A recording of today's gospel can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Mark
12: 28-34) marks a contrast with the gospel of Tuesday. Then, Jesus was
approached by some of the more dishonest scribes, looking to ensnare Him in
questions. Today, we have one of the honest ones, sincerely wondering and pondering,
thinking about God, questioning himself, wanting to discern honestly who Jesus
was, and trying to hear God’s call in his daily life. Jesus meets him, responds
to his question, and we hear in the scribe’s quiet reaction – well spoken, Master,
what you have said is true – a sign that Jesus’ words hit home, went to the
man’s heart, and spoke to his concerns not only about the Scriptures but, at
least implicitly, about Him.
What did he want
to know anyway? In essence, he wanted to know the most important commandment.
Why? Because what we put first defines who we are and tells others who we are.
This question could hardly have been a point of dispute among the scribes, but
it was surely the right question to discern who Jesus was, or rather where He
was from. For who but somebody on God’s side would put the love of God above
all other things? My kingdom is not of this world. Jesus is not in
search of Himself or in search of what He can accumulate for Himself, as we too
often are. His heart is turned to the Father, rapt in an inner prayer of
contemplation and love, even as He goes about His daily business. And the mood
music of this inner attention is captured precisely by those words:
Listen, Israel,
the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all
your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. […] and you must love
your neighbour as yourself.
Note here also the
first clause that lays emphasis on God’s identity first: the Lord our God is the one Lord. Some might
say that this was emphasised because polytheism was the cultural context in
which the Ten Commandments were given to Moses after the Jews had been living
for so long with their Egyptian polytheist slave owners.
Yet there is
something more here. Human nature in its sinfulness is inclined more or less towards
dislodging God from His central place in our hearts and to squeezing in something
else in His place, often ourselves, sometimes other things insofar as they
serve our purposes. We do not see or know ourselves as idolators, but that is
because we do not know ourselves well enough, or see how we honour our wayward
needs, pamper our desires, sacrifice important things on the bonfire of our own
vanities, or place ourselves unconsciously ahead of God and neighbour. Yet our
call is not to be perfect in our own eyes, but to give our all to God so He can
make us what He intends us to be. The Lord our God is the one Lord and
so our lives must in some senses be a hunt for the idols that we consciously or
unconsciously try to sneak into their honoured places in our interior castles.
These idols are obvious
when they are central to some sin or other: greed or anger, laziness, or
hostility. Yet they can lurk or hide away also in hidden corners where the
light shines less: our unexamined needs, our wayward tendencies which we turn a
blind eye to, those indulgences that provoke just a minor itch without ever
really coming to the surface of our minds, but which corrode our efforts all
the same.
Since loving God
seems such a lovely and pleasant end to which to be called, you would think
that we would run towards it without a trace of hesitation. And yet here we
are, years after we have known our calling, still lingering in the doldrums of self-obsession
instead of charging across the ocean of God’s goodness, sails filled with the
winds of His love.
Lord make me know
your ways, the ways
to your heart, the ways to serve my neighbour, and the ways to break free of
the slavery that my own wayward heart still hankers for.
The Lord our God is
the one Lord: we
must have no strange gods before him, and least of all, ourselves.
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