马太福音22:34-46

愿恩惠、平安从父神和救主耶稣基督归于你们，所有信靠基督出于爱的救赎，并且因此爱神，爱人如己的人。阿们。

领受律法的人如何能成功试探赐下律法的主呢？前面有撒都该人用复活的事试探耶稣，他们失败了，他们以为没有复活的事，结果主耶稣用圣经来驳斥他们——神不是死人的神，乃是活人的神。

撒都该人被辩得哑口无言，不知道怎么找出把柄来对付耶稣，他们正一筹莫展的时候，法利赛人就和他们聚集商议如何对付耶稣。事实上就是这样，对付耶稣这样的恶事竟然可以让本来互相敌视的两拨人团结在一起。我们从福音书中知道，法利赛人和撒都该人本来是不合的，就拿复活这件事来说，法利赛人是相信死人复活的，而撒都该人并不相信；前者比较宗教化，后者比较世俗化。如今他们为了对付耶稣而走在了一起。

这真是应验诗篇2篇的话：“万民为什么谋算虚妄的事？世上的君王一齐起来，臣宰一同商议，要抵挡耶和华并祂的受膏者，就是基督。”（诗篇2:1-2）这样的事比比皆是。主耶稣钉十字架受审，让本来互相敌视的彼拉多和祭司长文士联合在一起，甚至希律也跟他们一起谋事。保罗论到世人都违背律法、犯了罪的时候，在罗马书1章说：“他们虽知道神判定行这样事的人是当死的，然而他们不但自己去行，还喜欢别人去行。”（罗1:32）有一种恶是集体的恶，如果人人都这样，那自己就感觉良好，恶就不算什么恶了。

他们商量过后，应该是推举一位最有能力的人，这个人是律法师，就是非常善于教导律法的宗教老师。推举一位这样的人非常符合各方的意图，因为只有律法是他们所共识的，就好像今天不信的人也一样认为基督信仰大体是好的，因为都是教人向善嘛，讲律法总不是坏事，人人需要道德，社会也需要一定的道德伦理标准。无论多么世俗化的教派都认为教导律法，教导十诫都是必要的。

这位律法师如何代表两派宗教人士试探耶稣呢？“夫子，律法上的诫命，哪一条是最大的呢？”这个试探的本质是什么？是因为人们不能够完全遵守所有的诫命规条，需要有个优先次序。你比如说，福音书提到奉献的事情。你是奉献给圣殿多一点，还是存起来赡养父母呢？法利赛人出的条例是：“人若对父母说：‘我所当奉给你的，已经作各耳板，就是供献的意思，’以后你们就不容他再奉养父母。”（可7:11）主耶稣因此斥责法利赛人假冒为善，他们之所以这样把律法诫命规条分等级，最优先的要考虑奉献给圣殿，供养神职人员，其实并不是他们多么在乎神国度的事，这一点从圣殿被他们玷污成了交易市场就可以看出来，事实上是因为他们贪爱钱财，想要名正言顺地侵吞百姓的钱财。主耶稣说，摩西明明把诫命说的很清楚：“当孝敬父母；咒骂父母的，必治死他。”（可7:10）他们以为可以从耶稣的话中找出漏洞来定祂的罪，干犯神的诫命，僭越神的道；不料，这位律法的赐予者，律法所指向的那一位，律法的完全践行者，并不受人的试探，而是把人的罪暴露出来，呼召人悔改，归向神，并且真正借着信心践行神的律法。

弟兄姐妹们，哪一条诫命是最大的呢？是最重要，最优先需要遵守的呢？他们以为耶稣会挑选其中一个规条来阐释。然而耶稣对他说：“你要尽心、尽性、尽意爱主——你的神。这是诫命中的第一，且是最大的。”（太22:37）主耶稣把人拉向所有诫命规条，所有道德伦理的基本出发点，那就是对神的信靠、敬畏和爱。十条诫的第一条，“除了我以外，你不可有别的神。”这一条统筹其它一切诫命和律法规条。如果我们与神的关系摆正了，那么其它的关系自然而然就捋顺了。比如，如果我们知道并且信靠神是创造天地万物的主，祂如何地爱我们，拯救我们，我们怎么会继续金钱崇拜，要在世上的物质中寻找灵魂的安慰和保障呢？我们怎不把敬拜上帝作为我们幸福的源泉呢？我们怎能不高兴欢喜奔赴神的殿，就是基督的教会，朝见神的面呢？

主耶稣并没有停留在这最大的诫命上，而是补上一句：“其次也相仿，就是要爱人如己。这两条诫命是律法和先知一切道理的总纲。”（太22:40）我们人爱自己是本能，也是自私和罪所带来的“内曲”，内曲是神学上用的名词，就是人都是往自己里面寻找幸福，寻找安慰和向导。不是这样吗？你看多少励志的演讲不是在鼓吹激发人内在的潜力和潜能？多少人生导师不是在教你如何寻找属于自己的幸福，如何自己把握住自己的人生规划。然而事实上，爱自己，是完全不需要教的，人人天生都是自爱的，没有一个人生下来不是要满足自己的需要。

