A scribe asked Jesus to pick one command out of the whole Torah. He answered with two, joined them at the hip, and said everything else hangs from them.
The great commandment is Jesus' answer to the question of which command in the law matters most. Love the Lord your God with all you are, from Deuteronomy 6:5, and love your neighbor as yourself, from Leviticus 19:18.
Neither command was new. What Jesus did was refuse to separate them. The second is like the first, and the whole law hangs on the pair.
Most of the time me'od is not a noun at all. It is the Hebrew word for very. The King James renders it very 137 times out of its 299 appearances, according to the Blue Letter Bible lexicon entry.
Here it stands as a noun, your me'od. Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses it muchness, force, abundance. The King James says might, and the NIV says strength. The idea is all your very, whatever you have.
The Septuagint translated it dynamis, power. Mark 12:30 uses ischys, strength, and adds dianoia, mind, making four words where Deuteronomy has three.
Matthew keeps three and swaps in mind. Luke keeps four in a different order. Nobody was counting body parts. They were saying all of you.
The Shema takes its name from its first word, hear. Deuteronomy 6 tells Israel to speak these words when they lie down and when they get up, and Jews have recited them morning and evening for many centuries. The same chapter wanted them on the heart, taught to children, talked about on the road, and written on the doorframe. When a scribe asked Jesus for the most important command, Jesus quoted the words the man had likely prayed that morning.
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Deuteronomy 6:4 to 5Notice the order. The confession comes before the command. God is one, and He is ours, and then comes love. Israel was told to love the God who had just brought them out of Egypt, so the command rests on a relationship that already existed. We walk through that order in how to love God.
The great commandment shows up in three Gospels, and the settings are not identical.
A friendly scribe, impressed that Jesus answered the Sadducees well. He agrees out loud and adds that love is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. Jesus tells him he is not far from the kingdom of God.
The Pharisees regroup after the Sadducees are silenced, and an expert in the law asks in order to test him. Only Matthew records the line that all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.
An expert in the law asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks what he reads in the law, and the lawyer gives the two commands himself. Then he asks who his neighbor is, and the Good Samaritan follows.
Every version joins Deuteronomy 6 to Leviticus 19. In Luke, the lawyer makes the join himself and Jesus agrees.
That corrects a piece of sermon folklore, where Jesus shocks a room of legalists who had never thought to summarize the law. It is unfair to the Jewish teachers of the period. Summarizing the Torah was a known exercise. The Talmud remembers Hillel telling a gentile who wanted to convert, “That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” And the Sifra records Rabbi Akiva saying of love your neighbor as yourself, “This is an all-embracing principle in the Torah.”
Both sources were written down later than the Gospels, so we should not overclaim what any one scribe believed. But Mark makes the point on its own terms: the scribe was no enemy. For more on who these groups were, see who the Pharisees were and the Sadducees and Pharisees compared.
Jesus was not the first teacher to put love at the center of the law. What was new was who was saying it, and what He was about to do with it at the cross.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Nobody asked Jesus for a second commandment. He gave two anyway, and in Matthew He says the second is like the first. Love for God and love for people are not rivals competing for first place. They are the same love facing two directions.
The second command sits in Leviticus 19 among practical instructions: leave the edges of your field for the poor, pay your workers on time, do not trip the blind. Then verse 18: do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.
Read alone, neighbor sounds like your own people. Keep reading and the circle breaks open.
“The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
Leviticus 19:34Same chapter, same phrase, now aimed at the outsider. The reason given is memory: you know what it is to be the stranger.
That is exactly the ground Luke 10 walks on. The lawyer asks, and who is my neighbor? It is a question about limits. Jesus tells a story where a priest and a Levite pass by and a Samaritan stops. Then He changes the question and asks which of these three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers. Notice that the lawyer does not say the word Samaritan. He answers, the one who had mercy on him. Jesus says, go and do likewise.
Jesus chose the one character His listener would least want to learn from. The feud behind that is laid out in Samaritans in the Bible.
In Luke 10, what question does Jesus hand back to the lawyer after the parable?
The lawyer asked who counts as his neighbor, a question about where love can stop. Jesus turns it into a question about who acted as a neighbor. The issue is no longer who qualifies for your love. It is whether you will be the one who shows it.
The great commandment gets misread from two opposite directions, and the road has a ditch on both sides.
Love is warmth. If you feel affection for God in worship and you feel kindly toward people in general, you have kept the great commandment.
You cannot command a feeling, and this is a command. Covenant love is loyalty that shows up in what you do, what you give up, and who you stop for.
Love is compliance. Keep the list, avoid the forbidden things, show up on Sunday, and you have loved God with all your heart.
