When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested him by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “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. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22.34-40)
The conflict between the Pharisees and the Teacher continues in the reading that we have today. We have seen the back-and-forth for several weeks now, the Pharisees eager and earnest in their desire to belittle and besmirch the Galilean rabbi. As Matthew presents it, the exchanges become more heated and more pointed, ending only when the Pharisees have managed to gain Roman support in their effort to be rid of the Teacher called Jesus of Nazareth. That will come soon enough.
Today, we find the Pharisees again attempting to rattle the Rabbi by way of questions, as they have done in their last several efforts, each question an effort to box him in and to outfox him, hoping to diminish his influence among the populace that follow him and that give more allegiance to him than they do to the Pharisees who pride themselves as being the first and the last word on all things relating to the Judaic law.
This particular question, on the surface a valid one, requires Rabbi Jesus to provide an answer to the query as to which of the commandments in the law was the greatest. When one considers that there were 613 laws in the Hebrew text (248 positive and 385 prohibitions), the question makes sense. We do much the same, prioritizing everything from our life goals to our grocery list.
However, Matthew has made it very clear over the course of the last chapters that the Pharisees are not interested in learning anything important from the Teacher, but only want to see him stumble and fall in the face of their questioning. Theirs is always a strong stance of superiority in their painstaking attempt to crush him by way of cornering him in hostile debate over the law.
But, as we have already seen on multiple occasions, Rabbi Jesus is quick on his feet and unfazed by their foolishness. Without delay and with dexterity, he provides an answer that befuddles and bemuses the Pharisees, who are left speechless and powerless to remove this rabble rouser who threatens their authority over the Jewish crowds.
The same occurs today when one of them–a scholar of the law, as Matthew describes him–wants Rabbi Jesus to pick the greatest of all the commandments, seemingly forcing him into a corner, making him select one from the many and accrediting it as the most important. Much like the cartoon character in the Looney Tune cartoon series Wile E. Coyote who continuously tries to outwit the road runner, they simply cannot entrap the Galilean, despite their clever and conniving subterfuges.
So, what does the Teacher answer? What does he say is the greatest of all the commandments in the Torah? He gives a twofold answer, both of which are traditional and fully orthodox, likely disappointing his interrogators who wanted to find something subversive or suspect in his response, these badgerers coming up empty-handed yet another time, outsmarted by the Galilean.
His answers are bedrock Judaism. He replies, “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.” It is lifted from Chapter 6 of the Book of Deuteronomy that reads, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
His opponents can find no fault with the answer, particularly because it was part and parcel of the daily prayer that each observant Jew was supposed to pray, a prayer known as the Shema. So, Rabbi Jesus has the backing, not only of the Hebrew sacred texts, but also of Jewish practice. The command basically calls for a love of God without qualifiers or quantifiers. In other words, unrestrictedly and unreservedly.
Interestingly, Rabbi Jesus doesn’t stop there. He affixes a second commandment, although the Pharisees have only asked for one. He says to them, “The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Even here, there is little that the Pharisees can dispute with this second precept, the command also found in the Hebrew scriptures, particularly in the Book of Leviticus where it is stipulated that “You shall not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Any argument that they might present would be an argument against their own sacred texts. They know as much themselves. However, what is original to Rabbi Jesus is the conjunctive phrase, “The second is like it,” these few words, in effect, equalizes the two commandments, although not making them identical. By conjoining the two, he is saying that both are of equal gravity.
He says as much when he tells the Pharisees that “the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments,” putting into a neat nutshell the whole of the Hebrew scriptures, distilling the essence of the entirety of the Mosaic law into two precepts, both interconnecting and interlocking. He makes it clear that neither has ascendance over the other, but each has equal importance. Together, the two of them express the whole of the will of the Most High God.
Applying a common image, one scholar suggests that we think of these dual commands in the same way that we look upon the two hinges that hold a door in place. So long as both hinges are secured, then the door functions as it should. But if either hinge is loosened or removed, then the door no longer works, but wobbles, clearly unable to do its task because both hinges are necessary. It is a good example.
