The Two Greatest Commandments

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Jesus declared, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.”

— Matthew 22:37-40

Jesus plainly tells us that the two greatest commandments, on which all the rest of the law hangs, are to love God and to love our neighbor. Curiously, it seems that few have come to the realization that these two commandments really are one and the same. That is, we love God when we love our neighbor, and we ßlove our neighbor when we love God. There is no daylight between the two.

I think the best illustration of this point is found in Jesus’s discourse on the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. When the Son of Man comes, he will separate the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the wicked. To the sheep he will say: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took me in, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you visited me” (vv 35-36). To the goats, he will say the opposite; they did none of those things for him. The sheep ask when they did these things for the Son of Man, and he replies, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these people of mine, you did for me” (v 40). Similarly, the goats ask how they could have done these things for him, and he replies, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” (v 45).

In the above discourse, Jesus plainly tells us that we encounter him (who is the Son of Man) in our interactions with others. When we serve others, we serve him. When we love others, we love him. Thus, when we love our neighbor, we are loving God. Likewise, when we do not serve others and when we hate our neighbor, we are not serving or loving God.

This same point is reinforced in the First Epistle of John where we read the following:

If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And we have this commandment from him: Whoever loves God must love his brother as well (4:20-21).

Anyone who has seen Jesus has seen God (John 14:9), and, as has been shown, we encounter Jesus whenever we encounter others. Thus, the one who fails to love his brother has ultimately failed to see God in him; he has failed to encounter the unconditional love that one finds in Jesus. How can someone expect to love God when they cannot see him in the people right in front of them? The two are inseparable.