Gospel of 4 June 2020
Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Mark 12:28-34
'You are not far from the kingdom of God'
One of the scribes came up to Jesus and put a question to him, ‘Which is the first of all the commandments?’ Jesus replied, ‘This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.’ The scribe said to him, ‘Well spoken, Master; what you have said is true: that he is one and there is no other. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself, this is far more important than any holocaust or sacrifice.’ Jesus, seeing how wisely he had spoken, said, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ And after that no one dared to question him any more.
Reflexion
Today, our Lord gives us another teaching in response to a question. But unlike the questions we heard these last two days, this man, a scribe, has no intention of trapping Jesus. He approaches our Lord in sincerity and goodwill and his question may have been motivated by genuine intellectual curiosity rather than antagonism. He must have noticed our Lord’s wisdom and thought that the latter could throw light on a question which had troubled many scholars of his day: “Which is the first of all the commandments?”
Now, this question may seem to be a no brainer to us but during the time of Jesus, the answer wasn’t so apparent. The Torah was full of commandments - 613 according to rabbinic tradition - and it was common in debates and discussions among scribes, to look for the one general statement or overriding principle that would summarise and ground them all.
Our Lord gives His answer by quoting the Shema (Dt 6:4-5), which is the centerpiece, of the daily morning and evening prayer services, and is considered the most essential prayer in all of Judaism. This prayer is a mini confession of faith, an affirmation of God’s singularity and kingship. And because God is only One, His claim on us is therefore total, calling for a total response at every level of our being - heart, soul, mind and strength. This answer would not have been surprising to the scribe who asked the question in the first place.
But then our Lord adds a second part to His answer. He takes a verse from Leviticus 19:18, “you must love your neighbour as yourself” and stitches it to the first part. Our Lord is the first one, known to have explicitly combined these two verses into a single commandment with two parts. Although there is foundation to this connexion in the Decalogue (the first three commandments speaks of one’s duty to God and the next seven commandments refer to man’s duty to his neighbour), what our Lord says here is revolutionary in that, He places both on the same level - love of God and love of man.
St John in his first epistle expresses the essential connexion between the two loves: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” (1 Jn 4:20)
The scribe immediately shows his approval of the answer by saying, “Well spoken, Master; what you have said is true,” and then repeats what Jesus says. At the end, the scribe adds, “this is far more important than any holocaust or sacrifice.” This is a bold statement especially when the Temple Sacrifice was considered by many of his contemporaries as the pinnacle of observance of the Law. But this statement the scribe made was prophetic. The entire sacrificial system of the Temple was about to be replaced by the all sufficient atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and what Jesus accomplished on the cross was the perfect fulfilment of the Great Commandment of love. Like the temple Holocaust, but infinitely superior, Jesus would be entirely consumed by His loving self-offering to God for the salvation of His people. Jesus’ perfect sacrifice now becomes the source and model for the love of Christians.
At the end of the story, Jesus praises the scribe’s insight and says to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” There seems to be mutual admiration here; but the answer is two-edged. Being “not far from the kingdom” is not the same as “being in the kingdom.” The scribe got the theory right, but what he lacked was proof in his daily practice. Love cannot just remain an academic topic. We need to put it into practice before we can step into the kingdom. And so, we are reminded that love comes with a heavy cost. The cross is the price we must pay. Unless we are prepared to pay the cost, then the great commandment remains an interesting piece of information only, but gets us no where closer to the Kingdom of God.