(Ben Chidester)
Matthew 22:34-40 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38This is the great and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
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This is the final question that the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees ask of Jesus in their attempt to ensnare him, and it comes from a lawyer, one who was trained in the Law of Moses. He asks Jesus to identify the greatest commandment. Why was this a trap?
Perhaps he thought that he might unearth some inconsistency between Jesus’ teaching and the Law. If Jesus proposed some wildly new or different commandment, it might scandalize his hearers and turn them from him. The question was also somewhat of a trick one. The Old Testament did not identify any one commandment as primary. The only clear teaching of a fundamental underlying commandment was the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. If Jesus elevated one above the rest, they could attack him on this point.
In answering, Jesus showed both his wisdom and his authority. Rather than picking one commandment of the Ten, Jesus gave two commandments – one greatest and one second – that effectively capture the essence of the Ten. The command to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength is the essence of what we call the “first table,” which is the first four Commandments and which all describe the love and worship due to God. The command to love our neighbor as ourself effectively captures the essence of the “second table” – the latter six Commandments, which describe our duty to our neighbor. This summary of the Ten Commandments with these two showed Christ’s wisdom and understanding of the Law. But more than that, it also showed his authority to teach. Who, other than God, would dare to summarize God’s moral law beyond the Ten Commandments that he had given his people, as if he were wiser than God?
This event also teaches us something significant about Jesus’ relationship to the Law of the Old Testament. Some may not realize this, but the two commandments that Jesus gives are in fact in the Old Testament Law. The command to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength was given in Deuteronomy 6:5, just after Moses had reiterated the Ten Commandments to the people. The command to love our neighbor as ourself was given in Leviticus 19:18, after a string of more specific commandments of what loving our neighbor should entail, as if to summarize them. Jesus was not supplanting the Ten Commandments with two of his own. Rather, he was pointing out these two commandments, which were already part of God’s moral law, and making their significance – as the underlying essence of all of God’s moral law – clearer.
This helps us understand our relationship to God’s moral law as codified in the Old Testament. In Christ, we have been freed from the curse of the Law. We are no longer threatened by its obligation as a means of obtaining our own righteousness and salvation. But the moral essence of the Law, whether Old or New, is the same. The difference is that now, having been released from its curse, we are free to follow it, not as fearful slaves, but as beloved sons and daughters; not out of fear of judgment, but out of love and thanksgiving. May that be our attitude as we seek to love God and love our neighbor.
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An audio version of each devotion will be posted on our church podcast “Life Together at CRPC,” which is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.