May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
If we look at the passages in Mark’s Gospel that precede today’s Gospel reading, we can see that there were many questions that were being put to Jesus by the chief priests, the scribes and the elders as he walked in the Temple in Jerusalem. They were doing all they could to bring him down by means of questioning. Questions that aimed to undermine his authority and were fired at him, one after the other. They do not comprehend his answers and do not wish to be talked against but they are frightened of how the crowd might respond and so walk away.
In his ‘Expository Thoughts on the Gospel of Mark’, John Ryle writes that these questions are valuable to us because in reading the answers that Jesus gives, we learn something of Jesus himself. We learn that he is the cornerstone that the builders rejected. We are also given a glimpse of God’s ways. Earthly rules must be adhered to as well as giving to God what belongs to him. Regarding questions on the Resurrection, Jesus answers that as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God is the God not of the dead but of the living.
All this, though, baffles and fails to please the priests, scribes and elders. Fails to please them all bar one. One scribe believes that Jesus has given good answers. However, to satisfy himself further he feels prompted to ask the great question: ‘which commandment is the first of all?’ We know from today’s Gospel reading that the resounding answer Jesus gives is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. That is the Great Commandment. He follows this up with the second commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. The scribe understands this well as he appreciates that love is more important than burnt offerings and sacrifices to God.
Does this mean therefore that offerings and sacrifices laid down in the Old Testament are ruled out by the New Testament? According to Jerome’s Biblical Commentary it is not quite clear from the Great Commandment whether this meant a rejection of certain rituals that were part of Jewish law. We might take a cue here from Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew writes that Jesus added the words:
‘on these commandments hang all the law and the prophets’. As Jerome’s Commentary puts it: ‘the laws flow from the love of God and Jesus sees the law as a unified whole’. This unity can be found in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy, where there is a call to the Israelites to obey God’s ten commandments and this is followed by the Great Commandment to love God with heart, soul and might. According to the author of Psalm 119, you are ‘happy if you obey God’s law’.
I would conclude from this that while nothing matters more than love, this does not mean that we ignore our earthly duties that flow from it. As St Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, we are justified by faith, but we are to be subject to governing authorities because the authorities have been instituted by God.
To love God with your heart, soul, mind and strength does not necessarily mean that you are not going to suffer. We know from history that there have been martyrs who have been prepared to die for their faith in a horrible way, showing utter loyalty to God. The Great Commandment requires loyalty in bad times as well as good. As David Pawson writes in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, Jesus is himself loyal to his Disciples. He does not write them off even though after three years they have still not learnt. To bring this loyalty into today’s world, Pawson refers to the marriage vow. It is not ‘when I feel like it’ but ‘I will’.
Our journey, then, to the Kingdom of God is not without some rough terrain. We may sometimes feel that he is far from us when we are in pain and despair but if we adhere to the Great Commandment and the second commandment, even when times are hard, then we have the assurance that Jesus gives to the scribe that we, too, are not far from the Kingdom of God. As Tom Wright expresses it in his book ‘Simply Christian’, God’s love for the world calls for an answering love from us’.
It is not always easy to answer the call. There are hostilities, distractions and rejections that block our path to the Kingdom of God. There are sorrows and losses, disappointments and anxieties. These are the product of fear and it is fear that sends the unbelieving scribes, priest and elders away from Jesus. So we need to try not to let fear rule our hearts but be ruled by the unconditional love of God who loved us so much that he gave his only Son Jesus to die on the Cross for us.
One person who understood what that unconditional love meant was the Minister and activist, Martin Luther King, who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. According to the reflection on his philosophy by Alexandra Drakeford, he spoke of this love as the love of God working in the minds of men. Drakeford writes that what made him so extraordinary and committed to love was his ability to humble his mind and open his heart to God’s standard of love. This, despite the hatred he received. So, she writes, we need also to humble ourselves before God and to humble ourselves because of his glory not because of our feelings. We need to embrace the humility before God that Dr King did and love one another the way God loves us.
AMEN