Like the Pharisees, we generally can find no fault with the two commandments that Rabbi Jesus presents as a holistic perspective on the law and the prophets. Or, we shouldn’t, since both are clearly embedded in tradition with tentacles into bygone times as long as the trunk of a giant redwood tree. Argue with either of them and we are on shaky ground.
However, as I see it, our problem generally comes with the conjunction, that is, “and the second is like it.” The punch in the gut is found in those few words because Rabbi Jesus equates two commandments that we have a natural tendency to separate, generally elevating the first and relegating the second to a lesser position, at least in practice.
Few of us bicker about bestowing upon the Most High God our love, although we may not always measure it out as fully as the command when it requires a love “with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind.” It is near to impossible for us to do anything wholeheartedly, opportunistic and reductionistic as we tend to be.
If we fail to wholeheartedly follow the first–and we do–then we surely shortchange the second, selective and performative in our practice of loving our neighbor. We find it much easier to love a faraway God than a nearby neighbor. And therein is the rub because Rabbi Jesus doesn’t allow the separation of the two, but conjoins them, telling us that the second is like the first, meaning the second is as important as the first.
The Most High God rarely annoys us as much as the neighbor who espouses different values than we do, casts a different vote than we do, and supports different causes than we do. Of course, there is always the possibility that we have made God in our own image and likeness, thereby erasing our differences and easing our consciences since, after all, God thinks like we do.
But it is more difficult to do the same with our next door neighbor who stares us in the face each day, whose noise upsets our Saturday mornings, and whose kids behave like hoodlums, at least when compared to our own children. It is easy for us to be annoyed regularly by our neighbors who do not give us the option of being out of sight and out of mind.
As a result, we are always slacking on the second and backslapping ourselves on the first, conveniently forgetting that one doesn’t come without the other, except in our mind and in our practice. We need no better reminder than the words that Rabbi Jesus says. Cut and dice, separate and segregate as we might like, he is categorically clear when he says “the second is like the first.”
I’ve always had a fondness for Mother Teresa, probably because she seemed to have an uncanny understanding and inimitable practice of the teachings of Rabbi Jesus. One story told about her was about a person who traveled from the United States in the hope of joining her order of nuns in India. The person, surely thinking she was climbing the ladder of virtue by her renunciation of the easy life of an American and accepting the asceticism of life in India, did not find Mother Teresa so receptive of her offer.
Hearing the reasons proffered by the American for her desire to join the Missionaries of Charity in India, Mother Teresa posed a simple question, “Do you not have any poor in America?” With that question, Mother Teresa put before the woman the fact that she didn’t have to travel across the globe to find the poor. She had people in her backyard who were poor.
And when Rabbi Jesus used the word “neighbor” in the second command, he meant exactly what the word implies–the person nearby. Or, stated another way, he “particularizes” love. No longer is love abstract, but it is concrete, owed to the person who stands before us, and who, more often than not, annoys the hell out of us.
It is when we can love the most annoying person on our block that we come close to complying with the commandment to love our neighbor. Or, as one student of the scriptures suggested, “The love to which he calls us has a face–the face is that of our neighbor–and the face is not necessarily pretty.” Which, of course, is precisely why we’re always trying to separate the two commandments that Rabbi Jesus insisted stay together.
Decades later, the writer of the first Letter of John nailed it when he put the same unvarnished truth before us. He wrote, “If a man says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar, for he who doesn’t love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?’” Admittedly, there is a brutal realism in those words. And a hard truth.
For those of us–and it is more than a few–who like to measure our success as followers of Jesus by our compliance with a multitude of miniscule rules, the reading today is a reality check for us. There is no need for us to pat ourselves on the back unless and until we have tackled the twofold commandment of love that Rabbi Jesus puts before the Pharisees today. Until we do, we’re still swimming in the swallow end of the pool.
–Jeremy Myers
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