Our readings today are Deuteronomy 34:1-12, Psalm 90:1-6 and 13-17, although I’ll include verse 11 and 12, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, and Matthew 22:34- 46.
Our reading for the Old Testament is of the death of Moses, and God has brought him to and shown him the land of promise, but Moses is not to enter it himself. Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab. By the Lord’s command he buried him in a valley in the land… but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was vigorous in his old age, his sight was good, he was able to see the whole land. We hear here that the Lord commanded his death and the Lord buried him. Moses was a man who knew God face to face, a man who was a prophet in Israel, a man who would not be surpassed in the work of grace to the people of Israel.
Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses. At its centre, it says, “Turn, O Lord, how long? Have compassion on your servant.” Turn, O Lord, how long? Have compassion on your servants. The word turn refers back to the verse where it says, “You turn us back to dust and say, return back, you mortals.” It’s a deep turn; a turning of God towards them, to have compassion on his servants; is a cry of Moses that we heard in his asking for the people not to be destroyed.
Now I’m going to include verse 11 and 12 here, although it’s not in the Revised Common Lectionary readings today and says …who considers the power of your anger. Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due to you. So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. That’s seen as being the purpose of this prayer. Teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.
Again, in the psalm we hear of the wrath of God, the sense that God is against the people and Moses is crying out that God would turn and have compassion on them. God would understand. God would forgive. God would show his grace towards them. It’s an understanding Moses has of the nature of God. The nature of God to have mercy. The nature of God to show compassion. God is called upon by Moses to exercise this great power and Moses’s heart is that this wrath is as great as the fear that is due to God, and I think that’s what the wrath stands-for, for me as well.
In our creation and in our humanity, we have a huge capacity to love. We have a huge capacity towards mercy and compassion in ourselves. We know the power of God in this. And we should exercise the power of God. We should become those who communicate this great love. When this love is not communicated, when our culture, our society, who we are, does not communicate love, we find that in its place a space is made. Space is made where God who does not compel us to be, who does not coerce us to be, where his love is withdrawn, and where wrath finds a place.
We just need to listen to the news. Just need to look around us. I can look around now. I can see the sunshine. I can see the beauty of creation. I can feel and see the wind in the gardens round about and it is beautiful and yet when I look about there is destruction and we are causing destruction. We are part of the destruction of this great beauty and yet in the moment we can know love and we can show compassion and we can give to the creation its due. The Psalm says, your wrath is as great as the fear that is due to you. And we can know that measure. We can know that measure in our daily lives. We can know what we need to bring to God and it matters, however small.
In Thessalonians, we have a beautiful passage where Paul talks about the bringing of the Gospel and he says, …our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives, of trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the Gospel even so we speak, not to please mortals but to please God who tests our hearts. And then it says here, …we were gentle among you like a nurse tenderly caring for our own children. So deeply do we care for you that we’re determined to share with you not only the Gospel of God but also our own selves because you became very dear to us.
This is the heart of God towards us. This is the heart of Paul towards the Thessalonians. He knows he has seen God. He considers the power of his anger. He considers the wrath of God as being as great as the fear that is his due. We need to be taught, we need to count our days, we need to gain wise hearts in these difficult times.
Now when we turn to the Gospel reading, we see that Jesus is being tested. They’re trying to get him to fall into a trap. They say, “Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?” He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment, and the second is like it. You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
What was the test they were putting him to? They were putting him to the test of taking one of the commandments and putting it above all the others. And then they would accuse him of not keeping the written commands that he was not obeying; he would be in their power; they would be able to counter and contradict him being people who were experts in the law. So he could choose a commandment and fail. The other trap that he could fall into is he could deny the commandments. He could deny the written commandments and say these are not important. But he doesn’t do that. He answers them with love. He answers them with the dynamic of love. It’s love that gives life to the commandments.
Love is the matrix within which the commandments rest. And it’s not coercive. God can’t force us to love. You could say, well, God can force us to obey commands. These teachers of the law, they had gathered together to challenge Jesus; they wanted to exercise their power over him through the written word. But Jesus points them to the fact that, as Paul does later, it’s only love that makes it make sense, not their power but the power of love. And love will win people over whereas their commandments will put a barrier between people and God because of their hunger for power.
And then he turns. He wants to test their hearts as well. He talks to them about who the Messiah is. And they say to him, “The Messiah is the son of David.” He’s one of them; is of their line. Jesus turns this round and he says, …Who is it then that David by the spirit calls Lord? How is that David by the spirit calls the Messiah Lord, saying, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I put your enemies under your feet.” Jesus says, “Then 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 because, what he was pointing out was, the Messiah was to be Lord and the Lord was beyond the house of David. Messiah was more than the house of David.
The Messiah was to be a person who was more than a nation; more than a national bloodline. And we need to be careful. We need to be careful that this is our heart as well. We don’t see Jesus as being our possession, being within our bloodline, being within our tradition, being someone who we have power over because he’s “one of us”. No, Jesus isn’t “one of us”. Jesus is Lord.
Grace and peace.
Picture atribution: Love Lets Go of Power, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/55273 [retrieved October 25, 2026]. Original source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taniwha/7186930/
