Introduction
Before we get into this week’s text, a reminder for those planning Reformation Sunday: you can preach Matthew.
You can celebrate the Reformation and use the readings for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost. You can also mix and match readings from the two sets. If you want to keep the Reformation readings from Jeremiah and Romans and hear this passage from Matthew instead of John 8, you can do that. In our ELCA setting, you have that flexibility. Choose thoughtfully, with an ear toward how the readings will speak together.
And this year, staying with Matthew gives us an opportunity to hear where these weeks of confrontation in the temple have been leading.
Jesus is asked to identify the greatest commandment. His answer is familiar enough that we may barely hear it. Love God. Love your neighbor.
But then comes the sentence I want us to sit with this week: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Narrative Context
Yes, we’re still in the temple. The chief priests and elders have challenged Jesus’ authority. Jesus has answered with questions and parables that expose failures of leadership. The Pharisees’ disciples and the Herodians have tried to trap him with a question about taxes. The Sadducees have challenged him about resurrection, an exchange our Sunday readings skipped.
Now, having heard that Jesus has silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees gather, and a lawyer asks another question.
It’s important to hear how Matthew introduces it: the lawyer asks “to test him.”
That changes the exchange considerably from Mark’s telling. In Mark 12:28–34, a scribe hears that Jesus has answered well and asks about the first commandment. He affirms Jesus’ answer, and Jesus recognizes the wisdom of his response. There’s a conversation taking place, with the possibility of mutual recognition. Luke also describes a lawyer testing Jesus, but places that exchange much earlier in Jesus’ ministry and develops it into the parable of the Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37).
Matthew keeps us within the mounting hostility of the temple confrontation.
The question itself is a good one. Asking which commandment is greatest is a meaningful question about how to interpret scripture and order a faithful life. There are quite a few stories in Jewish rabbinic tradition about rabbis being asked similar questions (I wrote about it more in my commentary three years ago).
Matthew doesn’t tell us exactly what answer the lawyer hopes to exploit. He does tell us that the purpose is to test Jesus.
A question about loving God and neighbor is being used to try to discredit the person standing before him. That tension matters. It’s possible to discuss the commandments while acting against the love they command.
All the Law and the Prophets
This final sentence is much more than a convenient summary of Jesus’ answer. It brings us back to a concern that runs throughout Matthew’s Gospel.
Near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus insists that he has come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (5:17). Near its conclusion, he teaches his disciples to treat others as they would want to be treated, identifying this with the Law and the Prophets (7:12). Now, in the temple, he says that all the Law and the Prophets hang on love of God and love of neighbor.
These passages help us hear Matthew’s understanding of Jesus’ teaching. Jesus’ authority is expressed through his deep faithfulness to the scriptures of Israel.
Both commandments come from the Torah. Love of God comes from Deuteronomy 6:5, within the passage known as the Shema. Love of neighbor comes from Leviticus 19:18. Jesus draws on these central words of Israel’s tradition to explain how the rest is to be understood.
The commandments remain. Their interpretation must attend to the love on which they depend.
That also gives love some substance. Leviticus 19 places love of neighbor alongside commands about honest dealings, timely payment of wages, fair judgment, and refusing vengeance. Later in the same chapter, love is extended to the resident foreigner (19:33–34). Love has something to say about what happens to actual people in the community.
This helps us avoid turning Jesus’ answer into a vague instruction to be nice. Love may require repentance, the return of what has been taken, or a challenge to an arrangement that benefits us at someone else’s expense.
Immediately after this week’s reading, Jesus will accuse particular scribes and Pharisees of neglecting the law’s weightier matters: “justice and mercy and faith” (23:23). He also insists that these should be practiced alongside the other obligations. His criticism concerns the way people observe the law while neglecting what should govern their observance.
We can know a commandment, defend its importance, and still use it in a way that fails our neighbor.
A Reformation Connection
Luther gives us a helpful image for this relationship between the commandments.
