The Great Commandment

I was reflecting on the conversation in the Gospels where Jesus is asked which is the greatest commandment. Here’s the passage, Matthew 22:34-40:

34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36 ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?’ 37 Jesus replied: ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’

This was not an inquiry driven by genuine personal interest on the part of the questioner. Questions from Pharisees and teachers of the law tended generally to be trying to “catch Jesus out” (for example, Mark 12:13) and in this case, Matthew tells us that the question was asked in order to “test” him. What he doesn’t tell us is in what way. What was there about this question that would be a potential tripwire for Jesus? Presumably, he would have been aware of the questioner’s motives—it was hardly a conversation with a supportive audience—so what was it?

As always in seeking to understand the meaning in a Bible passage, we need to start with the context and how it would have been understood by (what it would have been “saying” to) the original audience. We already have some of that context (a question asked by a Pharisee to test him), but we can add more to that.

Before the conversation itself, a group of Pharisees had come together, presumably to debrief “what went wrong?” when Jesus had earlier “silenced” a group of Sadducees—another of the “factions” that were part of first-century Judaism—in his response to another question drawn from the law. They were speechless at his answer; no doubt these Pharisees were keen to avoid the same humiliation.

The question they decided to ask was once again about the law and must have been one that they thought would be particularly tricky. The Pharisee appointed to ask it as their spokesperson is said to be “an expert” in the law. Presumably, anyone (expert or not) could have asked the question, if that’s all it was—a simple question-and-answer. So the implication is that there would then be some kind of theological debate with Jesus (hence the need to put forward “an expert” as their champion, someone who could be expected to win).

We need to take a timeout here for a few words on the law. The law gets bad press amongst Christians, especially those of a Reformed evangelical persuasion. That’s because of its perceived association with legalism and getting to heaven by your own efforts or “good works.” But that’s a caricature. These ideas come to us from the Reformation. Luther and Calvin thought they saw a direct correlation between their situation vis-à-vis sixteenth-century Catholicism and Paul’s situation vis-à-vis first-century Judaism (expressed in Galatians and Romans). In both situations, the Reformers believed, they were warring with hypocritical religious legalists over the pure gospel of Jesus—salvation by faith rather than by works; by grace rather than by law. Though this has been assumed to be so in evangelical culture (I would be surprised if as a reader you are not familiar with some version of that—with Pharisees, in particular, being cast as “the bad guys,” the epitome of hypocritical legalism) recent scholarship on Paul and first-century Judaism has shown this to be a deeply flawed assessment. Yes, of course, there were religious hypocrites at the time of Jesus, as there are in the church today (indeed, no doubt in all religions, since time immemorial), but as Jewish scholars had tried to argue for several hundred years (largely unsuccessfully, until the past half-century or so) Judaism never understood itself in those terms at all. It was always based in grace through faith; it was never about saving oneself by good works. The “works” (so to speak)—namely, practicing Torah—were understood as a grateful response to God’s grace, not as a way of earning anything.

Torah was a comprehensive framework of do’s and don’ts given to Israel by God through Moses, so the people would know how to live as the people of God as they became a nation for the first time after being set free from slavery in Egypt. Hence, to translate Torah as “law,” with the legalistic overtones that our English word carries—in a Christian context, that’s not least thanks to Reformed theology—is very unhelpful. Torah means “instruction,” “teaching,” or “guidance.” One of the most frequently quoted Old Testament verses in the New Testament is Habakkuk 2:4: “The righteous shall live by faith.” That didn’t suddenly become true with Jesus (still less, with Paul’s theology), it had always been true in Jewish thinking.

So, then, where did the problem lie with the Pharisees? There are several aspects:

1. There were 613 commandments (both negative and positive) in the Torah. This sounds a lot but isn’t when you think they were all given in a rural, nomadic context and many Jews now lived in a settled, urban context, where they were always in need of fresh interpretations and applications in new situations. Different rabbis offered different views (what’s new there, eh?). Jesus was often asked for his view (for example, when approached by the rich young ruler, Mark 10:17 and parallels). This explains, “You have heard it said … but I say to you …” which was Jesus offering his own rabbinic take on something.

