https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3vhiaEDzkc
TEXT: Mark 12:28-34
[28] And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” [29] Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. [30] 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.’ [31] The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” [32] And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. [33] And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” [34] And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.
SERMON: “Masoned in Love”
“I wonder what sort of story we’ve fallen into,” Sam asked Frodo, as they were looking onward in their journey to Mordor all while reflecting on their brave adventures and looking back on old tales and singing old songs. And it’s a bonding conversation, as these two hobbits from the Shire think about where they came from, where they were destined to go and unknowing of whether their tale ends in a happy or sad ending. And so, they go on, and they go on together. And much like Sam and Frodo, we journey along together. And every single one of us is captured in a story, whether we think of our footsteps as brave or adventurous or mundane. And for us who find belonging into the bigger story of the Bible, of the Story of God, we’ve fallen into the best of stories, something that C. S. Lewis calls the true myth. It’s the kind of story that makes hobbits brave incredible journeys. It’s the kind of story that makes Holocaust survivors forgive their former Nazi abusers. Because we find ourselves in a story, where we’ve read the back of the book, and we know how the story ends — that Jesus wins. But as the chapters unravel, we get to step into the pages of the in between — between the climax and the concluding chapter, not with anxious wondering but knowing how everything ends for God’s own. Tom Wright says of the Christian in our journey that we all have a telos, which means that we all have an end point, we all have a destination. And the unique thing about our faith is that our end point is not something that we strive toward. But rather, it’s something that’s reached down to save us, to rescue us, to invite us into this tale. He says: “Love is not our duty, it is our destiny. Love is the language they speak in the new creation, and we get to learn it here. It’s difficult and requires us learning irregular verbs. But learn it and one day we will be singing in it.” Because our song finds its tune from the same tale — the bigger story that envelops all smaller stories. It’s the story of the love of God— in the movement of what Sinclair Ferguson titled his Advent devotional, Love Came Down at Christmas.
Because when Jesus is questioned here, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Here, he’s being questioned, as he has been, in order to be stumped — in order to put him deeper into a corner, to trap him. But the way that Jesus responds is by noting which of the commandments is the greatest, the one with such gravitational pull, where it can center and direct and animate the people of God. For the longest time, the NBA had the official 50 greatest players of all time list of players. But that list was formed in 1996. And because there had been almost 30 years of players who have come into the league since then, the NBA had to expand the list to the 75 greatest players of all time. And if you’re a well-informed basketball fan, you know who the GOAT is, the greatest of all time. And apparently, the GOAT Michael Jeffrey Jordan arrived later than everybody else there. And when Damien Lillard, one of the newly installed 25 players, recalls the moment that MJ, his Airness, walked in, everything shifted. It was like everyone stopped what they were doing, and all movements and gazes amongst the other players zoned in on him. And you have to know. In that room, you had Kareem Abdul Jabbar, you had Magic Johnson, you had Larry Bird, you had Oscar Robertson, you had Lebron James, you had Shaquille O’Neal. But it was just different, and he recalls how he could just feel the difference in the atmosphere. You didn’t have to stack accolades or resumes. Everyone just knew which player had the most influence, the most impact, the most pull amongst all the other players in the room.
And in this moment when Jesus is asked by the scribe — Which is the greatest commandment? To this, he turns to the one with the greatest gravitational pull, the one that moves the other parts. The one that’s personified in 1 Corinthians 13, with the preface to the chapter being — Still I will show you a more excellent way. This love that the apostle Johnwill come to say of later when describing God — that God is love. That we love because he first loved us. That which Augustine will come to say carries him. And here’s how he describes this movement in his Confessions: “A body by its weight tends to move towards its proper place. The weight’s movement is not necessarily downwards, but to its appropriate position: fire tends to move upwards, a stone downwards. They are acted on by their respective weights; they seek their own place. Oil poured under water is drawn up to the surface on top of the water. Water poured on top of oil sinks below the oil. They are acted on by their respective densities, they seek their own place. Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest.” And so, Augustine says that the place we find rest — Our hearts are restless until we find rest in thee. That my weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. And here in our passage, to a Jewishaudience who would have remembered these words that Jesus would share from Deuteronomy 6, captured as the shema. That while Leviticus 19:18 and the charge to love one another came first, it’s Deuteronomy 6:4-6 that takes priority. Because it’s our love of God and more importantly, his love of us that moves and guides us toward our love of neighbor. To those who had been marked by what we read in Exodus 19:4, when God tells his people after rescuing them from the Egyptians, that he had carried them. To these, what Jesus brings them and brings us into is the reappropriating of this commandment. That it would direct them not to look at their own hands, at their own deeds. But that they might be directed to a story, one whose beginning and end is marked with punctuation and finality. One that moves and guides and directs. But also anchors and grounds and centers. We are brought to God’s Story, which of course, means that we are brought to God’s love. A narrative that redeems, guides, and animates us into this countercultural community of the people of God called the church.
