Ten Commandments: Which is the greatest?

		Living the Scriptures  with St. Paul University  Catholic Center  Torston Wurm

In today's Gospel reading from Matthew 22:34-40, we hear about the Pharisees trying to trick Jesus by asking which of the commandments is the most important.

This question was not a trivial one. The Jewish law in those days included over 600 different commandments besides the Ten Commandments received by Moses on Mount Sinai.

So the question of the most important commandment was a "hot topic" among the scribes and Pharisees those days. They might just have had a discussion by themselves when they spotted Jesus, so they chose the smartest among them to ask this great teacher about his opinion.

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Oct. 23, 2005) Ex 22:20-26 Ps 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51 1 Thes 1:5c-10 Mt 22:34-40

Jesus put it very simply: "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."

By saying this, Jesus elevates the commandment for us to love God entirely to a higher level than the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.

When I prepared for First Holy Communion, I was taught that the most important commandment is to love our neighbor. But from this Gospel reading I subsequently learned, that to love God with all my heart, all my soul, and all my mind precedes even the love and compassion I have to show for the person next to me.

When I thought about it more deeply, this started to make sense to me. It is only when we love God entirely that we are able to share this love with the person next to us. In other words, only when God is entirely within us we are able to reach out to those around us and share this love, God's love.

The Pharisees, of course, were deeply rooted in the Old Testament and for them the main concern was to identify the great commandment onto which all their faith is based. Jesus, in his answer, clearly identified the foundations of all other commandments. The Ten Commandments themselves depend upon respect for the person next to you.

	Reflection question • Would someone observing how I live my life see that I obey the great commandments?

If you do love your neighbor, you don't steal, you don't commit adultery, you don't lie, because you don't want anybody else doing these things to you.

If you love your God truly, then you don't have any other gods next to Him, and by loving Him you follow His commandments. Everything else depends on these basic commandments.

Torston Wurm is a research scholar at the Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At St. Paul University Catholic Center, he is a member of the church choir and a Eucharistic minister.

St. Paul's Web site is www.stpaulscc.org

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