Matthew 22
34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And 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. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Recently, I saw someone online pointing out how often Jesus asks questions, even when answering the questions of others. This point has been made more than once on Twitter, for instance. Here is one example: “Jesus asked questions in 75 of 89 gospel chapters. Embrace his approach to human interactions and ask more questions. Listen more, talk less.” It is an interesting point, though one does get the feeling in reading some of these comments and the comments they invite that some seem to think this does not mean Jesus ever really answered any question at all! For instance, it is debatable that the primary point of Jesus’ own questions was to “listen more, talk less.”
The fact of the matter is that (1) yes, Jesus often asked questions and even answered questions with questions (in order, I would add, to help the questioner journey toward a deeper truth than they were ostensibly searching for or to uncover some motive the questioner thought they had sufficiently hidden from Jesus) and (2) Jesus did, in fact, answer questions that were asked Him…even if His answers were in the form of questions!
Our text is a case in point. Here, Jesus is asked a question and He does not answer with a question. He simply answers it. But not simply, after all. For then He appears to over-answer it. And we see that Jesus is answering questions on a deeper level for the good and conviction of the questioner. Once again, we see the challenge of trying to press Jesus into a corner.
To the Pharisees, theology was controversy and question. To Jesus, it was worship and life.
The Pharisees approach Jesus again and, this time, their question is one that was often discussed among the religious leaders of the day.
34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
On the surface, this is not an inappropriate question, though, as we will see, we have reason to question the Pharisees’ motives in asking it. After all, this question is asked in a series of confrontations that the Pharisees and Sadducees have launched against Jesus. Their intent is to trip Him up. But, again, the question is not a bad question. Andrew Wilson writes of it:
It sounds like a fair question. First-century Jews counted 613 regulations in the Law, 248 commands, and 365 prohibitions.[1]
So, given the proliferation of laws and commandments, there is indeed good reason to ask this question! And Jesus answers it:
37 And 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. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
These two answers—“love the Lord your God…and…love your neighbor as yourself”—are taken from two Old Testament texts. The first comes from Deuteronomy 6.
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
It follows, in Deuteronomy, the shema of Israel: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” This was the great creed of Israel. R. T. France writes:
Deuteronomy 6:4–9, from which this quotation is taken, was repeated twice daily by pious Jews as the opening of the Shema’. It therefore already played a key role in Jewish religious life, and Jesus’ emphasis on this text could cause no surprise. Heart, soul and mind are not different ‘parts’ of man, but different ways of thinking of the whole man in his relation to God; no clear distinction can be drawn between them.[2]
And the second commandment is taken from Leviticus 19.
17 “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. 18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
What Jesus does here is deft and important. By moving to the second commandment that is “like” the first, Jesus was showing that, for Him, theology is no mere theory, no mere controversy, no mere question. Rather, it is the truth of God that is lived out in life. It leads us to worship God and to love our fellow man. The truths of God, to Jesus, were not theoretical, nor were they the playthings of the religious intelligentsia. The Pharisees may have wanted a question answered and a conundrum solved, but what Jesus gave them was a blueprint for life: love God with all that you are and love your neighbor as yourself.
Beware the person who traffics in theological puzzles and dabbles in theological language while missing the point. The point of theology must be worship and a transformed life or it is not even theology. It is mere vanity.
The monk Evagrius Ponticus famously said, “A theologian is one who prays and one who prays is a theologian.” Yes, and seeing how Jesus handled theology, we might also say that a theologian is one who loves God and his fellow man. What a theologian most decidedly is not, however, is one who uses religious words to try to undermine Jesus Christ.
Jesus answers and His answer indicts.
Not only does Jesus’ answer reveal how He views theological truth, but it also indicts the questioners.
37 And 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. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
These answers—“Love God! Love your neighbor!”—are not, again, mere answers. They are a call to a way of life. And one thing we know from the rest of the gospels is that the Pharisees oftentimes missed the way of life to which Jesus was pointing with his answers to this question. Listen, for instance, to the specific censures offered by Jesus against the Pharisees in Luke 11.