In the Large Catechism, he describes the First Commandment running through all the others “like a hoop in a wreath, joining the end to the beginning and holding them all together” (I.326). Our fear, love, and trust in God should shape how we understand and practice every other commandment.
The image is different from Matthew’s language of hanging, but it helps us hear a similar relationship. The commandments belong together. Our relationship with God runs through our responsibilities to our neighbors, holding the whole together.
We hear this in the Small Catechism, too. Luther’s explanations of the commandments repeatedly begin, “We should fear and love God.” From there, he moves into the concrete responsibilities each commandment creates. In the commandments concerning our neighbors, avoiding harm opens into actively seeking their good.
The commandment against killing includes helping our neighbor in bodily need. The commandment against stealing includes helping protect our neighbor’s livelihood. The commandment against false witness includes defending our neighbor’s reputation.
Luther makes this connection explicit in the Large Catechism. As he moves through the commandments concerning our neighbors, he explains that love of God should lead us to help others and promote their well-being wherever we can (I.327–328).
That gives us a useful Reformation connection for our sermons. Love of God has consequences for how we treat the person standing before us. We cannot set that relationship aside when we interpret what God commands.
The commandments reach beyond a list of offenses we’ve managed to avoid. They direct us toward people whose lives, possessions, and reputations have been entrusted to our care. The hoop holds these responsibilities together, continually bringing us back to the God we love and the neighbors God calls us to love.
It’s a much fuller way to hear them.
What Does It Mean to “Hang”?
I remember a word study Dr. Erik Heen led in seminary on the word translated “hang” in this verse: κρέμαται.
Here, the image expresses dependence. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commandments. Love of God and love of neighbor support the whole.
Think about what that image tells us. Something that hangs depends on what holds it up. Jesus identifies love of God and neighbor as that support for all the Law and the Prophets. Every other commandment has to be understood in relationship to these two. If our interpretation of a commandment leads us away from loving God and neighbor, we need to examine how we’re reading it.
But the verb also gives us an interesting connection to explore.
The underlying Greek verb occurs only seven times in the New Testament. Its uses include a millstone hanging around someone’s neck (Matthew 18:6) and a snake hanging from Paul’s hand (Acts 28:4). It also appears in several passages describing crucifixion.
In Luke 23:39, one of the criminals “who were hanged there” derides Jesus. Acts 5:30 and 10:39 describe Jesus’ death as being hung on a tree. Galatians 3:13 speaks of Christ redeeming us from the law’s curse by becoming a curse for us, quoting the declaration about everyone who hangs on a tree.
These passages use different forms of the same Greek verb, κρεμάννυμι. The verb that describes the relationship between the scriptures and these commandments also describes bodies suspended in execution.
That language reaches back to Deuteronomy 21:22–23. In its original setting, an executed person’s body is hung on a tree and must be buried that same day. Deuteronomy describes the person hung there as under God’s curse. The Greek translation of this passage, the Septuagint, uses the same verb.
We should be clear about the step we’re taking. The word study doesn’t explicitly establish that Matthew has hidden a prediction of the crucifixion in this sentence. In this verse, Jesus is concretely saying that the scriptures depend on these two commandments. The connection to the cross is a theological and preaching connection across these passages.
But it’s a connection worth pursuing.
Jesus has told us what holds the Law and the Prophets together. As the story continues, we will see what happens when he remains faithful to that love amid betrayal, hostility, and violence. His love of God and neighbor will bring him into conflict with people who have the power to take his life.
That gives the image its force for our preaching. The cross becomes the place where we see how fully Jesus lives the love he commands. The Law and the Prophets retain their claim upon us, and we see their fulfillment in the one who continues to love even there.
The one who teaches that all the Law and the Prophets hang on love will himself be hung on a cross.
Fulfillment and the Cross
That brings us back to Jesus’ earlier declaration: “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (5:17).
What will that fulfillment look like as Matthew’s story continues?
