The 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 25, 2020

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.”

St. Matthew devotes the last eight chapters, that is, over a third, of his Gospel describing how the Lord Jesus came to Jerusalem, made a triumphal entry, confronted the leaders of the Jews there, suffered, was killed, rose from the dead, and then ascended into heaven.  The Evangelist presents the Lord as the true Ruler of Israel, marching into his capital and liberating it from the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin, who are insurgents.  In the heated debates that follow the Lord’s entrance into Jerusalem, the insurgents attempt to show that he is an illegitimate claimant to the throne of David.  Their cleverest members challenge him with seemingly impossible questions and dilemmas in order to show him up as an uneducated Galilean, but the Lord ingeniously outwits them on each occasion.  The Pharisees even enlist their own rivals for authority, the Herodians and the Sadducees, but these do not succeed either.  This is the context for the Gospel reading for today’s Mass.  One of the more learned Pharisees attempts to trip up the Lord by asking him a critical question: “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

While the answer to this question seems obvious to us today, serious discussion surrounded it during our Lord’s lifetime.  Now, there is no line in the Torah which says, This or that is the greatest commandment.  Until after the fall of Jerusalem and then the return of the Jews from 

Babylon, the question in fact never arose.  As Judaism as we know it today began to form at that time, questions about the law, its modern practice, the canon of Scriptures, and the importance of worshipping at the temple began to come up.  Different schools of thought, such as that of the Pharisees and Sadducees, developed around certain teachers who proposed answers to these questions.  In addition, rabbis who led synagogue services were not trained in any kind of centralized, systematic way so that diverse personal theological opinions were common throughout Israel.  As a result, no authoritative way to answer theological questions existed.  The various groups and rabbis had their own ideas.  The questions put before Jesus were therefore contentious even without considering that they were posed to him in order to challenge and possibly overthrow his authority as a rabbi.

It is difficult to imagine what answers the Pharisees were prepared for, and which they would attack as not being the most important commandment.  They do not seem to have been ready for the Lord to answer as he did: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  St. Mark, in his Gospel, adds the detail that the Pharisee who asked the question was very pleased, even surprised, by the Lord’s answer, and in response, the Lord told him that he was not far from the Kingdom of God.  Mark then remarks, “And no man after that dared ask him any more questions” (Mark 12, 34).  In addition to the answer to the original question, Jesus tells the Pharisee what the second commandment was, linking them as though they were bound together: one could not be perfectly obeyed unless the other was also: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  According to the Evangelists, only the one Pharisee responded.  There was no cascade of ridicule or condemnation as the others intended to make.  In fact, not only had the Lord spoken convincingly, explaining that, “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments”, but he had stymied their attack by quoting and showing the significance of the second commandment: the Pharisees would have further delegitimized themselves in breaking it by attacking the Lord.

To “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” means to show him our love by obeying his commandments at all times, by centering our lives on the fulfillment of his will, and by trusting him to provide for us.  To love our neighbor as ourselves primarily means to assist our neighbor in knowing and loving God — in fulfilling the first commandment.  That is the link, the bond between the two.  Through the Lord’s grace, may we always strive to love him as he desires us to do, thereby entering into his joy.