MATTHEW 22:34-40
“OUT OF THE EATER CAME SOMETHING TO EAT. Out of the strong came something sweet.” Within any Children’s Bible certain Old Testament stories are sure to be found—the story of Noah and the ark, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale, and, of course, the story of Samson and the lion.
The story of Samson and the lion comes from the fourteenth chapter of the book of Judges. There we are told that as “a young lion came toward him roaring... the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon him, and... [with his bare hands] he tore the lion in pieces” (Judges 14:5, 6). Now, of course, our Children’s Bibles (as is only appropriate, I suppose) depict Samson wrestling with the beast rather than tearing it limb from limb. And such Bibles often end the story of Samson with just that memorable scene. But in the book of Judges itself we are told that Samson returns later—“after some days” (Judges 14:8)— to see a swarm of bees in the dead lion’s body, and with the swarm he finds a bit of honey. Fearless Samson then, finding this sweet treasure, puts his hand into the carcass and scrapes the bee's honey out of the lion’s side. Later this event became the answer to Samson’s famous riddle: “Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet” (Judges 14:14).
The story and the riddle of Samson symbolizes well what has occurred in 21:23-27 and 22:15-33. But here, instead of a lion attacking a mighty man of God, we have a den of religious predators seeking to devour the sovereign Son of God. The first attack comes from “the chief priests and the elders of the people” (21:23). In 21:23-27 they claw at Jesus’ self-imposed authority. The second strike comes from the Pharisees and Herodians. In 22:15-22 the upper jaw of the Pharisees comes together with the lower jaw of the Herodians, seeking to squeeze Jesus with their question, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” Then finally the Sadducees roar about the resurrection. In 22:23-33 this last group seeks to deface our Lord with their ingenuous question about a woman and her seven husbands.
Yet like Samson (the strongest man in the world), Jesus (the wisest man in the world) tears them to pieces, if you don’t mind the less-than-tame analogy. It is out of the carcasses of his questioners’ questions that we Brethren find something sweet.
The Lawyer and His Question
As we come to our text for this chapter, we see there is one more challenge our Lord must face. It is the potential sting of one hovering bee. Look with me at 22:35. Here we have “a lawyer” who has been buzzing around. He is a lawyer in the sense that he is an expert in the written Old Testament law as well as its oral interpretation and application. He is a religious lawyer, a Pharisee who is “one of the scribes” (Mark 12:28).
At first, when we read in verse 35, “And one of them [a Pharisee], a lawyer, asked him a question to test him,” we may rightly fear he has only come to lower his stinger, for you see the scribes, whenever mentioned in Matthew’s Gospel, are found stabbing at our Lord. Also the word “test” or “tempt” doesn’t have positive connotations. Is this lawyer trying to get Jesus to indict himself with some lawless statement on the Law? “Who needs the Law? I am the Law unto myself. Follow me.” Furthermore, the language of verse 34 (“they gathered together,” cp. v. 41) reminds one of Psalm 2:2: “the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed.”
Matthew seems to add such subtle details to intensify the animosity: the scribe is here to sting! Mark’s version, however, views the scribe more as someone who is scrapping for honey, if you will.
He is there to learn. I think if you blend those two voices, you arrive at this man’s voice here. In verse 36 he asks, with the mix of animosity (as a lawyer who is there to test the “teacher” about his “knowledge of and fidelity to the Torah”) and yet sincerity (as a learned man who is still willing to learn), “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
With this question this man is not asking “which laws from the Scriptures need to be obeyed and which can safely be ignored?” Instead he is asking, “Jesus, in your opinion, what is the fundamental premise of the Law on which all the individual commands depend?” He is asking, “Of the 613 commands (as later rabbinic tradition would number them—248 positive and 365 prohibitive)—which command gets at the heart of them all?”