Jesus will continue to call people to repentance. He will challenge the use of religious authority to burden others. He will insist on mercy, expose injustice, and refuse to let the threat of violence determine his faithfulness. When one of those with him draws a sword at his arrest, Jesus commands that it be put away (26:52).
His teaching about love will take the shape of his own life, even as that life is taken from him.
Read alongside Deuteronomy, the cross presents a terrible paradox. The public sign of condemnation is placed on the one whose life embodies love of God and neighbor. His execution appears to discredit him. God’s raising him from the dead will vindicate him.
Here we need to be precise. Jesus’ death must never become an accusation against Jewish people or Judaism. Jesus is Jewish. So are his disciples. The commandments he teaches are Jewish scripture. Matthew depicts particular chief priests and elders seeking his death; Pilate authorizes his crucifixion, and Roman soldiers carry it out. These actors and actions must not be collapsed into collective blame.
We also need to keep that care within our Reformation preaching. Luther’s own anti-Jewish writings belong among the failures our tradition must confess. We cannot celebrate his teaching about love while excusing his violations of it.
With that in view, I think Matthew presses a difficult question upon us: who is actually setting aside, abolishing, what God commands?
When people accommodate themselves to coercive power, silence calls for repentance, and resist demands for peace, equity, and justice, what happens to their claim to defend God’s word? What does faithfulness look like in the person who continues to speak and practice love even when doing so threatens his life?
Matthew’s next chapter makes this tension explicit. Jesus denounces people who honor the prophets’ tombs while repeating the violence directed against those prophets (23:29–36). Preserving the memory of God’s messengers can coexist with resisting their message.
That possibility belongs in our pulpits and congregations, too.
We can praise the courage of prophets safely in the past while asking people in the present to stop making us uncomfortable. We can celebrate reformers while treating the church’s current arrangements as beyond question. We can defend the authority of scripture while resisting its claim upon our money, our loyalties, and our treatment of our neighbors.
The cross exposes what human beings can do to the love we claim to honor.
But in Matthew’s telling, Jesus’ death also fulfills his saving mission. Before his arrest, he gives the cup to his disciples and interprets his approaching death as the pouring out of his blood for forgiveness (26:28).
The one who fulfills the Law and the Prophets goes to the cross for the people who fail to love. His death and resurrection become the promise from which they can begin again.
The reading’s final exchange about David’s son and David’s Lord (22:41–46) keeps the question of the Messiah’s identity before us. We have to follow the story to see what his lordship will look like. The teacher answering questions in the temple is the Messiah who will give his life.
Preaching Possibility
Love God. Love Neighbor. Try again.
For our sermons, I think we need to sit with how easily we can affirm Jesus’ answer but simply return to life as we know it unaffected.
“Love God. Love your neighbor. Let’s just be nicer to each other today and move on already.”
Matthew’s setting makes that message difficult. There’s much more at stake here. A question about the greatest commandment is being used to test Jesus. The people discussing love are participating in an effort to discredit the person before them. As the story continues, the hostility will deepen, and Jesus’ faithfulness will bring him closer to death.
Our sermons might begin with a question we need to hear ourselves: where have we used faithfulness to God as a reason to withhold love from our neighbor?
That could lead into the ways we protect our comfort, the loyalties we exempt from examination, or the people we ask to wait because responding to their needs would cost too much. Keep our neighbor concrete. Help the congregation hear what love might require in the life they actually share.
And then follow Jesus to the cross.
The commandment exposes our failures. Christ’s promise gives us somewhere to bring them. The disciples who will abandon him are already receiving the meal in which he promises forgiveness. After the resurrection, he will gather them again and entrust them with the work of teaching what he has commanded.
There is a Reformation sermon here: forgiveness that reaches us in our failure and frees us to return to the neighbor we have failed. We still have people to hear, wrongs to address, and love to practice. Christ sends us toward that work with the promise that he is with us.
The one in whom the Law and the Prophets find their fulfillment hangs there for us.
We have failed to love. His love has not failed us.
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