This is the sermon preached by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen on Sunday, November 3rd, 2024, for the monthly worship service of Unfinished Community, drawing from Mark 12:28-34.
Well my friends, this is it. This is the Bible verse; the one we always come back to, time and time again, because of how central, how fundamental, how important it is.
Those of you who are on our community Discord server - either right now, or just in general - already know how important this verse is; to me, if not to our entire faith overall. You’l find me there making reference to this one on the order of once or twice a week; we don’t even have to do a devotional on it, because it comes up so often that we all generally know how the teaching goes.
Two commandments; love God, and love each other. Everything else extends from these two things. The law, the teachings of the prophets, every Biblical call for justice, every divine motion against oppression, greed, wealth, and power; every single aspect of who we are and what we’re called to do as followers of that Almighty Divinity who is the very embodiment of true and perfect love all of it balances on these two things.
Love God. Love each other.
The ten commandments? Boil them down to their essence, and they all mean these two things; love God, and love each other.
The entire contents of the Deuterocanonical law? Everything offered as a commandment from the Most High from selfish and mixed fabrics, to welcoming the immigrant and the refugee?
Love God. Love each other.
The freedom we are given in Christ, to re-assess, re-interpret, and re-set the law from it’s ancient context into our newer, more complicated modern lives? The one commandment we can always turn to that doesn’t require interpretation, doesn't need contextual analysis, doesn’t ever change with time and tide?
Love God. Love each other.
This here is the definition of faith, the definition of what it means to follow God, to be a part of the ongoing work of creation and change set forth by the Divinity in the very moment the universe exploded in to being and made manifest in each and every one of us here and now, today. This is the ballgame folks, the end-all be-all of every question, every confusion, every debate over just what it is that we, as Christians, are supposed to do with our time here on this earth.
The filter through which we strain all the junk that comes through our lives; the answer sheet we check every new idea, every new information, every new understanding against. The one teaching by which Christ’s own will live and die, as right unto the grave it self we cry out with joy those two wonderful, unshakable, beautiful commandments.
Love God. Love each other.
So…what’s left to talk about, right? I mean, as much as I’m sure you all just love sitting here listening to me pontificate on the teachings of God, I’ve gotta imagine you’re wondering by now just how it is I’ll manage to stretch out this very well-trodden scripture into something we can discuss and explore together over the next 15 minutes or so!
Honestly? This was my challenge to, at first. How do you make such a well-known, foundational text new enough, interesting enough to convince folk to do that thing which - as those of you online might not be able to see but this of us in the room are all too aware of - my own children seem fundamentally incapable of, and sit down and listen for a few minutes?
And, in wrestling with that, I found myself turning to my oldest, dearest, most beloved exegetical friend; context.
But this time however, I don’t want to look at context as a means to find some heretofore unexplored angle on the teaching that we can embrace or discuss. While that kind of exploration is wonderful for our own practice of faith, there really isn’t some new way to understand this that’ll suddenly shock or surprise you. The teaching here is precisely as you see it - the bedrock of what it means to have good faith.
No, what I want to look at today is what’s going on around that teaching because it is powerfully relevant to what man of us are facing today.
Before we arrive at today’s passage, we have a full chapter of interactions between Jesus and the religious leaders of the time that go pretty much exactly as you’d assume. At the end of chapter 11, Jesus swings by Jerusalem and is immediately met with aggressive questioning from the chief priests, scribes, and elders of the temple, spoiling for a fight and just looking for something they can use to drag Jesus down and discredit his teachings of love, grace, mercy, and peace.
When that doesn’t work, they send him over to a collection of Pharisees and Herodians, whose bad-faith arguments Jesus elegantly entraps with that wonderful bit of rhetoric “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” leaving them all standing there silenced and amazed because not only did their argument about taxes utterly fail to trip Jesus into saying something they could either use as an excuse to execute him for heresy, or as something they could give to their Roman overseers to have them execute him for inciting rebellion against the state, but it also managed to leave them no way to argue against it without doing the same to themselves instead.
And once that happens, the Sadducees step in, crack their knuckles, and start drilling Jesus on complex and obscure pieces of theological reasoning, only for Jesus to not only out-reason them using the same legalistic theological reasoning that they came at him with, but to do so so clearly and so cleanly that he can stand before them and say to them, unchallenged, “you are quite wrong.”
So when, in the midst of the chaos of all these competing bad-faith arguments, a member of one of the only groups of religious leaders who hasn’t jumped in the fight yet turns up, we know what to expect. Surely, this scribe is coming in with some new angle of attack, some piece of reasoning, or legal loophole designed to trap Jesus into doing or saying something that can be used defat him for good.
We’re expecting Round IV of an ongoing fight. We’re expecting honestly the exact same thing we get when conservative folk in America get up to argue the Gospel according to Trump; unyielding opposition, entirely fact-resistant and wholly dedicated to the destruction of the other party. We’re expecting argument as combat, argument as a means to accomplishing victory over the enemy.
We hear the question the scribe brings, and our experience in the text so far - to say nothing of our actual experiences in the world today - render his question into a sword. Our expectations tell us that this guy is acting in bad faith, that his goal here isn’t understanding but victory over the Lord Jesus Christ, so we’re immediately on the theological defensive here.
The second he opens his mouth, we’ve all gathered around behind Jesus and we’re just waiting for him to hit back.