About twenty years before Jesus, the story is told of a Gentile convert to Judaism who approached Rabbi Hillel and asked him to summarize the whole Law while he stood on one leg (in other words, summarize it quickly). Hillel’s answer was a negative version of the Golden Rule. He said, “What thou hatest for thyself, do not to thy neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and learn.” Before and after the time of Jesus, other rabbis used key Bible verses to answer this common question. One rabbi quoted Proverbs 3:6 as the heart of the Law: “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” Another rabbi quoted Habakkuk 2:4: “The righteous shall live by his faith.”
Jesus' Answer: Love God
It is in this tradition that Jesus is asked, and that he answers, the question. He quotes from the Torah, as he did in the previous text with Exodus 3:6. Here he quotes from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Jesus answered:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind [Deuteronomy 6:5]. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself [Leviticus 19:18], On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. (22:37-39)
Here Jesus provides an interesting and helpful image. He has us envision both the Law and the Prophets (his canon [cp. 5:17; 7:12] is bigger than the Sadducees’), with its “commandments and covenants, prophecies and promises, types and testimonies, invitations and exhortations,” as hanging (Young’s Literal Translation renders the phrase, “on these—the two commands—all the law and the prophet do hang”) on these two love-command hooks. One scholar summarizes the image like this: “The picture, then, is of two pegs at equal height from which a great bundle hangs.”
That image is interesting and unique because many Jews in Jesus’ day viewed their Bibles as hundreds of pegs “from which hundreds of individual commands hang down in suspensions of almost equal lengths.” So here Jesus cut all those strings, pulled out all the pegs but two, “and suspended the whole Bible from its two main commandments,” which are so close to each other they can rightly be called “the Double-Love Command,” two separate pegs united by love—two pegs nailed or pushed into the wall and two nails through the sides of both pegs.
Let’s look at these two pegs separately, and then we’ll place them back together, as intended.
The first command to love comes from Deuteronomy 6. In the original Hebrew the first word of Deuteronomy 6:4 is the word “Shema,” which means “hear.” “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” The Shema was “the oral creed of Judaism.” The synagogue service began with its recitation. While in prayer, a pious Jew wore it on his forehead and on his wrist, in a tiny leather box called a phylactery. At home the Shema hung upon their doors. And in every godly household it was repeated in the morning and again in the evening every single day of the year.
The Shema, of course, contains no command. It is simply a distinctive statement about monotheism: God is one. Yet. like all statements in Scripture, it has applications. Its application comes in Deuteronomy 6:5, which Jesus quotes in verse 37: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
So, to Jesus what mattered most were not the hundreds of various laws and their relative rankings. What mattered most was a loving relationship with the one true God (love for YHWH, not Baal or Allah or Vishnu), a loving relationship that requires the whole of a person—heart, soul, and “might” (Deuteronomy 6:5), or as Jesus puts it “mind.”
Perhaps he substituted “mind” for “might” as a subtle rebuke to their riddles, the sense being, “Use your heads!” More likely, heart, soul, and mind are simply “overlapping categories” representing “our every faculty and capacity.” Love God with everything you are. That is, the mention here of “heart... soul and... mind” was not intended to give us a psychological breakdown of the various components of the human personality—the heart being the hub of the wheel of all our thoughts, words, and deeds, the soul representing the seat of our emotional activity, the center of our desires and affections, the mind understood as the seat and center of our intellectual life as well as dispositions and attitudes." Rather these three parts were intended to give us a comprehensive picture of what is to be our total devotion.
The key to this command is observing the “alls.” Three times in verse 37 the word “all” is repeated. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This repetition of the word “all” emphasizes “the necessity of a total response of love to the lord-ship of God.” “God’s wholehearted love,” as one commentator put it, “must not be answered in a halfhearted manner.” And as another commentator summarized, “The demand is for total allegiance: one should love God with every globule of one’s being.” All! “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” with all of everything you are. Total devotion.
