Read Mark 12: 28 – 34 – The First Commandment

Jesus is now in Jerusalem, and it’s the week leading up to the Passover.  Jesus has already caused a stir, acting against the money-changers and traders by turning the tables over in the Temple courtyard.  And he continues to draw a crowd and attract the attention of the Jewish authorities who continually try to back him into a corner.  Jesus unites members of very different Jewish factions in their opposition to him!

He’s approached in the Temple (where he’s been speaking at some length) by a scribe, one of the ‘professional’, ‘official’ teachers and interpreters of Moses’ Law.

But this scribe seems more sympathetic. He’s overheard Jesus’ arguments with Pharisees and Sadducees and wants to know which of the more than 600 laws of Moses is the key, so to speak, that unlocks the meaning of the whole.

Jesus brings together Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 5, the Shema, and Leviticus chapter 19 verse 18 the ‘holiness code’, reminding the Jewish lawmakers that true Holiness shows itself in love, not separation.  Jesus is fusing together love for God and love for neighbour.

Unlike the Pharisees, who applied the law to the fine details of daily life in order to forge a strongly separatist identity for God’s people, Jesus prefers the broad-brush approach.

Love for God and neighbour are the loving, human responses to a loving divine choice. Jesus sets out an alternative vision of Israel’s identity, one that binds the whole community together, rather than allowing it to fracture along the fault lines of status, privilege and race.

Wholehearted love for God translates into love for neighbour, and creates community in the face of all that promotes separateness, a sectarian mentality and separatist practices, both within God’s people and between Israel and the wider world.

In the Old Testament (eg. Leviticus) your neighbour is described, not only as ‘anyone of your kin’, but also includes ‘the poor and the alien’ (ie the foreigner) who are to benefit from the harvest.  Israelites weren’t to glean right to the edges of the field but leave the crop there for ‘foreigners’ to gather.

This conversation is the inspiration for Jesus’ parable about the compassionate foreigner (the ‘good Samaritan’ told in Luke’s Gospel).

Notice the scribe’s affinity towards Jesus’ teaching, and Jesus’ reciprocation in warmly endorsing the scribe’s wisdom.  Jesus acknowledges that the scribe is ‘not far from the kingdom of God’ because he seems to understand what God desires most.

Like the prophets Jeremiah and Amos, Jesus recognises the delusions of misplaced religious devotion of sacrifices and ritual.

By replaying Jesus’ answer this scribe shows that he is impressed with Jesus, unlike others we have met earlier in Mark’s Gospel!

Jesus distils the Shema (Deuteronomy 6: ⁴ Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. ⁵ You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might) to first principles.  As the scribe listens, he realises that what Jesus is pointing to is not keeping the law by rote, nor even using it to provide a framework for ethical behaviour.  Rather, it is about becoming people shaped by their relationship to Jesus, whose life demonstrates what those principles demand from us and from all Jewish people.

We also shouldn’t lose sight of the significance of the location of their discussion – in the Temple Courts, with its different areas for men, women and non-Jews – the separatist vision of holiness literally set in stone.  Remember that Jesus told the money-changers and traders that the Temple was to be a house of prayer for ALL nations – everyone, regardless of gender or faith.

Neither Jesus nor the scribe mentions those parts of Moses’ law that divide people according to the accidents of race, or the habits of observance (like circumcision) and the rules around food and the Sabbath.  The love advocated by Moses, interpreted by Jesus and the scribe, is costly and demanding, as it sets out to renew and transform any world order or ideal that takes difference and distance as its default positions.  So, we should not overlook the present-day unscriptural warring of Israel with her neighbours.  Jesus wept over Jerusalem – and still weeps.

Jesus’ interpretation of the law of Moses refines his re-ordering of the world in readiness for the coming of God’s kingdom. Reflect back on the Beatitudes in Mark’s Gospel, ch 5.

Faith and prayer are the weapons Jesus recommends. Listening and attentiveness are the dispositions God requires.  Wholehearted and all-embracing love informs and shapes the liberating service Jesus offers to all humankind.

And he asks us to do likewise.

Rev Janine