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Looking up content for: Matthew 22:34-46 (posted on 10/17/2005)

Comments and Observations

  • Commentator Dale Bruner thinks that Matthew 22 creates a frame around the ministry of Jesus as Matthew has presented it. Jesus' ministry began when he faced three temptations from Satan in the wilderness. Now, as Jesus is only a day or two away from being arrested and killed, the ministry concludes with three tests that come in the form of three questions.
    • The Pharisees first ask about paying taxes to Caesar, hoping to get Jesus in trouble with the Roman IRS in case Jesus says something treasonous. They strike out.
    • So next the Sadducees step in with a clever question about marriage in heaven. Jesus neatly sidesteps also this trap.
    • So then, in this tag-team effort, we come to this text where it's the Pharisees' turn again and so they ask him about the Law of God. "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment?"
  • It's an innocent-looking question but really it is a stealth attempt to make Jesus look like a theological liberal. If Jesus picked out any of the Bible's commandments and elevated it to the status of #1, that would imply that he was treating everything else as second-class. If you are the father of five children and one of them asks you who your favorite kid is, a wise father says, "I love you all the same." No good parent wants any child to feel like he or she plays second fiddle to the other siblings.
  • So also here: if they can trick Jesus into picking a favorite commandment, he'll be guilty of downplaying other commandments. But since every commandment represents the very word of God, picking and choosing among them would be heretical. Jesus knows what they are up to and so he knows just what to say. Jesus says that love of God is the greatest of all commandments. After all, if you don't love God, you won't be much inclined to keep any commandment. If, however, you do love God, then the rest follows. And just to make the point, Jesus throws in the second commandment about neighbor-love. Between these two loves, Jesus manages to catch every single commandment you could ever name.
  • But Jesus' reply was actually more clever than just that. Because in Jewish circles the single most famous verse is the Shema from Deuteronomy 6. "Shema" is the Hebrew word for "hear" or "listen" and it comes from that verse, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." The Shema was traditionally recited by every Jewish child and adult at the start of each day and at the conclusion of each day. In other words, there was no single verse from the entire Torah that the average Jew knew better than this one.
  • So when Jesus responds to the Pharisees' tricky question by quoting a portion of the Shema, he was throwing back in their faces something they took to be exceedingly basic, something that was second-nature to even the youngest Jewish child. In other words, if even a child knew the answer to the Pharisees' question, why didn't they seem to know it!?

Questions to Ponder/Issues to Address

  • Note that this section of questions ends when Jesus throws his opponents off balance with a clever question of his own. But what is it about Jesus’ question that so baffles (and silences) the Pharisees and others? On a straightforward level, Jesus is saying no more than that the Christ, although in the line of David, is greater than David’s ancestry could produce on its own. The Christ will be more than the sum of his historical parts/ancestors. But what makes that observation so startling?
  • Retrospectively it means that if Jesus is the Christ, then the answers he had just been giving to this mini-barrage of questions represent nothing short of the voice of God. The divinity of the Christ is here more than just a little strongly implied!
  • Do you think it is significant that Jesus’ silencing of his foes leads directly into Matthew 23’s grim list of seven woes? Could it be that Jesus—having been for so long on the receiving end of criticism—is now taking his “turn” in addressing the issues of the day?

Textual Points

  • In Matthew's version of this incident, Jesus subtly changes the Shema of Deuteronomy. The original Shema asks us to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength. Jesus alters it to heart, soul, and mind, and surely the Pharisees and everyone else there noticed the change. As Neal Plantinga once said, if at bedtime some night your child prayed, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my brain to keep," you'd take note of this departure from the usual phrasing!
  • It's difficult to say why Jesus made this substitution. Just possibly, however, this also was a subtle rebuke of the Pharisees. They were good at using their minds to do legalistic hair-splitting of all kinds. They had just now focused their mental faculties on coming up with clever questions with which to trip Jesus up. Maybe this was Jesus' way of telling them that being tricky was not the reason God had given them brains in the first place! Morality of especially the legalistic kind tends to focus on what we do with our bodies. Jesus says honoring God involves also how you think, how you wield the powerful gift of your intellect.

Illustration Idea

Here is a powerful illustration on what it means “To love your neighbor as yourself.”

It was almost exactly 9:00 am on the morning of September the 11th in 2001 when Melanie Belkin emerged from the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel onto a street in Lower Manhattan. Her two children were in the backseat. Ava was 22 months old and Noah just over four years of age. Noah was only four but he had already endured thirteen surgeries to repair a welter of birth defects. To help him breathe, doctors had done a tracheotomy in Noah's throat such that he now took in air through a small tube in his neck. It sometimes would get clogged so Melanie always kept a portable vacuum pump in her purse in case the trach needed suctioning. They were on their way to Noah's school that day, a trip they'd made countless times before. But this day was horribly different. Suddenly they were surrounded by emergency vehicles, and it all upset Noah so much he threw up in the back seat of the car.

Traffic came to a standstill and so Melanie was forced to abandon the car. She put baby Ava into the bright yellow stroller they had bought a few weeks earlier--Noah had picked it out for his baby sister because he liked how bright it was. As they raced through the streets looking for shelter, Melanie knew Noah's tracheotomy tube would soon be clogged. The air was already filthy with smoke and debris. Seeing their plight, a stranger took off his shirt and ripped it into three pieces so that Melanie and her children could use the fabric as a makeshift breathing mask. She stopped at a phone booth to call her husband but the phone was dead, and then the earth shook as 2 World Trade Center collapsed.

Now a billowing cloud of hell was coming their way. Another stranger picked up the stroller, Ava and all, and herded Melanie and the kids into the cab of a delivery truck. As the dust cloud swept over the truck, Melanie cleaned out Noah's tube while another woman in the cab held Ava. A business man tore off his Ralph Lauren shirt and also tore it up into pieces to help shield noses and mouths from the foul air. Then the second tower went down and it began all over again. Someone quoted Psalm 23. The truck driver saw a restaurant that had just been opened for shelter. Fighting through the dust storm, he led them all there.

But now the vacuum pump was left behind, so the truck driver went back out into the chaos to retrieve it while the restaurant's pastry chef tended to Melanie's children. Eventually, a park ranger arrived, and the strangers around Melanie made sure the ranger put her and the children on the first ferry back across the water to Brooklyn. Once there, Melanie realized her purse and the stroller had been left behind. She had no money, so yet another stranger handed her five $20 bills and then disappeared.

Weeks later, Melanie Belkin was still reeling from the waves of strangers who saved her children's lives. She didn't know the name of a single one. Then one day a UPS man arrived at Melanie's door. He had the bright yellow stroller and Melanie's purse, the stroller scrubbed clean by the restaurant's staff and sent back to the address found inside Melanie's wallet. The restaurant people told her the truck driver wanted to be sure she got this back. Noah was delighted since he had picked out that stroller in the first place. That morning Melanie had kept such a tight grip on the stroller, she actually bent her wedding ring, as she discovered after getting back home that awful day. But it was the sea of good and loving neighbors, not her own fierce grip, that saved them all. (The source of this story is, "Another New York Example of the Kindness of Strangers" by Jim Dwyer from the New York Times in their Pulitzer Prize winning section, "A Nation Challenged." December 28, 2001, pp. B1, B7)