2. Israel was occupied by the Roman Legions, which for the people of God rescued from slavery (and later, exile) was a disaster. The questions on everyone’s lips were why this had happened to them and when would Messiah come to rescue them. Different factions had their own answer and their own response (for the Zealots, for example, it was plotting armed resistance). The Pharisees’ answer was the sinfulness of the ordinary (poor) people—this was “God’s judgment on us because of them,” they said—and hence, they were aggressive in demanding people’s obedience to Torah. Or more particularly, to their body of interpretations of Torah.

3. Because of this well-meaning, but misplaced, zealotry for the law, they had as a consequence rather lost sight of the point of the law in the first place. Which, as Jesus said, was for the good of people, not just to make God happy. When Jesus said (Mark 2:27) that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” he might as well have been speaking of the whole of Torah (the Sabbath was representative rather than definitive, just as Paul would later similarly deploy “circumcision”—the technical word for that is a synecdoche).

Summed up, the Pharisees saw loving God as fulfilled through loving the law of God. Whereas Jesus saw loving God as fulfilled through loving the people of God. For Jesus, the Pharisees were insufficiently concerned about the harm done to people through their demands for observance—especially when it concerned the ordinary people, the poor people, who were already victims in life (Pharisaic demands that they could not fulfill without experiencing yet further distress).

If you’re tempted to think I’m being rather too nice to Pharisees, reflect on verses such as Joshua 22:5: “Take good care to observe the commandment and instruction that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded you, to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to keep his commandments, and to hold fast to him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.” Notice the features commingled here, and how it differs from Jesus’ rather pared-down version.

I wonder whether the expert in the law sent in to do proof-text battle with Jesus would have cited that verse as his answer: that the most important commandment is “to keep his commandments.”

This background helps explain why although Jesus was asked for one commandment, he answered with two: love God and love people. Jesus was bringing together Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Why? Because from God’s perspective, the first one is not happening unless we’re also practicing the second one. One might even go so far as to say that from God’s perspective the first one is defined by the second one.

Matthew doesn’t include our unnamed Pharisee saying to Jesus, “Why did you choose that one/those?” But Jesus tells him anyway. “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” That’s in the NIV. The NIRV says everything is “based on these,” and in the parallel passage in Mark, “There is no commandment more important” (Mark 12:31).

Paraphrasing that, Jesus is saying that these two are the lens through which we should be looking at the rest. And specifically—not least given the Pharisees’ zealous yet flawed view of what “loving God” looked like—we should be looking at the rest of the commandments through the lens of “loving people.” Asking ourselves to what extent obeying any other commandment contributes to the overriding aim of loving God through loving people. What we call “the Great Commandment” is commanding kindness, grace, mercy, and generosity in our love and support for people. Not sacrificing them on the altar of other commandments, unkindly applied in order to be prioritizing “pleasing God.” There is no reason to think that Jesus thinks any differently about such things now.

So, every other commandment sits below these two. No commandment should be demanded of people or prioritized in such a way that it undermines these two or contradicts these two because from the outset they were the objective and the goal for the rest. They’re the reasoning behind the other commandments, then and now, in the heart of God. Jesus’ citation of these two—and his little explanatory commentary at the end—allows us to see where all of the commandments were coming from, and still are.

In John 10:10, Jesus says, “A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come so they may have life. I want them to have it in the fullest possible way.” Who is the “thief” in this saying? We tend to assume Satan, which it may be, but it doesn’t say that. It may include Satan but be more than Satan—it may be all of the enemies of human life and flourishing. But another possibility—given who Jesus was speaking to at the time (verses 1 and 6)—is that he had in mind the Pharisees, whose demands on the ordinary people “to please God” were harming them; robbing them of that fullness of life that our compassionate God desires for people. As Christians, we need to get on message with that.