You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Mt 22:34-40
The Pharisees plan another attack on Jesus, when they hear that their rivals, the Sadducees, have been silenced. One of them asks Jesus the question which was frequently discussed among the rabbis, Which is the great commandment in the Law? Jesus replies that the first and great commandment is the commandment to love God; and that there is another like it, to love your neighbor as yourself. Both of these commandments are quotations from the Old Testament: the first is part of the words which every Jew was expected to recite every day, the Shema. The second is like an answer which a rabbi had given to a similar question, 'What thou hatest for thyself, do not to thy neighbors.' It is possible, though not certain, that the commandments to love God and to love your neighbor had been brought together by the Jews in pre-Christian times.
Matthew here considerably shortens Mark 12:28ff, omitting Mark 12:32-34. There are agreements here with Luke 10:25ff, and it has sometimes been thought that Matthew and Luke had in addition a source other than Mark for this section.
v. 34. When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together….
In Mark, the question is asked by a scribe. Matthew brings back the Pharisees.
They gathered together (synechthesan epi to auto) is a quotation from Ps. 2:2 [(The rulers) take counsel together] which Matthew uses again at 26:3.
v. 35. And one of them [a scholar of the law] tested him by asking…
A lawyer (nomikos): This is the only place where Matthew uses this word. Luke uses it six times. Mark never. Even here in Matthew it is omitted by a small group of authorities, and may be a later addition, from Luke 10:5.
To test him: Matthew adds these words; cf. 22:18.
v. 36. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Teacher is another Matthean addition, to make the introduction to this question conform to the introductions to the two previous questions, vv. 16 and 24.
v. 37. He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind."
The quotation is from Dt. 6:5.
This verse is part of the “shema”, the basic and essential creed of Judaism, the sentence with which every Jewish service opens and the fist text which every Jew-ish child commits to memory.
v. 39. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
“The second is like it” has the sense of “the second is equally important”. The two commandments are equally important but NOT interchangeable. Loving one’s neighbor does not mean you don’t have to mind loving God anymore and loving God does not require you to love your neighbor anymore.
The quotation is from Lv. 19:18; it has been quoted before in this Gospel at 5:43 and 19:19. “As yourself” means loving one’s neighbor totally, that is with your whole heart etc. The second commandment is not a recommendation to love oneself first and then one’s neighbor. It does not also counsel loving one’s neighbor in the same way as you love yourself.
v. 40. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
Mark had “There is no commandment greater than these”; Matthew changes it, to say that all the law and the prophets can be deduced from these two commandments; cf. 7:12. This was the teaching of the Jewish rabbis, and Matthew is here bringing Jesus into line with them.
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