爱从来不是爱自己，因为爱的对象总是在我们之外，这就好像我们总是期待被爱一样，没有人说我爱我自己就够了，人总是期待他人对自己的关注和爱。首先是我们要把爱的对象摆正，放在神，我们的造物主身上，祂先爱了我们，所以我们爱神；其次，我们把爱的对象从自己身上转移开来，爱我们身边的人。“爱人如己”是要消解自爱、自怜、自恋、自我。让我们信徒从有罪的“内曲”中释放出来。这也可能是神造亚当之后，虽然一切都是好的，然而亚当除了神之外，并没有像自己一样可以去爱的对象。“那人独居不好”，这不好并不是说神的创造不完美，有瑕疵，而是指着爱需要自己以外的对象来说的。神赐给亚当配偶夏娃，就是让他去爱她，呵护她，照顾她。之后神赐福这第一对父母，让他们生养儿女，也是让他们有爱的对象，效法神的爱，操练神的爱，建造有爱的教会，神的家室。这也是我们当下的使命，在一个充满自爱文化的社会当中，如何培养爱神、爱人如己的后代，是多么关键。教会就是信徒实践这样的爱神、爱人如己的地方。

弟兄姐妹们，我们是有从天上来的智慧的，让我再提醒一下大家。我们这个时代是最讲爱的时代，然而也是最扭曲爱的时候，问题就出在爱本身被偶像化了，比如，一切都可以以爱的名义任意而行，世人所谈论的爱都是让自己满足，而不是奉献和舍己，把自己放在一边。让我们警惕这样偶像化的爱。事实上，圣经告诉我们，神就是爱。如果人离开了爱的源头，就是爱我们的神，那么我们一切所谓的爱都是空谈，都是以爱来造神，继续满足自我的需要和幻想。

还有，回到律法师试探耶稣的根本问题上，哪一条诫命是最大的呢？言外之意，哪一条可以忽略或者可以靠后排序呢？主耶稣的回答并不是在排序，而是告诉人律法的本质和总纲，律法的最终目标，爱神和爱人如己。雅各书告诉我们：“凡遵守全律法的，只在一条上跌倒，他就是犯了众条。”（雅2:10）不是也有经文说：“人若说：‘我爱神’，却恨他的弟兄，就是说谎的；不爱所看见的弟兄，就不能爱没有看见的神。”（约一4:20）

主耶稣把律法和律法的精义总纲都讲清楚了，但并不意味着我们可以靠行律法与神和好，领受上帝的恩惠，好像我行的越好，神越爱我一样。事实上，主耶稣要试探祂的人明白，这爱的命令离开祂的救赎是艰难的；这也是为什么耶稣用一个新的问题，就是论到基督，来询问法利赛人。目的当然不是试探他们，而是要他们认识基督，认识和领受生命。主耶稣生在律法之下，为我们完全遵守律法，得了完全的义赐给我们。要拯救我们脱离律法的咒诅。基督是大卫的子孙，是主在肉身中显现，也是那位女人后裔的到来，为要把我们的仇敌魔鬼、死亡统统踩在脚下，让我们得胜和自由，并且可以自由地服侍主，服侍人。

既然我们知道主耶稣是爱我们，为我们流血舍命，钉死在十字架上，为要拯救我们，赦免我们，脱离罪和罪性，我们就真的自由了，不再被自我所束缚和捆绑。让我们的目光盯在神身上，并且时刻观察我们身边人的需要，时刻准备好去服侍身边的人。弟兄姐妹们，这是真正的自由和能力，能够从自爱自恋中解脱出来，感谢上帝，赐给我们这样的自由，让我们摆正爱的对象。

使徒保罗继续论爱和律法的关系：“爱是不加害与人的，所以爱就完全了律法。”（罗13:10）“命令的总归就是爱；这爱是从清洁的心和无亏的良心，无伪的信心生出来的。”（提前1:5）我们在践行爱之前，甚至不需要问哪件事是需要最优先去做，才是完美的。因为我们在基督里面已经是完全的了，是毫无瑕疵，是自由的了。我们爱神、爱人也不求回报，因为求回报的爱是属世界的，并不是从神而来。我们自由地爱人如己，因为这是神的爱从我们身上流淌出去，并不索取什么。世人的爱总是在索取，在交换，只有在基督里得释放的人，才能够真正地舍己和爱人。

让我们今天再一次从圣餐礼中领受丰盛的赦免和生命，表明主的死，学习基督的大爱，并且以此把神的爱践行在教会和社区当中。奉耶稣基督的名。阿们。

Matthew 22:34–46

Grace and peace be to you from God the Father and our Savior Jesus Christ, to all who trust in Christ’s redeeming love and who, having been loved by Him, love God and love their neighbors as themselves. Amen.

