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Paul.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
There is a moment in Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus gives an answer that might be so familiar to us we might miss everything else that is said.
Jesus begins with beautiful words that would have been deeply familiar to his Jewish listeners. The command to love God with all your heart and soul comes from the Shema, a prayer at the very heart of Jewish religious life. He then brings alongside it another commandment, this time from Leviticus, about loving your neighbour as yourself. Neither of these teachings are new, but Jesus places them together and declares that everything else in the Law and the Prophets hangs upon them.
I have always been struck by this summary of the most essential part of what Jesus explains to be a follower of his.
But then, Jesus asks the Pharisees a question of his own. They give him a perfectly reasonable answer, one that Matthew himself has already given his readers. But Jesus challenges them, and suddenly it all gets awkward. Nobody knows what to say.
Matthew ends the encounter with an unusual observation:
“No one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.” — Matthew 22:46
What had Jesus asked them?
