Mark 12:28-34[1]
It’s hard to avoid the
truth that most of us live our lives with ourselves at the center. We may choke
on the very words if we try to say it out loud. I think that’s one reason why
we have always used the “younger generation” as the scapegoat for our selfishness.
But the truth of the matter is that humanity has always lived with themselves
at the center. Even when we do something to help someone else, we often do it
for approval or simply to feel good about ourselves. Of course, there are those
among us who rise above this and truly serve others. But if we’re honest we
have to admit that they are the exception that proves the rule.
Although we prefer to
locate “selfishness” in someone else, anyone else, it’s something we all have
to deal with if we are going to try to follow Jesus as his disciples. That’s
why week after week we gather here and confess to God, to one another, and to
ourselves that we live with “self” at the center of our lives. That’s one of
the basic definitions of the “sin” we try to confess together every week in
worship. Our confession is not only an attempt to acknowledge that we all fall
short. It’s also a way of trying to reorient our lives with God at the center.
That’s what our Gospel
lesson for today is about: the question of what it looks like to live with God
at the center of our lives. The question comes at the end of a debate that the
religious leaders had been carrying on with Jesus, hoping to make a fool out of
him in front of the people who followed him. One torah scholar asks him which of God’s commands was the “first,” or
most important. You may find it surprising that I don’t believe this scribe was
trying to trip Jesus up. Mark says he asked this question when he saw that
Jesus answered “well” those who were antagonizing him. I think the scribe
noticed that he was “on the same page” with Jesus, and so he was genuinely
curious about how Jesus understood the heart of what God wants from us.
It was no coincidence
that Jesus chose love for God and love for neighbor in reply. The “first”
commandment came from the Shema,
which was and still is the heart of the Jewish faith (Deut 6:4-5): “Hear, O
Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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” (Mk 12:29-30). And the “second”
commandment (Lev 19:18), “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is part of
a summary of God’s mandates in Leviticus called the “holiness code”. It’s
called that because its theme is “you shall be holy for I the Lord your God am
holy” (Lev. 19:2). While we assume these two commands go together, what we
should understand is that it’s very likely Jesus was the first one to put them
together like this.
But in one sense,
Jesus wasn’t really breaking any new ground here. These two “great” commands
reflect a fundamental framework of faith that runs throughout the whole Bible.
It begins with the fact that God loved the family of Abraham and Sarah, and chose
them to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. This is called the
“covenant” in the Bible, and it speaks of a relationship that God established
in his grace and mercy. When we miss the fact that everything else is based on
God’s love, we can get on the wrong track about God and about what it means to
live with God at the center of our lives.
The next part of that
framework is that the Bible insists that those who have experienced God’s love,
those who are fortunate enough to live in a relationship in which they know
that God loves them unconditionally and irrevocably, will respond by loving God
so much that we will put God at the center of life. That’s what it means to
love God with all your heart. We may find it surprising that the way to do this
is by following God’s ways, by putting God’s commands into practice in our
everyday lives. We get confused about this because we think a life of obedience
somehow earns for us the right to God’s love. But that’s not it at all. We live
this way because we know God loves us, not to gain God’s love.
The next step is that we
who love God in this way will demonstrate it by the love we show others. This
way of loving God by loving others isn’t just about how we feel about people.
It’s about what we do. And the Bible gets very practical, very specific, and
very down to earth about what that looks like. We love others when we show them
mercy and justice, when we treat them with dignity, respect, fairness,
compassion, and kindness. We love others when we feed the hungry and welcome
the stranger. That whole framework, responding to God’s love by loving God in
such a way that we love others is what living with God at the center of our
lives looks like.[2]
I’ll be the first to
admit that living this way isn’t easy, and it isn’t something we learn quickly.
I find that the farther I go in my journey toward discipleship, the more aware
I am of how I fall short. The lure of trying to satisfy our own desires is one
that can be incredibly difficult to recognize, and even more so to avoid. But I
don’t think that God expects us to be perfect in this life. I think the point
is that we take seriously the call live in a relationship with God, a
relationship that is grounded in God’s love for us. The way we do that is by loving
and serving God through loving and serving others. That’s what living with God
at the center looks like, and it’s a challenge that takes a lifetime to master.
[1] ©
2021 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm, Ph. D. on 10/31/2021
for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics,
4.1:54-66, where he maintains that this has always been God’s intention against
all efforts to “break up” this “one covenant” of grace into a series of
different “covenants.” He disputes the
“federal theology” of Johannes Cocceius, whose ideas are probably best known
today in the “Dispensationalism” of Tim LaHaye and Hal Lindsay.
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