Most workplaces have a handbook. It lives in a binder or a PDF on the shared drive, it covers everything from the dress code to a lost badge, and almost nobody has read the whole thing. Ask someone who has been there a while what actually matters and they won't quote it. They'll give you two or three things: show up when you said you would, don't make your problem somebody else's problem, take care of the customer.

That is the shape of the Gospel for Proper 25, Year A. In Matthew 22:34-46 somebody asks Jesus to boil the entire law of God down to its single most important line, and he answers with two. Neither one is his own. The readings for the Sunday are Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18, Psalm 1, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 and Matthew 22:34-46, and together they make a strong case that the greatest commandment was never meant to stand alone.

The greatest commandment in Matthew 22

We're still in the temple courts in the last days before the arrest. Two weeks ago it was the wedding banquet, last week it was the coin with Caesar's face on it, and one group after another has come at Jesus with a question meant to trip him up. The Sadducees have just tried and failed. Now a lawyer, which in the Gospels means an expert in the law of Moses, steps up "to test him": "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

That was a live question. The law of Moses is long. A few centuries later a rabbi named Simlai is recorded in the Talmud, in the tractate Makkot, counting the commandments and arriving at 613. Nobody in Jesus's day had fixed that exact number, but everyone knew the list ran to worship, food, farming, debts and what to do with a field after the harvest. Which one holds the rest together?

Jesus doesn't hesitate. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Both lines are quotations, the first from Deuteronomy 6, the prayer every faithful Jew said morning and evening, the second from Leviticus 19. He doesn't add a word to the law. He reaches into it, pulls out two lines and sets them side by side.

Then he says the sentence I keep coming back to: "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Word Study — Kremannymi

The verb is kremannymi (kreh-MAHN-nee-mee), to hang something from a fixed point so that its whole weight is held from above. It is a very physical word. In Matthew 18 it is the great millstone hung around a neck, literally a donkey's millstone, the upper stone so heavy an animal had to turn it. In Acts 28, on Malta, it is the viper the islanders see hanging from Paul's hand after it comes out of the brushwood fire. Here it is the whole law and the prophets, hanging from two commandments.

Two pegs on the wall

So picture a wall with two pegs in it. Everything else, all six hundred and thirteen, the sabbath and the sacrifices and the rules about fields and loans and neighbors, hangs from those two. The pegs are love of God and love of neighbor. Take them out of the wall and nothing else stays up. The other commandments aren't thrown away. They just stop meaning anything, because there is nothing left holding them.

There's a detail in Matthew that is easy to read past. The lawyer asked for one commandment, singular. Jesus gives him the first and then keeps going, uninvited: "And a second is like it." He could have stopped at loving God, and nobody in that courtyard would have argued. He won't let the first commandment stand alone. The word "like" is doing real work. You can't hang the law on one peg.

Leviticus 19: love your neighbor as yourself, at payroll

The second peg comes from the first reading. Leviticus 19 opens with "You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy," and anyone expecting a chapter about the temple is in for a surprise. It's about wages, courtrooms and gossip. Just before the lectionary portion begins, it says you shall not keep a laborer's wages until morning. Pay people the day they earn it. Then the reading picks up: no unjust judgment, no partiality to the poor and no deference to the great, no slander, no standing by while a neighbor's life is in danger. And then the line Jesus quotes, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord."

The neighbor command doesn't float down as a warm feeling. In Leviticus it lands in the middle of payroll, court cases and what people say about each other when they're out of the room. Holiness, in this chapter, looks like paying a day laborer before sundown.

Word Study — Kamokha

"As yourself" is one Hebrew word, kamokha (kah-MOH-khah), which means "like you." Readers have long argued over whether it means love your neighbor the way you love yourself, or love your neighbor because they are like you, made by the same God and worth the same. The Hebrew can carry both. Either way it takes the instinct we already have, to look out for ourselves, and turns it outward. And every time, Leviticus signs it the same way: "I am the Lord." The second commandment has the same author as the first, which is why Jesus can say it is like it.

Psalm 1 fits underneath all of this. The one whose delight is in the law of the Lord is "like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither." The psalm doesn't picture the law as a cage. It pictures a tree with its roots in running water, a life with something steady underneath it, whether or not that person could recite all 613. And Matthew's scene closes with Jesus asking a question of his own about whose son the Messiah is. Nobody can answer it, "nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions."

What does your rule hang on?

Bring it to work, since that's where a lot of us spend our best hours. It is entirely possible to keep every rule in the handbook and still be the person nobody wants on their team. You can be on time to every meeting and still make sure the credit lands on you. You can follow the expense policy to the penny and still let someone else take the blame for a mistake that was half yours.

Jesus's picture gives us a test. Take any rule you keep and ask what it's hanging on. Does it hang on love of God? On love of the person next to you? If it does, keep it gladly. If it hangs on neither, it may still be a fine rule, but it isn't holding anything up.

And Leviticus gets specific in a way the handbook never will. You already know how you want to be treated when your deadline is slipping: a heads-up before it blows up in the meeting, your name said when the project goes well, your paycheck on time and the real reason when something changes. Kamokha. The person in the next cubicle wants all the same things. They're like you. If you manage people, watch the things Leviticus watches: whether they're paid fairly and on time, whether you favor the people who can do something for you, whether you let a rumor run without stopping it.

So try two things this week. Pick one rule you keep without thinking, at work or at home, and hang it on one of the two pegs. Say it out loud if you have to: I do this because I love God, or I do this because I love the people around me. If it won't hang on either, ask why you keep it. Then pick the one coworker you're least inclined to look out for and treat their problem the way you'd want yours treated: their deadline, their credit, their name in the room. That's the second peg.

The full episode of Monday to Sunday is above.