42 “But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.
These censures are particularly enlightening. The Pharisees, Jesus tells us:
- neglect justice and
- neglect the love of God.
Are these not the two answers Jesus gives to the question in our text: love God and love your neighbor?
To neglect justice is to neglect neighbor-love. To neglect the love of God is to not love God. In keeping with Jesus’ two answers in our text, verse 42 even offers yet another parallel: “These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” This sounds very much like Matthew 22:40: “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” All “the others” parallel “all the Law and the Prophets.”
Time and again in the New Testament we see Jesus pointing to the Pharisees’ violation of these commandments. In Matthew 21, the parable of the tenant, Jesus paints the Pharisees as those who war against God by killing His Son.
37 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ 39 And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them.
Clearly, Jesus does not see these men as loving God. In Matthew 23, we see Jesus’ seven woes against the scribes and Pharisees, revealing their gross neglect and violation of both love of God and love of man.
In Mark 2, we see find Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for their lack of compassion for sinners.
15 And as he reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. 16 And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, “Why does he eat[b] with tax collectors and sinners?” 17 And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Many of the Pharisees loved neither God nor man. In part, at least, what Jesus is doing in our text is saying, “The answer to your own question is an indictment of your own lives, for you are obeying neither the greatest commandment nor its logical result: the love of neighbor.”
It is a dangerous thing to approach Jesus with false pretenses! He sees the realities behind our questions!
Jesus Himself is the answer to the question.
And there is a deeper sense still in which Jesus is saying that the answer to the Pharisees’ question about the greatest commandment is Jesus Himself. We can find the clue to this idea in verse 40.
40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Jesus says that “all the Law and the Prophets” “depend” on these two commandments: love God and love your neighbor. But Jesus has used that phrase, “all the Law and the Prophets,” before. We find it in Matthew 5 near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
There, Jesus says that He, Jesus, that He Himself, fulfills all “the Law” and “the Prophets.” Then, again, in our text, He says that “all the Law and the Prophets” “depend” on these two commandments. In other words, He is Himself the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets just as He is Himself the very incarnation of the greatest commandments: love of God and love of neighbor.
Douglas R. A. Hare makes the interesting point that verse 40 “takes us back to the very beginning of Jesus’ teaching ministry, to the programmatic statement in 5:17–20, which opens with the words, ‘Do not suppose that I have come to destroy the law and the prophets; I have not come to destroy but to fulfill.’” So, these two passages (5:17 and 22:40), Hare argues, “bracket Jesus’ ministry to Israel as the God-authorized end-time teacher.”[3] They serve as bookends, or as an inclusio informing all that lies between them.
Would you love God and love your neighbor? Would you obey these commandments upon which the Law and Prophets depend? Then come to the one who is Himself the fulfillment of the Law and Prophets. Come to God’s love incarnate. Come to the very embodiment of love of neighbor.
Would you like to see what it looks like to obey the greatest commandment? Then set your eyes and ears and mind and heart on Jesus. For Jesus loved the Father with an eternal and unbroken love!
Would you like to see what it looks like to obey the second greatest commandment that is “like” the first? Then set your eyes and ears and mind and heart on the cross of Jesus Christ. For there, Jesus demonstrated a love of neighbor and a love of God that the world had never seen before. At Calvary, Jesus showed what it looks like to love with a love that shocks the world.
What is the answer to the Pharisees’ question? It is not a what. It is a who. Who is the answer to the Pharisees question? It is Jesus. Jesus is the answer. Jesus fulfills and embodies the greatest commandment and the second that is like it in Himself. Jesus is the answer.
[1] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december/greatest-commandment-gods-laws-equal-jesus.html
[2] France, R. T. Matthew. The Tyndale New Testament Commentaries. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), p.319.
[3] Hare, Douglas R. A. Matthew. Interpretation. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p.258.