Jesus and His Bible, Part 13

 The First of All Commandments and the Second, As Well

After the last round of thrust-parry-thrust-touché between Jesus and the Sadducees, a scribe asked his question. He asked it because he liked how Jesus had dealt with the previous question, and it was this: “Which is the first commandment of all?”

Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord; and you 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.’ And the second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:29-30). 

The first part of this quotes from Deuteronomy 6. Significantly, Jesus included this theological prologue—“the Lord our God is one.” This recapitulated his answer to the Sadducees, God’s self-identifying formula to Moses (Exodus 3:14), “I am who I am.” The present tense, Jesus said, shows that God is present and presence. Jesus required his Sadducee questioners to confront the enigma that all of time is present to God, all humans are present to God, all of God is present at any time; to admit that their model of the past is not God’s reality. This is such a mystery.  It may be one of the questions a human can pose but, when answered, cannot understand. 

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! And  you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5). This particular quotation from Deuteronomy 6 has two words for God in it: Elohim, which is plural (remember “Let us make human in our image…male and female”) and Yahweh, which is singular. Specifically, “Yahweh, our Elohim, is one Yahweh.” (This nuance is lost in Mark, written in Greek, in which the words are Kyrios and Theos, both singular.)

Again, we are plunging into an ocean of mystery.  This is (or is like?) the mystery of the Trinity, the three-in-one, affirmed by Christian creeds for centuries, often in response to challenges to trinitarian belief. Jesus emphasized the unity of purpose between himself and his Father, and in John’s Gospel, emphasized the unity of substance between himself and his Father, and said that when he was no longer physically present,  the Father would send the Spirit of truth to guide them.  The Trinity fits in well with the Elohim part of the Deuteronomy quotation.

The rest of the quotation is about loving God. Robert Alter says that this emphasis on love in Deuteronomy is new, that it is an addition to the traditional “fear of the Lord.” He also adds that it is the word used in treaties which pledge loyalty. 

Alter goes on to explain that the heart is the seat of understanding and is also associated with emotions. The “soul” is better translated “life-breath” or the “essential self.” And the word “might” is usually an adverb “very,” meaning “over the top.” (Alter, Moses, 641, n.) So if I put this into my own words:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your understanding and feelings, with your essential self and your life-breath, and with an unbreakable and complete loyalty.

I notice that Jesus added “with all your mind” into this list.  The questioner responded with his own list, which I suspect we are to consider parallel: “the heart, the understanding, the soul, the strength.” They were on the same page, despite the differences—Love God with all you are. This is the most important of all.

The second, which Jesus said is like the first, is to love your neighbor as yourself. This also derives from the Torah: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18).

This positive command occurs in the Levitical context of many “thou shalt not” admonitions centering on the following:

• Do not reap all your field, but leave some for the poor and the stranger
• Do not steal
• Do not deal falsely
• Do not lie to one another
• Do not take false oaths in God’s name
• Do not oppress your neighbor
• Do not rob your neighbor
• Do not withhold the wages of the day-laborer overnight
• Do not curse the deaf
• Do not trip up the blind
• Do no injustice in judgment
• Do not be partial to the poor
• Do not defer to the rich
• Do not slander others
• Do not take vengeance nor bear a grudge

All these are implicit in loving the neighbor as one’s self, but are made explicit for those of us who want to limit our love for our neighbors. Further on in the Leviticus chapter this occurs: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”  There is no exception to the command, in other words. 

The questioner and the crowd before Jesus were well aware of the context of this second command and likely squirmed over their own failures to love. Even if we can say, “Oh, I love God wholeheartedly and more than anyone or anything else,” can we say, “I love my neighbor as myself, and my behavior toward my neighbor is in line with the expectations of Jesus’s Testament?” I’m feeling a little uncomfortable right now.

Series on Meeting Jesus, part 2

2) Jesus Shows Us the Father

The next step in the book was to explore Jesus’s relationship with God.  At the center of Jesus’s life was a profound and continuous relationship with the Spirit of God.  Nothing was more important to Jesus than this relationship.  By living it in front of us, Jesus taught us to think of God as our Father—the way a Father ought to be—and to enter ourselves into a transforming relationship with an immediately present God.

As Dallas Willard puts it, our Father in heaven means that God is immediately with us in the space that surrounds us, the first heaven—God in whom we live and move and have our being, as Paul says (Conspiracy, p. 57; Acts 17:28).

In the following scriptures (and it is all scripture, except the last paragraph), be open to noticing which ones you most connect with.

Love your enemies, bless them who curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them who are lie about you and bully you so that you may be children of our Father who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good and rains on the just and the unjust.

Be your best self, just as God is God’s best self, merciful as God is merciful.

Be merciful, give alms without showing off; be private, and let your Father who is with you be your witness and give you whatever reward he chooses.

Pray inwardly to your Father, who is also inwardly with you, and don’t think of prayer as a means of controlling God but instead trust God to know your needs.

Pray to our Father, absolutely near to us, asking that God’s character will be venerated and respected, that God will rule and be obeyed here and now by humans as by the invisible servants of God. Ask for the needs of the day. Ask for what we owe God and our neighbor to be forgiven and to forgive those who owe us. Ask God to lead us around trials that invite us to mistrust or miss the mark, and ask God to draw us close and rescue us from the power of evil. For the kingdom, the power and the glory belong to our Father forever.

Know that forgiving others their moral lapses makes it possible for our Father to forgive yours.  Not forgiving keeps you in the power of tormenters, so forgive from your heart.  This is how our Father’s universe works. Father, forgive them, for they do not see or know what they are doing.

Fast privately, not obviously, and your intimately present Father will see and reward you.

Our Father who is immediately present with us knows you need food and clothing and will take care of you, so you don’t need to give all your energy and desires to those things.  Instead, give your energy to craving for God, to pursuing God as King, to doing things God’s way. Even flawed earthly parents give gifts to their children that are healthful rather than harmful, and how much more will our good Father give good things to those that ask?

It’s not enough to call Jesus “Lord,” or even to do powerful deeds in Jesus’s name; what is important is to do the will of our immediately present Father.

It isn’t what a person eats and excretes that defiles the person. It is ignoring what God says to do in favor of human tradition.  Every plant which our Father who is right here hasn’t planted will be rooted up.

Our Father wants not one of the little children to perish.

When we are in conflict with another person, whether that person is offended by us or he or she offends us, keep it private, or at most two or three persons go with you to talk.  But if you two can agree on what to ask for from God, who is right there with you, God will do it.

We follow Jesus, drinking his cup and baptized with his baptism, but our Father decides how to distribute reward; likewise only our Father knows our last day and hour.

When our Father does reward, it is because we imitate God’s actions: we give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, companionship to the sick and imprisoned.

Recognize that really only God is our true Father.

Pray like Jesus to our Father when we face suffering: Papa, Daddy, You can do anything, so please let me avoid this; nonetheless, not what I want, but what you want for me. Father, I entrust my spirit to you.

Write down one or two experiences in which you have experienced the immediate presence of God.  If this is not your experience, feel free to say so.  Perhaps you will have opportunity to share your experience with someone else.