The Greatest Commandment doesn’t answer a question: it responds to it. Which makes this a story of embodied love.
Becoming and Believing
Proper 26B | Mark 12:28-34
What is the first commandment? Such a simple question. Easy.
We simply go to the Ten Commandments and name the first one.
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”
–Exodus 20:2-3
Or we can try to summarize it to say that the first commandment is to put God first.
But that isn’t what Jesus does.
He responds with a prayer.
The Sh’ma.
“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.”
This isn’t just any prayer. This is the prayer. The one everyone knows because they pray it every day. It is beyond fundamental.
And it is not communicating precisely the same things as the first commandment.
So what are the commandments communicating?
Well, there is one god: God. And you are to love God with everything you’ve got. Which totally tracks. Then they talk about not using God’s name to swear oaths, keeping the Sabbath holy, and not doing things that break community.
We all hear Jesus’s response to the scribe and go yeah, if I were trying to sum up the central theme of what God is about, I’d use just about the same words. It doesn’t just make sense, it also accurately sums up the underlying current of the commandments: love God first and treat your neighbor as if they were as valuable to God as you hope to be. So yeah: love God, love neighbor.
This sounds right.
But it doesn’t really sound like what the scribe is asking for.
It sounds like he’s the department chair confronting Jesus about his dissertation. God has given us well over 500 laws, which is first among them all? He’s not speaking chronologically. He wants Jesus to name the greatest commandment like he’s supposed to name the best rock song of all time. Use your expertise to name something that can’t possibly be objective.
It is a fundamentally academic pursuit of logic and argumentation.
And, we recall, it is little different than the disciples arguing amongst themselves about which of them is the greatest disciple. Or, as we heard two weeks ago, James and John demanding a special place in Jesus’s army.
This is why seeing Jesus respond with a prayer is so significant. He isn’t answering a question because there can be no true answer.
Instead, Jesus responds with a prayer. A prayer that is completely familiar and central to their practice of faith. While the scribe is asking an academic question, Jesus offers a practical response.
This speaks to the heart of faith.
We try to take Jesus’s response as if it is an answer! As if he has given the “right” answer when Jesus has instead turned the story around.
The story presents like a scribe confronting Jesus, but it is actually a story of Jesus teaching the scribe and his followers.
Jesus brings us all, not to which commandment is most important, but to invite us to winder: what is God up to in the world?
So God is revealed in Scripture, yes. And in prayer. And in community, fellowship, and learning. God isn’t a thing to learn about but the ground of our being and the means of restoration. Recall that God is love.
Jesus responds with prayer and pulls in a teaching from later in the Torah, from the book of Leviticus, a teaching that fleshes out what God is up to—quite literally.
Because God’s work is enfleshed in us.
And this is when we know the story is not about an objective truth about God because the scribe shares back what he has heard from Jesus. It’s a technique called mirroring (here’s what I hear you saying). And the scribe mirrors Jesus and says he’s got it right. But he doesn’t stop there. He shows Jesus why this is the right formula:
He uses his own words to describe the project.
“this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
In other words, the project isn’t about rules, order, or getting it all “right.” It isn’t about the “right” answer!
And then it says
“Jesus saw that he answered wisely”
He doesn’t evaluate the man or project correctness on his answer: he sees wisdom in the scribe’s response.
And Jesus responds to the scribe
“You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
Because the scribe is no longer thinking in frameworks and certainty. He is displaying the generous character of the kin-dom.
We are witnessing his transformation! And therefore, we can learn and change too.
Becoming
I love this story, but it doesn’t leave us with an obvious call-to-action. This is a middle moment that displays something real: about Jesus and God’s great project, yes. But also about us and our experience of faith.
It forces us to reexamine our certainties, analysis, judgment. How we seek to grade and rank everything. How we center belief in a process of agreeing to concepts rather than experiencing God’s joy in all of creation.
In this way, the evangelist we call Mark is inviting us to interrogate ourselves and our own expectations. That we might turn from “belief that” toward “belief in”. Belief in God as God believes in us. And quite like I believe in my kids. They do so many amazing things. How I believe in you.
This flips everything upside down.
Belief becomes creative. We can make new things. Not by believing harder or righter, but by believing in this beautiful world and in everything it is truly capable of.
This is also the best part of Halloween.
We play make believe. We dress up and haunt our neighborhood: some become grotesque monsters, both imagined and real, and others become heroes who embody the bravery of myth and hope.
We get to laugh at death knowing it cannot contain the work of God.
So we gather on this All Hallow’s Eve with a spirit of creative play. To embrace the way our community comes together to welcome total strangers asking for treats, to honor the spirit of becoming something new and different and straight out of our imaginations, and to spread the joyful freedom in knowing that death is not the end.
We remember that today is for life so tomorrow we might honor the lives of others.