We’re all formed by something. We are all impacted by the potters around us. We’re told in Romans 9 that God is the potter, and that we are the clay. But it’s not just God and his story that forms and shapes us, but there are competing potters all around us, who seek to shape us with alternate narratives. Tish Harrison Warren talks about our daily liturgies. And what she says is most important is her daily liturgy of reflecting on her liturgies. She calls it her formation audit. Because we are impressionable people and moldable clay. And if we aren’t conscious and aware of what influences are impacting us, we won’t be left the same. But rather, we are constantly being shaped by the air we breathe in. As Stanley Hauerwas says: “All knowledge communicated, whether acknowledged or not, is formation.” And I’ve noted before that as a church that enjoys our liturgical practices and patterns and observances, we learn our habits not just from Christian traditions but from the Old Testament people. Because it was God who habited these people to patterns and rhythms and liturgies, in order to reprogram them, in order to tell them and to reform their identity toward a different story, a redeemed narrative. These were a people who had for 430 years experienced brutal enslavement under Pharaoh and the Egyptians. And upon liberating them, there were seven festivals that the people would habit to gather around — to remind one another and to be reminded, “We are free people, because we belong to a different Story. We are a people formed by the Story of the Lamb.” And so, for these Israelites, as they journeyed around in the wilderness, it may have looked like aimless wandering for 40 plus 40 years. But it wasn’t aimless, it was guided. It was guided toward creating an identity for them as a people, as a redeemed and liberated people. They were formed by these very words as the people of God. And it’s said that the Shema — these words from Deuteronomy 6:4-6 — was the last thing that came out of Holocaust victims before their imminent death. That it was often the first thing heard upon the birth of children and the very last thing said, bookending the lives of these Jews with these words. This was formation for the people of God.
The unfortunate thing for this scribe, along with many others, was that he came to understand the Shema as a mandate, as a strict commandment, instead of part of a story. They were being told the what without understanding the why. And for us who are inclined to take the words of Scripture and misappropriate them outside the bigger story. Where we might highlight a particular sin or a particular moment of failure. Or, even highlighting a particular success above the others. When this commandment takes us away from seeing the bigger picture. That instead of seeing the grace of God, if it pulls us to see more of the works of man, I’d argue to say that this is when we miss the mark, when we lose the heart of what’s being taught and said here.
Because Jesus does something here that’s quite remarkable. We’ve probably heard the word agape everywhere today. You might not have even grown up in the church, and you would know that it means love in Greek. It’s been popularized and used everywhere post-New Testament and in our modern context. But did you know that this is actually the very first time that Mark records Jesus using this word in his Gospel? And we’re all the way at the end of chapter 12, and we’re in the last week of his earthly ministry. It was a word that wasn’t regularly used. In fact, it’s used three out of four times here in this passage in the entirety of the Gospel of Mark. It’s said that the word agape and its verb form agapaw — that these were not used in contemporary Greek literature to be an ethic but rather an animal instinct. It wasn’t so much of a conscious decision but a reaction, thus, an animal instinct. It would have described something sensory akin to how we might describe one to breathe and smell and feel. It was so scarcely used in this context that it would have thrown people off who heard this used from the lips of Jesus. Because what Jesus is doing is something new, something completely different. He’s taking an old creed in the Shema, and he’s reappropriating it to a completely new teaching than what the Jews would have known, taking an animal instinct and attaching it to become a heavenly instinct. Not calling upon his people to conjure up something toward acting out of their own volition but learning to react. Learning to observe then move. Learning to behave as a part of something bigger. This agape love would become so formative that Martyn Lloyd-Jones would later come to say that when Christians sin, we sin not against law but primarily against love. That a greater motivator than being upright in conduct was to be shaped and formed by this story. A story, not of morality and adhesiveness to the law but of proximity to God, to the one who shapes and forms us in this grand story of rescue.
