This month of November, we’re going to have a series of festival Sundays here at St Margaret’s: Next Sunday will be All saints’ Sunday, then we will celebrate St Margaret’s on November 14th; the week after, November 21st, will be Christ the King which will finally lead us to the first Sunday in Advent on November 28th. After this Sunday, we will read from John’s Gospel until we reach Advent when we will start a new liturgical year – Year C – reading through Luke’s Gospel.
So this Sunday is sort of an “in between” Sunday. This is actually the last time we hear from Mark’s Gospel, and I find it very fitting that the last we hear is Jesus’s summarizing all the Law with these commandments of loving God and loving neighbor. It’s important to notice that it’s not just a “memo” though, a flash card for good disciples before they take their exams – Jesus is in Jerusalem, living his last days on earth. Those words we hear today are actually Jesus’s testimony, Jesus’s last will. If you remember Jesus’s farewell discourse in John’s Gospel, well, this is where we are in the timeline. What takes John four chapters to present is here condensed in a few verses by Mark. We have studied in Chapter 10 how people came to Jesus asking “all the wrong questions” until a blind man comes with the right disposition of heart. But you see, it’s not over until it’s over. After that, Jesus has many other encounters in Jerusalem with people asking him questions. But this time, in chapter 12, Mark puts a final dot. Our passage ends up with Mark concluding: “After that, no one dared to ask him any question”.
Loving God and loving neighbor is a summary of all the Law, and that’s it! But of course commenting about that would take all the sermons in the world and we would not even have begun to cover it. So instead of trying to do that, I think it would be more helpful to focus on the way Mark specifically puts the saying into context, and then we can have a look on how the commandments are actually formulated in Jesus’s mouth on that occasion.
1. First of all, what is specific about the context of this saying?
– A scribe comes to ask Jesus a question and in the end, Jesus praises him for his wisdom.
It’s important to notice because we can easily fall into caricatures about the scribes and the pharisees as the “bad guys” of the Gospel, and we don’t want to adopt this kind of thinking that could lead us to antisemitism. The scribe is praised by Jesus for his wisdom, and he “isn’t far from the kingdom of God”. We cannot reduce people in categories of bad and wrong / good and right in the Gospel. Jesus was tough with the Pharisees, but remember that Jesus had disciples among the pharisees (Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus). Some scholars believe that Jesus was himself a pharisee, and it makes sense because we are often tougher on our own people when we have moral expectations. For example, for us, our job would be to hold Episcopalians accountable to higher standards. It is okay because it’s something we need to require of ourselves, because we are Episcopalians, it’s not like we kept on saying that really Catholics should do a better job at being Christian! Jesus didn’t see the Pharisees and the scribes as outsiders, they were his people and so he could ask them to give their best.
– In Mark’s context, we also need to notice that it’s okay to ask questions! Actually, I am in awe to realize how many people in this Gospel ask questions to Jesus. And yes, they ask the wrong questions, but little by little, some people show up with better questions. The questions are not “wrong” because of their content, but what we learned last week seeing how Bartimaeus made his request is that people who came before him had the wrong attitude rather than the wrong questions. They asked questions to trick Jesus, to make him contradict himself, or contradict the law. They used their questions to show off or to justify themselves and Jesus refused to play the game. But when they come up asking questions genuinely and expectantly, Jesus always answers and he even praises those people. So it is for us. Our faith is not to accept everything silently, part of our faith is to ask reverent and relevant questions and to come up each time with better, deeper questions that will bring us closer to the Kingdom of God.
2 – Which leads us to the content of the saying = What is specific to Mark in the way it’s formulated?
I am going to skip a bit the part about the love of neighbor – just because we had already said a lot about it when we studied James, but also because this is not in this part that stands out in Mark’s rendering of Jesus’s words. What I would notice though is that if Jesus insisted so much on love, and made it a commandment – it’s because it’s not easy! We have a tendency to put ourselves first, a natural tendency of self preservation that can turn into something sinful when we lose focus that our neighbors are as important as ourselves, and it’s something we need to be reminded of constantly. We had a meeting this week at church and we discussed how this time of pandemic had increased in us our feelings of insecurity and defensiveness, and how we find ourselves in needing to learn to love each other again. It’s okay! It’s in the Gospel: We constantly have to work on being more loving. And we can always start again, start anew.
– Now I would like to turn to what I think is really the specificity of Mark’s Gospel today, and it’s about the love of God. If you know a little about Hebrew Scriptures, you will notice that Jesus quotes the “Shema Israel” the great prayer of the Jews from Deuteronomy 6. What is remarkable is that, as often, Jesus takes some liberties when quoting the Scriptures, and he actually adds a line! In Deuteronomy, the commandment is to love God with your “whole heart, whole soul and whole might” whereas Jesus says “to love God with your whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, and whole strength (or might)” and then the scribe repeats what Jesus says “yes, you have to love with all your understanding” – I think this addition is amazing. It’s amazing because this is what Mark encourages us to do, as noted earlier. Mark encourages believers to inquire, to ask questions, to seek understanding. Maybe you’ve heard of John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal Bishop, who died recently. That’s what Spong used to repeat all the time: “We have to do a better job at loving God with our mind and we need to seek understanding of our faith”. He did that all his life and it certainly put him at odds with some of the teachings of the church, and we may not agree with some of his theology, but we can recognize in him the integrity of the scribe who instead of siding with his peers mindlessly, just repeating what he had heard, was able to think for himself and asked Jesus for clarification. Spong said that asking questions was “taking God seriously”.
So it should be okay to ask questions, God is a mystery but in Jesus God reveals himself and responds to us and make God known to us. Don’t be surprised by the ending line of our passage. People “didn’t dare to ask any more questions” to Jesus not because they felt silly or humiliated. They were in awe (=the meaning of the “fear of God” in the Bible). They stopped asking questions because they have had their answer to their deepest question: What is it, in the end, that matters the most – the scribe’s question.
As a conclusion, just notice that Jesus is asking us to be whole, to love God with all our being, as God is one, we should be one, all given to our quest for God – which is of more value than all the sacrifice, as the scribe notices – the giving of self in building our relationship with God.