Raising the Roof of Faith - Placing God First

Week 6: November 7-13

Mark 12:28-34
28 One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ 29Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30you 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.” 31The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ 32Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”; 33and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbour as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’ 34When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.

Commentary
We so easily get caught up in our legalisms. By the time of Jesus, the 10 Commandments which were the foundation of the Hebrew covenant with Yahweh, their God, had become a legal code of 600+ laws that had to be observed for one to be righteous. We see Jesus routinely getting in arguments with the Pharisee’s over these things. Working (gathering grain) on the Sabbath, healing on the Sabbath, eating with the wrong sorts of people (treasonous tax collectors and the dissolute), etc. By the letter of the law, Jesus was breaking the religious code and traditions of his people. Except that he wasn’t. The code was not fundamentally about do’s and don’ts...but about our heart towards the world. And this is what Jesus drives at in the story above. The point of the Commandments was this: love God entirely, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love God. Love neighbor. How did it get so complicated?

Well...we like to measure things, we human beings. And so we start making the law even more specific so that we can measure whether we are really loving God or loving our neighbors, until we get so mired in our legalisms we can’t see our way to their original intent.

It’s all predicated on the idea that you and I aren’t intelligent enough to discern whether we are really loving God, loving neighbor or not. So we get specific, and lose it all altogether.

But just so we’re clear, Jesus wasn’t a legalist, and he didn’t want us to check our brains at the door. The law (or parts of Scripture) may say a thing, but anything that ever gets asserted as law (and a must do) must be weighed, not against itself or where it was found (such as the Bible itself), but against the Law of Love...and God’s demonstration of it given to us in the cross and resurrection. These in the end are the only valid measures.

Questions for Discussion
1. What are some modern examples of legalism in the church? Are these things helpful to our human community of Christ, or a hindrance? Do they help us love God more deeply, and our neighbors more authentically, or are these rules simply legalisms that make us feel good about ourselves?
2. How do you know when you are loving God? What does it look like for you as an individual? What does it look like for us as a Church?
3. How do you know when you are loving your neighbor? What does it look like for you as an individual? What does loving neighbor look like for us as a Church?