Matthew 22: 34-42 The Greatest Commandment
October 23, 2005
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, oh Lord my strength and my redeemer.

When the pious Pharisees of our story see that Jesus has bested the Saducees, they want to take their turn. The question they put to him seems designed to ensnare Jesus into an unlawful answer. “Which is the great commandment in the law?” they ask him. This could be seen as a trick question. One strain of Pharisetic thought held that all Mosaic laws were absolutely equal, and that to place one above the others was blasphemy.

But Jesus, as usual, finds an extraordinary way to escape the snare the Pharisees may have set for him. He offers not one commandment but two. One very central to Jewish piety and one seemingly less significant. He first quotes from Deuteronomy 6:5. This passage was chanted several times a day by pious Jews (and still is) as a part of their sacred daily prayer. It is called the Shema. Shema is Hebrew for “hear” and the prayer in part, goes like this:

Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord our God is one God
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
With all your soul and with all your might
Keep these words in your heart
And tell them to your children
Talk about them when you are at home
And when you are away from home.
Speak them when you lie down and when you arise
Place them on your doorposts
and all your gates
As a seal on your arm
and upon your forehead

The essence of the kind of love described in this passage is as far from sentimentality as you can get. Its essence is commitment and action. It is not a feeling, which could never be commanded anyway, and might best be described with the Hebrew word “Hesed” or “covenant love.” Jesus blasts the lid off the box by adding that the second commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself” is “like” the first. In other words, this law is every bit as important as the first one. This implies that this “covenant love” is also required towards our neighbors, something the Pharisees may not have been ready for. And he ends by saying that on these two commandments hang all the law (the Torah) and all the books of the prophets. With this interpretation he is saying that the law and this deep, committed utterly life-pervasive love are one and the same. Matthew after all, began his gospel with a story about a righteous, pious Jew who let love and compassion trump the law when the law seemed contrary to the will of God. He married his young intended bride in spite of the horrifying fact that she was pregnant with someone else's child. Although a punishment of death would have been more “lawful,” he was moved to an action based on, love and commitment.

As contrasted to the centrality of the Shema and the "Love the Lord your God" commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself" languishes in Leviticus between the dictates of whose nakedness you must not uncover and the agricultural laws. It falls immediately before the command not to let your cattle mate with a different breed and never to wear a mixed garment of wool and linen. The whole phrase goes:

You shall not avenge or bear any grudge against the children of your people but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus plucked a rather insignificant law from 2 books away and placed it with the central law of Judaism. In the Old Testament context a neighbor was a fellow Israelite “A child of your people.” But in a previous chapter of Matthew, Jesus has brought this understanding to a new and more outrageous level. By telling story of the good Samaritan he has shown that “your neighbor” includes that whom you might consider your enemy. The Pharisees are confronted with a shocking sequence: To love God is to love one’s neighbor, and to love one’s neighbor is to love one’s enemy.

Now that he has been victorious in the answering of three questions from the Sadducess and Pharisees, Jesus gets proactive. He now takes the initiative and he asks the Pharisees, “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” This is a trick question, as theirs were, because he knows what their answer will be. To refute the simple answer that the Messiah must be the son of David, as is prophesied all over the place in the Old Testament, Jesus quotes psalm 110:1, to show that the Messiah cannot be both David’s Lord and his son. As contrasted with the beauty of the Shema, psalm 110 as a whole would probably deserve an X rating for violent content. I read to my surprise that the first verse was rather central to the piety of the early Christians and it is quoted 37 times in the New Testament. But the psalm includes not only the relevant quote:

The Lord said to my Lord
Sit at my right hand
Until I place your enemies under your feet

but also:

The Lord is at your right hand
He will shatter kings on the day of his wrath
He will execute judgment among the nations
Filling them with corpses
He will shatter heads over the wide earth

It is likely that the early church left these verses out, missing the fact that placing enemies under your feet never turns out well, and in fact is exactly what Jesus preached against.

The son of David that we worship is not interested in placing the enemy beneath our feet. The son of David that we worship is the bringer of the love that passeth all understanding – the love that implies action, commitment, living the word, not just listening to it or even just saying it.

If our worship is anything, it is or should be an active theological debate with our violent and toxic culture. Any brave population that dares to sing, “praise God from whom all blessings flow” is radically counter-cultural in an environment that blares from every billboard, magazine and computer pop-up, “Praise the celebrities, the powerful and the rich from whom all we covet flows.”

I work with children and youth and news has not been good for that precious and vulnerable population of late. The tragedies have been coming hard and fast. And one of the most tragic was the death of a 14-year-old boy. I knew this child. He was part of the community. After I heard about the death of this boy, I heard Jesus’ question from the Gospel differently. “What do you think about this boy who took his life?” “Whose son is he?” I realized that I knew so little about this boy and his struggles. “What do you know about this 16-year-old boy accused of murder?” “Whose son is he?” “What do you know about these three small boys who were drowned by their delirious mother?” “Whose sons were they?” I realized how little I know or understand about he epidemic of suicide among our youth, about the living hell that would lead a young mother to drown her children or a 16-year-old to murder an innocent woman. “Whose children are they?” All these children who are losing their hope, existing in a living hell, resorting to the most drastic escape strategies, are all our children.

I keep coming back to the inscription the Bishop left me in my Bible. He quotes first Peter: “Always account for the hope that is within you, and do it with gentleness and reverence.” We need to reach out to our youth – not only to pass on the message of hope – we need to BE the precious message we are privileged to hear: the peace-filled, hope-filled, utterly forgiving, transcendent love of Christ.

We may never have that perfect covenant love described in the greatest commandment – but we can give what we can give. And God will give us the grace to give that love and that hope to the children in our lives and the children of the world. If nothing else we can go home to hold our children, to tell them we love them if only because of the parents who can never hold their children again. We need to give them the treasure of the hope that is within us.

To hold it in our hearts
To tell it to our children
Talk about it when we are at home
And when we are away from home.
When we lie down and when we arise.
Let it be as close to us as a band around our arms or a seal on our foreheads

For our children, for our selves and for the world. Amen.