The Great Commandment & Some Sketchy Exegesis - Reflections on Mt. 22:34-46, 22nd Sunday after Pent

by John C. Holbert on Monday, July 20, 2026

         Matthew simply cannot forego his portrayals of Jesus’ ongoing confrontations with the religious leaders of his time. Again and again, Matthew takes rather innocuous discussions of important issues from his Markan source and turns them into potentially angry and dangerous debates. Matthew 22:34-40 is an excellent example. Mark 12:28-34 describes a rather friendly discussion between Jesus and an eager scribe concerning the great commandment, but Matthew transforms the scene into another test of Jesus, this time initiated by a lawyer (although the textual evidence of the use of the word “lawyer” is not conclusive, and Matthew does not use the word elsewhere in his Gospel—the interlocutor may be instead the familiar Pharisees). The test consists of the identification of “a Great Commandment” (there is no definite article in the sentence; perhaps it should be translated as a superlative “greatest”). Rabbis later determined that there were in reality 613 commandments in the Torah—248 positive ones (“you shall”) and 365 negative ones (“you shall not”). 

         Jesus answers the question with a quotation from Deut.6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind” (Mt.22:37). This is of course a portion of a Jewish proclamation, uttered several times a day, the famous shema, that begins “Hear, Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one.” There is a notable alteration in Matthew’s quotation from the Septuagint Greek version of the verse: the Septuagint reads “might” or “power” (dynamis) for the third demand for love of God, while Matthew reads “mind” (Greek dianoia). One could conclude that Matthew’s version of the famous verse is more inward looking: the three love demands are “heart,” the seat of will and intelligence in Hebrew anthropology; “soul” is Greek psuche, a translation of Hebrew nephesh, a notoriously slippery term that may mean “throat,” “breath,” or perhaps “life”—the common reading “soul” is confusing, if not misleading; and “mind” is Greek dianoia, also a difficult word to translate which can mean a kind of thinking, a disposition, a purpose or plan. Matthew appears to imply that loving God is the work of the entire person, the inner will, the whole life, the central thought and purpose. That is the greatest and first commandment, says Jesus, “and the second is like it” (Mt.22:39). “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

         Jesus here quotes again from the Greek Septuagint, Lev.19:18. And once again Matthew alters his Markan source. Mark read simply, “The second is this,” then quotes Leviticus. But Matthew reads “the second is like it,” implying that the Levitical quotation stands at the same level as Deut.6:5; they are not identical, but bear the same weight. Neither one can be uttered without reference to the other. We must recognize here that Jesus offers nothing genuinely new in these famous formulations. The great rabbi Hillel, perhaps a near contemporary with Jesus, was quoted as saying: “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary on it; go and learn it;” this was in addition to the continual use of the shema as the Jewish credal claim. It may be that Jesus’ connection of the two passages could be seen as original with him, but even there any number of rabbinic comments would have echoed him, or preceded him.

         I should make one other observation on the second verse from Leviticus, because it has played a significant role in how it has been understood in our own time. When we are told to “love neighbor as we love self,” we moderns have often focused rather intently on self-love as the means toward loving neighbor. However, I think it is only in a culture where we worry excessively about self-esteem, self-care, that we imagine that without concern for self, there is finally no way we can love our neighbor. Frankly, I find that idea dangerous, and wholly unbiblical. I can see no hint in the Bible of the psychological emphasis on the necessity of self-love as a prerequisite of neighbor love. I do not here imply that self-esteem is unimportant. What I am saying is that self-love is not at all necessary for one to love one’s neighbor; that is not in my mind the import of Lev.19:18. In any case, Jesus announces to the testing Pharisees that “on these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets” (Mt.22:40). That is, the entire biblical story, says Jesus, is tethered to these two divine commands; the entire Torah is metaphorically suspended equally from these commandments.

         In the second part of today’s text, Mt.22:41-46, Matthew engages in what we would call now some very sketchy exegesis! However, we need to know that his exegetical movement was familiar and accepted by his Jewish hearers. The issue is, again confronting the Pharisees: “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” (Mt.22:42). The issue is the origin, the lineage of, the Jewish Messiah, long-expected in Judaism. The Pharisees are quick to answer this question which they know well. “David’s (son),” they reply. After all, that answer is rooted deeply in their scripture. Jeremiah 23:5 reads, “I will raise up for David a righteous branch,” and Isaiah 11:1, 10 famously wrote, “a shoot from the stump of Jesse…a root from Jesse” (David’s father). 

         But Jesus disputes this answer by quoting Ps.110:1, making the widespread assumption that David himself wrote the psalm. Jesus asks, “How is it that David in the spirit (that is under God’s inspiration) calls him (Messiah) ‘Lord,’ saying ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet?”’ If David calls him ‘Lord,’ how is he God’s son?” In both translations of the word Lord in the psalm, it is reading the Greek kyrios; does it make any sense, says Jesus, that David would call Messiah the Lord? If David is the author/speaker of Ps.110, and the second Lord is someone superior to David, the “son of David” is not finally an adequate way to speak of Messiah. Messiah must finally be Son of God. For us moderns such exegesis would be laughed out of the classroom, but Jewish readings of the first century made certain assumptions that we no longer make, like David wrote the psalms, and that the word kyrios bears a double meaning within the same verse. This is Matthew’s way of suggesting, arguing, that the Jewish Messiah is in fact Jesus of Nazareth, a conclusion that the Pharisees are hardly willing to accept, despite the clever exegesis of their own scriptures. 

         Matthew 22:34-46 includes several crucial ideas well worthy of more than one sermon. I commend this rich text to you as a grand source of homiletical pleasures and delights!