WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 1/22/06

Mark 12:28-44 “Love The Lord Your God”

The issues of who Jesus is, and what it means to be his disciple, come to a head in the week that precedes his arrest. Day by day, Jesus is in the Temple courts, delighting the crowds but facing opposition from the religious leaders. He has bested the chief priests, the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Herodians and the Sadducees in debate. Now he meets a scribe who is close to becoming his disciple; he sharpens the question of who he is, he denounces those who love attention, and he commends a poor widow for her sacrificial giving.

1) The Greatest Commandment

More than once, Jesus was faced with questions about his attitude to the Torah. Did he believe it, practice it, respect it? What was its greatest commandment? Some hoped to trap him in his speech – there were, according to the scribes (the official teachers of the Law), over 600 different positive and negative commands in the Torah. The issue was not so much which one was most important, but whether there was one that gave the key to understanding all the others; some guiding principle for interpreting Torah?

Jesus is clear: there are two such principles that will allow you to grasp the whole Torah. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love is the meaning of the Torah; love is the reason for the commandments; love – as Paul will later say – is “the fulfillment of the Law.” This means at least two complementary things. Love of God and others is the summary of the Law; and to love is to obey the Law. Christians will spend decades – or perhaps millennia – working out the implications of these principles.

There is a third implication: that faith and ethics are tied closely together. Loving God is a good (though perhaps incomplete) definition of faith. Loving others is what Christian ethical living is all about. Loving God and loving others are bound together.

So Jesus takes the daily prayer of the pious Jew of his day – Deuteronomy 6, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength” – and says that those who follow this are not far from his new kingdom. How far? They will enter it when they see that Jesus himself is the greatest expression of God’s love; that “this is love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins,” and that “since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10-11).

2) Loving God

What follows in Mark 12 are, I believe, illustrations of what it means to love God and others. Firstly, Jesus again raises the question – indirectly, but clearly enough for those with “ears to hear” – of who he is.

How, he asks, can the Messiah whom everyone believes will be a “son of David” be referred to by David himself (in Psalm 110) as “my Lord”? In David’s words, the LORD God himself says to “my Lord” – the Messianic king – “sit at my right hand” and “I will put your enemies under your feet.” The message is that the Messiah will be more than another man, more than a simple human descendant of David. He will be a transcendent figure, one who sits at the right hand of God.

Jesus himself has already been hailed as “Son of David;” on his entry into Jerusalem he was greeted with “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord... Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David.” Will people – especially the priests and the scribes – now be willing to make the connection? Jesus is “David’s son,” but he is more than just a human descendant. In some ways, this is one of the most public of Jesus’ statements about himself prior to his trial. Will people accept his claims?

Will we also accept them? – and, not so parenthetically – accept not only who he was and is, but how he argues his case? Notice that Jesus’ whole argument stands and falls here on the assertion that Psalm 110 was written by David under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Here, as on every occasion he quotes the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus affirms their inspiration and authority. If we join the skeptics who say that most of the Psalms were in fact written during the Exile, 500 years after David, or that the Old Testament is a collection of outmoded ancient attempts to understand history in religious terms, we are up against the words of Jesus. If we claim to be a disciple of Jesus, then we should surely follow him in this: that he affirmed the inspiration and authority of the Hebrew Bible. For Jesus it was equally valid to say “the Scripture says” and “God says,” because the Scriptures were and are “the Word of God.” To “love God with all our heart and mind” must mean at least this, that we take his words as authoritative.

3) True Piety

There were then, as there have always been since, those who thought that their knowledge and their piety were such that they deserved commendation. Too many of the “teachers of the Law,” in Jesus’ view, were too fond of their “perks of office.” They were like Congressmen who can’t ever get enough “pork” for themselves and their friends.

These self-important scribes went around in long flowing white robes – like prayer shawls that reached to the ground. They loved to be greeted with respect, called by their titles, have everyone rise when they entered the room (the kind of deference we give to judges); they liked to be seated in front next to the Torah scrolls, facing the congregation, in the synagogues; to be invited to the best banquets and given the place of honor next to the hosts. But while they were full of public piety and long prayers in the Temple courts, they thought nothing of enriching themselves when, for example, they were appointed executors and guardians over the estates of women whose husbands had died.

