But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, “Teacher, which is the great 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.” Matthew 22:34–39
You can tell a lot about people by listening to the questions they ask. Professor and author Steven Covey said that he sometimes graded his students 50% based on the answers they gave and the other 50% based on the questions they asked. In the gospel narratives of the final days of Jesus’ life, the leading factions of Judaism all had questions for this teacher who had become so alarmingly popular. The questions of these different groups revealed in turn their hypocrisy as well as their ignorance. When a scribe asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest, Jesus said that it is to love the Lord with all one’s (1) heart, (2) soul, (3) mind, and (4) strength. With this response, one might say that Jesus was sending a special message to each of the political groups that had assembled to interrogate Him: (1) the Pharisees, (2) the Herodians, (3) the scribes, and (4) the Sadducees. We will focus first on the Pharisees to whom Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart.”
The Pharisees were born out of a movement to regain Israel’s freedom of worship. When the notorious Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes rose to power, Judea was under Greek domination, and this tyrant desecrated the temple, burned a pig on the altar of God, and compelled the Jews to sacrifice to his gods. When a priest named Matthias saw one of his brethren ready to offer a pig in the village of Modin, his zeal stirred him up, and he cut the man down as he approached the altar. This sparked a long period of armed conflict between the Jews and their Greek overlords in which the followers of Matthias and his family (known as the Maccabees) engaged in a campaign of guerilla warfare. When a happy set of circumstances led to victory for the Jews and the temple was rededicated three years after its defilement, some of the Jews who had encouraged the rebellion from the start were content with this victory (from this sect arose the Pharisees), while others insisted that they must press on toward complete political independence as well (hence the Sadducees).
The problem with the Pharisees was that they had no heart in their religion. Jesus rightly accused them of putting their own oral traditions ahead of God’s commandments (Matthew 15:3–6). Jesus applied to the Pharisees the prophecy of Isaiah: “These people draw near to me with their mouth, and honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (vv 8–9; cf. Isaiah 29:13). Shortly before His death, Jesus sternly condemned the Pharisees for their hypocrisy (Matthew 23). He said that they would bind heavy burdens on men which they themselves would not bear (v 4) and loved the praises of men (vv 5–7). He called them blind guides who strained gnats but swallowed camels (v 24) and compared them to whitewashed tombs that look beautiful on the outside but are full of corruption within (vv 27–28).
To these hypocritical leaders, Jesus says, “You must learn how to love the Lord with all your heart!” God wants us to love Him with all our hearts. We must believe with the heart that God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 10:9). We must obey from the heart the form of doctrine to which we were delivered (Romans 6:17). We must worship with the heart (Ephesians 5:19). The fact is that Christianity is a religion of emotion, and we must learn to give Jesus not only our bodies in His service, but also our hearts.