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Summary: AI-assisted (Claude) from transcripts

Summary

All of the Above

The commandments of God are not multiple choice. That is the heart of Jesus' answer to the Pharisees and Sadducees in Matthew 22:34-40, where these usually-feuding parties gather together to test him with a question that was hotly debated among the rabbis: out of more than six hundred laws in the Torah, which one is the greatest? Some argued for the law of sacrifice, since it covered sin and gave thanks. Others insisted on circumcision, the sign of the covenant. Still others held out for the Sabbath or the laws of cleanliness. The leaders of the day were accustomed to ranking the commandments and quietly letting the "lesser" ones slide whenever a "greater" one was being kept.

Jesus refuses the game. He answers by quoting the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4-5: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." To love God with all the heart is to fix the affections supremely on him. To love him with all the soul is to devote one's whole life and energy to him. To love him with all the mind is to prize his law above the verdicts of our own reasoning. This is what Luther's Small Catechism captures in the refrain that we are to "fear, love, and trust in God above all things." Then Jesus adds a second that is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." On these two, he says, hang all the Law and the Prophets.

That word all exposes how often we treat the commandments as a menu. If we manage not to murder, we feel free to gossip. If we attended church, we excuse a careless use of the Lord's name. We pick the commands that suit our mood and the neighbor we happen to be dealing with. But James 2:10 closes that exit: "Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it." There is no such thing as a partial obedience that satisfies God's law. Left to ourselves, we would not really keep any of it; we would simply choose the version of righteousness that flatters us today.

This is also why our prayers so easily curdle into hypocrisy. We come to God asking him to change our neighbor, lining ourselves up beside the Lord against the very person he has commanded us to love—while that neighbor, of course, is praying the same prayer about us. Yet Psalm 103 tells the truth about how God actually deals with sinners: "He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities... as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." Jesus does not pick and choose which sins to forgive. He bore them all to the cross—every murderous thought, every cold shoulder, every self-exalting refusal to love—and rose victorious, leaving the tomb empty because our sins have been answered for in full.

So the commandments are not a buffet, and neither is the gospel. God's love for us is active and complete; our part is to receive it. He calls us, washes us in baptism, forgives our sins, and seals us with his Holy Spirit. That same Spirit then moves us outward, giving us the strength and the prompting to love the neighbor we could never have loved on our own. Every commandment in the second table flows out of the first as a "so that": I fear and love and trust God, so that I will not harm my neighbor but help him; so that I will honor father, mother, and authorities; so that I will guard my neighbor's reputation, marriage, and possessions as my own.

Which commandments are we called to keep? All of the above. And the good news that holds it all together is this: the Lord does not pick and choose between your sins. He has forgiven every one of them, loves you with a love that is free and never-ending, and fills you with that same love so that your neighbor might hear the news that Christ loves them too.

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