The 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, October 29, 2023

Matthew 22, 34–40

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.”

The events recounted in the Gospel Reading for today’s Mass take place the day or two after the Lord entered Jerusalem to cries of Hosanna.  After arrival, the Lord, coming as a conqueror, went directly to the Temple, as its rightful Lord, and seized it back from the corrupt Jewish leadership by casting out the money-changers and the sellers of animals, performing the sign showing that the sacrifices of the Old Law were abolished by his own imminent Sacrifice.  The Jewish leadership fought back, seeking to stone him or at least to find some way of discrediting him before his disciples.  In the present reading, after failing several times to do this, a member of the Pharisees tries again with a different strategy.

“Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?”  This new opponent begins his attempt to discredit Jesus by a very simple test.  In asking him what was the greatest commandment, he can appear as genuinely interested in the Lord’s teachings, and yet see if he can trip him up on the very fundamentals of Jewish belief.  The scholar of the Law (more accurately translated as “one learned in the Law”)  does not think that Jesus will answer satisfactorily and that Jesus, in his answer, will give him an opening for showing him up as a fraud.  Even if Jesus does answer the question in a generally satisfactorily way, the scholar of the Law can still use his answer as a wedge to break him apart, he thinks, for Jesus is an unlearned man from Galilee.  

So what is this learned man asking?  He is asking which of the laws God gave the Israelites through Moses was the most important, the most foundational.  Now, the commandments of the Law are found in the five books of the Pentateuch, or Torah, interspersed with narratives, songs, and other material.  The commandments are not given in any particular order.  The so-called Ten Commandments are given twice: in Exodus 20, 2-27, and in Deuteronomy 5, 6-21, with slight differences.  A person asked what was the greatest commandment of the Law could say, with some justification, that either the first or the second Commandments was the most important: “You shall have no strange gods before me”, or, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”  The first establishes God as the only true God; and the second establishes that he possesses such immense holiness that his name cannot be spoken, unlike the names of the pagan gods.  An argument could be made that either of these commandments is the source for the entirety of the Law, whether moral or liturgical.

But Jesus gives a different answer: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  This is from the Shema Israel (“Hear, O Israel”) found in Deuteronomy 6, 4-5, recited daily by observant Jews according to commandment.  This law to love God with all one’s being comes first so that even the First and Second Commandments proceed from it.  A God who is to be loved with all one’s being leaves no love for “strange gods”, and because he is worthy of such utter and complete love his name must be most sacred so that it cannot be spoken by human tongues.  All the moral and liturgical laws flow from this single commandment.  The Lord Jesus gives the second commandment as well: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  This law does not follow hard on the Great Commandment in the biblical text: it is found in Leviticus 19, 18.  The Lord Jesus can say that this is “the second commandment” rather than, say, that regarding God’s name, because the Great Commandment perfectly states what an individual’s behavior toward God should be.  This second commandment has to do with behavior towards our fellows whom God also created in his image and likeness.  Thus, the commandment for how to behave towards God, and one for how to behave towards his image and likeness.  “The whole Law and the Prophets depend on these two commandments.”  Without these two commandments there is no basis for the Law and for the coherence of its various ordinances.  

St. Mark completes the story in Mark 12, 32-34, noting the legal expert’s praise of Jesus for his reply and his own comment on it, leading to Jesus telling him that he is not far from the Kingdom of God, which silenced all his hearers.

The two Great Commandments may seem obvious to us but this was not the case two thousand years ago even to those who studied the Law.  This is a revelation of Jesus.  The profundity of his answer to the question posed by the man learned in the Law ought to move us with its perfection — only God could have said this.  As an experiment we might read for ourselves the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy and see if we could have answered as Jesus did.