The priest and the Levite may have had their reasons, and they still walked past. Rules that step around a bleeding man are not love of God.
At Sound of Heaven we hold that the great commandment is the center of the law, and that Jesus is what that center looks like with a face. He is the final and complete revelation of the Father, so we define love from Him, not from a dictionary or our moods.
So we say no to the feeling version. Feelings are God's gift, but love in Scripture is something you can be told to do on a day you feel nothing. We cover the word itself in agape love, and it points the same way.
We also say no to the rulebook version, which does more damage in churches. It gets used on people who are already exhausted and have been told one more discipline will finally make them acceptable. Love that is only rule keeping produces people who are careful and cold.
One more thing needs saying. In Luke, Jesus tells the lawyer, do this and you will live. That is not a new way to earn eternal life by trying harder. He answers the man on the terms of his own question, and the parable then exposes the question. Eternal life is a gift in Jesus. Love is what that life looks like once it is in you.
And notice what Jesus tells the scribe who got it right: you are not far from the kingdom of God. The kingdom was standing in front of him in the person of the King. It is here now, and this is how its people live.
Matthew's line is a picture. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments, like everything on a wall hanging from two pegs. Pull the pegs and it all comes down. So the great commandment is also a way of reading the whole Bible, and Jesus used it that way Himself.
Twice in Matthew, in 9:13 and 12:7, Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. The scribe in Mark said the same thing about burnt offerings. When worship and people collide, God sides with the person.
In Mark 3:4 He asks whether it is lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill. A reading of the Sabbath law that leaves a man with a withered hand was a reading that had lost its pegs.
Scripture was written through real people in real cultures, and not every act done in God's name shows His heart. When a reading makes you harder toward people Jesus loved, it is time to go back to the pegs and to Him.
One boundary is worth marking. The great commandment is Jesus summarizing the law of Moses. On His last night, in John 13:34, He gives His disciples a new command, love one another as I have loved you, and that belongs to a different conversation about new covenant life. We treat it in what is the law of Christ, and how the old law reached its goal in Him is laid out in Jesus fulfilled the law.
If an interpretation cannot hang on love for God and love for neighbor, it has come loose from the wall. Put it down and look at Jesus again.
Everything here comes back to Jesus. He loved the Father with all His heart, soul, mind and strength, all the way to a cross, and He stopped on the road for the wounded, the outsider and the enemy.
So the command is not a mountain you climb to reach Him. It is what happens to you after He reaches you. You love because you have been loved, and that love pushes outward toward whoever is by the side of your road this week, maybe the neighbor on your block you have never spoken to, or the family that just moved in.
For related reading, see the law of Moses, a summary of Deuteronomy, what the kingdom of God is, love your enemies and what we believe. If you are in the area, plan a visit and come see what this looks like in a real church family.
Asked for the one greatest command, Jesus joined the Shema of Deuteronomy 6 to the neighbor love of Leviticus 19, said the second is like the first and the whole law hangs on them, and then showed in His own life that this love is neither a passing feeling nor a list of rules.
If someone came to mind while you read this, or you are the one lying by the road, tell us. Somebody at Sound of Heaven will pray with you.
The great commandment is Jesus' answer when He was asked which command in the law matters most. He quoted Deuteronomy 6:5, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and joined it to Leviticus 19:18, love your neighbor as yourself. It appears in Mark 12, Matthew 22 and Luke 10. Jesus refused to separate them, saying the second is like the first and that all the Law and the Prophets hang on the two.
The first is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, taken from the Shema in Deuteronomy 6. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself, taken from Leviticus 19:18. Jesus ranked them first and second, but He also said the second is like the first. In practice they cannot be pulled apart, because love for God that walks past a hurting person is not what the command describes.
No. The great commandment is Jesus summarizing the law of Moses by joining two commands already in the Torah. The new commandment comes on His last night with the disciples in John 13:34, love one another as I have loved you. That one measures love by what Jesus Himself was about to do at the cross, and it speaks to life in the new covenant. The two belong together, but they answer different questions and should not be blurred.
In Luke 10 a lawyer asked exactly that, hoping to find the edge of his obligation. Jesus answered with the Good Samaritan, where a priest and a Levite pass a wounded man and a Samaritan stops to help. Then He turned the question around and asked which of the three was a neighbor. The point is that your neighbor is whoever is in front of you in need, and the real question is whether you will act like one. Leviticus 19:34 already extended this love to the foreigner.
Matthew 22:40 pictures the whole Scripture hanging from two pegs. Every command, story and prophetic warning was meant to serve love for God and love for people. Jesus read the Bible that way Himself, quoting Hosea's I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and healing on the Sabbath. So if an interpretation makes you colder toward the people Jesus loved, it has come off the pegs.