This kind of public piety, says Jesus, is not what it means to “love God with all your heart” – and to defraud vulnerable people under your care is certainly not “to love others as yourself.” There is plenty of warning here for those of us whose calling involves “public piety,” especially that those who abuse their positions will be “punished severely.” If you think it is a privilege and a pleasure to be up here in “a flowing robe, facing the congregation,” you should know that at the same time, it is, and it is not! It is a wonderful calling, but a terrible responsibility. Let us be careful that we do not in any way equate faithful discipleship with public displays of piety. Attitudes of heart mean much more to God than outward displays.

4) Love God With ALL Your Heart

We see this again in the final episode of Jesus’ public ministry – from now on he will speak only to his disciples and those who confront him in his trials. Sitting in the temple courts, Jesus watches people putting their free-will offerings into (probably) the thirteen trumpet-shaped metal containers located in the Court of Women. The rich ostentatiously throw in large amounts, but Jesus’ attention is fixed on a widow who puts in two “lepta” – the smallest coins in circulation in Israel. Together they made one Roman “quadrans,” more familiar to Mark’s readers in the Western part of the Empire. It would take 128 lepta to make a denarius, one day’s wage for a laborer.

The widow put into the temple treasury a few coins, maybe the equivalent of 50 cents or less today. But to Jesus, she put in so much in proportion to what she had. She gave up the little she owned, because her love for God was real enough that she trusted him completely to supply her needs. She did not hold back, saying “I can’t afford to give, now that I’m a widow.” The rich were able to give far more, but that did not stop her giving what she could, and more. The rich, even after giving much, were able to keep for themselves far more than she ever had. They were never in danger of going without, of going hungry, of wondering how to afford basic necessities.

So Jesus makes an issue of what people give in proportion to what they have. You could even paraphrase it, that it matters to Jesus how much we keep, as well as how much we give. In his view of the world, our attitude of dependence on God is what shows our love for him, not the scale of our outward acts of piety.

Who then are the true disciples of Jesus, then and now? Those who know that God loves them, and in return they love him with all their hearts, and with their minds and bodies too. Love for God is not a purely “spiritual” thing; it also involves very physical and intellectual issues of love and submission. True disciples are so affected by God’s love that they learn to love other people the way God loves these same “other“ people.

True disciples embrace the truth of who Jesus is, and acknowledge him as Messiah, King and Son of God. They submit themselves to his authority in all things, including the words he has spoken in his “Word” to reveal his will and his way to them. True disciples guard their public lives so that they do not become a reproach to the name of God and of Jesus Christ. They do not boast, they do not court publicity or crave attention, they do not demand respect or deference from others, they do not “wave their titles around;” they do not take bribes or defraud anyone; they “love their neighbors as themselves” in public and in private.

True disciples know that God will provide for our true needs; that he always has done and always will, and that even when life becomes hard – as when we are bereaved – God is still there to support and befriend us. We need not retreat into silence, privacy, or suppose that we cannot take part in the life of the community of God’s people. We can give what we have, and not what we do not have; we can know that no matter how small our gift to the work of God in time or money or effort, it is noticed by God and appreciated by God. We can know that how much it costs us is the measure of its value to him, and that our small gift may be greater to him than the less generous contributions made by people who are much more richly endowed with time, money, energy. True disciples know that every gift matters when it comes from a heart that loves God, and that how much we feel we must keep for ourselves is a painfully accurate measure of how much or how little we truly love and trust God.

May we all become true disciples; have the grace to trust him more and to trust ourselves, our knowledge, our positions, our wealth, less! May we grow to be those who have been touched by the love of God in Jesus Christ, especially when the times are hard, or when moments of decision arrive. May we be those of whom Jesus says, “she gave all that she had” out of love for the God who loved us first.

Let us pray...