were, after all, part of the prayer they recited twice a day every day.

And they were kind of a restatement of the first of the 10 Commandments — You shall have no other gods before me.

But Jesus never made things easy for the Pharisees, and He never responded quite the way they would like for Him to have responded.

So I can imagine that when He said, “The second is like it,” some of them became frustrated with Him.

In fact, at the end of this exchange, in verse 46, Matthew writes that from that day on, none of the Pharisees dared to ask Jesus another question.

They were tired of Him tripping them up with their own traps.

But as I studied this passage this week, I had a question that I’ve wondered about many times before, so I finally did a little digging.

The question is this: What did Jesus mean by “The second is like it”?

I took a look through some of my favorite commentaries, and the truth is that most folks just breeze past this part of the verse and move on to the part about “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

I did find one commentary that said it probably means this commandment is of equal importance as the one in verse 37.

And that’s probably true.

In fact, you’ll hear me argue something along that lines later.

But "the second is like it” seems an odd way of saying “the second is just as important.”

And that’s one of the red flags I look for to tell me that there might be something going on with the language that I’m missing.

So, I did a word study on this word, “like.”

The Greek word here is homoios, and it means “like, similar, or resembling.”

Well, that’s not very helpful, because that’s just how it’s translated.

So the next step in a word study is to look at how a word is used in other places by the same author.

And here’s where I struck gold.

It turns out that Matthew uses this word eight other times in his Gospel, and in each of those cases, he is quoting Jesus.

What’s more, each of those other eight times we see the word homoios, it appears in the telling of a parable.

Now, some of Jesus’ parables were extended stories.

Think of the Parable of the Good Samaritan or the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

But not all of them were.

Some were simple metaphors or similes.

Get ready for an English lesson.

A metaphor is a figure of speech.

It is a word or phrase for one thing that is used to refer to another thing in order to show or suggest that they are similar.

In English, when we use the word “like” in a metaphor, it’s called a simile.

So, a coin with two sides might be a metaphor for the two great commandments.

But if I said the two great commandments are LIKE a coin with two sides, that’d be a simile.

The point of a metaphor or simile is usually to take something that’s hard to understand and make it easier to understand by comparing it to something that’s more familiar to us.

And that’s just how Jesus uses this kind of figure of speech throughout the Gospel of Matthew.

In each of the other eight times we see this word homoios, Jesus is using it as part of a simile.

Seven of those times, He uses homoios to describe the Kingdom of Heaven — something His listeners understood as a concept but that was still unclear to them as a reality.

He used something they understood well to explain something they didn’t understand well.

Let me give you two examples, from Matthew, chapter 13.

And then, in the very next verses, we see another short parable, another simile about the Kingdom of Heaven:

The idea in both of these little parables is that we should so value having a part in the Kingdom of Heaven that we would be willing to give up everything else on earth for it.

And the construction of every other simile Jesus uses in the Gospel of Matthew is the same.

Something hard to understand or to quantify is compared to something that’s easy for us to understand.

THIS hard-to-put-into-words thing is LIKE that easy-to-understand thing.

So, how does this fit with today’s passage, where Jesus responds to the lawyer with the great and foremost commandment, followed by the second that is LIKE it?

Well, here’s the thing.

Love in Scripture isn’t really about some feeling you have in your heart.

It’s not simply an emotional thing.

Or at least, it’s not ONLY an emotional thing.

Love is an action verb.

In Scripture — and I’d argue that in life, too — love is characterized by DOING.

My wife loves me, so she makes tasty dinners for me.

I love her, so I yank on her ponytail once in a while.

Or I send her flowers.

Or I write sweet notes to her.

That kind of thing.

The idea is that love that’s never expressed in action is a pale representation of real love.

But what kinds of things can we really DO for a God who has no need of anything from us, a God who exists as spirit?

There’s nothing we can give God that He doesn’t already own.

He’s not waiting around for a Hallmark card from us, even if we knew where to send it.

The Pharisees would have answered that keeping God’s commandments showed that they loved Him, and they wouldn’t have been entirely wrong about that.

The problem with that, though, is that sometimes, as in the case of the Pharisees, commandment-keeping turns out to be self-righteousness, and that’s not loving God.

I think what Jesus was getting at with this simile was that we have a hard time knowing HOW to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind.

We have a hard time knowing how to put action to the emotion.

And so, He gave us this little explanation by way of comparison.