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)
On this 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we still find ourselves in the controversy part of Matthew’s gospel, that section of his book that follows Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and precedes his execution on the cross. It is a short period of time, but it is filled with tense exchanges between Jesus and his opponents, the Pharisees and other religious leaders.
As we have seen on previous Sundays in the selected texts taken from the same section, the Pharisees are intent on removing Jesus from the public arena by one means or another. As the tension escalates, we find the Pharisees attempting to corner Jesus by way of questions based on the Hebrew sacred texts. They pose three tricky questions in quick succession, the first having to do with the rather absurd scenario of a woman who had married seven brothers, each of whom were deceased, the question left to be answered being, “Which of the seven will she be the wife of in heaven?”
For some reason, the lectionary has skipped over that question and instead has moved straight to the second question, the one that we find in our selection today. It is posed by a Pharisee who asks Jesus, “Which commandment in the Law is the greatest?” On the surface, it is a reasonable question. The same question is found in both Mark’s and Luke’s gospels.
However, given the nature of the circumstances as Matthew presents them, the question is less a friendly one, as Mark would have it, and more a contentious one, that fact made clear by Matthew informing us that the question was meant “to test Jesus.” We need only remember that the same word was used by Matthew when describing the testing of Jesus in the desert by Satan. Again here, the one testing Jesus is hoping to see him succumb and fail the test.
Were the question posed by someone clearly interested in the answer, as Mark would have it, the question would have had more legitimacy, especially given the fact that there were 613 commandments that faithful Jews were expected to follow at the time. So the problem is not with the question, but with the spirit in which it was asked.
Given the high number of commandments on the books, we can understand why the question carried weight. Jesus was not the first to have to face the question. Other rabbis often resorted to a distinction between so-called light and heavy commandments in an effort to decide the weightiness of a particular law. However, the Pharisees, as Matthew makes clear, hope Jesus will give an answer that makes his role as an interpreter of the law highly suspect.
Much to their disappointment, Jesus deftly answers the question, as he does each of the three posed to him in this section. The answer he gives is irrefutable, telling the questioner, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. A second likewise is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
Given the fact that both commandments are rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, the first found in the Book of Deuteronomy 6.4-5 and the second seen in the Book of Leviticus 19.18, the Pharisee who posed the question can find no cause to challenge Jesus’ answer. Nor, for that matter, does he compliment Jesus on his insight, as the questioner does in Mark’s gospel.
What distinguishes Jesus’ answer and elevates it to a new level is his combining of the two commandments, bonding two previous laws into one comprehensive rule for living, stating unequivocally that “the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments,” an attestation to the essential distillation found in this “great commandment.”
In other words, Jesus’ answer to the Pharisee cuts through the confusion of having to abide by hundreds of commandments and focuses on the core principles that underlie all of them, the love of God and the love of neighbor. With these two principles as guides, the believer can be assured that his or her path leads to God.
Jesus’ answer that clears away the confusion with the swipe of one simple sentence is reminiscent of the apocryphal story told about John the Beloved in his last years. Weak and frail, now the last of the twelve still alive, John would be brought into the assembly of believers so that those gathered might hear from him important lessons for their lives as followers of the Risen Lord.
Asked to say a few words to them, the Beloved Disciple would answer, “Love one another.” Prodded to say more, he would simply answer, “Love one another.” It was said that time after time when he was brought into the assembly, he would utter the same mantra, “Love one another.” It was not a weakness of mind or a slackening of spirit that saw him say the same thing over and over again; it was the fact that he believed that those three words were the summation of Jesus’ teaching, the foundational principle upon which everything else was built.
Jesus does the same when asked by the Pharisee as to what was the greatest commandment. Rather than expound on the merits of various commandments, weighing one against another, he locates the unifying principle of all of them, the core and central tenet that supports all the others, setting the commandment to love God and to love others as the sine qua non of faithfulness to the Law and to the prophets.
