Jesus brings the two great commandments together
By Anthony Esolen *
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mk. 12:29-30; cf. Dt. 6:4).
“Which commandment is the first of all?” asks one of the scribes, pleased with how Jesus answers his enemies (Mk. 12:28). We know how Jesus replies. But first let us set the broader context.
The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodian hangers-on have been after Jesus, trying to trip him up, to induce him to say something the authorities would condemn or the common people reject. Note that the only thing that unites them here is their fear and hatred of Jesus. The Herodians have made peace with Rome, to their own profit. The Pharisees and Sadducees are wary of danger from the Romans, whom they dislike, perhaps not so much as they dislike each other, divided as they are over one central question, for the Sadducees “say that there is no resurrection.”
So they try to entangle Jesus in a pointless question over seven brothers who, one after another, shared the same woman as their wife. “In the resurrection whose wife will she be?” they ask, not actually caring to learn the answer (Mk. 12:18-23).
Jesus, we remember, has raised the dignity of marriage as high as heaven. For “the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a marriage feast for his son” (Mt. 22:2); Jesus wrought his first miracle at Cana to keep the wedding feast merry (Jn. 2:1-11); and he will reveal to the beloved disciple, John, the final all-encompassing wedding feast of the Lamb, which is the life of heaven itself, for “blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9).
He has also swept aside that sin-born compromise whereby Moses permitted divorce. “For the hardness of your heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives,” he says, “but from the beginning it was not so” (Mt. 19:8). To phrase it in a more Semitic fashion, Moses allowed a man to put away his woman, since in Hebrew, as in German and in many other languages, the words for man and woman double as words for husband and wife, since that, in their creation, is what man and woman are for – one another. “For this reason,” says Jesus, citing Scripture, “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,” that is, to his woman, “and the two shall become one” (Mt. 19:5; Gen. 2:24).
That word, one, is crucial in the Old Testament. We find it first at the creation of light, sprung as it were from the very being of God, who says, “Yehi, ’or,” that is, “Be light,” and “yehi ’or,” “there was light” (Gen. 1:3). The verb echoes the unutterable name of God, YHWH, built from the Hebrew verb to be. It is the only time in the Genesis account that the name of what is made is repeated immediately after the command. And it is the only time when we are given, to name the day, a cardinal number, not just an ordinal like “second” or “third” but yom ’echad, “one day,” with the emphasis on that climactic and final word, ’echad, one (1:5).
Thus, when Eve the woman is taken from the flesh of Adam the man, it is a division to be consummated in a more complex union. Adam has named the beasts, but when he sees Eve we hear his words for the first time: “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man” (Gen. 2:23). And that is why “a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24), bashar ’echad, flesh that is one. Adam’s feelings are ordinate to the physical reality, created by God. Feelings express the union or they accompany it, but it is the reality that brings on the love. Only then does the author mention that the man and woman are naked, and not ashamed. Nor should they be ashamed. They are to increase and multiply.
The Sadducees, then, are playing games with words, or they feebly imagine the resurrection as a continuation of life on earth, caught up in time and change. Whether they do so inadvertently, or to ridicule their opponents, is not clear. Nor is it pertinent. Jesus rebukes them: “Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mk. 12:24-25).
That is, there is no reason for the man or the woman to marry, because there they enjoy eternal life, as the angels do, transcending the world of time and change and the need to beget children. Like the angels, those messengers that may speak in persona Dei, as did the three who visited Abraham (Gen. 18:1-15), they are now one with God.
Fractious the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians may be, but they cannot deny the justice of Jesus’ reply to the scribe, that the first commandment is, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mk. 12:29-30; cf. Dt. 6:4). This is the first commandment: Hebrew reshith. It names the first, not in time, but in greatness, and not comparatively, but absolutely. “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth,” says the sacred author (Gen. 1:1), and that first word in scripture is b’reshith, at the head of things.
“Then we may say that the command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. 12:31; cf. Lev. 19:18), is the earthly and human likeness of the first.
The reason why we must love the Lord with all our heart and soul and mind and strength is that, in fact, he is ’echad, one. He is not like Rama or Vishnu or Siva, whom a Hindu worshiper might worship as his favorite, while making sure to give due honor to the others. He is not to be shared with some love of Mammon (Mt. 6:24), and, in fact, that cannot be done. We must choose, “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (6:21).
What is one in essence cannot be divided. God is one, and it is not just that he is the only deity. All things come from him and are upheld by him in their existence and attain their fulfillment in him and through him. For this reason alone can the first commandment be the consummate commandment. It is why the word all (Hebrew kol) is repeated several times in the commandment, for emphasis. God is the source and the unification of all love. For the commandment is also a deeply personal appeal: “Hear, O Israel,” cries Moses. The sole power that can make “brothers dwell in unity” (Ps. 133:1) is himself one. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodians are disunited not, in the first instance, because they do not love one another, but because they are not whole and entire in their love for God.
This is why the second commandment is, as Jesus says, like the first (Mt. 22:39). Our English word second comes ultimately from Latin secundus, suggesting what is in sequence, what follows. The Hebrew sheni, by contrast, can suggest what repeats what has come before, what is done again. Then we may say that the command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. 12:31; cf. Lev. 19:18), is the earthly and human likeness of the first. We may infer that if you do not love your neighbor as yourself, your love for God is not entire.
But such love of neighbor comes from the love of God. We have no more warrant to rely on human affections to bind brothers in one, than on the same to keep marriage whole and indivisible. Of course, we are meant to be one in brotherhood; the flesh of man and woman is, by nature, made whole in indivisible marriage; but the fall of man, amply recorded in Genesis, sets brother against brother, wife against concubine, father against son, son against father, and so forth. The love of God – love from God to us, and our responsive love for God – is the binding remedy.
Finally, it behooves us to look at that Hebrew word for “neighbor,” re‘a. It suggests friendship, companionship, belonging to the same people. “Who is my neighbor?” asks the scribe in Luke’s account of the scene, whereupon Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10:29-37). Who is my friend, my companion, my countryman? Jesus surprises the scribe by casting the Samaritan, from a people the Jews despised, as the man who was the neighbor, that is, the countryman, to the man who had fallen among thieves.
He does not say that it is good to be a Samaritan. “You worship what you do not know,” he says to the Samaritan woman at the well, but the time draws near when “the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (Jn. 4:22-23). That does not imply diversity of worship, but unity. We are to love God with all our hearts, and if we do, we will wish to draw all men into the true and only brotherhood, going forth to all nations, not to dissolve them into one ghastly parody of union, but “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28:19).
Thus do the two great commandments come together in the commission God has laid upon our heart and soul and mind and strength.
* Dr. Anthony Esolen, faculty member at Thales College in North Carolina, has been a professor of literature and humanities for 35 years, and is a poet and author or translator of more than 30 books. He publishes a web magazine dedicated to language, music, poetry and classic films called Word and Song with his wife, Debra.
