Doing Love, Mark 12:28-34
One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that Jesus answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one; you shall love your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘God is one, and besides God there is no other’; and ‘to love God with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ – this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 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. Mark 12:28-34.
I was walking with a friend one day through the park and there was some kind of wild family picnic going on. There were people drunk all over the place, beer bottles strewn all over the lawn, lots of screaming, and a few kids destroying one of the garbage cans. My friend and I just stood there looking at the drunken mayhem and he said to me. “Herb, do you know what I think is the ultimate proof of Jesus’ divinity?” No, I said, “What is the ultimate proof of Jesus’ divinity?” He said, “It’s that verse where it says, “Jesus looked upon the multitudes and had compassion.” When I read that, I know how utterly different Jesus was form me.I look at these multitudes and want to utterly obliterate them.”
In today’s’ lesson, Jesus gives us the irreducible Great Commandments, the bottom line of our faith. These two commandments take such a central role in the life of the church that they are assigned to be read every year, which makes preaching on them particularly difficult. How do I offer something fresh? With commandments so big and all-encompassing, how does one craft a sermon that is not like a soufflé -rising enthusiastically to great heights but full of air.
While I find the lesson difficult to preach on, it’s very refreshing. If you work with any organization for some time you will discover that the innate tendency is to regulate. As each conflict or crisis arises, a new rule is put in place to address it, and eventually things get overly complicated. Religion is notorious in this regard. Christianity is full of a tangle of opinions, doctrines and rules. Let’s be clear that it was nothing particularly unique to Judaism.If you work with rules for any length of time you soon come to realize that you can’t remember them all, and often one comes in conflict with another. And so, it’s crucial to know which is more important. Figuring that out also makes things far easier to remember. Why bother remembering “You shall not steal goats, you shall not steal cows, you shall not stead your neighbor wife,” when you can simply remember, “You shall not steal.”
Now, I like to give credit where credit is due and point out that Jesus’ answer to the question, “which commandment is first of all,”was not particularly unique.We have proof that Rabbis long before Jesus worked hard at trying to keep things in perspective and not stray from the center. There was a long tradition of trying to boil things down to their essence.It is out of that tradition that the scribe probably asked his question. And, we have evidence that Rabbis before Jesus had already scotch- taped two pieces of Torah together- the Schema, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your…” with Leviticus 19:18, “you shall love your neighbor or as yourself.”Jesus wasn’t doing anything novel but was placing himself well within the center of his religious tradition.
But even our Judeo-Christian heritage has no monopoly. Confucius said, “Do onto others what you would not they should do unto you.” Buddhist writings include the statement, “Hurt no other with that which pains yourself.” Islam says, “No one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves from himself.” So. loving your neighbor as yourself is not in any way exclusively Christian. But to say that there is nothing uniquely Christian is not to suggest that it is any less profound.
It’s a breath of fresh air when Jesus says it can all be reduced two these things.The question for me is what does it mean to love God? It’s difficult enough to love those we can see and touch, but how do we love what is Spirit? Do you love God? If so, what do you mean by saying so?
I suspect thatthere is nothing really mysterious about a relationship with God, it is very much like a human relationship.It requires intentionality, paying attention to the relationship. If you have ever been in a relationship, you know that it requires constant attention to nurture it and keep it going. You have to spend some quality time with the other. Spending one hour on Saturday afternoon is not going to nourish love. Never eating together, never taking time to share your stories, is not going to nurture love.One has to intentionally take time.
With God, we can pay attention to the relationship by regular prayer, meditation, worship, retreats, pilgrimages, study, journalizing, reading over the scriptures meditatively.We can’t presume to be in love with God without drinking form the deep well spiritual disciplines. We require a plan for our lives, incorporating special practices that care for the relationship.And dare I say that an hour and 15 minutes on Sunday morning is not a love affair, it is a meeting for an occasional cup of coffee.. The more we pay attention to the relationship, the more it deepens.
