"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
It wasn't a particularly devious question designed to entrap Jesus, necessarily. Though one could see a situation where, to any answer he gave, they would have responded by asking about some other commandment that he didn't mention. But it was more likely they intended to give him an opportunity to summarize his teaching by his answer, positioning the whole in relation to the main themes or priorities. Either way, the answer of Jesus didn't leave any openings for them to wonder about the competing priority of various rules. His answer was comprehensive and exhaustive.
He said to him,
"You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."
There really ought to have been no doubt that the commandment to love God above all held the first place among all of the laws of Israel. It had been emphasized again and again since it was first received by Moses, and had been implicit even before that. But there may have been a question of how the large number and variety of other commands related to the first and most important one. It was this that Jesus clarified by saying that the second was like the first. Already, before the coming of Jesus, this answer had a certain intuitive logic to it, since humanity was made in the image of God. One could not love God fully without also loving the creature he gave the dignity of his image and likeness. And love of neighbor could not be well maintained without reference to the God who was the origin and destiny of every person.
One could not, however, love one's neighbor in lieu of loving God, as though there was nothing else to do beyond one's obligations of mercy and justice to others. We saw in the rich young ruler a person who had in fact kept all the commandments pertaining to love of neighbor from his youth and yet was still lacking something important. He could have achieved harmony between the love of God and love of neighbor by setting aside his worldly attachments and following Jesus. Jesus brought together the opportunity to love both God and neighbor in his own person, and through him, the possibility to embrace the world with a unified love that neglected neither God nor neighbor. Jesus was the bridge between God and man who elevated what was possible for humanity in terms of how perfectly they could love God, who had now come so close, and neighbor, whose dignity was now revealed with awe-inspiring clarity as a consequence of the incarnation.
The inseparability of these two commandments became a common theme of biblical writers such as John the Evangelist:
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen (see First John 4:20).
We Christians are supposed to be recognizable by our love. This means that we need to be more than a spiritual NGO. People should notice that we are not just meeting obligations of justice but that we recognize a greater dignity and destiny in humanity than others, and treat them accordingly, as revelations of the love and the goodness of God.
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