Study, Pray, Serve: 30th Sunday of the Year

Now, this is Matthew chapter 22, verses 34 to 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 them, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.

This is the greatest and 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.

All right, so he's being tested.

He had shut down the Herodians and the Pharisees.

We heard about this last week.

You know, they're trying to trap Jesus.

Is it lawful to pay the census tax? And Jesus just silences them with this lovely way to sidestep the trap and give glory and praise to God.

Well, here they're trying to test him from a different direction.

All right, fine.

What's the greatest commandment? And what Jesus offers, and you'll hear this throughout the scripture readings if you're paying attention at all during the masses that we have throughout the year, but the law to love God and the law to love your neighbor, that's taken from the Old Testament.

It's Deuteronomy 6, verse 5, and Leviticus 19, verse 18.

Deuteronomy 6.5, that's the Shema.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God.

Therefore you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.

It's a beautiful, beautiful statement of faith.

We love God.

And then the second that comes right with it, love your neighbor.

Now, by fusing these two together, Jesus makes it clear.

He's basically condensing the Ten Commandments.

The first few are all about loving God, and then four through ten are all about loving your neighbor and all the different laws that are invoked to do that.

The point that I want to bring up about this is it's meant to help us understand that what Jesus is doing here, he really is acting as a teacher, drawing upon the richness of salvation history to talk about it's all about love.