And when Jesus starts speaking, not only are we ready to receive his teaching as the masterstroke that it is, but we’ve already prepared ourselves to experience it as a death stroke for a temple scribe to whom we have already ascribed every possible kind of negative motivation. We’re ready to see the demon slain, the villain struck down, the rhetorical enemy made humble at the feet of Christ the conqueror!
Which, if we’re being honest, is probably why we almost always stop reading at the end of verse 31. Jesus has boldly laid down the law, given us a teaching so perfect, so unassailable that it would endure for time immemorial, why would we need anything else here? Surely that arrogant, unsuspecting scribe just scampered away in humiliation and defeat, awed and humbled by the overwhelming majesty and pure teaching power of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Except…that isn’t what happened.
In truth, the scribe doesn’t to Jesus’ teaching as we might expect, with an immediate defensive reaction, with a carefully crafted expression of tactical wit and political acumen; not even a frustrated interruption, or an anachronistic “well actually.”
Instead, he responds first by listening, patiently, to the answer Jesus has for the question asked, followed by recognition of the clear and absolute truth expressed so simply by the teacher of teachers standing before him.
Even when every human part of him must have been screaming for him to be suspicious or defensive, Jesus never once rises to the attack. He hears the recognition of the scribe, and accepts it in love. Not only that, but Jesus tells him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
Do you see how there is absolutely no acrimony here? There is none of the calculated fencing of corrupt religious leaders trying to find an exploitable weakness while revealing none of their own. There is no combat, no argument, no debate.
Just…truth. God’s truth, shared freely between servants of God in good faith.
You see, we spend so much time looking at the conflict between Jesus and the religious leadership that it becomes hard to imagine them as anything but a monolith of corruption and cruelty. Elders, priests, scribes, Herodians, Pharisees, we imagine the whole lot of them as being cartoon villains before the bright-and-shiny holiness of Jesus.
But no institution, no belief system is a monolith, and no matter what a person might do or be, they are still people, worthy of being spoken to and treated with respect.
From the beginning of these exchanges back in Chapter 11 - in fact, throughout Jesus exchanges with those would question and doubt him - you’ll notice Jesus never responds to a direct question with condemnation or attack.That’s not to say he doesn’t condemn the religious leaders, or speak against their hypocrisy and corruption boldly and bluntly on many an occasion.
He absolutely does. But he always starts from the assumption of good faith. Even when bad faith is virtually certain, Jesus always starts with that door open first.
What Jesus knows here is that everyone, from the widow at the well, to the orphan in the street, to the immigrant seeking refuge, to the gold-cloaked scribes and yes, even the corrupt leaders of the temple at the time, to you and I here today, all of them - all of us - no matter how far we’ve gone astray, are beloved children of God. Each one of us is a bearer of the image of God, no matter how much muck we might have heaped atop it over the course of our lives.
One of the hardest disciplines in our spiritual life is living into the second part of that commandment: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. We like to think of that in terms of soup kitchens and homeless shelters, love extended to the least among us, and that’s not necessarily wrong; it’s just that the commandment doesn’t end there.
Loving our neighbors means looking through the muck, reaching past the twisted theologies and bent social views, setting aside the hateful rhetoric flying in our face, and even sometimes dodging a punch or two so that we can see the person looking with fear from behind the wall they’ve built out of their bad-faith rhetoric.
That is what Jesus is doing here, and that’s why we don’t stop reading after verse 31, because Jesus doesn’t just tell us to love our neighbor, he demonstrates it as he’s teaching it.
Jesus had every reason to believe, as many of us do, that this scribe was limbering up to deliver the mother of all bad-faith arguments. Jesus had every reason to expect yet another attack, yet another criticism, yet another intractable enemy bent on tearing him down, on obscuring the face of God in exchange for a few more pieces of sliver added to the temple coffers.
But when the question was asked, Jesus didn’t criticize. He didn’t strike back, lay a trap, or boldly call out the scribe’s hypocrisy.
He looked. He listened. And when he had every opportunity to expect bad faith, he made his stand as he always did :on good faith instead.
Many of us, particularly those of us in the United States, are going to be confronted with many, many people acting in bad faith in the days and weeks to come. We will see violence, cruel and hypocritical words, acts of terror, and worse things still. And it will be easy, so very, very easy to write off those who would say and do such things as enemies, to separate them in our hearts from the category of “neighbor” so that we no longer owe them the same care, compassion, respect, and love that we offer in good faith to all our neighbors, just as Jesus told us to do.
Nobody is born a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, or a bigot. No one is born hateful, cruel, or unloving. These things are learned, over a lifetime of paths taken and decisions made that we know nothing about; which we can know nothing about. And no matter what comes next, our role as followers of Christ Jesus will be as it ever has been - to stand boldly for God’s justice, to stand in defense of the vulnerable and the oppressed, to be unyielding in love and uncompromising in our pursuit of peace for all God’s children.
But we must always, always do so in good faith, recognizing the inherent goodness within our most implacable enemies even as we stand against them, ever ready to hear their questions and respond with honesty rather than derision, truth rather than defensiveness, and always with a willingness to see that despite whatever we might expect to see, despite whatever our experiences have taught us to see, these too are our neighbors, flawed and failing just as we are too.
Like Christ we can be firm in our convictions without being cruel, unwavering in our defense of the vulnerable without being destructive ourselves, and ever able to see the people peering out from behind the bad-faith arguments, to which the only antidote possible is the love, peace, mercy, and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ offered up as it ever has been:
In good faith.
Comentários