PROPER 26, YEAR B

Sunday, October 31, 2021

Saint Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Mark 12:28-34

This morning’s Gospel gives us Saint Mark’s version of what is known as the Great Commandment. A scribe asks our Lord: “Which Commandment is the first of all?” It was a common question among the rabbis of that time: which of all the hundreds of commandments in the Jewish Law stands first in importance as summing up and interpreting all the rest?

 

In his response, our Lord gives not one text from the Torah but two. First, he quotes the text from Deuteronomy 6:5 known as the Shema, recited daily by pious Jews, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and 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.” But to this he joins a second text from Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  

According to some commentators, this answer differed significantly from many other answers given by various priests, scribes, and rabbis. Some argued that keeping the Sabbath was the most important commandment; others that it was circumcision; others that it was the offering of the Temple sacrifices. 

But still, at least some teachers gave answers like the one Jesus gave. A gentile who wanted to become a Jew once asked the great rabbi Hillel the Elder, who lived in the first century BC, for a concise summation of the Torah. Hillel answered: “What is hateful to thee, do not do unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law, the rest is commentary; go and learn.” Likewise, the rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, who lived in the early second century, described the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” the most important principle of Judaism.

The great genius of our Lord’s response, however, was to join these two verses together: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God …” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” To my knowledge, none of the other Jewish teachers of the time made this move. So together, these two commandments passed into the Christian tradition as the Summary of the Law, Matthew’s version of which we recite at the beginning of almost every Rite I Mass.

As any of the kids who’ve been through my one of my Confirmation classes can tell you, the Summary of the Law furnishes the two headings under which the Ten Commandments are arranged. Commandments 1 through 4 tell us what it means to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength: namely, You shall have no other Gods before me; you shall not worship idols; you shall not take the Lord’s name in vain; keep holy the Sabbath day. 

And Commandments 5 through 10 explain what it means to  love your neighbor as yourself: Honor your father and mother; Do not commit murder; Do not commit adultery; Do not steal; Do not bear false witness; Do not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor. 

Under the subheadings of each of the Ten Commandments, Christian ethicists have extrapolated many more principles and precepts of moral behavior. But in the end, they all fall under the wide umbrella of our Lord’s Summary of the Law: Love God; Love your neighbor.

A key message for us is that Christian discipleship isn’t ultimately about obeying rules: It’s about love; or, more precisely, about learning to love the right things in the right way in the right order. Love is at the heart of the Gospel. As Saint John says, “God is love.” In his life, death, and resurrection, Christ reveals and manifests the depth of God’s love for his creation. Through baptism, and participation in the Church’s sacramental life, we’re engrafted into Christ’s Body so that his life becomes our life; we live in him, and he lives in us. It follows that his life becomes manifest in us precisely insofar as we learn to love as he loves. Indeed, as the early Church Fathers pointed out, Christ alone has perfectly fulfilled his own commandment: loving God with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength; and loving his neighbor as himself. In John’s Gospel, Jesus calls us to imitate him in fulfilling this command: “Love one another, as I have loved you.”

And so, when we’re contemplating the ethics of one course of action versus another, a key question is whether the action we’re considering adequately expresses our love for God and love for our neighbor. Or does it place, say, the love of self or of some created commodity in place of both? That’s a fairly simple test; and a question that we all can benefit from asking ourselves periodically.

The Jewish rabbis whose sayings are recorded in the Mishnah and the Talmud agreed that we love God by behaving in such a way that brings honor to God in the sight of our fellow creatures. One way in which we express our love for both God and our neighbor is by regular attendance at worship. Even before we kneel in Church and say our prayers, the very effort of getting up and getting to Mass is a visible and tangible expression of our love for God, a public testimony to God’s place in our lives. Moreover, it expresses our love for our neighbor because, believe it or not, when we come to Mass we give encouragement and support to our fellow worshipers, many of whom are more glad to see us than we ever realize, and conversely are disappointed when they don’t see us.

The genius of our Lord’s Summary of the Law is his joining together of two commandments that really are inseparable. We cannot love God adequately without loving our neighbor. But neither can we love our neighbor adequately without loving God. Some years ago, a couple told me they were going to stop coming to church because they felt that their time and money would be better spent helping those in need, for example, by contributing to the local food bank. On reflection, they got the second half of the Summary of the Law, and they got it right: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But they were missing the first half: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. As Christians, we’re not given the option of picking one or the other. We’re called to do both.