The Greatest Love
The Greatest Love
(All Saints Sunday)
Matthew 22: 34-46
34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
38 This is the greatest and first commandment.
39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
The Question about David’s Son
41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question:
42 “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”
They said to him, “The son of David.”
43 He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet” ’?
45 “If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?”
46 No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
Matthew 22: 34-46
34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
38 This is the greatest and first commandment.
39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
The Question about David’s Son
41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question:
42 “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”
They said to him, “The son of David.”
43 He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet” ’?
45 “If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?”
46 No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
Introduction
By the time we reach Matthew 22, Jesus has been under fire all day.
The chief priests and elders challenged his authority.
The Herodians tried to trap him with a question about taxes.
The Sadducees, who didn't even believe in the resurrection, tried to make him look foolish with a riddle about a widow and seven brothers.
Wave after wave, they come at him — and wave after wave, he stands.
Now it's the Pharisees' turn.
And notice how Matthew describes their motive: a lawyer asks him a question "to test him."
This isn't a sincere seeker.
By the time we reach Matthew 22, Jesus has been under fire all day.
The chief priests and elders challenged his authority.
The Herodians tried to trap him with a question about taxes.
The Sadducees, who didn't even believe in the resurrection, tried to make him look foolish with a riddle about a widow and seven brothers.
Wave after wave, they come at him — and wave after wave, he stands.
Now it's the Pharisees' turn.
And notice how Matthew describes their motive: a lawyer asks him a question "to test him."
This isn't a sincere seeker.
This is a legal expert trying to catch the Teacher in a trap.
Here's the setup:
Here's the setup:
Jewish tradition had counted 613 commandments in the Law — 248 positive, 365 negative.
Rabbis debated endlessly which laws were "heavy" and which were "light," which mattered most and which mattered least.
Ask a rabbi to name the greatest commandment, and you could back him into a corner.
Name one, and you seem to be devaluing 612 others.
It was a question designed to trap a thoughtful man in a controversy no matter how he answered.
Jesus doesn't get trapped. He goes to the center.
I. The Answer That Ends the Argument (vv. 37–40)
Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 — the Shema, the words every faithful Jew recited morning and evening: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."
Then, without being asked, he adds a second commandment, from Leviticus 19:18: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
And then he says something remarkable: "On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."
Not "these are the top two out of 613."
Not "these outrank the others."
He says the entire law — everything Moses commanded, everything the prophets preached — hangs on these two.
Like a door hangs on its hinges.
Take away the hinges, and it's not that the door gets a little wobbly.
It falls off entirely.
This matters for us because it's easy to turn faith into a checklist.
We can obsess over the particular rule and lose sight of the reason for any rule at all.
Jesus is saying: every commandment God ever gave — about worship, about honesty, about justice, about sex, about money, about how you treat a stranger — is an expression of one of these two loves.
Love for God.
Love for neighbor.
If you get those two right, you're not exempt from the rest; you're the kind of person who naturally moves toward the rest.
If you get those two wrong, you can keep every other rule flawlessly and still miss the entire point — which is exactly what the Pharisees, in all their careful law-keeping, kept doing.
Notice too that Jesus doesn't let you choose one love over the other.
Some people want a purely vertical faith — just me and God, no obligation to anyone else.
Others want a purely horizontal faith — just good works, humanitarianism, with God left out of it.
Jesus welds them together. You cannot claim to love the invisible God while disregarding the visible neighbor.
And you cannot generate durable, sacrificial love for other people while cut off from the God who is the source of love in the first place.
First commandment, second commandment — like it, Jesus says.
Cut from the same cloth.
II. The Question That Ends the Testing (vv. 41–46)
Rabbis debated endlessly which laws were "heavy" and which were "light," which mattered most and which mattered least.
Ask a rabbi to name the greatest commandment, and you could back him into a corner.
Name one, and you seem to be devaluing 612 others.
It was a question designed to trap a thoughtful man in a controversy no matter how he answered.
Jesus doesn't get trapped. He goes to the center.
I. The Answer That Ends the Argument (vv. 37–40)
Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 — the Shema, the words every faithful Jew recited morning and evening: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."
Then, without being asked, he adds a second commandment, from Leviticus 19:18: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
And then he says something remarkable: "On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."
