Matthew 22:34-40

Matthew 22:34-40 The Pharisees ask what is the greatest command?

This is the third in a series of 3 challenges Jesus faces in his final week in Jerusalem before he is executed.  This time it is the Pharisees who challenge him. 

The Jews had identified 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law, which was a lot to keep track of.  Jewish teachers sometimes tried to summarize the Torah in a sentence.  A Gentile once came to Hillel the Elder, the great Jewish scholar, and asked to be converted “on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot.”  Hillel summarized the Torah with a statement that is essentially the reverse of Jesus’s Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12, saying, “That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation.  Go study” (Shabbat 31a).

Hillel founded the school known as the House of Hillel in Jerusalem and was a spiritual leader there from around 20 or 30 years before Jesus was born until Hillel died when Jesus was a teenager or young adult.  His “house” or party of scholars lived on for more than a century after his death, generally in opposition to the stricter House of Shammai that led the Pharisees during Jesus’s ministry.

What do the Pharisees ask Jesus?

How does Jesus answer the question of which commandment is the greatest?

Notice that Jesus quotes two commandments (found in Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 9:18), not one.  Why does it take two commandments to summarize the law?

One deals with our relationship with God, and one deals with our relationship with people.  (Jesus also cited the second of these commandments, Leviticus 9:18, in his answer to the rich young man in Matthew 19:19.)

Jesus says that all of the teachings of the Old Testament Law and prophets depend on, or are based on, these two commands.  Why is that?

Test Jesus’s claim by applying it to some of the commandments you know from the Old Testament (for example, the Ten Commandments or other things God tells us to do in the Old Testament).  How is each command based on one or the other of these two greatest commandments?

What does it mean to love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind?

How do you love God with your whole “heart”?

How do you love God with your whole “soul”?

How do you love God with your whole “mind”?

Some Christians try to downplay the importance of the mind, but Jesus (and the Old Testament, and Saint Paul) emphasize the importance of the mind in our relationship with God.  How can you use your mind in ways that “love” God?

What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself?

What are some ways you try to love your neighbor as yourself?

People often point out that to love your neighbor as yourself implies that you love yourself.  The concern that arises if that if you don’t love yourself, it may be hard to love others.  What are some ways that we can apply to ourselves the same love that we extend to our neighbors?

The Jews would have taken it as a given that people love themselves, care for themselves, and try to provide for themselves.  How can that instinct to take care of our own needs help us understand what we are called to do to love others by also taking care of their needs?

Jesus says the second command is “like” the first?  How are the two commandments related?  How does the second command reflect the first?

Jesus taught us in Matthew 25:31-46 that if we aren’t loving our neighbor, we aren’t loving God, because Jesus is to be found in the people in need around us.  So these are not two totally separate ideas about how to honor God.  The two commands work together because God has chosen to make us and everyone else in his image, so he is present in our neighbors.

How can you follow these two commands in your life today?  What is one thing you might do more faithfully, or start doing, to better fulfill the two great commandments?

Now take a step back and consider this:

A woman in one of my Bible Study groups once shared a story when we were discussing this passage.  She was struggling with the idea of showing love to a difficult person in her life.  She talked with her priest about it, and the priest reminded her that the other person is a child of God too.  He told her to look at the other person as God does.  She tried to do that, and, she said, “It worked.”  Once she was able to see the other person through the eyes of God, she was able to not just tolerate the other person but develop a friendship with them.

Loving God with our minds sometimes means looking at a situation and thinking through how God sees it, and then acting accordingly.  Loving our neighbor means seeing them as God sees them.  When we adjust our thinking, God is able to do things through us that he can’t do when we are closed off from extending his love to others.  It is tremendously rewarding when we can experience the reality that, by loving God and loving our neighbor, we are participating in the work of God.

Where in your life can you take a new step this week to love God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and all of your mind, and extend that love to others?