There are moments that I despair of humanity. As an example of something that warrants my despair, the other day someone was railing on-line about how there were homeless people pitching tents in the Vashon cemetery, and that this was just an awful occurrence. I was so verklempt and somewhat akin to livid that I was stunned into silence, which doesn’t happen often. I mean, I understand all about respecting graves and some people do get rather particular about how gravesites are kept. However, maybe, some gravesites are never visited except by this group of homeless people. It is unlikely that the homeless people are actually disturbing anyone at the cemetery. If the entire island is full of NIMBY (not in my backyard) people, then a homeless encampment at the cemetery seems the least problematic.
And while we know that as Christians that there is a loving, caring way to embrace our homeless neighbors in the encampment, Mark’s Gospel is not really the Gospel to give that sort of teaching. But the core of all the other gospels – Luke and the good Samaritan story, John’s call to agape, self-giving love – the core of those teachings is right here for sure, in Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees that we just heard: Love God with all your heart and might, and love your neighbor as yourself. Mark’s Gospel besides being the shortest and fast moving, it is notable here that this interchange takes place in Jerusalem, after the grand entrance into Jerusalem (you remember, that we celebrate on Palm Sunday), the reason that no one dared to ask him anymore questions was that he was both spot on AND they were plotting to kill him.
We need to be quite clear here that neither the Gospel nor our passage of Hebrews is anti-Semitic in their intention. We are the ones going astray if we read them that way. Jesus answers the questions from the scribe that God is first always and second is your neighbor; and he reads them exactly as his Jewish tradition does. Jesus is not saying that the specific other nine commandments don’t matter. One can easily read the condensation of the nine commandments in to one. In other words, you could read all the commandments that have to do with people and not directly with God as loving your neighbor as yourself.
This self-emptying love of Jesus, of loving neighbor as self, can be looked on as only an ideal, as something to which we are to aspire to, or alternatively it can be looked upon as what God in Christ would have us to do. I suspect that we all know that we will fall short whether we think this is attainable or not. St. Paul and the Gospel writer of John are pretty clear, that still this is where we put our energies, I think it is expected that we aim for it.
However, behind these commandments, behind any agape love, the driving force for all, whether you believe agape love is unattainable or attainable, the driver is always God. The first commandment, for Jews and for us… Hear O Israel— Shema, meaning Hear, and the whole phrase is known as the Shema. As we just sang:
It is God who calls you. It is God who originally called Israel, it is God who calls us all the time. Jesus makes it clear, that you can’t love God and NOT love your neighbor. This is why Jesus’s company was tax collectors and prostitutes. He means to love ALL the neighbors. If we are all made in the image of the Divine then there is no one who is unlovable. God loves us so that we can love others.
I suppose in our day and age, it also needs to be said that loving neighbor is not enough either. True love of neighbor, not just doing good deeds comes from the source, our love of God.
In this way, it is akin to the passage in Hebrews. This passage extols the priestly ministry of Jesus as he passes through the perfect tent, into the heavenly realm, (remembering that the previous rituals of Moses were performed in a very human earthly tent). Jesus has perfected this, but even the scribe knows that the love that comes out of the Shema goes beyond any sacrifice made bodily.
And Jesus goes beyond the typical ritual sacrifice. I think there is an equally tied to an expectation that we are to go beyond our comfort zones for loving as well. Maybe we are not able to love so selflessly, but what if everyone tried to love selflessly. It might get us killed, but they couldn’t kill us all. I think it’s worth trying. Radical hospitality, might turn into something else, we might actually really hear God, because then we might be speaking the very language of God.
Track 2
Deuteronomy 6:1-9 Psalm 119:1-8 Hebrews 9:11-14 Mark 12:28-34