Not "these are the top two out of 613."
Not "these outrank the others."
He says the entire law — everything Moses commanded, everything the prophets preached — hangs on these two.
Like a door hangs on its hinges.
Take away the hinges, and it's not that the door gets a little wobbly.
It falls off entirely.
This matters for us because it's easy to turn faith into a checklist.
We can obsess over the particular rule and lose sight of the reason for any rule at all.
Jesus is saying: every commandment God ever gave — about worship, about honesty, about justice, about sex, about money, about how you treat a stranger — is an expression of one of these two loves.
Love for God.
Love for neighbor.
If you get those two right, you're not exempt from the rest; you're the kind of person who naturally moves toward the rest.
If you get those two wrong, you can keep every other rule flawlessly and still miss the entire point — which is exactly what the Pharisees, in all their careful law-keeping, kept doing.
Notice too that Jesus doesn't let you choose one love over the other.
Some people want a purely vertical faith — just me and God, no obligation to anyone else.
Others want a purely horizontal faith — just good works, humanitarianism, with God left out of it.
Jesus welds them together. You cannot claim to love the invisible God while disregarding the visible neighbor.
And you cannot generate durable, sacrificial love for other people while cut off from the God who is the source of love in the first place.
First commandment, second commandment — like it, Jesus says.
Cut from the same cloth.
II. The Question That Ends the Testing (vv. 41–46)
Then something shifts.
The Pharisees are still standing there, having just watched their trap fail.
The Pharisees are still standing there, having just watched their trap fail.
And Jesus turns the tables.
He asks them a question:
"What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?"
Easy question.
Everyone knew the answer.
The Messiah would be the son of David — a king from David's royal line, promised all the way back to 2 Samuel 7.
"The son of David," they answer, correctly, confidently.
Then Jesus quotes Psalm 110:1, a psalm everyone agreed David himself had written, under the Spirit's inspiration: "The LORD said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand, until
I put your enemies under your feet.'"
Here's the puzzle Jesus lays in front of them: in that verse, David calls the Messiah "my Lord."
In the ancient world, an ancestor does not call his own descendant "Lord."
A king does not address his future heir as his superior.
Fathers outrank sons in status, not the other way around.
So how can the Messiah be merely David's son — David's descendant, David's subordinate in the family line — when David himself, writing under the Spirit, calls
him "Lord"?
"And no one was able to answer him a word."
The room goes silent.
And that silence is the whole point.
The Pharisees had a category for Messiah: a human, national, political deliverer — David's son, nothing more.
Jesus shows them from their own Scripture that the category is too small.
The Messiah is David's son and David's Lord.
Fully human, born of David's line — and also, somehow, David's sovereign.
Matthew's readers, on the other side of Easter, know exactly who fits that description: Jesus of Nazareth, descended from David according to the flesh, and risen, exalted, seated at the right hand of God — David's Lord in the flesh.
III. Why Both Halves of This Passage Belong Together
At first glance, these look like two separate stories Matthew happened to place side by side — a question about ethics, then a question about identity.
But they're not separate.
They're the same argument told twice.
The first exchange asks: what does God require of us? And Jesus answers by pointing past the 613 rules to the character behind them — love.
The second exchange asks: who is Jesus, really? And Jesus answers by pointing past the category "son of David" to something greater — Lord.
Put them together and you get the whole gospel in miniature.
We are commanded to love God with everything we have and love our neighbor as ourselves — and if we're honest, none of us has ever done that perfectly, not for one full day.
The law doesn't just instruct us; it exposes us.
It shows us the size of the debt.
And then, in the very next breath, Jesus reveals who he actually is — not merely a wise teacher, not merely a descendant of David, but David's Lord, God himself come to stand where we stand and do what we could not do.
The command we could not keep is fulfilled in the person we could not have invented.
The law that exposes us points, in the same chapter, to the Lord who rescues us.
That's why the Pharisees stopped asking questions.
Not just because they lost an argument, but because Jesus had shown them, from their own Scriptures, that the true issue was never really about which rule is greatest.
It was about who he is.
Conclusion and Application
So let me leave you with three things.
First, let love be the test you apply to your own obedience.
Before you ask, "Have I followed the rule?" ask, "Have I loved?"
A life of rule-keeping without love curdles into the very legalism Jesus was confronting.
