We are, as a people, convinced that the more choices we have, the better. Choice means freedom, so the goal of our culture seems to be to give us as many options as is humanly possible. Let’s say you want to settle in for a movie night, but you have no idea what you want to watch. “Hey honey, let’s just look around on streaming,” you say. How many choices do you have?
You have, in total, across all major US streaming services, according to film industry website reelgood, just about 34,000 different films to choose from. While one of you looks, the other might get to scrolling through short form videos, which are produced…from best industry estimates…at the rate of 24,000,000 new uploads every single day.
Perhaps, this pastor might suggest, you’d be better off just settling in for a quiet moment to read scripture and meditate. So you go to Amazon and search for a new study bible, and find that you have over one hundred thousand different options, in variant translations and printings and from more resellers than you can count. Which choice is the optimal and maximized choice? Which one is the best?
The volume of options produced by our culture is a great drowning torrent, a veritable biblical flood, with so many different paths that even considering a fraction of them can feel overwhelming. How do we know the choice we have made is the best choice, and that we haven’t missed out on a better opportunity because we’ve somehow missed some key vital datapoint that slipped out of our view in the seething chaos of complexity.
It’s something called the paradox of choice, a term coined by psychologist Barry Schwartz in a book of the same name. Being free to choose different possible paths is one thing, but the more options lay before us, the more and more likely we are to become both unable to decide and always, invariably sure that we’ve somehow made the wrong decision. It’s a recipe for anxiety, resentment, and lingering bitterness.
How do we find the right path when an infinity of paths lie before us? What makes us cohere and hold together as persons?
The fundamental essence of that Way is laid out for us in Matthew 22:34-46. Matthew gives us yet another story of Jesus being challenged and pressed by the religious and cultural authorities.
He’s approached by a lawyer, although it’s important to note that this “lawyer” isn’t the kind of lawyer we’re used to. This is a theologian, a Bible scholar, a student of the sacred law of Torah.
That lawyer asks him a question, and the question is simple: which law is the most important? This was a non-trivial question, as the law of Torah was not simple. At the time of Jesus, the rabbis had identified 613 different laws which governed the life of an observant Jew, and the implementation and interpretation of every one of those laws were open to debate, discussion, and interpretation by different schools of thought.
It was a tricky one. Try to dodge the question, and you aren’t showing that you know the law. Choose one and side with a particular school of thought, and you set yourself up for an argument that could last for generations.
Jesus replied by providing his interrogator with a teaching that is at the core of both ancient and modern Judaism. He first quotes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, a passage from Torah that lays out the essential duty of everyone who stands in covenant relationship with God. That text, known as the shema, reads: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
This diamond-hard core of Torah lays out the basic responsibility of everyone who stands in relationship with God to prioritize that relationship, to allow it to be the thing which defines both the character of your choices and your character itself.
The second response comes from elsewhere in Torah, from the Book of Leviticus, chapter six, in a section that lays out the fundamental ethical responsibilities of every human being towards every other human being. We heard an excerpt from that section read earlier, but the baseline teaching is the one Jesus drew out from Leviticus 19:18. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
In this tight and well structured response, Jesus gets down to the essence of covenant. If you ditch everything but these things, if you peer through the fog and chaos of complexity and interpretation to what it means to live as a faithful and ethical human being, you end up with this. This is what counts. This is where the rubber meets the spiritual road, where it is less about law and more about a way of living. There, in this answer, Jesus provides the purpose that gives clarity to the complexity of the Bible.
That was important, because though the Torah itself was a good thing, it was easy to lose yourself in it. Instead of seeing the point of it all, human beings got lost in chasing the details, in arguments over nuance and debates over minutia...and forgot the entire point of what they were doing.
And there, as we struggle to come to terms with the complexity of our lives and the seemingly overwhelming number of choices that face us, Jesus offers up a beacon, illuminating the point of the faith he proclaimed and the life he offered to us. It simplifies and focuses our existence, while at the same time preserving our freedom to choose and act graciously.
Our pervasive fear that we’re not doing things exactly perfectly can press in there, too, of course. We might worry that we’re not loving God in the right way, or that perhaps we’ve not optimized and maximized our love of neighbor.
But maximization is the enemy of joy, and optimization sabotages contentment. That’s kinda their function in consumer culture, eh?
In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz talks about the difference between maximizers—who are always seeking the next best thing—and and “satisficers.” Satisficer is a portmanteau blending the word “satisfy” and “suffice,” and it speaks of a willingness to find contentment in the good enough. A humble meal does the trick, because it fills you and nourishes you, even if it’s not worthy of Michelin stars. And sure, you’re not driven by an unslakable thirst for more, which means you probably don’t strive enough to satisfy Elon Musk’s 190 hour workweek expectations. But you get that you’re not perfect, and you’ll never be perfect, and understand that grace means that’s OK.
So when choices overwhelm, remember the point of it all, and remember grace, and be unafraid to do what you can.
Posts
