“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
(Matthew 22:37-39)
Sometimes, when we walk our dog Ragna, he decides he wants to eat grass. And then he gags, and it just gets ugly. And so, we made a law: No eating grass. But then one day, we were walking and he took a bite out of a small plant that was growing by the side of the trail. Now, he felt that he was justified in eating this. After all, the rule was no grass. It never said anything about plants. And when we pressed him on it by saying, “You know what we meant,” he totally disregarded us and threatened to call his lawyer. And so, before we went walking the next time, we drew up a whole list of things he could not eat on our walk: grass, plants, small shrubberies, rotten sticks, anything dead, anything stinky, anything disgusting, bugs and so forth. And then, we expanded that list further by outlawing any licking of those same things or even prolonged sniffing of those things. So now, when we are out walking, we carry with us a dictionary-thick list of laws that specify what he can or cannot eat. What did we do? We took one little law and expanded it so that it would cover all situations.
That was what had happened leading up to Jesus’ day. The 613 laws of the Torah had expanded into this huge mountain of laws so that no one would never come close to breaking them. But such a mountain of laws was unwieldy, and so people began to offer summaries of the Law that would enable people to do God’s will in every situation. That’s what Jesus did. When he was asked about what commandment was the greatest, he was being asked for one law to rule them all. But he wasn’t alone in doing this.
There is a famous story about two Rabbis who were roughly contemporaries of Jesus. One, Shammai, was very conservative and the other, Hillel, was bit more liberal minded. A Gentile came to Shammai and said: “I will convert to Judaism IF you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” In response, Shammai drove him out of the building with a big stick. The same Gentile went to Hillel and made the same deal: “I’ll convert IF you can teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Hillel responded: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.”
Now, if that sounds similar to Jesus’ Golden Rule, that’s because it is. Jesus says in Matthew 7:12: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus says we need to gauge our actions toward others by how we would want to be treated. Now, Jesus is not advocating that we devote ourselves to loving and serving ourselves and ourselves only. Instead, he is using a normal and healthy self-love as the basis for us to know how to love others in the same healthy way. So, when we see someone in need, we have to ask: “If I was that person, how would I want to be treated?”
Now, if you are playing at home, you might also have noticed that this sounds like the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man gets mugged and is left in a ditch to die. A priest passes by, but doesn’t stop to help him. A Levite passes by and keeps on walking. But then a Samaritan comes by and, even though he was voted most unlikely to respond, he stops and helps the man. And then, Jesus asks (Lk. 10:36): “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” And the expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.” Here’s the difference in the 3 responses. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” That’s the point Jesus is making in the Golden Rule. We put ourselves in their place and respond to their need as we would want someone to respond to us if we were in the same situation. This other-centeredness is to shape our every interaction.
Now, since you are playing at home, you probably already saw the connection between Jesus’ Golden Rule and Jesus’ explanation of the greatest commandment in Matthew 22. There, we read (vs. 36-40): “An expert in the law, tested Jesus with this question: ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” It’s those words, “the law and the prophets.”
Since we are here, we have another place where these words appear. In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Count them! That’s three times this clause is used. Once, near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17), once near the end of the Sermon of the Mount, and once in Matthew 22. Here’s something interesting. There are 76 verses between Matthew 5:17 and our first usage of “the Law and the Prophets” and the Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12 which sums up the Law and the Prophets. In between those two points, there is no mention of “the Law and the Prophets.” And that suggests that these two verses are bookends that hold together and shape everything between them. So, if you want a summary of the ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount and the Old Testament Law, look no further than the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would want them to do to you.” Instead of worrying about the hundreds and hundreds of Laws, we can just focus on this one. In other words, the Golden Rule is not just another teaching point. It is summary statement of everything that Jesus has said in the sermon! It boils down every ethical issue that Jesus has been talking about—from anger, lust and adultery to divorce, oaths and retaliation and even on how to treat our enemies. In every situation, Jesus says (7:12), “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”
But wait, in Matthew 22, Jesus said that loving God and loving others is not only the greatest commandment, but “all the Law and the Prophets” hang on these two directives. In other words, these two commands sum up the Law and the Prophets. Now, I am no expert in math, but I do remember an axiom that said, “If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C.” If that is true, then if (A) – the Golden Rule fulfils (B) the Law and the Prophets and if (C) the Greatest Commandment fulfill the (B) law and the Prophets, then the Golden Rule (A) and the Greatest Commandment (C) are equal.
So, what is the greatest of all the commandments? We can say it this way: “However we would want to be treated by others, we should treat others in the same way.” But we can also say it this way: “Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.” We can say it either way because they both mean the same thing.
But the issue isn’t how we state it. The issue is: will we live by it? If we want to be a disciple of Jesus, then we need to love our neighbors as ourself and treat them as we would want to be treated. See, the Golden Rule is only golden if we do it. Here’s the problem. We know the Greatest Command. We know we are to love God and to love others. And we know the Golden Rule: We are to treat others in the same way we would want to be treated. We know these things. We just don’t want to do these things. We don’t want to love people that we find annoying and beneath us. But Jesus didn’t say: “Love the people you love.” He said: “Love your enemies.” Love those who persecute you. Love those in need. And love those you find impossible to love. Love them and treat them the way you would want to be treated. See, if we are going to follow Jesus, then we only have one ethic: love. Everything else is commentary.
