This coming Sunday is the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Jesus’ choice of Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18 is notable for two reasons. In the first place, by focusing on “love” rather than on more tangible regulations to be obeyed, it raises the discussion above merely judging between competing rules, and gives the priority to a principle which has potential application to virtually every aspect of religious and communal life. When Jesus declares that “the whole law and the prophets” depend on this principle, he is repeating the point he made in 7:12, “this is the law and the prophets.” The ethical principle he there laid down did not use the word “love,” but that is what it was all about. The priority of love in the life of a disciple will be a frequently repeated NT principle, and one which it would be very hard to object to.

In the second place, by bringing these two texts together Jesus asserts that the one principle of love applies equally to the two main aspects of religious duty, one’s attitude to God and one’s attitude to other people. It is these two foci which provide the framework of the 10 Commandments, with its two “tables” covering these two aspects in turn. If the 10 Commandments are a sort of embodiment of the law, these two quotations in turn sum up the 10 Commandments.

As France (2007:846) points out, even though the love of God as expressed in Deut 6:5 rightly takes first place, Jesus goes beyond the scope of the original question to assert that “a second” must be placed alongside it. It is “like” Deut 6:5 not only in that it is equally important, but also in the formal sense that it uses the same verbal form, “you are to love,” and more fundamentally in that it equally insists that one’s religious duty is focused outside oneself. It might be possible to think even of love for God as a self-centered spiritual experience, but love for one’s neighbor is inescapably practical and altruistic.

Is Jesus the first Jewish teacher to bring the two texts together in this paradigmatic way? The great Jewish teacher Hillel summarized the law in a way that is much like the so-called golden rule of Jesus: “What you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and learn.” And there is certainly evidence that others had combined love for God and for neighbor in a summary of religious duty in non-Biblical, Jewish writings such as Jubilees, The Testament of Daniel, the Testament of Isaiah, Philo, and the Testament of Abraham. But as far as canonical, biblical sources, there is no parallel to Jesus’ use of this double quotation to make the point. (France, 2007:843)

Image credit: The Pharisees Question Jesus (Les pharisiens questionnent Jésus), James Tissot, 1886-1894, Brooklyn Museum, PD-US