Love the
Lord Your God
The greatest commandment, and what it demands of us — Matthew 22:34–46
There is a moment in every religion when it hardens into a system. When the living call of God becomes a checklist, when faith becomes management, when the love that once compelled people becomes a set of rules they navigate. Jesus is facing that moment in Matthew 22. The Pharisees approach him not to learn but to trap, and the trap they choose is a question about the greatest commandment.
It seems reasonable enough on the surface. There were six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Jewish law, with additional explanations layered on top. Rabbis had argued for generations about which sat at the centre, which held all the others together. The question was designed to catch Jesus in a controversy, to force him into a corner. His answer refuses the corner entirely.
The Greatest Commandment
He quotes from Deuteronomy 6:5, the Shema, the prayer that observant Jews repeated daily. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. It is the right answer, the answer any trained religious expert would have given. The crowd would have nodded. The Pharisees would have been ready to move on.
But Jesus does not stop. And the second is like it: love your neighbour as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.
He does not give one answer. He gives two, bound together. And in doing so he makes it impossible to treat love of God as a purely private, interior matter. The love that goes upward, to God, has an outward, horizontal expression. You cannot separate them. They hang together.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: love your neighbour as yourself.”
Matthew 22:37–39
With All Your Heart
I began the sermon this morning by thinking about household rules. Most of us grew up with them. Things you simply knew not to do, rules that needed no explanation. And Jesus is speaking into a society that had turned faith into exactly that: an elaborate architecture of rules, each one designed to prevent the breaking of another, each one adding weight to a system that had long since lost its heart.
The Shema cuts through all of it. Love God with everything. Not with the part of you that is available on Sunday mornings, not with the part of you that is comfortable and well-managed. All your heart. All your soul. All your mind. All your strength. As Saint Augustine put it, our heart is restless until it finds its rest in God. We are made for this love, and when we find it, it is not a burden but a homecoming.
But this kind of love is not something we can produce by effort or willpower. Jesus is not issuing a new instruction to the Pharisees and saying: try harder. He is pointing to something that only grace can give. It is a gift, received by faith, made real in us by the Spirit who dwells in us. We love God because he first loved us. And we need his help to keep loving him, even as we stumble and fail.
Love Your Neighbour
The second commandment is what prevents the first from becoming a private religious exercise. And Jesus makes it deliberately expansive. He does not say: love your family. He does not say: love those who are easy to love, those who are like you, those who return what you give. He says: your neighbour. And we know from his teaching elsewhere, especially the parable of the Good Samaritan, that neighbour means anyone God brings across your path. The easy ones and the difficult ones. The ones you would choose and the ones you would rather avoid.
As yourself. Not as a project. Not at a distance. With the same natural, instinctive care you give to your own needs. It is a remarkably high standard. It is also, in the right light, a remarkably freeing one. It is not about manufacturing feelings of warmth for people you find difficult. It is about acting toward them with the same practical care and attention you give to yourself, trusting that God's Spirit can do the deeper work in you.
Everything Hangs on These Two Things
Jesus pushes the Pharisees further still. While they are gathered, he asks them a question of his own. Whose son is the Messiah? The Son of David, they say. Then how does David call him Lord? No one could answer. From that day, the text tells us, no one dared ask him any more questions.
He is pressing them toward the one thing they are missing. The Messiah they are waiting for is standing in front of them. They have the law. They have the tradition. They have the system. They do not have the person. And without the person, neither commandment makes sense. We love God because he has shown us what love is in the cross of Jesus Christ. We love our neighbours because we have been loved at our worst, at our most undeserving, at the moment when we had nothing to offer.
Everything hangs on these two things. And these two things hang on him.
We gathered this morning around that simple truth. Love the Lord your God. Love your neighbour as yourself. Go in the week ahead and find the person God has given you to love today, the easy one and the difficult one, and offer them the same grace that has been offered to you.
Wednesday Bible study continues through Acts from 7pm in the lounge. Thursday morning community drop-in. All Souls Day service of remembrance next Sunday evening at 7pm.
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