Of course, we do well to take a minute to look at the word love, an overused word in our times that can refer to everything from preference for a particular coffee drink to an opinion about a favorite personality on social media. In doing so, we weaken the true meaning of love, too often using it to express a feeling rather than an action, a sentiment instead of a commitment.
Put simply, when Jesus speaks of love, he isn’t speaking about how we like to take our coffee. For Jesus, love always has a face. It is the love of the poor man whose face is marked with despair and desperation, or the love of the marginalized person who can find no safe refuge in a hostile world, his face carrying the pain, or the love of the immigrant who finds himself or herself living with belittlement and disparagement. It is the love that is seen in the face of the homeless person who crouches at night over a doorway or in the love of the face of the person of color who is met with suspicion and recrimination for no other reason than the color of his or her skin.
Truth be told, this is the real test of our ability to comply with the commandment to love God and to love our neighbor. In the abstract, at the level of an idea, we embrace it and claim to follow it. But when it moves from an abstract principle to a concrete reality, an actual face in front of us, then we falter and we fail, turning away from the face of the person in the crowd who needs our love more than anything else.
For Jesus, love was always particular, his love directed towards a particular person, the one who stood in front of him, not some faceless individual outside his reach. Instead, he extended his healing to the sick man who cried from the side of the road, offered welcome to the sinner who felt the world was against him or her, found food for the hungry soul whose body and spirit were depleted and deprived of the necessary sustenance for both.
Mother Teresa understood this reality far better than almost anyone in our own times, resisting any attempt to love in the abstract, always insisting on loving in the concrete. As a result, she urged would-be devotees to stay at home and to show love to the people on their own streets, insisting there was no need to come to Calcutta to care for the hungry when there were plenty of hungry people in their own neighborhoods.
When Jesus spoke of the love of God, he understood it with the same concreteness, removing it from a comfortable concept to an often uncomfortable reality, insisting that it was found in action, not in words. For both, love of God and love of neighbor, there was an implied relationship, not in the abstract, but in the nitty gritty messiness of loving someone who, more often than not, is difficult to love.
If we are to experience Jesus’ great commandment as something other than words, then it requires us to take action. We shape our lives in accord with God’s ways. We remove all that hinders us from becoming the person that we were created to be. We resist the constant temptation to meld into the crowd, taking on its ways rather than taking on the ways of the Most High God.
The ancient prophets understood this fact with an unmatched clarity. They never spoke in the abstract, but always spoke in the concrete, offering examples of the right way to live and offering just as many examples of the wrong way to live, reminding the people that God required of them, in the words of Micah the prophet, “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly.”
Or, as Zechariah the prophet in much the same way put before the people, telling them in no uncertain terms, “Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor.” Again, he put a face on love, as did all the prophets, dislodging the notion of love from some bookshelf where it rested safe and untouched, and putting it on streets and in towns where the faces of the unloved lived.
In bringing together the two commandments–love of God and love of neighbor–Jesus effectively removed our escape route, the one that allowed us to proclaim our love for God while at the same time failing to love our neighbor, falsely believing we could choose one over the other, or that the first had superiority over the second.
Not so, Jesus made clear to the Pharisee. They are intricately connected and any attempt on our part to claim one while denying the other is both an illusion and a lie. Just as a door requires two hinges to work effectively, so living in accord with God’s will requires following both commandments. Just imagine a door with only one hinge and we can see how ludicrous it would be for us to believe we can get by with focusing on only the first one.
The early Christian believers understood that both commandments were held together in an unbreakable bond. For instance, the writer of the First Letter of John spelled it out in these forceful words, “If anyone says ‘I love God and hates his brother,’ he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
Jesus’ words to the Pharisees, then, serve as a good reminder to all of us, that love of God requires love of neighbor. And in answering that this is the greatest of commandments, he also reminds us that if we follow the other 611 commandments, but fail in following these two, then we have probably wasted our time and, more sadly, wasted our lives. That was the problem with the Pharisees. They focused on the minutiae while ignoring the bigger picture. Put simply, on this test, unlike many exams we have taken, not every answer we give has equal value.
–Jeremy Myers