A life of love naturally fulfills what the rules were for.
Second, let your love for God and your love for neighbor check each other.
If your "love for God" never shows up as patience, generosity, or forgiveness toward the person in front of you, examine whether it's really love for God at all.
And if your "love for neighbor" never drives you to your knees before God, examine whether it's rooted in anything that will last.
Third, and most important: settle the question Jesus asked the Pharisees.
What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?
You can call him a good teacher, a moral example, a wise rabbi — David's son and nothing more.
Or you can let Scripture say what it actually says: that this man is also David's Lord, seated at the right hand of God, with authority over your life and mine.
The Pharisees left that day with no more questions to ask.
May we leave today with the one question that matters, finally answered — and a love, for God and for neighbor, that answers back.
He asks them a question:
"What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?"
Easy question.
Everyone knew the answer.
The Messiah would be the son of David — a king from David's royal line, promised all the way back to 2 Samuel 7.
"The son of David," they answer, correctly, confidently.
Then Jesus quotes Psalm 110:1, a psalm everyone agreed David himself had written, under the Spirit's inspiration: "The LORD said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand, until
I put your enemies under your feet.'"
Here's the puzzle Jesus lays in front of them: in that verse, David calls the Messiah "my Lord."
In the ancient world, an ancestor does not call his own descendant "Lord."
A king does not address his future heir as his superior.
Fathers outrank sons in status, not the other way around.
So how can the Messiah be merely David's son — David's descendant, David's subordinate in the family line — when David himself, writing under the Spirit, calls
him "Lord"?
"And no one was able to answer him a word."
The room goes silent.
And that silence is the whole point.
The Pharisees had a category for Messiah: a human, national, political deliverer — David's son, nothing more.
Jesus shows them from their own Scripture that the category is too small.
The Messiah is David's son and David's Lord.
Fully human, born of David's line — and also, somehow, David's sovereign.
Matthew's readers, on the other side of Easter, know exactly who fits that description: Jesus of Nazareth, descended from David according to the flesh, and risen, exalted, seated at the right hand of God — David's Lord in the flesh.
III. Why Both Halves of This Passage Belong Together
At first glance, these look like two separate stories Matthew happened to place side by side — a question about ethics, then a question about identity.
But they're not separate.
They're the same argument told twice.
The first exchange asks: what does God require of us? And Jesus answers by pointing past the 613 rules to the character behind them — love.
The second exchange asks: who is Jesus, really? And Jesus answers by pointing past the category "son of David" to something greater — Lord.
Put them together and you get the whole gospel in miniature.
We are commanded to love God with everything we have and love our neighbor as ourselves — and if we're honest, none of us has ever done that perfectly, not for one full day.
The law doesn't just instruct us; it exposes us.
It shows us the size of the debt.
And then, in the very next breath, Jesus reveals who he actually is — not merely a wise teacher, not merely a descendant of David, but David's Lord, God himself come to stand where we stand and do what we could not do.
The command we could not keep is fulfilled in the person we could not have invented.
The law that exposes us points, in the same chapter, to the Lord who rescues us.
That's why the Pharisees stopped asking questions.
Not just because they lost an argument, but because Jesus had shown them, from their own Scriptures, that the true issue was never really about which rule is greatest.
It was about who he is.
Conclusion and Application
So let me leave you with three things.
First, let love be the test you apply to your own obedience.
Before you ask, "Have I followed the rule?" ask, "Have I loved?"
A life of rule-keeping without love curdles into the very legalism Jesus was confronting.
A life of love naturally fulfills what the rules were for.
Second, let your love for God and your love for neighbor check each other.
If your "love for God" never shows up as patience, generosity, or forgiveness toward the person in front of you, examine whether it's really love for God at all.
And if your "love for neighbor" never drives you to your knees before God, examine whether it's rooted in anything that will last.
Third, and most important: settle the question Jesus asked the Pharisees.
What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?
You can call him a good teacher, a moral example, a wise rabbi — David's son and nothing more.
Or you can let Scripture say what it actually says: that this man is also David's Lord, seated at the right hand of God, with authority over your life and mine.
The Pharisees left that day with no more questions to ask.
May we leave today with the one question that matters, finally answered — and a love, for God and for neighbor, that answers back.
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