A Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after
Trinity
On these two commandments hang all the Law
and the
Prophets.
—St. Matthew 22:40
We heard in this morning’s Gospel Saint Matthew’s account of Jesus’s teaching about the two great commandments. Actually, we heard that twice, because at the beginning of the service we heard the same teaching, as we hear it at every celebration of the Eucharist.
The same teaching is found in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, but with this difference: instead of directly answering the question, Jesus turns the question back on the scribe or lawyer who asked it, and elicits from him the correct answer. This is Saint Luke’s version:
Behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.
The lawyer’s next question,” who is my neighbour?” moves Jesus to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan.
For the sake of completeness, here is the third version, which is in the Gospel according to Saint Mark:
One of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that [Jesus] had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
There are noticeable differences among the three accounts, so that it is impossible to be sure whether the evangelists are describing the same incident or three different incidents. One should not imagine, in any case, that our Lord only said each thing once. He must have delivered the same teachings, told the same parables, and answered the same questions in town after town, village after village. Maybe the scribe who put the question to Jesus in Saint Luke’s version was present on an earlier occasion, and Jesus turns the question back to him to see whether the scribe was paying attention.
In all three accounts, the scribes are playing a game of “gotcha” with Jesus. They ask him, “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” They hope he will say something that they can use against him.
The
“Law” to which the scribes refer in their questions is Torah, the five
books of
Moses, the first five books in the Bible.
Christians sometimes refer to these books as the Penatateuch
(which
means “five books”), but the ancient Jewish name is Torah, which is
historically translated as “Law.” But
Torah must not be equated with something like the California Vehicle
Code, or
even like the Constitution of the
The five books of Torah are thought to have been written by Moses himself, under direct inspiration from God. They possess incalculable authority. Scholars and rabbis devoted themselves, and among contemporary Jews still devote themselves, to the study of single words or passages in Torah. No one dared to claim to understand it completely.
When
we hear the
word “commandment,” we tend to think automatically of the Decalogue,
the Ten
Commandments, brought down from
But there are more than ten commandments in Torah. According to the traditional count, there are some 614 commandments, and they regulate everything about one’s daily life. It is commanded that boys be circumcised on the eighth day of their lives, and that men keep their heads covered and wear fringed garments and leave the hair of their forelocks unshaven. It is commanded that meat not be mixed with dairy in cooking, and that wool not be mixed with linen in weaving. It is commanded that only unleavened bread be eaten at the Passover, and that no pork or shellfish be eaten at all. It is commanded that a woman taken in the act of adultery be stoned to death and that all private debts be cancelled every fiftieth year.
At several places in the New Testament, the faithful Jews may be heard to say, “We have a law.” And when they say that, they are referring to the commandments of Torah. And, besides Torah itself, there were the interpretations of a thousand years: official levitical or rabbinical interpretations, rulings of religious courts, historical precedents—all dictating to some degree how the 614 commandments of Torah were to be applied in various circumstances and situations.
When the scribes asked Jesus, “which commandment is the most important?,” they were testing him. They were challenging him to choose from among the commandments that God made, and Moses wrote down, and the priests and rabbis had preserved for a thousand years, one commandment to be more important than all the rest. Jewish tradition taught that all of the commandments of Torah were interwoven, like a seamless garment; no commandment could be greater than any other commandment, because they were all dependent on one another. All of the commandments were equally important.
The scribes probably thought he would duck the question. But, if he answered it, they figured that whatever he said would make him vulnerable to criticism and contradiction; that whichever commandment he chose would offend some group or some powerful person. By choosing any one commandment as the greatest, he could be accused of excusing violation of all of the rest.
Of course, they figured wrong. When Jesus answered the question everyone had to agree that his was a very good answer, maybe the best possible answer. And he answered the question so well, according to Saint Mark, that from that time forward no one dared to challenge him in that way again.
What about the answer? In the first place, it should be noted that it does precisely answer the question as the question was put. Both the first and great commandment and the second that is like unto it are among the commandments in Torah. The first, about loving God, is in the sixth chapter of the book called Deuteronomy; the second, about loving your neighbour as yourself, is in the nineteenth chapter of the book called Leviticus. So the commandments are among the 614 contained in Torah.
We call Jesus’s answer the “summary of the Law,” which should be understood as the “summary of Torah.” It is sometimes explained as a summary of the Ten Commandments; and, in a way, that is accurate, because, in a way, the Ten Commandments are themselves a summary of Torah. The commandment to love God is said to comprehend the first four commandments: “thou shalt have none other gods but me,” “thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image,” “thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain,” “remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath-day.” And the commandment to love your neighbour is said to comprise the last six commandments: “honour thy father and thy mother,” “thou shalt do no murder,” “thou shalt not commit adultery,” “thou shalt not steal,” “thou shalt not bear false witness,” “thou shalt not covet.” That is fine as far as it goes, but our Lord goes further.
According to Jesus, on the two great commandments hang all of the Law and the Prophets. The “Law and the Prophets” was the name of Scripture, of the Old Testament, of the whole Bible as it existed in the first century. According to Jesus, the entirety of Scripture depends upon loving God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength and loving your neighbour as yourself. This is not just the summary of the Law, this is the summary of the Bible. And because nothing in the New Testament contradicts what is in the Old Testament, these two great commandments are and remain the summary of the Bible.
What if someone were to ask any of us, “What is the most important thing you have learned from reading the Bible?” Or even, “What is the Bible all about?” How would we answer? Do we ever consider how we would answer such a question?
The answer is the answer that Jesus taught. If anyone should ask you, tell them this: This is what I learn from the Bible: first, and above all, I must love God with all my heart, and all my mind, and all my soul, and all my strength; and second, I must love my neighbour as myself. On these two things, everything in the Bible depends.