“Great Commandment” Mark 12:28-44

In the Gospel we find two “greats”. The great commission is found in the Gospel of Matthew to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That is the basis for our mission as the United Methodist Church to go and make disciples for the transformation of the world. But there is another “great” as well. The Great Commandment. That is found in today’s text. To love God and love our neighbor. 

Unlike last week, the question that we find at the start of today’s text isn’t one that is meant to trick Jesus. The person asking is genuinely interested. Part of the Jewish religion is to debate about texts. Its a beautiful practice of deeply diving into them and learning something new. So when it says that Jesus was debating, it wasn’t adversarial, as we often think about it in the American context. It was simply part of their learning and love of the text. 

So someone comes up to Jesus and asks this beautiful question -Of all the commandments, which is the most important? There were hundreds of commandments in the Jewish Scriptures that were written. Then on top of that there were socially acceptable customs and rules, like those we talked about a few weeks ago. No one this person was wondering what was the most important! There were so many of them! That folks were expected to both memorize and live into. 

Why? Because they are God’s covenantal people. These commandments weren’t given for just individual people, they were to be lived out by all people under the covenant as a sign of their relationship to God. 

But Jesus didn’t just pick one. He picked two. 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 second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Why? Because love of God and love of neighbor are deeply intertwined. You cannot separate them.

Think about it this way. If you say to someone that you are a Christian and that means you love Jesus, but then you turn around and treat people poorly, is that a good witness? By no means!

For the people Jesus was speaking to love and justice were linked in a way that could not be broken. You could not say that you loved God and then act in an unjust way. The laws were meant to help aid people in this love of God and justice/ love for their neighbor. 

And this love that Jesus was talking about. It wasn’t based on sentiment. It wasn’t based on if you felt like it. Love for neighbor as an embodiment of the love of God, wasn’t conditional. It wasn’t optional. It wasn’t based on what you felt like that day or how someone else treated you. Because in showing love you were proclaiming the convent love of God. 

It seems so simple, right? But just because something is simple does not mean that it is easy. What does it look like for us to love God and love our neighbor today? 

Because here’s the thing. We are still witness for Christ today in the world when we live into the Great Commandment. We follow a Savior who showed up the ultimate form of love on the cross, giving his life for the world. Christianity should be known for love. Yet that isn’t how we often come across. 

The Barna Group is known for doing research about Christianity. Do you know when they asked a group of non-Christians what the first thing they thought of when they they heard Christian was? It wasn’t love. Number one, hypocritical. Number two, judgmental. 

Now it would be really easy to get defensive about that. But friends, if those are the first thing that folks outside of the Church think about Christians, that isn’t on them. That’s on us. Because obviously something about how we are loving God and loving our neighbor is not coming through.

It’s interesting, because shorty after Jesus spoke about the Great Commandment, he ran into a very similar situation. He is teaching to a crowd who had delight, but that doesn’t mean they understood or accepted what he was saying. You could say that there were more adventures in missing the point, like we have seen so often throughout the Gospel of Mark. 

So Jesus took a real life example for them. Saying watch out. Now we often read this as if Jesus is saying to watch out for all of the scribes, all of the religious leaders. But what he was really trying to point out was watch out for people who behave this way. Why? Because how people lived out their faith matter. People were watching them. People were mirror their actions as an expression of their faith. In other words people were paying attention to them.

Is that not true of you and I as well, friends. I can tell you, when people know that you are a follower of Christ they pay attention to you. They want to see if your words and your actions match. They want to see how this love of Jesus has changed your life. And when we fail to do that - when we act like we only need to love God on Sundays and love our neighbor when its to our benefit, then we are no better than the religious leaders who were behaving badly. 

So what does it look like to live out your faith? It looks like the widow. The widow who gave everything she had. How are we love God, friends?  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. It would be very hard to claim that wasn’t what the widow was doing that day. Loving God. And it lead her to give out of that love. 

This love of God, it makes us want to give of ourselves. Not just when it is convient or when we know that people are watching, but in all times and all places. This love of God makes us want to go out and share it with our neighbors. Not just the people we like and find it easy to get along with. But even folks who are difficult. Why? Because we are the living expression of God’s love in the world. How we live matters. 

The Apostle Paul had something to say about this type of love in 1 Corinthians. If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast,[a] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

If we do not have love we are empty noisy sounds. If we do not have love, we are nothing. If we do not have love, we gain nothing. 

Church, the world is waiting for love like this. The world is waiting for us to actually live into this Great Commandment. To love God and love our neighbor. How can we go out and be those people in the world this week? Amen.