How can those who have received the Law, succeed in testing the Lord, who gave the Law? In the preceding passage, the Sadducees tested Jesus concerning the resurrection, but they failed. They thought there was no resurrection, but the Lord Jesus refuted them with the Scriptures: God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

The Sadducees had been silenced by His argument. They did not know how to find anything with which to accuse Jesus. While they were at a loss as to what to do, the Pharisees gathered together to discuss how they might deal with Him. Indeed, this is how things happen: the evil purpose of opposing Jesus could bring together two groups that had previously been hostile to one another. We know from the Gospels that the Pharisees and Sadducees did not get along. Take the resurrection, for example: the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead, whereas the Sadducees did not. The former were more religious in their outlook, while the latter were more secular. Yet now they joined forces to oppose Jesus.

This is truly a fulfillment of the words of Psalm 2:

“Why do the nations rage

and the peoples plot in vain?

The kings of the earth set themselves,

and the rulers take counsel together,

against the LORD and against his Anointed.” (Psalm 2:1–2, ESV)

We see this kind of thing everywhere. When the Lord Jesus was put on trial and crucified, Pilate and the chief priests and scribes, who had previously been hostile to one another, joined forces against Him. Even Herod joined them in their scheming. When Paul speaks in Romans 1 about the world’s rebellion against God’s Law and the sin of all humanity, he says, “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:32, ESV). There is such a thing as collective evil. When everyone is doing the same thing, each person can feel perfectly justified, and evil no longer seems like evil.

After discussing the matter, they apparently selected the person they considered most capable: a lawyer, that is, a religious teacher who was particularly skilled in teaching the Law. Choosing such a person suited the interests of all parties, because the Law was the one thing they had in common. It is much like today, when even unbelievers may consider Christianity broadly good because, after all, it teaches people to do good. Surely teaching the Law cannot be a bad thing. Everyone needs morality, and society needs certain moral and ethical standards. No matter how secularized a religious group may become, it still considers the teaching of the Law and the Ten Commandments necessary.

How, then, did this lawyer represent the two religious parties in testing Jesus? He asked, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” (Matthew 22:36, ESV).

What was the essence of this test? Human beings cannot keep every commandment and regulation perfectly, so they feel the need to establish a hierarchy of priorities.

Consider the matter of offerings mentioned in the Gospels. Should you give more to the temple, or should you set aside money to support your parents? The Pharisees had established a rule that said, in effect, that if someone told his father or mother, “What you would have gained from me is given to God,” then they no longer permitted him to do anything for his parents (Mark 7:11–12, ESV). The Lord Jesus therefore rebuked the Pharisees for their hypocrisy. They ranked the commandments and regulations of the Law in such a way that offerings to the temple and the support of religious officials took priority. Yet this was not because they genuinely cared so much about the kingdom of God. We can see this from the way they had defiled the temple by turning it into a marketplace. In reality, they loved money and wanted a seemingly legitimate way to take possession of the people’s wealth.

Jesus pointed out that Moses had made the commandment perfectly clear: “Honor your father and your mother,” and, “Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die” (Mark 7:10, ESV).

They thought they could find a loophole in Jesus’ words, convict Him of violating God’s commandments, and accuse Him of arrogantly overstepping God’s Word. But the One who gave the Law, the One to whom the Law points, and the One who perfectly fulfills the Law cannot be manipulated by human beings. Instead, He exposes their sin and calls them to repentance, to return to God, and to live out God’s Law truly through faith.

Brothers and sisters, which commandment is the greatest? Which is the most important, the one that must be obeyed first? The lawyer expected Jesus to select one particular regulation and explain its priority. But Jesus said to him:

“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, ESV)

The Lord Jesus directs us to the fundamental starting point of all the commandments, regulations, and moral and ethical principles: trust in God, reverence for Him, and love for Him.

The First Commandment says, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3, ESV). This commandment governs all the others. When our relationship with God is rightly ordered, our other relationships will also fall into their proper place.

For example, if we know and trust that God is the Lord who created heaven and earth and all things, and if we know how He loves and saves us, how could we continue to worship money and seek comfort and security for our souls in the material things of this world? How could we fail to regard the worship of God as the source of our joy and blessedness? How could we not gladly and joyfully hasten to the house of God, the Church of Christ, to come into His presence?

The Lord Jesus did not stop with the greatest commandment. He added, “And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:39–40, ESV).

