“You shall love the Lord your God... and your neighbor as yourself”
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and Love your neighbor as yourself.… You have answered correctly… do this and you will live. (Luke 10:25–28 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A summary: love God, love people.
The cultural key
'Which commandment is the great one?' was a live scholastic question: tradition counted 613 commandments and debated 'heavy' and 'light' ones. Jesus answers with the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4–5), recited by every Jew morning and evening, and pairs it with Leviticus 19:18. 'Depend' is literally 'hang' (kremannymi; Hebrew talah), the rabbinic idiom for derivation, as when everything is said to 'hang' on a text. Hillel had answered a similar challenge: 'What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; the rest is commentary; go and learn.' Luke reverses the roles: here the lawyer recites the two great commandments and Jesus approves ('You have answered correctly'), where in Matthew and Mark Jesus gives the summary himself. The lawyer, 'desiring to justify himself,' then asks 'And who is my neighbor?', and the Good Samaritan is the answer: Luke turns the scholastic question into a story with a despised hero.
Recovered meaning
Not a replacement of the commandments but their skeleton: every command in Scripture hangs from these two pegs, and any reading of the Law that doesn't trace back to love of God and neighbor has come off its hook.