Now, something important that I learned in seminary was that before Deuteronomy 6 is Deuteronomy 5. That’s what I paid the big bucks for. But the importance of this is that Deuteronomy 5 was something that we know as the Ten Commandments. But you might know that this is the second time these are uttered. The first time was back in Exodus 20, shortly after the Red Sea, their great story of liberation from Egypt. But think about when this was given. Right after the narrative of crossing the Red Sea, you have what? The story of Israel grumbling, saying — God, we liked it better in Egypt. God you’re not being who you said you were. This isn’t what we expected. And what came from these? Manna from the sky, water from the rock. These provisions from God, not because they were obedient but because he is gracious. And it’s in this context where the Israelites are given the Ten Commandments. And here’s the thing. Deuteronomy 5 comes not because the Israelites did a good job keeping the Ten Commandments. There was the golden calf, there was the event of Nadab and Abihu, there was Moses angrily striking the rock, there were the sons of Korah, there was Achan and his sin and corporate punishment. And yet, the same words are repeated to the people. Godwasn’t moving the goal post. But rather, here he was reminding them that the law is dependent not upon the lawbreakersbut upon the lawmaker. That God’s Word is God’s Word, and God’s law is God’s law. And once God pronounces something, it’s as good as done — nothing changes it, nothing alters it.
Which would be devastating news, if that’s all there was to the story. After all, we are reminded through this scribe of the events of 1 Samuel 15 and of Hosea 6 and of Micah 6 when alluding these burnt sacrifices and offerings. That the people of God would often turn out to be a regularly idolatrous, disobedient, and unjust people. But the good news of God’s unchanging law is that love doesn’t first come up to God but it comes down to us. As Thomas Aquinas notes in his Aristotelian thinking, God is the first mover. And it’s his movement toward us that catalyzes and initiates our love and our movement toward him. But instead of coming toward us in wrath and judgment, he came to us by wearing our flesh, by wearing our iniquities, to be among us. To live a perfectly obedient life, one so obedient even to the point of death on a cross. And he did it for us, so that we might be formed and shaped in this story. Because just as God’s law is unchanging, so are his promises. And his promises for covenant lawbreakers like you and me are that if we trust that Jesus actually moved toward us. And if we trust that God gave him up to die for our sins. If we trust that Jesus lived the perfect life you and I and all of his people couldn’t live but died the death that we should have died. If we believe that the promise is the promise, that the deed is done, that it is finished, and that the Word of God is unbreakable, as we read in John 5:39. If we believe that, then love is something that changes us, that turns us, that forms and shapes us.
And friends, I know that you’ve done some horrible things. I know that you’ve kept sins hidden. I know that you have addictive patterns that you slip back into. I know, because you’re a sinner, as am I. But God’s Word is his Word, and his Word is his bond. And we can trust that he will keep to his Word, because Jesus went to the cross and stayed there, drinking down the fullness of God’s wrath that was deserving for his lawbreaking people. And so, as we close, I want us to take home some notes from Hans Urs von Balthasar, who makes this analogy regarding the face of God and how he teaches us to love. He writes: “It’s only after a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks that she finally receives her child’s smile in response. She has awaked love in the heart of her child, and as the child awakes to love, he also awakens to knowledge.” That it’s not the frowning face of God that will correct us and teach us to love. It’s the smiling face of God that teaches us to love. Every time you and I slip and relapse and fail, we don’t celebrate it, but it doesn’t change our status. Your actions and mine don’t have that kind of power. The smiling face of God is forever given to us, because the mangled face of Jesus was there on the cross for us. And as those bought by his blood and his love, we are changed by the smile of our Father. And that’s what we get when we come to the Table. We feel the smile of a loving Father who delights in feeding his hungry children. May the Story of Love shape and mold us, not by our guilty hands but by his blood-stained, nail-pierced, and punctured hands. We are told in 1 Peter 2:24 that by his wounds we have been healed.
For every Sunday, you and I are invited into this story. Just as the disciples were — confused, scared, anxious, unsure. Because of what transpired. Because of their cowardice and how they left Jesus’ side. And yet, in the midst of their failures, what did Jesus do? He appears to them after the resurrection and prior to the ascension. To story them in love. Because when the apostle Paul writes right before the great chapter on love, in 1 Corinthians 13, we read in 1 Corinthians 12:31 his introduction to love, saying — Still I will show you a more excellent way. And that same Greekword for show, we read in Luke 24:40, in that place of confusion, fear, anxiety, and uncertainty — And when he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And you see, this is our place of recalibration, where we are shown the nail-pierced hands and feet. For as our risen high priest, he extends and outstretches his hands toward us. Telling us we’re blessed, showing us we’re loved. Saying — Remember these holes in my hands and feet. For everything he’s done we cannot undo, because his love will carry us all the days of our lives.
