⭐WEB · Matthew 22:36
What does Matthew 22:36 mean?
"“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?”"
— Matthew 22:36 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
When the multitudes heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.
But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together.
One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him.
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?”
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
This is the first and great commandment.
A second likewise is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
Explanation
Matthew 22:36 records a question, not yet an answer: "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?" On its own, this is simply someone asking Jesus to identify the single most important command among all the laws given to Israel. It sounds like an academic inquiry, but the surrounding context reveals more is going on beneath the surface.
The setting is Jerusalem during the final days before Jesus's crucifixion, a tense period marked by repeated confrontations between Jesus and the religious authorities. Matthew tells us that a Pharisee, described as an expert in the law, asked this question specifically "to test him" (verse 35). This follows a string of similar attempts by different groups—Pharisees asking about paying taxes to Caesar, Sadducees asking about resurrection and marriage—all designed to trap Jesus into saying something that would either alienate the crowds or give the authorities grounds to arrest him. The Jewish law contained 613 individual commandments according to rabbinic tradition, and debates over which
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