NOTES for Mat 22:35-46

Tempting Jesus, that is, trying to catch Him in His words, one of the Pharisees asks Jesus about the greatest commandment. He expects the Nazarene Teacher to say something that disagrees with the rabbis' teaching about the hierarchy of commandments, or better still, to speak dismissively about rituals. But, as in other similar cases, the Lord does not answer such a deceitful question; He speaks about something else. He speaks not so much about the hierarchy of commandments as about the meaning of God's Revelation contained in the law and in all Scripture. Love God and neighbor. This is the content of Revelation, this is the meaning of the covenant. What is absent here is any room for learned rabbinic research.

The distance between Revelation and petty religiosity is emphasized by Jesus' following question to the Pharisees about whose son the Christ is, whom David calls Lord (from the point of view of the Pharisees' logic, an ancestor cannot call a descendant this). God's Revelation in Christ is the mystery of love, the Cross, and the Resurrection, and not the sacralization or desacralization of daily life.