Commentary on Matthew 22:34-46

A legal expert from among the Pharisees asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest (verse 36). The question is a test, but it is not a hard one. Jesus’s answer—love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself—would have found immediate recognition from everyone within earshot. Rabbi Akiva, whose teaching is preserved in the Sifra (Kedoshim 2:4.12), called the Levitical command to love your neighbor the great principle of Torah. Hillel, a generation before Jesus, had said the same thing to a gentile who asked for the whole Torah summarized: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow—this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a). 

So Jesus is not introducing a new idea. He is stating what everyone already knows. And that is precisely the problem.

The Pharisees know the answer. Jesus knows they know. The crowd knows. There is no debate about the content of the commandment. The failure has never been informational. The failure is always somewhere between the knowing and the doing, in the space where we understand perfectly what love requires and find ourselves, quietly and repeatedly, unable to deliver it.

What is missing

Thomas Aquinas defined love as velle bonum alicui—to will the good of the other. Not to feel warmly toward the other. Not to tolerate the other. To actively, structurally, sacrificially orient your will toward the flourishing of another person. It is a definition that cuts through every sentimental misreading of the commandment. Love is not a feeling that comes and goes. It is a choice, made again and again, in the direction of someone else’s good.

But Aquinas understood something else as well. The will cannot orient itself toward the other if the self is still crowding the center. You cannot will the good of someone you have quietly decided is beneath you. You cannot love, in the Thomistic sense, without first making interior room for the other person to matter as much as you do. That interior making-room has a name. It is called humility.

This is what the commandment assumes and what we persistently skip. We try to go directly to love without first passing through humility, and we wonder why the commandment doesn’t hold. We agree with it on Sunday and violate it by Tuesday, not because we are hypocrites, but because we have not done the interior work. Humility is not a spiritual nicety that lives alongside love. It is the structural foundation without which love, in the full Thomistic sense, cannot be built.

The half of the text nobody preaches

Here is where most sermons stop. But Jesus is not finished. He turns the tables and asks the Pharisees a question of his own: Whose son is the Messiah (verse 42)? They answer correctly: The Son of David. Then Jesus presses: How is it that David himself, in Psalm 110, calls the Messiah “Lord”? If the Messiah is David’s descendant, why does David subordinate himself to the one who comes after him? The Pharisees go silent. They have no answer.

But look at what Jesus has just done. He has not changed the subject. He has illustrated it. David, the king, the giant-slayer, the man from whose line the Messiah would come, looked at his own descendant and said: “My Lord.” He bent the knee to someone he could have claimed superiority over. He oriented his will toward the greatness of another rather than protecting his own precedence.

David demonstrated the humility that makes love possible. And the Pharisees, who know the commandment perfectly, cannot answer the question because the question is asking them to do the same thing David did: to subordinate themselves to someone they did not expect to be above them.

They cannot do it. Not because they don’t know the commandment. Because they haven’t done the prior work of humility.

What the preacher might ask

The congregation sitting before you this Sunday already knows they are supposed to love their neighbor. The question worth asking in your best pastoral voice is whether they have examined what makes it so hard. Not the difficulty of the action, but the difficulty of the posture that must precede it.

Who are the neighbors they find it structurally difficult to will the good of, not because they dislike them, but because something in their formation has suggested that those neighbors count for a little less? Where has pride, so subtle it doesn’t feel like pride, quietly made the commandment impossible to keep?

The Pharisees were proud people. And their institutional, interpretive, and positional pride made it impossible for them to bend the knee to the one before them, even when they knew the answer he was seeking.

Jesus gave them the commandment. Then he gave them the example. Love God. Love your neighbor. And remember that you cannot do either without first doing what David did: humbling yourself before the Lord, who is greater than your own lineage, your own tradition, your own very correct answers. Humility is the prerequisite for love to flourish. This is the homework assigned for the preacher, the congregation, and all who follow Jesus.