In Mark’s version (Mark 12:28-34) of this story the scribe’s question and Jesus’ answer is surrounded by what I take to be an example of what the fulfillment of this love commandment doesn’t look like and an example of what it does look like. (I use the term fulfillment because Paul is fond of using it in relation to love.) Fulfilling this love command doesn't look like the great mob of people who have come from every corner of the Roman Empire to use the temple like “a den of robbers” (as a hideout), those religious schizophrenics who murder and commit adultery and all sorts of other evils throughout the week but come to the temple to pray, offer a sacrifice, and receive forgiveness (see Mark 11:15-19). However, fulfilling the love command does look like that famous widow (Mark 12:41 —44) who gave God “everything she had” (Mark 12:44)—all her heart, all her soul, all her mind (and yes, all her money, “all she had to live on”). She loved God! That’s one example, I think, of what love looks like.
Now back to Matthew, but don’t move far from the widow. She is an example of what our inner and outer devotion to God should be. God gives everything to us; we give everything to God—however little it looks like to the world. Loving God isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible. All things are possible with God. As Augustine prayed, “Grant what you command, and command what you will.”
Recently I met with a small group of people in Chicago. At one point in the conversation we were talking about good commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew. As two of us were raving about one commentator in particular, another jumped in and said, “Yeah, he’s good, but he’s too pietistic for me.” I said, “Well, I like piety.” He replied, “You would.” That was a jab—a friendly but intentional jab—not at my overly sentimental or emotional preaching but at my persistent preaching on the necessity of good works and holiness and a changed life. To some such preaching is too pietistic because they think it takes away from the cross of Christ.
Well, the morning after that, in my pietistic devotional time I have each morning, I prayed, “Lord, am I too pietistic in my preaching? Am I missing the gospel? Am I preaching too much about what we should do rather than what Christ has done?” This was a sincere prayer. The answer came (it would have come audibly if I was more pietistic than I am), and I think I have the mind of Christ on this. I say that mostly because the answer came to me in question form, which is very much how our Lord thought and talked.
Anyway, here’s what came to mind: when did Protestant piety go out of fashion? It’s in all the Reformed Confessions! How does piety distract or remove from the work of the cross? What would Paul think of that? And didn’t Jesus decide to answer this scribe’s question by talking about love? He didn’t say, “The greatest commandment is to be justified by faith alone.” And he didn’t say, “And I really mean ‘alone’!” He chose to go the pietism route and talk about love—our actions (certainly) but also our attitudes and affections. Love is a fairly all-encompassing word, isn’t it?
Therefore, with all that said (I stand firmly upon the foundation of the founder of my religion), here’s some pietistic preaching for you. My brothers and sisters in Christ, God is to be first in our lives. That’s what this first great commandment teaches us. He can’t be second or third or fourth of fifth or fiftieth. The sum of the whole Old Testament (and New Testament) is the command to love God and to love him before all others, more than anything and anyone else. And in a world that lacks a God-consciousness (let alone a God-centeredness), and in Ecclesias where preachers refuse to preach straightly and forthrightly the need for Brethren to love God, we need to pray doubly hard to set the Lord God before our eyes and to see him (as Jesus did) towering “in sovereignty above the state (22:15—22), above death (vv. 23-33), and... above all other human responsibilities (vv. 34-40).”
This day I say to you, with proud humility, that the purpose of my life is to live for God. I love God, not perfectly, not completely, but totally, with heart and soul and mind. I’ll put it this way: I’m totally depraved. That is, I’m sinful in every part of who I am. Yet, by God’s powerful grace I’m totally saved. That is, now, by God’s grace I love God with every part of who I am. You see, I say, with proud humility, that I’m totally God’s. And I hope you can say the same. I hope you can join me in my piety.
Jesus' Answer: Love Others
The second part of Jesus’ answer follows quite naturally. Like the shape of a cross, the vertical dimension (the command to love God) connects with the horizontal dimension (the command to love others). In verse 39 Jesus says, “And a second is like it.” “Like it” in the sense of flowing from it (the “motive force”) or “like it” in the sense of equally important (Paul seems to think so; cp. Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14)? Can it be both? I don’t know.
“And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Again, Jesus quotes from Leviticus 19:18, which he quotes three times in Matthew’s Gospel (cp. 5:43; 19:19), more than any other Old Testament text. I guess Jesus likes love. (He’s so pietistic.)
