Jesus’ opponents are at it again! In this Sunday’s gospel, they enlist a lawyer to do what lawyers do best: ask a question that puts a person on the hot seat. “Which commandment of the law is the greatest?” (Matthew 22:34-40). If the law consisted only of the Ten Commandments, this would be a difficult enough task, but the written Jewish law, the Torah, included an additional 613 moral, ceremonial, and dietary precepts.

Jesus’ response is radical. It goes to the “radix” or the root of the issue. The root problem was that these Pharisees majored in the minors. As Jesus said, they loved to strain out gnats and swallowed camels. They missed the forest for the trees, going to great lengths to observe the letter of the law while totally missing its underlying, sanctifying spirit.

Joining together two passages from the Torah, Jesus answers: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind” (Deuteronomy 6:5). “This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Leviticus 19:18).

Jesus’ reply challenges them for a couple of reasons. First, it brilliantly sums up the entire law; every single precept is an expression of these two commandments. If you read the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:1-17, you will see that the first three are about loving God and the other seven are about loving your neighbor. Every line of the Bible can be assigned to either Column A (love of God) or Column B (love of neighbor). These two commandments are the root of them all.

The other reason that Jesus’ answer unsettles them is that these two root commandments are precisely the ones the Pharisees keep breaking. Observance of the law for them is not an act of divine worship or love, but rather of self-promotion. Instead of their observance of the law leading to love of neighbor, it leads, instead, to scorn for those who fail to live up to their standards. Over and over again, we see them upbraiding others and glorifying themselves. Recall, for example, the parable of the Pharisee and the publican at prayer in the temple.

The apostle Paul, a converted Pharisee, understood this. He says: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1). Paul knew this firsthand, from experience; he spent many years as a young man absolutely fervent in his observance of the law and resolute in this determination to destroy those he considered less observant or heretical. On the other hand, Saint Augustine says, “Love, and do what you will.”

Jesus did not say just to love. He said we must love the Lord with our whole heart and soul and with all our mind and strength. God alone must be our first love.

Does wholehearted love of God leave no room in the heart for a spouse, children, family, and friends? If that were the case, there would be no second great commandment in this story.

In fact, Jesus says the second commandment is like the first. That’s because the kind of wholehearted love Jesus is speaking of is charity (agape), which means loving God for his own sake and all others for his sake, and doing so, not by human strength, but with the divine love that is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5).

When we love others with true charity, we love God through them. Every loving act toward another person becomes an expression of our love for God.

The point is to make us watchful of the way we treat any of God’s children. Let us look at each one who crosses our path, each, rich or poor, obnoxious or likable, as under the protection of the God who is Father in Heaven to us all. Let us make sure that, as much as humanly possible, we do not cause any person to cry to God by what we say or do to him or her.

The two great commandments, then, are two sides of the same coin. Last week, Jesus told us to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. The two-sided coin of love of God and love of neighbor is the only currency we can use to pay that most basic life obligation, the one owed to the Creator in whose image we and all others are fashioned.

                                                                             Grand Lady Antoinette Franklin