A proper perspective will frequently elicit the inherent simplicity from a mass of details rather than impose an external simple-ness. Such is Jesus’ view of the Hebrew legal complex, a hermeneutic for which Jesus himself would scarcely have claimed novelty.
As so often in the gospels, the principle emerges in the melee of encounter.
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘”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.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Israel’s ethical heritage is sufficiently layered and interpenetrable to engage the intellectual energies of scholars for lifetimes. Paradoxically, its purpose is as simple and available as Jesus suggests.
C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, refers to the odd irregularity of real things, over against the shallow simplicity we so often wish to discover and, then, to manage. He might have been listening to Jesus.
Canter Bridge 
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