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Often times
in Mark’s Gospel religious leaders question Jesus in order to trip him up;
to make their own point; to catch Jesus out;
to prove Jesus wrong; to stir up some real or
imagined controversy. Just read the earlier sections in
Chapter 12! Jesus
relates a parable about the Watergate Vineyard, an indictment of the failed
religious leaders, and they get the message and
send in the attack dogs! It reads a lot like our current political season;
the first question posed to Jesus is about taxation policy.
Should we pay taxes to Caesar? In a clever retort backed up by a
PowerPoint presentation on 1st Century Judean coinage,
Jesus asserts that what is more important than what we give to Caesar is
what it is we give to God! This from the Pharisees and the Herodians...
a group of folks in hick to the Roman army of occupation!
There then follows a question about marriage; an
unlikely tale, a tale worthy of M. Night Shyamalan -
a horror story of sorts: seven brothers who all
end up marrying the same woman, one after the other. She must have owned the
Jerusalem franchise for anti-freeze! This quite remarkable woman sees off
all her husbands. She
outlasts them all, she survives the craziness of seven husbands.
She deserves a medal,
but instead the question posed to Jesus is,
"Whose wife will she be in heaven?"
All this from the Saducees, a group of theologians
who had long ago given up on any belief in the after-life!
In the
section we read today
however, the scribe who questions Jesus does not ask a tired old trick
question of such vein as, “If God created Adam and
Eve, who created God?” or “How many angels can balance on the head of a
pin?” Nor is he motivated it seems by anything other than the desire to
understand who Jesus was and what it was Jesus was teaching! No, this man
has a much better attitude. Specifically
he wants to know Jesus’ position on the fundamentals.
He asks about the basics, the foundation on which
faith can be built. And
unlike the Jeopardy replies that Jesus so often gives, answering a question
or a statement with a question, this time Jesus
speaks very succinctly and clearly.
The answer Jesus provides would likely have confused His more hostile
questioners because it is a surprisingly orthodox answer for its time. Many
Jewish texts repeat the formula that the fundamentals are:
God is one, love God, and love your neighbor. But this was Jesus’ answer,
not destined to make the headlines in the Jerusalem Theological Journal of
Post-Modern Apocalyptic Existentialism, but a
straight forward, no nonsense Declaration of Faith:
Love God, Love your neighbor!
Such a belief is the best beginning for any proper understanding of the
Jewish faith. Love God, Love your neighbor is what the Hebrew
Scriptures are all about. Love God, Love your neighbor and don’t separate
the two is the standard to which Israel is called by all its prophets,
including Jesus! Love God, love your neighbor is the message Jesus
will live and proclaim.
In the midst of a culture crowded with all kinds of gods, Judaism was
distinctive in its insistence that God was one. In community,
the followers of Judaism remained faithful to this belief, and practiced
care for the orphan, the widow, and the destitute. This two fold love:
love for God, the one God, and love for the needy define the purpose
and indeed the continued existence of this community.
It is no surprise then when the scribe concurs
with Jesus. We can
imagine the wheels turning in his head, saying to himself, “From what I had
been told this guy, Jesus was a heretic and yet when I hear him speak, he
upholds the very foundations of our faith! What is all the fuss about?”
The fuss, of course, was that Jesus was deaf and blind to class, deaf and
blind to gender, deaf and blind to religious, social and ethnic boundaries.
Jesus actually believed and lived this teaching, these commands,
that loving God meant that that all human beings,
all human beings,
were his neighbors. This belief set Jesus apart from and extended the truth
of His Jewish faith, and eventually it would be this very belief and Jesus’
living of it that would see Jesus nailed to a cross.
It is helpful in facing such an incident to see Jesus as standing firmly
rooted in the prophetic Jewish tradition; a
tradition that was not about being private and exclusive,
but was all about community! Jesus was always with people, only
rarely did Jesus take Himself off on His own. Whenever Jesus traveled,
people would accompany Him. Wherever
Jesus entered into a town or a village, people gathered to be close to
Jesus. Jesus was a Jewish prophet before Jesus was a Christian prophet.
Jesus was all about discovering the presence of God in community. Jesus,
Immanuel, God with us,
moves beyond burnt-offerings and sacrifices, the
rituals of that time, to the very heart of faith:
loving God and loving others.
Still today, Jesus the prophet, as well as Jesus the Lord, comes to us and
any who seek to claim or declare faith, saying that real believing must take
us past any and all of the rituals of our faith;
to the heart of loving God with all our passion and prayer and
intelligence and energy and loving our neighbor as well as we love
ourselves.
We are to love God with all of our heart, and with all our soul, and with
all our mind, and with all our strength.
We are to love God with all our HEART, we are to love with our
feelings and with feeling, but we are also to love from the heart:
the very seat of our identity. Made in the image of God, created by
God, our lives held by God, we are to love God with and in every fiber of
who we are.
We are to love God with all our SOUL, with who we are as spiritual
beings. Designed to best live and function in partnership with God, we are
to seek always to live with an open sense of constant, conscious contact
with God.
We are to love God with all our MIND, with our minds, with
all
our minds. Our thoughts, attitudes and thinking patterns are shaped by love
of God and love for God, leading to the ability to be transformed:
seeing and glimpsing our understanding of God and acting upon what we have
learned.
We are to love God with all our STRENGTH, the strength of our
physical being, to be there for God physically present and available to
God. To be with God in the same way as when we say to someone whom we love,
“I will be there for you; I am here for you!” As they struggle,
you become physically present for that person; in
the doctor’s office, in the recovery room, at the funeral home, in the
courtroom. To be there for God is to be God's person in the world around
you.
Many of us might ask, "How
can we not love God, after all that God has done and given to us?"
We affirm that we wouldn’t be alive and here today if it weren’t’ for God!
We identify God as the
One
who brings us beauty of this and every day, who shares with us the gracious
love given in Jesus Christ! Why would we not want to love God with
everything we have? And yet…. we know just how
easily swayed we are, and tempted and twisted and stubborn, just how quickly
our attention wanders on to other things, how often our focus shifts from
big “G” God to other small “g” gods!
Loving God in such a way requires that we love our neighbor as we love
ourselves. Loving God utterly, inevitably throws us together with other
people whom we are required to embrace lovingly. Loving God totally and
completely requires that we love all of God’s creation...
yes, even the Yellow Jackets and the Bulldogs and the fetid Buckeyes and the
rest and them all! And remember that when Jesus
was asked to define whom He thought of as His neighbor, Jesus told a story
identifying the Samaritan, the outsider, the outcast, the despised, the one
normally profiled at the airport, the alien in our midst, as our neighbor.
This sermon will in fact only conclude today when you get home. When you get
home, I invite you to search around your home for the doors, of any and
every size and shape. As you identify each door, look and see how many
hinges it has. Your mission, if you choose to
accept it: In the next ten seconds,
see if you can find any door that has only one hinge!
Why hinges you ask? Why doors? Well I want to hold onto the experience of
this day: that Jesus in these verses has opened up
a door for all of us to the very center of what it means to live our
faith. By the DOING of these commands,
we are taken to the very heart and soul of the life we are being asked to
live! I suggest to you that these two commands:
Love God, Love your Neighbor are the two hinges that balance the door
through which we are asked to walk in faith and obedience.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul and you
shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. We call this the golden rule
in the sense that it is of greatest value. It is also the slightly mis-spelled
goalden rule because here is the true focus, the correct aim, the
proper trajectory for our lives - our goal:
Loving God and Loving our Neighbor! Amen. |
