“…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5))
Mark 12:28-34 (Year B: The Fourth Sunday before Advent or the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, 4th November, 2018)
In addition to this coming Sunday’s Gospel reading which is common to most Christian churches, the other readings from scripture found in the ‘paired’ Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) of the Church of Ireland for this Sunday are: Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Psalm 119(118):1-8; and Hebrews 9:11-14. Directly parallel Gospel readings to this particular Gospel reading from Mark may be found in Matthew 22:34-46 and in Luke 10:25-28.
In the liturgical cycle of the Roman Catholic Church, for this coming Sunday, the choice of readings is the same as above except for the following: Psalm where 18(17) is used instead of 119 and the Reading from the Letter to the Hebrews is 7:23-28.
The next time you read the Bible cover to cover you might like to use a yellow marker and mark over the word ‘all’ (assuming you are reading the Bible in English). You will run out of yellow marker! You will be surprised at how often this word ‘All’ crops up from start to finish:
- In all wisdom
- With all your heart
- All the people of Israel
- That all may be one
- Christ in all
- Etc. etc.
1. All people need to be saved.
2. All people can be saved.
3. All people can know they are saved.
4. All people can be saved to the uttermost
When all is said and done, the ultimate goal of history, and of our own personal lives and of our communities is straightforward: it is simply that God may be all in all.
But how?
The response by Jesus to a question from a scribe (a type of 1st century Jewish theologian whose role was to interpret and to teach) shows all that we need to know and do in order to be all (whole or holy):
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ (verse 29)
Oddly enough, we sometimes don’t stop and ponder what the meaning of the phrase ‘all your mind’ actually means. It doesn’t mean suspending our God-given human reason to question and deepen our understanding and commitment. To ‘heart’, ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ could be added ‘body’. (Mark and Luke refer, in addition, to ‘all your strength’). In short, we are called to love with all our being – every bit of it.
But to love God – who is all – with all our being means something very concrete, here and now. It means the following:
Love your neighbour as yourself. (verse 31)
In other words, we can only know if our love for God is sincere and meaningful if it is expressed in love for this neighbour in this moment, in this place and in these circumstances. To love is to act based on a desire for what is truly good for our neighbour and for ourselves. We realise our own good through loving. It could actually lead to such heroic deeds as giving up our seat on a bus to someone in particular need (provided that we, ourselves, are not pregnant or infirm!). Then it might involve staying faithful to a commitment or an appointment when this dearly costs. It might even lead ultimately to the giving of our life; not such a rare thing in some parts of the world for people of faith.
In responding to the questioner, Jesus brings together two foundational commandments from the Old Testament:
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength’ (Deuteronomy 6:5)
‘…love your neighbour as yourself.’ (Leviticus 19:18)
The emphasis on loving the other to be found in the sacred scriptures was on ‘loving one’s own’ or more than that, loving the sojourner in our midest (e.g. in Exodus 23:9). On occasions, one or other of the prophets gave clear indications that God’s saving power was for everyone in the world and not exclusively for his own chosen people.
So, there is nothing new at one level – Jesus is merely quoting Jewish scripture. At another level, something new is happening. He is bringing two commandments together and directly linking them by means of a ‘new commandment’ which combines both. In many other places Jesus goes beyond loving the stranger who stays with us but he reaches out to many who are outside our place and tribe such as happened when he met the Samaritan woman. It is the hallmark of real Christianity which would follow much later as the Jesus movement within Judaism evolved into a gathering (ekklesia) of disciples a growing number of whom would be gentiles.
The symbol, power and truth of the Cross is at the centre of Christian loving as revealed in Jesus Christ. The cross has two beams:
- a horizontal one that indicates love for one another (the two thieves on each side of Jesus, for example, as well as the onlooking crowd including immediate family).
- a vertical one that indicates God’s love for us and our love for God.
God is loved in and through our neighbour. But, we love our neighbour for himself or herself and not as an instrument to satisfy our own spiritual needs or impulses. That is the way God wants it. After all God who is in all, loves all wants us to love all with our all.
