A lawyer asks Jesus which commandment in the Law is the great one (Matthew 22:36). It was an open debate, and whatever a teacher named, someone could accuse him of slighting the rest. Jesus joins two commands. The first comes from Israel's daily confession (Deuteronomy 6:5): 37"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." The second comes from Leviticus 19:18, 39"You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Then he says 40"On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."
The order matters. Love for God comes first, and love for the neighbor follows from it. To love a neighbor as yourself is to want that person's true good, and a person's highest good is God. A command to love with heart, soul, and mind leaves no part of a person outside it. The two commands are one love moving in two directions.
Then Jesus asks a question of his own: 42"What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?" The Pharisees answer 42"The son of David." Every Jew raised on the promises to David knew that answer. The title Christ means anointed king, and the Pharisees expected the king to be David's heir. Jesus then quotes David, speaking in the Spirit, who calls the Christ his Lord (Psalm 110:1). 45"If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?" A father does not ordinarily call his own descendant his lord. Either David misspoke, or the Christ is more than David's line could produce. Matthew says 46"no one was able to answer him a word," and from that day no one dared to ask him more questions.
Matthew opened his Gospel by calling Jesus 1"the son of David" (Matthew 1:1). Being David's son was true, and it was never enough. The Pharisees pictured a king cut from David's cloth who would finish what David began. Psalm 110 says the Messiah sits at the right hand of the one David himself calls Lord. Paul, writing to Rome, says Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God in power by his resurrection (Romans 1:3-4).
Later, before the high priest, Jesus says the council will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power (Matthew 26:64), and they call it blasphemy. The verse that silences a lawyer in the temple becomes, within days, the charge that sends Jesus to the cross.
The two exchanges are one. The first names what the Law amounts to: love for God with everything, poured out toward the neighbor. The second names who is able to give that love. A command this large was never going to be met by trying harder, and it shows how far short every heart falls, ours included, long before it exposed anyone in that room. David's son commands what only David's Lord can supply.
Read the first commandment slowly this morning, and ask the Lord to supply what it requires.
Prayer
Father, you have commanded us to love you with everything we have, and we know how far short that command finds us every day. Thank you that the one who gives the command also fulfills it, seated at your right hand, and that his love is given to us freely. Teach us to love you first and the people around us from that love. In Jesus' name, amen.