What the World Needs Now
Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on Mark 12: 28 – 34. Focus on the one thing we need – Love! Well maybe a house, a bed, table and ok a chair. What about a light? Check out Simona Frenkel and the choir following the sermon on the podcast.
There are two kinds of people. Those who truly seek the truth and those who seek to trap others in their truth. The Pharisees were in the later category. They knew what the truth was and were constantly searching for ways to trip Jesus up so they could call him a blasphemer and discredit him in front of the crowds that followed him.
But there is another type of person who truly seeks the truth because for them life is not about what others say its about a search to find the truth that will set their lives free. The scribe that comes to Jesus in our story is such a person.
The job of a scribe in Jesus’ day was to go through the scriptures and codify the hundreds of Mosaic laws and the thousands of Pharisaical traditions and place them into categories while also ranking them in order of importance. The primary categories they used for sorting through the laws were, ceremonial, ethical, moral and ritual laws. They were the legal scholars of their day.
Yet knowledge of the law doesn’t guarantee understanding or application of it, just as reading about flying doesn’t make you a pilot. This inquiring scribe knew the law but he was unsatisfied with the results of his scholarly examination of God’s word. He wanted more than an intellectual understanding of the law he wanted a relationship with God.
Yet the more he studied the law the more confused he was about it. His cry to Jesus was really a cry of: “What will help me find joy?” This wasn’t an attorney cross-examining Jesus; this was the equivalent of an attorney swallowing his pride and saying to the Lord, “I just don’t get life. There has to be more than an intellectual understanding of it. There has to be something that makes my heart feel alive.
So Jesus helps him simplify the some 631 codified Mosaic Laws and offers him three guiding principles that don’t even need to be written down to be remembered.
- The our God is One (Deuteronomy 6:4).
- You shall love the Lord God with every fiber of your being (Deuteronomy 6:5).
- You shall love your neighbor extravagantly (Leviticus 19: 18).
The Jews knew this prayer as the Shema. It was the heart of the Jews relationship with God and its still recited twice a day by devout Jews in remembrance of God’s preeminence in their lives. But Jesus goes on to say that God’s Oneness his unity is expressed in action through love, which is the harmony that holds the universe together. It is a reminder that we are not the center of the universe. God is and its’ expressed outwardly by a tenacious drive to love God’s people.
Our scriptures have translated this as “love your neighbor as yourself”. But the Hebrew verse uses a term that means, “Love your neighbor as if they were your own beloved.” And the Greek actually translates it as we are to “love extravagantly anyone who is near us as if they were our dearest friend.”
What Jesus is saying to the scribe’s quest for joy or meaning in life is to tell him that to experience God, to experience joy we must love as Christ loved not as we love. Human love is fickle, conditional and dependent upon our moods and interpretation of neighbor, which rarely if ever includes the people we don’t like much less love.
The joy, which the scribe is seeking, cannot be found in following the rules or in being right. This is a love that breaks beyond the rule of “do unto others as you want them to do to you.” There is no comparison between these two standards. One is “if I want you to be nice to me, I need to be nice to you.” The other is unconditional: “I want to bring you joy regardless of how you treat me.”
I’ve been searching for a human example of this type of love and the only one that springs to my mind is the Amish who forgave the gunman who killed their children while at school. It seems so long ago and almost forgotten by today’s standards of violence. But that’s what love looks like in its toughest form. That’s what it looks like when it’s the hardest to love like Jesus loved, but there is also a form of this that many of us have experienced.
Thank goodness most of us are not called upon to demonstrate that type of love. It’s the kind of love that will break your heart.
But we can understand it if you ever been with someone you loved who was suffering and you cared for them night and day because to do otherwise would have been unthinkable to you?
It’s a kind of love that if you are not allowed to give it, to be as vulnerable as it takes offer it, to sacrifice anything to give it, you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t give it. I think it’s rare, but I have experienced it here and there throughout my life. It’s a type of love that is so all encompassing that it literally doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical, or rational or even safe but it takes you over in such a way that not to be able to give it would be like trying to hold your breath until you died.
It’s almost like an ache. That to relieve the ache you must constantly love another, to give the very best you’ve got and when that fails to dig even deeper to find a way to give even more of yourself. Everyday we can ask God to help us love. We can ask God to give us the love that Jesus had. And we can ask for God to give us joy by giving us the opportunities to make a positive difference in the lives of those God will put in our lives on any given day.
I think that’s the key. It’s not something that we can study ourselves into, but it is something we can ask God to do for and through us. It’s a prayer that God answers every time we truly pray it. It’s a power that is truly and completely freeing. It is the power of God himself and it is the key to entering into God’s kingdom.
I want what the scribe wanted. I want to know what it’s like to be in God’s kingdom and I want to know the joy that truly loving others can bring. So just do it! Amen
Comments are closed.