You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.— Matthew 22:37–38
It was the last week of Jesus’ life. He was teaching in the temple courts, and one group after another came with questions meant to trap Him. The Sadducees had just been silenced. Then the Pharisees gathered, and one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question to test Him (Matt 22:35).
The question was an old one. Jewish tradition would later count 613 commandments in the Law, a number the Talmud credits to a teacher named Rabbi Simlai. Teachers argued over which commands were heavy and which were light (Matt 23:23). Any answer would offend someone.
Jesus did not reach for an obscure verse. He quoted the Shema, Israel’s oldest confession of faith. It begins, Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one (Deut 6:4), and faithful Jews prayed it every morning and every evening (Deut 6:7). He gave them the words they already knew by heart.
Then He added the second, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and said something that should stop us: On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets (Matt 22:40). The Greek word, kremantai (κρέμαται), means hang, the way a door hangs on its hinges. Take the hinge away and the door is just heavy wood leaning against a wall.
That is what the commandments become without love. Still correct. No longer able to open.
Jesus calls this one the first. The order matters.
We tend to run it backward. We try to love people well and hope God fits in somewhere. But love that starts with us runs on our own reserves, and reserves run out. Patience thins. Kindness starts keeping score.
John puts the order plainly. We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). God is not only the model of love. He is the source. We receive before we return.
Think of the body. When the nerves between the brain and the hand are cut, the hand is still there. It simply cannot move. Our love for people works the same way. Cut off from God, it can look intact for a long time. It just stops moving.
Most of us have tried to love a difficult person on our own reserves. It lasts about as long as we would expect.
The Talmud tells a story about Rabbi Akiva, one of the great teachers of the early second century. In the years of Roman persecution around the Jewish revolt of 132 to 135, Rome forbade the teaching of the Law. Akiva kept teaching. He was arrested, and the Romans executed him by tearing his flesh with iron combs.
As they did, the hour came to recite the Shema. He began to pray it. They were the same words Jesus had quoted: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
His students could not bear it. Master, even now?
According to the Talmud, he answered that all his life he had been troubled by the words with all your soul. He had understood them to mean even if He takes your soul. He had wondered whether he would ever be able to keep that command. Now he could.
He held the word one until his breath was gone.
Akiva understood what “all” means. It is not the love we give when things are going well. It is not a love that waits for good days.
Love like that looks unreasonable from the outside. Paul seems to have faced the same reaction. Some in Corinth apparently thought he had lost his mind. His answer was simple. If we are beside ourselves, it is for God (2 Cor 5:13). Then he gave the reason: the love of Christ controls us (2 Cor 5:14).
Loving God first does not pull us away from people. It gives us new eyes for them.
Anyone who has been in love knows the world looks different. The same street. The same coworkers. Nothing around us has changed. Something has changed in the one who is looking.
Loving God works the same way, only deeper. The neighbor who irritated us becomes someone God loves. The stranger becomes someone God sees. When the vertical is right, the horizontal starts to open.
Most of us would say God comes first. The harder question is what our days would say.
If someone followed us for one ordinary week and watched where our attention went first, what we worried about at night, and what we would give up without a second thought, what would they say we love with all our heart?
That question is not meant to condemn us. It is an invitation back to the hinge.
If we have been trying to love the people around us and keep coming up empty, the problem may not be the people. It may be the source.
He did not ask to be first on our list. He asked to be the love the whole list hangs on.
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