In the context of Leviticus, loving one’s neighbor means (and what a corrective the content of this command is for today’s concepts of love) not harboring anger in your heart, or seeking vengeance, or bearing a grudge, and yet frankly reasoning or kindly rebuking him or her if necessary. That’s love in Leviticus.
Unoriginal Originality
On one hand Jesus’ answer to this scribe’s question is unoriginal (he does, after all, simply quote from two popular Old Testament texts), yet on the other hand it is quite original. For you see, while this combination of these love commands is commonplace to us, it was not to them. This combination was revolutionary. James Edwards writes, “Although love of God and love of humanity were occasionally affirmed separately in Israel, there is no evidence that before Jesus they were ever combined. It does not appear that any rabbi before Jesus regarded love of God and neighbor as the center and sum of the law.”
So while Jesus’ answer was based on two well-known and often-cited texts from the Torah, he was the first in history to affirm that love for God and love for people are indivisible. He was the first to say that the Shema must be complemented and completed by a love for one’s neighbor. So there is a distinction between the two love commandments, but not a division. The first command is greater than the second; yet the first cannot be met unless the second is accomplished (and vice versa).
So with that said I say, away with the doctrines of humanism, which teach us to love people without any reference to God, and away with the doctrines of mysticism (I’ll define that word in a minute), which teach us to love God without any reference to people. Both of these dangers, humanism prevalent in the world and mysticism prevalent in the Ecclesia, are diffused by Jesus’ answer.
Let me address mysticism for a moment. There is room for mystery (and piety) and even subjective communion with God in Ecclesial devotion, but there is not room for mysticism, defined as a love for God that is detached from a love for others. Let me give you an odd but awesome example.
A few years ago I read an old and interesting book on the desert fathers. The desert fathers were hermits of the third and fourth centuries who lived in the desert (surprise, surprise). On a positive note these men resembled those faithful persons described at the end of the list of the heroes of faith in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, those who “went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy— wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth” (vv. 37, 38). But on a negative note, with their extreme denial of food, water, clothing, shelter, and sleep, these men resembled those false teachers whom Paul addressed in Colossians 2:16-23, where he speaks of a “self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body” that have “an appearance of wisdom” but are “of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.”
In this book I read about Nathaniel, a man so focused in his devotion to God that he resolved never to cross the portal of his cell. Simply put, he wouldn’t leave his humble little house. Well, one day a ten-year-old boy came to the monk’s door because the boy’s donkey had fallen down and was hurt. The boy cried out, “Father Nathaniel, have mercy on me and give me a hand!” Nathaniel heard the voice and opened the door. Standing inside, he asked him, “Who are you and what do you want me to do?” The boy replied, “I am So-and-so’s servant, and I am bringing loaves [of bread for Communion for the church in town], I beg you, do not neglect me, lest I be eaten by hyenas.” The blessed Nathaniel, we are told, stood there surprised and stunned; filled with compassion, he debated within himself and said, “I must fail either the commandment [the commandment to love one’s neighbor] or my resolution [his resolution not to leave his house].” How did this supposedly great man of faith reply? “Listen, boy!” he said. “I believe that if you are in need, the God whom I serve will send you aid.” He shut the door and went back to his business of “loving” God.
Now, of course, this is the type of religiosity that Jesus rebukes in the Sermon on the Mount and in his famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. In Luke’s account of our passage (Luke 10:25-37), it is this very parable that Jesus tells to this scribe. In the parable, if you recall, it is the religious leaders, a priest and a Levite, eager to get to Jerusalem apparently to worship God in the temple with their ritual sacrifices, who on their way walk around the body of the half-dead man. They are presumably too busy “loving God” to love others, so busy focusing on the first great commandment that they don’t have time for the second, for their neighbor, the person who has been providentially placed along their path, the person in need of compassion and care.