And that’s not all:
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22:40)
In one swoop Jesus reduces the 613 commandments of the ‘Old Law’ into two commandments not so much by abolishing them all or at once but in rooting then in the essential. His listeners were left speechless.
How we could simplify our lives and our laws and our canon laws and our rules of community if we took to hear the simple truth that underlying ‘all the law’ and the scriptures is the commandment to love God with our all and to do so sincerely by loving the person next to me now.
Very simple. Too simple in fact.
Love is the one thing you cannot overdo. If we risk everything for love we can liberate ourselves from false and dead religion and be conquered by that Love which has loved us from all eternity in the first place.
And that’s all for now!
(words above = 1,040)
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
Further reading: notes and questions, verse by verse
Preliminaries
A ‘scribe’ (it is a ‘pharisee’ in Matthew and a ‘lawyer’ in Luke) questions Jesus about The Law. It is not, as it appears in Matthew and Luke, a hostile line of questioning. The scribe, like us, is struggling to work things out. He knows only too well the controversies of interpretation of the sacred writings in the Jewish world of his time. As Mark tells this story, it follows on from a controversy involving the ‘conservative’ priestly elite known as the Sadducees who had rejected any notion of an after-life or a resurrection (it could be claimed that they were closer to Richard Dawkins than the Pharisees!) and the Pharisees who believed in the resurrection as well as the ‘oral’ Torah (what went beyond the literal words of that part of scripture accepted by the Sadducees. Jesus sided more with the Pharisees.
A type of socratice dialogue opens up in the passage that follows the Sadducee-Pharisee controversy. Jesus draws on a key passage from scripture – the basis of the daily Shema recited by devout Jews then as well as today (Deuteronomy 6:4-9):
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
you shall love your neighbour as yourself
And, here is the key point – he brought both together as distinct but mutually reinforcing and necessary sides of the same coin. In one way, Jesus was not saying or doing anything new. It was all there in the sacred scriptures when God spoke to his chosen people. In another way it was all new because Jesus was restating an Old Commandment and making this very emphatically and very centrally the basis of all other commandments. It was a matter of radically simplified moral theology! It might have seemed that these two commandments entailed loving God first and then our neighbour as an afterthought. Not so. It means loving God with all our being and loving our neighbour as ourselves at one and the same time. Loving God comes first in terms of the order of commandments but loving our neighbour comes first in terms of action because it is in loving our neighbour that we know for sure that we are loving God. God is in our neighbour – poor, excluded, lonely, oppressed and hungry as well as in the next person beside you at this moment on a bus, at a counter, in a queue, online ….
10:28 A Question for Jesus
One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’
This scribe was looking to go deeper. He wanted to know how to get to heaven. But, Jesus will reveal to him in verse 34 that he was already very near the Kingdom of God.
10:29-30 The first and greatest commandment
Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
We may note the repetition of ‘all’. We may, also, note the entirety of being. Loving God is more than saying a prayer, giving intellectual assent or performing particular works. All of that may be good and helpful: even essential for our journey. What is essential to our lives as followers of Jesus is love – love of God with every fibre of our being not because we chose to so much as we became aware in our lives of God’s love already present in our lives simply because God is Love and Love is.
10:31 The second and great commandment
The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’
From hundreds of rules and from thousands of norms that may go with ‘religious’ living there is one Rule that governs our actions and on which all other rules and norms may be based. We may tick all the boxes and put on an impressive liturgy, sermon or piece of theological discourse. But, if we are not living out of the love of God we are just noisy gongs and clanging cymbals (plates of metal used as a musical instrument) (1 Corinthians 13:1).
10:32-33 The scribe gets it
Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”; and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbour as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’
The scribe calls it out just as Jesus says it but, more than that, he makes the message his own. We, too, must make the words of Jesus our own by internalising them, living them and applying them afresh day by day. The Scribe adds a significant detail: Love is more important than ritual sacrifices. Now, that was as radical departure. This may happen when we listen deeply with others in the living current of Christian tradition.
10:34 Here is the Kingdom of God very near
When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.
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