The Peripatetic Preacher
As usual Mark gives us something quite unique in his recounting of the confrontation between Jesus and a “scribe,” more fully understood as a teacher of the law, one who expounds the meanings of the Torah for the Jewish community. Mark sets the dialogue between the two in the context of a disputation between Jesus and the Sadducees concerning the proper interpretation of what happens to a childless widow who marries seven brothers in succession in fulfillment of the command for Levirate marriage (Deut.25; the example is ludicrous on its face, but exaggerated to make the point); in the resurrection: “whose wife will she be,” they ask? Of course, Mark reminds us that the Sadducees do not even believe in any resurrection (Mark 12:18), so their question is obviously a specious one, designed to trap Jesus in some reply that they may then ridicule. His answer to them rebukes their question directly by claiming that there will be no marriages in the resurrection since all will become angels of God. That entire dialogue appears to be fruitless, and Jesus concludes it by saying to them, “you are totally wrong” (Mark 12:27)! With that rebuke of his Sadduccean colleagues ringing in the air, the scribe comes up to Jesus.
Mark first notes that the scribe observes “how well he answered them (the Sadducees),” probably fully agreeing with Jesus’s rebuke of his far more conservative Jewish brothers. The Sadducees were fanatical with regard to the Pentateuch, though they perhaps found much value in the entire Hebrew Bible. If something was not mentioned or implied in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), it had no reality for them, hence their rejection of any belief in resurrection or after life. In addition, the Sadducees apparently had no interest in the expanding oral law, that enriching case law that moved to apply the 613 laws of the Torah, as counted by the rabbis, to contemporary Jewish life. It is those 613 laws, 365 prohibitions and 248 positive commands, that formed the basis for Jewish community life together.
The scribe asks, “Which commandment is the first of them all,” with the possible implication that he is asking which one is most important. For first-century Jews, such a question might sound decidedly awkward, if not nearly blasphemous. All the laws are equally important and must be taken equally seriously. If that is so, then the question is not asking for which of the divine laws was most important so much as to ask is there a helpful and useful summary of the laws, a basic principle from which the whole law might be derived. In reply, Jesus quotes the most famous Jewish claim, the Shema from Deut.6:4, a phrase recited daily by all pious Jews then and now. Matthew and Luke do not include the Shema in their recounting of this story, but it is certainly relevant here since the entire law may be understood as the national response to God’s call of Israel to be the chosen people. “Here, Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord (or “is one),” Mark has Jesus begin (Mark 12:29), but then has him continue with the familiar words from Deut. 6:5: “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.” The Hebrew of Deut.6:5 reads “heart…soul…and might.” The Markan “mind” is used in the Septuagint as another translation for “heart,” while “strength” is used in Mark instead of the Hebrew “might”.
The scribe would surely be pleased by this reply, since it lies at the very center of Jewish belief and practice; no Jew would find fault with such an answer. Though Jesus is asked for only one summarizing response, he offers a second: “You are to love your neighbor as yourself,” here quoting Leviticus 19:18. “There is no greater commandment than these,” Jesus concludes, and the scribe could only smile with satisfaction; Jesus is an excellent Jewish teacher! The faith and ethics of the Hebrew Bible are inextricably bound together; the command to love God arises directly from the command to love neighbor and vice versa. The love of God is finally empty unless it is fulfilled in the love of neighbor; again and again in other places in the New Testament this claim is made from the first letter of John to the letter of James.
Jesus’s answer is hardly unique to him. R. Akiba in the 2nd century CE quoted Lev. 19:18, while Hillel in the first century is often quoted as having taught “what is hateful to yourself, do not do to your neighbor; this is the whole law, the rest is commentary.” Thus, Jesus’s answer could just as well have been offered by the scribe himself, as Luke’s account suggests (Luke 10:27). It is important to note, however, that the response may be understood in two quite different ways: all the other laws may be seen as merely ways of spelling out how one should love God and neighbor, or, rather, since these two are the summary of all laws, the others need no longer be carefully kept. Matthew apparently heard the reply in the former way, suggesting that “on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets (Mt.22:40), but warning elsewhere that “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law” (Mt.5:18). After all, Matthew’s audience was primarily Jewish, and it was important to him to portray Jesus as primarily an observant Jew. But the latter understanding, where these two laws summarize and make all others less significant, would clearly appeal to many early Christians who wished to find in Jesus’s words a basis for minimizing the ongoing impact of the myriad Jewish laws. Certainly, Paul’s constant claims that the Jewish law had in certain respects been “overcome” by the death and resurrection of that same Jesus, would have been important as the gospel was preached to both Jews and Gentiles. Of course, such a view could and did lead to a kind of antinomianism (see the Corinthian community, for example) that was dangerous in multiple ways. Paul’s famous announcement that anyone “who loves the neighbor has fulfilled the law” (Rom.13:8) was taken as great news by some early believers who desired a freedom from the shackles of the traditional Jewish law.
Then the scribe summarizes what he has heard from Jesus first by repeating what Jesus has said and then adding that “to love one’s neighbor as oneself is greater than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices put together” (Mark 12:33). Once again, this may be heard in two ways: love trumps all sacrifices, as, for example, Jer.7:22f and Hosea 6:6 suggest, and thus behavior and attitude are far more crucial for the believer than any act of worship; yet, the setting of the dialogue is the temple after all, perhaps suggesting that there may still be a place for worship and sacrifice. For the early church, finding its own way in the world apart from its Jewish roots, this statement by the scribe would have been welcome proof that the important demands of God were not be found in temple worship and sacrifice but in the love of God, especially as that was demonstrated by love
of neighbor. And they would have thrilled to Jesus’s response to the scribe’s interpretation, “You are not far from God’s realm (or traditionally “the kingdom of God”)” (Mark 12:34). This clearly implies that the two great commandments are in the end all one needs to know to fulfill the call of God. Of course, Mark’s gospel, as we have seen again and again, suggests that the fuller implications of what it means to love God and neighbor are not at all easy or comfortable; suffering and giving of self are elements of that love that cannot be avoided.
This debate in the 2000-year old gospel of Mark remains current in 21st century faith communities. Does the command to love God and neighbor imply that all other commands and laws are of secondary significance for the contemporary Christian believer? In my own United Methodist denomination, this very question is the one that has vexed us for nearly five decades. There are those among us who say that the so-called “anti-homosexual” verses of the Bible must be understood as valid today, and that such persons are not welcome as leaders in our churches, since their sexual orientation is, as the phrase from the Discipline has it, “incompatible with Christian teaching.” (I hasten to add that I do not find any of these verses to say what these particular United Methodists say they do, but that is an argument I have made elsewhere.) Other United Methodists, and I count myself among them, have long said that the gospel of Jesus does not exclude anyone, and that love is in fact the whole summary of the law of God. Mark’s scene has been played out over and again through the ages, and finds its contemporary echo in numerous modern faith communities. I readily admit that I find Jesus’s comment to the scribe to be both memorable and enormously important: “You are not far from the realm of God.” In other words, by loving God and loving neighbor, you are very close to discovering just what it is that God has called you to do. I can only agree, and must continue my own search to discern just what loving God and neighbor means now for my own 21st century life.
(Images from Wikimedia Commons)
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