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“The Great Commandment”
Mark 12:28-24
Jeremiah 31:7-9
A Sermon Preached by the
Rev. Douglas M, Donley
I enjoy reading the Star Tribune
Faith and Values section on Saturdays. I
especially like the relatively new section called “believer”. This is the section that has someone talking
about their faith. It has their favorite
song, scripture and a few sentences about what they believe and why. This is a hard one to nail down. Imagine putting all of your beliefs into a
few sentences.
The great neorthodox
theologian Karl Barth wrote volumes about the minutia
of theology. It was like a James Joyce
novel, pages of single paragraphs filled with run-on sentences. We had to slog through it all in seminary. When he was asked to sum up all of his work,
he said two things that I remember. The
first is that theology needs to be done with the Bible in one hand and a
newspaper in the other. The other thing
he said was that all he believed could be summed up by this statement, “Jesus
loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Think about what you might keep as
your favorite scripture verse.
Some might say that the most
important thing in the entire world is the Great Commission found in Matthew
28: “Go Ye into
all the world and preach my Gospel to every creature, making disciples of all
the nations.” This is the mantra of the church
growth movement. On the positive side,
this spreads the good news of the liberating message of Jesus Christ. The missionary movement that we support
through this month’s World Mission Offering is born out of the Great
Commission. The down side of folks that
are focused on the Great commission is that it can live by the mantra that says
more people equals more holiness. This
is a belief that too often makes people Christians by saying the magic words without
making them disciples by doing the miraculous deeds of Christian duty. It may pad the books of the church roles and
make for successful church programs, but it can also be market-based and
numbers obsessed. And yet it is willing
to risk telling the story of the faith in a compelling way. It is truly trying to be holy. This is the Great Commission.
Then there is the Great
Criteria. This is found in Matthew 25
where it talks about whenever you have done it unto the least of these who are
my sisters and brothers you have done it unto me. This is the criteria that say we have to
visit the sick. We have to clothe the
naked. We have to feed the hungry. We have to bring good news to the poor and
visit those in prison. We have to lead
around the blind. This is very
important.
I like what Jim Wallis from the
Sojourners community says about the Great Criteria. “The Great Criteria is not about right
doctrine or good theology, not about personal piety or sexual ethics, not about
church leadership or about success in ministry.
It is about how we treat the most vulnerable people in our society, whom
Jesus calls the “least of these.” The
Great Criteria is about how we treat the poor.”
Whole social programs and justice
movements have grown out of the Great Criteria.
This has served to be a check on the Great Commission people by saying
it can’t only be about bringing more people in, but that all people must be brought
in, especially the poor and the lame and the outcast. This is the Great Criteria. This is what Vatican II called the
preferential option for the poor. God
has a special place in her heart for the poor and the outcast. This is the Great Criteria.
Then there is the Great Commandment
found in today’s scripture reading. I
think this is where I would find myself, were I to be answering the question in
the Star Tribune about what I believed most thoroughly.
You shall love the Lord, Your God with all your heart,
strength, mind and might and you shall love your neighbor as yourself is a
straightforward focal point on the essence of what it is to be a
Christian. This is the great commandment
(or great commandments).
Let’s set the context.
Jesus is being challenged left and right. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes,
they were all trying to trap him. They
didn’t like his following. They thought
they might be able to catch him in a contradiction or at least a sound bite
that would discredit him in the next political ad:
“Can you believe what Jesus said this time?
First it’s blessing lepers.
Next it’s praying for enemies.
And now he’s even turning over
Moses’ laws.
Jesus: soft on
The Pharisaic, scribal and Sadducean parties are responsible for the content of this
announcement.”
Scribes were very interested in
keeping order. They were intellectual
scholars. They knew the book. They were interested in testing Jesus’
orthodoxy. So they asked him which was the most important commandment. Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 6 by saying you
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.
This is in fact
the Deuteronomist’s expansion on the fist
commandment, “Hear oh
The scribe may well have wanted
Jesus to get the heart of the matter. He wanted him to remember that loving God
is the first and foremost thing we should do.
But we can’t just do it with our lips.
We must embody the love of God.
We must love God not only with our lips, but also with our heart, and
with all our soul and with all our mind and with all
our strength. This means that loving God
takes our all in all, our whole being, our whole focus.
The scribe must have been
pleased. This is the focus of the
scribal party. It’s to love and praise
God. Therefore, worship ought to always
be positive. We need to not cease in
praising God. We need to use all of our heart
and our mind and our soul and our strength in the praise of God. This is surely what it’s all about. If we stop and do something else, like talk
about politics or point out the plight of the poor, this might be against the Great
Commandment that we are to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength and mind.
