One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him,
"Which is the first of all the commandments?"
This scribe didn't seem insincere in the way that many others did when they tried to entrap Jesus with trick questions. He rather seemed to ask Jesus a question in order give him a chance to freely express what was most important to him, a summary, perhaps of his entire message.
Jesus responded to the scribe with with the commands to love God above all things to love one's neighbor as oneself. By drawing together these two threads from the Old Testament Jesus succinctly the meaning of the entire law. We could imagine Pharisees giving different answers, answers concerned with serving God by proper ritual and sacrifice as the starting place, and only concerned with inner transformation or love of neighbor as secondary matters. What Jesus definitely did not offer as a response was something which could be merely external to oneself, worn as a mask, or adopted as one aspect among many to compromise one's identity.
Jesus replied, "The first is this:
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul,
with all your mind,
and with all your strength.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (see Proverbs 9:10). If we fear to lack or to lose the temporary things of this life more than we fear the Lord we are misled to our harm and our peril. As Bob Dylan sang, "[I]t may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you're gonna have to serve somebody". We are creatures made for worship. If God is not in that central place we have no recourse but to treat created things as idols, to worship them and serve them in spite of the fact that they cannot fulfill us. It is not enough to say we love the Lord, either, to be safe from this risk. We must do so actually, committing all of the energies of our hearts, our souls, and minds, and our strength to doing so. We might imagine that if we really were concerned only for God that our lives would be as those of monks or hermits, disinterested, we imagine, in the world. This is not actually the case for monks or hermits who live in the presence of God for the sake of those in the world. Nor is it is not the case for us.
The second is this:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these."
In Matthew's Gospel we hear Jesus say more on the link between the two commandments. We hear, "[t]he second is like unto the first" (see Matthew 22:39). By saying this Jesus made a remarkable and dramatic link between the love of God and the love of neighbor which may have been implicit before but only now said definitively. Yet it is clear that this link was the basis around which the early Christians ordered their lives. Jesus said that whenever we fail to love those made in his image, the lowest and the least, we fail to love him. Paul realized that his persecution of Christians was taken by Jesus as persecution of Jesus himself. John made the connection between the commandments clear:
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).
This intertwining of love of God and love of neighbor ensures that we will not become so heavenly minded as to be no earthly good. Indeed, the more we love God, the more we must love and serve here on earth. But now, in Christ, things are properly ordered. We don't love neighbor merely unto temporary ends of wealth and success and health. We love them as we have learned to love ourselves, which is unto things eternal. This does not exclude transitory blessings but it does set them in proper perspective.
The scribe said to him, "Well said, teacher.
The scribe was very receptive to the answer his question received. He saw prophetic proof that God was more interested in love than in the ritual sacrificial system. It was indeed the case that the entirety of that system served to bring awareness to the need for a perfect offering of love of which man unaided by grace was unable to offer. Rather than offering what was needed, humankind had to settle for the blood of goats and calves and lambs as substitutes until God himself provided the Lamb.
"You are not far from the kingdom of God."
And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
The scribe only at this point realized that the answer he received was more than he expected. He now realized that, although he knew the answer, he couldn't live it. He himself was still only near the entry to the kingdom, still outside, still missing something. He was unable to offer that perfect offering of love and thereby fulfill these two commandments perfectly. He was no longer merely having an interesting intellectual discussion among equals, but was in the presence of holiness, of a true master, of someone on a different and higher level than himself. The call to conversion, which could now only mean a call to follow Jesus himself, was made plain. Perhaps in the silence following his question he did choose to follow him. If he did so he would find the answer to the question of how to move from near the kingdom but still outside to the halls of the banquet within.
Therefore, he is always able to save those who approach God through him,
since he lives forever to make intercession for them.