Loving God also means loving that which God love. When I am in love with someone, I suddenly find myself being in love with that which they are in love with, except for dirty dishes in the sink. I fall in love and the next thing I know I’m sitting a watching college basketball. I hate basketball! But because my partner loves it, it slowly becomesa love of mine. It’s the same with God. Spend some time with God, spend some time pouring over the Gospels, and you will discover what God loves- things like mercy, forgiveness, giving oneself beyond the call of duty, justice. The poor and people on the fringes seem to have a special place in God’s heart.
The second commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. Love of God and love of neighbor are twins. I don’t know about you, but the second commandment, is much more difficult. As one of my professors once said, “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.” Dealing with the real, live, particular people around us is a challenge. First of all because I have my own limitations, shortcoming, and failures I bring to the table, and then I bump into those shortcomings in others.
I think Frederick Buechner is right when he suggests that the love that Jesus is referring to isn’t just a nice, warm, romantic feeling towards the other. You can’t command that, although you can cultivate that. And those warm feelings are fickle, they easily induced and manipulated and can very quickly disappear.
Buechner says, “In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling…on the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being, even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end.” ( Wishful thinking , pg. 65) In this sense I think you can even lover someone without likening them very much. We can continue to work and pray for their well-being.
And the kind of love we are talking aboutisn’t always a soft virtue, it can sometimes have an edge to it.“When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn’t say, “There, there. Everything is going to be all right.” He said, “You brood of vipers! how can you speak good when you are evil!” “ But Jesus said that to them because he loved them and wanted them to know fullness of life. Although that kind of loving moment should be rare.I think the guidelines for Renovare Spiritual Development Groups puts it well:
Encourage whenever we can.
Advise once in a great while.
Rebuke only when necessary.
Condemn never.
Fred Craddock tells the story of a mule his family owned when he was a boy. The mule didn't have a name; they just called it "the red mule." The fences around Fred's home were poor, and the mule would get out, and it was Fred's job to find the red mule and bring it back. This would invariably involve going up over a hill, across the back wood, to the old family cemetery. This was one of those cemeteries with leaning headstones and graves going back to the 1700's. There was a thick carpet of pine needles on the groundso that you couldn't see which way the graves were laid out; the crooked headstones weren't much help. Fred hated going through that creepy cemetery, but he had no choice. To make matters worse, his Mom told him, "When you go through the cemetery, make sure you don't step on the graves. Graves are sacred ground, so don't you go steppin' on 'em." He said that he must have looked ridiculous tiptoeing and taking long and short steps trying to avoid stepping on the sacred ground. He would also whistle and make noises to convince himself that he wasn't afraid. He went home one day and told his mama, "I just can't tell what part is sacred. And his mama said, "Well, I know, it looks the same. But if you'll just treat it all as sacred, you'll never miss." (Craddock Stories) If we treat the other as sacred, we will rarely miss.
I also just want to mention that theGreat Commandments can also be used as our guide toBiblical interpretation. Biblical stories are often filled with less than perfect characters and some of the statements written by our forebears reflect the prejudices, shortcomings and shortsightedness of their writers.When we read those stories we can ask ourselves the questions, how does this passage square with loving God and neighbor, because that is our interpretive lens through which everything else is to be seen.
But one thing that is clear from today’s story, knowing the right answer, or agreeing with the right answer is not enough. When the scribe agrees on the correct answer, Jesus says to the scribe “you are not far from the kingdom of God.”You are not far! The scribe is lacking something.As important as the right answer are ultimately it is the living and doing that matter.
Knowing that we are to love God and neighbor is not the same thing as helping a dying friends to lift her fork so she can eat her supper. Knowing the right answer is not helping to repair a house or sending money to Darfur. Being able to site the great commandments is not sending letters to Congress or visiting the prisoner, or joining in a protest march.
We can’t simply believe God is love, or have faith in love, or recite the word love. The rubber hits the road when we bring those words to life. Will you fumble along with me in struggling to do love? It’s when we do love that we truly live.