The Law and the Lord

From a Wednesday of Holy Week reflection on Matthew 22:34-46 -

The saying about David's Lord and David's son thus propels us back to the question about the great commandment. Not a jot or tittle, said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, will pass from Torah until all is accomplished; and as he articulates the greatest commandment in Torah, so he is on the way to its ultimate accomplishment. The vertical commandment, that we should love God with all our heart, is joined together with the horizontal commandment, that we should love our neighbors as ourselves; and Jesus combines the vertical and the horizontal into the greatest symbol of triumphant love the world has ever seen, a symbol at once clear and obvious and yet fathomless in its profundity, all the more so for its having been up to that point a symbol of the triumph of Caesar, his coins and his empire. The cross stretches up to God in loving obedience, and out to the world in loving service, and all because it is not David's son but David's Lord who hangs there, so that the real stretching out is downwards, from God to us.

(Tom Wright, The Scriptures, the Cross and the Power of God: Reflections for Holy Week)