Our love for ourselves is instinctive, but it is also bound up with the selfishness and sin that turn us inward. Theology has a term for this condition: being curved inward upon oneself. Human beings seek happiness, comfort, and guidance within themselves. Is this not so? How many motivational speeches urge us to discover and unleash our inner potential? How many life coaches teach us how to find our own happiness and take control of our personal life plans?

Yet, in truth, no one needs to be taught how to love himself or be ambitious. We are all naturally self-loving. No one is born without the desire to satisfy his own needs.

Love is never merely a matter of loving oneself, because the object of love is always someone beyond ourselves. This is much like our own expectation of being loved: no one says, “It is enough that I love myself.” Human beings naturally long for the attention and love of others.

First, we must rightly direct the object of our love toward God, our Creator. He loved us first, and therefore we love Him. Only He can fill the vacuum in our heart that longs for unchanging love. Second, we must turn our love away from ourselves and toward the people around us. To “love your neighbor as yourself” is to break the grip of self-love, self-pity, self-obsession, and the ego. It is to release us believers from the sinful condition of being curved inward upon ourselves.

Perhaps this also helps us understand what God meant when He created Adam. Everything was good, yet Adam had no one other than God whom he could love as one like himself. “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18, ESV). This does not mean that God’s creation was imperfect or defective. Rather, it points to the fact that love requires an object beyond oneself.

God gave Adam a wife, Eve, so that Adam might love her, cherish her, and care for her. Later, God blessed this first couple with children, giving them others to love, so that they might imitate His love, practice His love, and build a Church filled with love, the household of God.

This is also our mission today. In a society saturated with a culture of self-love, how crucial it is to raise up a generation that loves God and loves their neighbors as themselves! The Church is the place where believers put this love for God and neighbor into practice.

Brothers and sisters, we have wisdom from above, so let me remind you of something once again. Ours is an age that speaks more than ever about love, yet it is also an age in which love is more distorted than ever. The problem is that love itself has been turned into an idol. People claim that anything can be done in the name of love. The love of which the world speaks is often about satisfying oneself, rather than giving oneself in service and self-sacrifice, setting oneself aside for the sake of another.

Let us beware of this idolatrous understanding of love. In truth, Scripture tells us that God is love. If people turn away from the source of love, from the God who loves us, then all our talk of love becomes empty. We fashion a god in the image of our own idea of love, continuing to satisfy our own desires and fantasies.

Now let us return to the fundamental question behind the lawyer’s test of Jesus: Which commandment is the greatest? Implied in the question is another: Which commandment can be ignored or given a lower priority?

Jesus’ answer was not simply a ranking of commandments. Rather, He revealed the essence and summary of the Law, its ultimate goal: love for God and love for our neighbors as ourselves.

The Epistle of James tells us, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (James 2:10, ESV). And does not Scripture also say, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20, ESV)?

The Lord Jesus has made both the Law and its essence clear. But this does not mean that we can be reconciled to God and receive His favor by keeping the Law, as though the better we behave, the more God will love us.

In fact, Jesus wants those who test Him to understand how difficult it is to fulfill the command to love apart from His redemption. This is why Jesus poses another question, this time concerning the Christ, the Messiah. His purpose is certainly not to test the Pharisees in return, but to lead them to know the Christ and thus to know and receive life.

The Lord Jesus was born under the Law and perfectly fulfilled it on our behalf. He gives us His perfect righteousness and saves us from the curse of the Law. Christ is the Son of David, God manifested in the flesh, and the promised offspring of the woman. He came to crush all our enemies—the devil and death—and put them under His feet, so that we might have victory and freedom and serve the Lord and our neighbors freely.

Since we know that the Lord Jesus loves us, that He shed His blood and laid down His life for us on the cross to save us, forgive us, and deliver us from sin and our sinful nature, we are truly free. We are no longer bound and enslaved by the self.

Let us fix our eyes upon God and continually pay attention to the needs of those around us, always ready to serve them. Brothers and sisters, this is true freedom and power: to be released from self-love and self-obsession. We thank God for granting us this freedom and helping us rightly direct the object of our love.

The apostle Paul continues to speak about the relationship between love and the Law: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10, ESV). And again: “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5, ESV).

Before putting love into practice, we do not even need to ask which particular action must take priority in order for us to be perfect. For in Christ, we have already been made complete. We stand before God without blemish in His sight, and we are free.

We love God and our neighbors without seeking anything in return, because love that demands repayment belongs to the world; it does not come from God. We freely love our neighbors as ourselves because God’s love flows out through us without demanding anything in return. The world’s love is always seeking something, always exchanging one thing for another. Only those who have been set free in Christ can truly deny themselves and love others.

Let us once again receive the abundant forgiveness and life offered to us in the Lord’s Supper today. As we proclaim the Lord’s death, let us learn from Christ’s great love and put God’s love into practice in the Church and in our community.

In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.