Mark 12:28-34
Prior to this passage, Mark has been describing a series of disputes between Jesus and members of the religious establishment: temple officials, teachers, and legal scholars, usually translated as “lawyers.” They weren’t lawyers in our modern sense, but were experts in the law of Moses.
In this passage a lawyer has been listening to Jesus’ teachings. Contrary to many of his peers, he likes what he’s heard. So he asks Jesus a question. He asks, “which commandment is the most important?”
Unlike some other questioners, he’s not asking this to trap Jesus. He sincerely wants to know what Jesus thinks. The rabbis considered that there were 613 commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament. Some taught that there was one command that was the greatest, and they had different ideas about which one that was. The lawyer was asking which command in Jesus’ view was the most important.
Jesus replies, “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.” He then gives the second most important command: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus says that these two commands — love of God and love of neighbor —are greater than all the others. We know from other passages that Jesus defined love of neighbor in the broadest of terms, as love for our fellow human being who needs us.
The lawyer responds that he agrees with Jesus, and he adds that loving God and others “is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” He understands the implication of Jesus’ teaching — that the Jerusalem temple, the priesthood and entire system of sacrificial offerings were on their way out. God’s Reign is near and what matters in the Kingdom of God is love: loving God and loving others.
For many of the religious leaders of that time the most important part of relating to God was the Temple worship. For many Christians today, as well, the priority is on religious rituals and disciplines, styles of worship, doctrinal correctness. These things have their importance if they are expressions of our love.
Because the essential heart of faith is loving God with all that we are and have, and loving our fellow human beings as we love ourselves. The Apostle Paul writes, “If I have faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” However religious someone may be or feel, whatever religious activities they may be involved in, it is love that makes us genuine followers of Jesus.
Now it can be confusing to understand how God’s commands fit into a life of faith. When Jesus commands us to love God and others, he doesn’t mean that we have to earn the right to a relationship with God. That we have to be a loving person before God will accept us. That’s not what Jesus is saying.
We enter a relationship with God in Jesus by saying “yes” to God. By entrusting our lives to Jesus just as we are, unloving as we may be, with all our sins and shortcomings.
As the old hymn says, “Just as I am, and waiting not, to rid my soul of one vile blot; to Thee whose blood can cleanse each spot, Oh Lamb of God, I come! Just as I am, Thou will receive, will welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve. O Lamb of God, I come!”
It is after we have a relationship with God, united with God by faith, that the commands to love become vital for us. Because then God will work within us to increase our capacity to love God and others.
One of my mentors in Christ, whose name was Jim, came to faith in Jesus as a young man in his 20s in the 1920s. As a new believer he began to feel that God was calling him to be a pastor and missionary. But there was a problem. He was a virulent racist. He had begun a relationship with God, and called to ministry, but he hated Black people.
One night he had a vivid dream, a vision from God. It was a vision of life in the Kingdom of God. In his vision he saw people of every color and tone of skin. They were together as a brothers and sisters in loving fellowship. Jim heard a loud voice of an angel cry out, “there’s no segregation here!” No segregation or racism or hatred in God’s kingdom.
Jim woke up the next morning with his feeling of hatred gone. God had dissolved it. Eventually Jim and his wife became missionaries to Jamaica, working closely with Jamaicans with love and mutual respect to establish new churches.
We can’t love like Jesus loves in our own strength. But God empowers us to grow in Christ-like love. Not usually as dramatically as in the case of Jim’s racism. But over time as we mature in faith, we will grow in love.
Loving God and loving others – the two great commands — are inseparable. It’s impossible to divide them. In Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, he says that when we show compassion for the hungry, the homeless, and sick, that we are showing compassion for him. When we actively love others, especially those most in need, we are expressing love for God.
I’ve told the story before from the Hasidic Jewish tradition in which a rabbi finds a leper covered completely with sores sitting in a miserable hovel. He starts spending day after day sitting with him. Each day all day sitting with this leprous man covered with horrific sores and rotting hands and feet.
After a while, other people ask him, why are you staying all the time with that miserable leper? The rabbi replied, “Don’t you know, that’s the Messiah. As Isaiah tells us, ‘He had no stately form or majesty and was despised and rejected by mankind.”
The rabbi understood that in loving the least worthy, the most desolate of his fellow human beings, that he was loving the Messiah, he was loving God. That’s the point of the story. When we love our neighbor in need, we are expressing love for God.
The inverse is also true: as we love God first in our lives, we will have more love for others, not less. We’ll have more love for our wives, husbands, children, friends, neighbors, even our enemies. Love for God and for others are not in competition with each other. They are almost the same thing.
It’s important to be clear about what love doesn’t mean. Love doesn’t mean always doing what somebody else wants us to do. Love doesn’t mean ignoring our own needs. Christ-like love is guided in wisdom by prayer and the Holy Spirit. Sometimes love has to be tough love. Sometimes love means saying no. Sometimes it means separating oneself from someone who is abusive. But love always wants what is truly good for the other person.
Today we’re talking about love. Not just any kind of love, but the self-giving love that we see in Jesus, unselfish love for God and for others. Love especially for the person who needs us.
In commanding us to love, Jesus doesn’t ask us to do something he hasn’t done himself. Jesus loves us and gave himself for us, even to death on a cross. We can grow in love, Scripture says, because God first loved us.
Let me close with a quote from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the American civil rights movement, a Nobel Peace prize winner who inspired people all around the world.
You may know that in the course of his work for civil rights Dr. King was jailed multiple times for non-violent protests. He was threatened, beaten, knifed, shot at, and ultimately, at 39 years old, killed.
In the early years of his ministry Dr. King had a powerful experience of God speaking personally to him, telling him to carry on with his work and not to be afraid. A decade later he explained to a church gathering why he was speaking out for racial justice and poverty alleviation. As he thought back on his early encounter with God, he said:
“I choose to identify with the underprivileged, with the poor and hungry. If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way. If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way. If it means dying, I’m going that way. I’m going that way because I heard a voice saying, ‘Do something for others.’”
Brothers and sisters, we probably won’t be called to make the ultimate sacrifice that Dr. King made. But God is speaking to all of us, saying, “Do something for others.”
Marty Shupack, November 2024