Jesus would have passed the test and everyone would be happy if he had
not added that pesky second commandment. “You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.” The Scribe didn’t ask for the
second commandment. He asked for the
first. Jesus didn’t follow the
directions.
Not only that, but it’s not the second commandment. In fact it’s not even in the Ten
Commandments—not the list in Exodus 20 or the slightly different list in Deuteronomy
6. It comes from Leviticus 19:9-19. That dreaded holiness code that we tend not
to like so much because of all of its restrictions.
But there in the midst of it all is the statement, “You shall love your
neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments,
says Jesus, lay all of the law and the prophets. If you hold to these, the rest is just window
dressing.
In
fact, Jesus was going so far as saying, you can’t understand the first
commandment, without the second. The
second is intimately related to the first.
We need to have both love for God and love for our neighbors who are the
images of God all around us.
Ched
Myers tells us about the joining of these two commandments in his commentary
entitled Binding the Strong Man: “The
point Mark is trying to make by this bold conflation is consistent with his
ideology: heaven must come to earth—there is no love of God except in love of
neighbor.” (Myers 1997:318)
Of course, the scribe might not have liked this
statement, this inclusion of loving your neighbor. There are plenty of examples back then and
there are plenty of examples right now of people calling themselves Christians
and not loving their neighbor.
We constantly violate
Leviticus 19. We constantly fail to live
by the Great Commandment let alone the Great Commission and the Great
Criteria.
Religious folk tend to like to think we know what God
wants. We like to have answers to help
us make sense of our world. Thank God we
can come together with questions burning in our hearts that can help us address
the dissonance between love and justice, between war and peace, between hope
and despair. We can come together to
find the answers in community.
We know of plenty of churches so interested in being holy
that they exclude people who don’t follow their interpretations of the
rules. But we can be like that, too
can’t we? We like the fact that our
church has this liberal sign out front.
It’s one of those things that makes people go
huh? Liberal Baptist? Of course liberal means open-minded. The sign is 50 years old to distinguish us
from a mostly forgotten split in American Baptist life where the Conservative
Baptist Convention formed and left the then Northern Baptist Convention which
later became the ABCUSA.
But this week, someone put some duct tape over the
Liberal part of our sign. One of you
e-mailed me and said, “did I miss some church decision
last week?” I assured her that churches
don’t make decisions that fast. I
removed the duct tape as well as I could.
But it raised again the thought, is this church welcoming and affirming
to everyone, or just liberals? Do
conservatives feel comfortable here?
Then you have to say, political conservatives? Social Conservatives? Theological conservatives? We need to be careful lest we think we have an
exclusive corner on God. We do the best
we can as we seek to be faithful.
The Pharisees and the scribes thought they knew what God
wanted. They had all of the
answers. They knew their
scriptures. They were good
Synagogue-going folks. But they were
more interested in keeping the religious community holy than they were in
loving their neighbor.
What was so offensive to them was that Jesus came and
told them what God really wanted, using the scriptures to back it up.
You can’t keep the church holy if you don’t love your
neighbor.
You cannot have eternal life unless you love your
neighbor.
You
cannot be a follower of Christ unless you love your neighbor.
But what if your neighbor votes a different color than
your red, blue, green, or white?
What if your neighbor is Muslim?
What if your neighbor is a conspicuous consumer?
What if your neighbor doesn’t rake his or her leaves?
What if your neighbor is committed to the absolute
opposite of what you’re committed to?
There is a cartoon that has run in numerous issues of the
Baptist Peacemaker. It has a preacher
speaking from the pulpit saying, “When the Bible says that Adam and Eve were
the first people on earth, that’s what it means. But when the Bible says love your enemy, that’s
not what it means.”
Today is Reformation Sunday. It’s the time that we remember the
reformation that happened 500 years ago when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses
on the Wittenburg door. Luther and those who followed were interested
in making sure that religion had integrity.
But the reformation did not just happen 500 years ago, it continues to
happen as people rediscover the Great Commandment, and the Great Criteria along
with the Great Commission.
My brother and I have ongoing discussions about
theology. Sometimes we agree with each
other, other times we don’t, but we are always challenged by the
encounter. A few Easters ago we realized
that we were both Great Commandment people.
The difference was that he focused on the first part, “Love God with all
your heart, soul mind and strength”, while I focused on the second part, “Love
your neighbor as yourself.” We realized
that we could both use each other’s correction and our commitment to the Great
Commandment would be enhanced if we both gave weight to both parts of it.
Jesus closes by saying that the scribe is “not far” from
the
Sisters and bothers, may we live by the Great Commission,
the Great Criteria and the Great Commandment.
May we come close to the kingdom and the kin-dom
of God as we love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength; and love
our neighbors as ourselves.