Here in 22:39 Jesus makes clear that he will have nothing to do with this kind of “love.” He teaches that a genuine love for God must express itself in genuine love for neighbor. As the Apostle John wrote in 1 John 4:20, 21, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him [Jesus]: whoever loves God must also love his brother.”
God cannot be loved apart from our neighbor, and our neighbor cannot be loved apart from God. There are two pegs nailed into the wall of God’s Word, and those two pegs are also nailed into each other. And those two pegs are the pegs that ought to be nailed into the heart of every Brother.
The Assumption of Self-Love
As is sadly necessary, let me make a final clarification on the condition of this command. We are told we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
In recent decades it has become popular to advocate that Jesus teaches we must love ourselves before we can love others, that we must build up our self esteem before we can esteem others. If you buy into this thinking, Jesus here teaches not two great commands but three: (1) Love God, (2) love ourselves, and then (3) love others. Barbara De Angelis represents this position when she writes, “If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself.” Wow. Really? No. That’s nonsense. Let me repeat—that’s nonsense.
Years ago I remember hearing a good Brother speak claim that the downward spiral of self-love in the culture and the Ecclesia was well reflected in the starting publication dates of certain popular magazines. First, there was People Magazine. Then there was Us Magazine. And now there is Self Magazine. We have gone from focusing on people to us to self. But, of course, the trend of the culture is the reverse of the Bible. The Bible teaches we are to move from self (me) to us (the Ecclesia) to people (the world). So the magazine title for the Ecclesia should be something like Self-denial (cp. 10:38,39; 16:24-26). That word should be printed in large, bold type on the front cover of Christianity today and always. Self-denial!
When Jesus commands us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, he assumes a healthy dose of self-love is already in place—a self-love that is natural (it is the way we were created; we naturally care for our bodies, our needs, etc.) and a self-love that is sinful (an egocentric affection that continually seeks self above and before others).
Like most people I have not had to work on loving myself. I naturally love myself more than I love my congregation, more than I love my God. That’s not a good thing to say, but it is an honest thing to say. It is only by God’s grace that I ever think about loving others and loving God more than I love myself. Looking out for number one will always be our number one priority. So the call here is that we take this inclination and focus it elsewhere. Instead of focusing inward, we focus outward. We must focus our self-love on loving others. The measure by which we love ourselves now becomes the measure (it’s a high measure) by which we are called to love others.
So, what is the greatest commandment? Jesus says there are two. The first is to love God; the second is to love others as much as we love ourselves. That is Jesus’ sweeter-than-honey answer to this buzzing-around-the-carcass scribe. And it’s the answer not only to the meaning of Scripture but also to the meaning of life.
Soaking My Soul
If I were to give a critique of my own preaching, it would not be that I’m too pietistic. It would rather be that I too often don't let what I’m learning and saying soak into my own soul. My friend Todd Wilson said in a talk he gave on the topic of preaching, “My growing conviction about preaching is this: preaching exists not primarily to impart to you information from the Bible—about who God is, or about who Jesus is, or about the Christian life— preaching exists primarily to enable the people of God to encounter the living Christ.” Amen to that. I wish my hearers (and readers) would encounter the living Christ when I preach about Christ. I wish that I would encounter the living Christ when I preach about Christ.
You see, it is one thing to tell you about loving God and loving others. I can and hopefully did correctly explain all the details. But it is another thing altogether for you and me to desire Christ so much that we want to and do heed his commandments—to see him, as it were, and to like the fact that we see him and to mourn over our lack of love for the Lord and others. Why do we still so blatantly sin against God? Why do we ever, even for a moment, hold a grudge against a fellow Brother? Why can we love the poor of the world by writing a check but care so little and do even less for that poor neighbor who struggles to make ends meet?
May this text always—is this not at the heart of Christianity?—soak into your soul. And may it soak into mine too. Be transformed by the power of the gospel. Be transformed by the teachings of Jesus Christ. Love God. Love your neighbor. There is nothing greater in the whole wide world.
(R. Kent Hughes. and Douglas Sean O'Donnell., 2013; edited Carl Hinton., 2020)