What Matters Most

“What Matters Most”—September 3, 2018

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that [Jesus] answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”  Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”Then the scribe said to Jesus, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘God is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love God with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”  After that no one dared to ask him any question. [Mark 12:28-34]

Just because something is simple does not mean it is easy.

And at the same time, just because something isn’t easy doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Case in point, this conversation between Jesus and a member of the Respectable Religious Crowd of his day.  It centers on a huge question--in a sense, the biggest, most fundamental question of all--namely, "What matters most?"  In life, in the commandments of God, in the whole of creation, what matters most?

And Jesus' answer, although simple, is not simplistic, nor naïve.  It is, in a word, love.

Love matters most. Physicists since before Einstein have struggled to come up with a single, unified, grant "theory of everything," and there Jesus has up and done it.  Love is what matters most.  Love of God, and love of others--since Jesus' definition of "neighbor" is all-inclusive to embrace whomever God sends across your path.

But once those words are out of Jesus' mouth, we are left with a follow-up question: what does that do for all the other commandments, and what does that practically mean for how I go to the post office, or buy my groceries, or choose a political party?  How do we get from the extremely simple sentence, "Love God and neighbor" to the complicated messy details of our actual lives?

Well, for starters, we should be clear that both in the original question and in Jesus' answer, the issue is framed in terms of "the greatest commandment," not "the only commandment." Nobody is suggesting that there is only one commandment that matters and the rest are just dead weight.  And nobody is suggesting that the other commandments are completely unrelated to whatever the “greatest” one is. From the vantage point of the Hebrew Scriptures, all of the commandments hang together as a way of life--they are not a random assembly of arcane rules, but the commandments about not being envious (coveting) goes along with the commandments about sabbath rest and sabbath year and debt forgiveness and welcoming the foreigner and taking care of widows and orphans, and all of the rest.  The expert in the Law wasn't asking Jesus to erase all but one of the commandments: he was asking if there is a way that you can hold up one as the lens through which you see all the rest.

In a way, it is a question of key-signature.  

When you get a piece of music in front of you, the notes are something of a jumble on the page until you look at the key-signature on the staff.  That tells you how all the notes relate to one another.  It gives you an answer for which note is the root, the tonic note, that makes all the other chords “work”, and toward which all the other chords in the piece are going to lean into in order to resolve.  If you don’t end on your root chord, the piece feels incomplete, whether the composer intended that or not.  Now, of course, a key-signature doesn’t eliminate the other notes—a piece in the key of C Major doesn’t only have endless series of C-Major chords in it.  It’s just that the root chord tells you, in a sense, where you start from and where you end up.  It feels like home, so to speak.  This is the question that Jesus and the scribe have been discussing:  of all the various commandments in the Law, among all the thou shalts and thou shalt nots, which is the root chord?  Where do we begin and end?  What commandment helps us make sense of all the rest, and which one do the other commandments want to resolve towards?  

So the answer, on which both Jesus and this scribe seem to agree here, is the two-fold commandment of love:  Love God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Problem solved, right?  Question answered, right?  Well, in one sense.  But knowing the key-signature of a piece of music is hardly the same as being able to play it.  I could tell you at a glance what key something is in just by looking at the listed sharps or flats on the page, but would have to practice for a long, long time to get most anything really playable under my fingers.  It is, I suppose, a reminder, that just because something is simple (like a key-signature) doesn’t mean it is easy.

That’s just it:  the answer to “What is the greatest commandment?” is the kind of answer you spend a lifetime growing into and growing better at.  Love isn’t the kind of thing you can check off a list with a single action or word or feeling.  Burnt sacrifices, on the other hand, you can check off a list:  “How many sins did I commit today?  Well, put another ox on the fire and that will cover me til Tuesday, I reckon.”  Ritual cleansings can be done with a simple set of instructions followed like a recipe and then you’re done for the day.  Proper prayers can be memorized or read off of a book, and you’ve done your duty there, too.  Laws about fasts and festivals, circumcision and Sabbath, pure foods and proper clothes, they can all be checked off your list and put out of your mind.  They may involve elaborate rituals or complicated parsing of regulations, but they are more or less easy to do—it’s just a matter of following instructions.

We might wish in our own day for a similar check-list of "required religious stuff" that will earn us heaven-points.  Did you recite the creed? Pray the right prayer to ask Jesus into your heart?  Post a Bible verse on Facebook to make sure your friends all know you're a religious person? All of those are terribly easy things to do, and we like to do such things in the thought that it will get us off the hook for the harder stuff that we don't want to do and aren't as good at--like being kind to someone who has been rotten to you, or putting the needs of a stranger you'll never meet before your own.  We would love it if Jesus would just give us an easy checklist of things we could do in the first few minutes of the day so that we could have the rest of our day free for our own agendas.  But he does not.  Any of those others showy things we might attempt are easy.

Love, on the other hand, is a simple command, but one that consumes and fills a lifetime.  Love, whether of God or of neighbor (or of stranger or enemy, as Jesus would point out) calls forth a relationship, and a relationship takes energy, commitment, time, passion, and a willingness to suffer… even to give yourself away. That is easier said than done.

And yet, that kind of relationship—with God, and with the people God puts in our paths in this life—is perhaps the most beautiful and blessed thing there is.  It is what we are meant for.  It is what we have been meant for all along—lives lived in love with the God who called us beloved first, and lives spent carrying one another and being carried in turn, as we each take our place serving and being served in the beloved community.  “A neighbor’s blessed burden, within reason, becomes a burden borne of all and one,” sings Colin Meloy of the Decemberists.  That sounds an awful lot like one half of key signature of the whole Law.

It is not easy, and indeed, like anything in life, it requires practice.  But it is what life is all about, the “life that really is life” as 1Tim. 6:19 puts it.  That is what the whole Kingdom of God has always been about—life, lived fully, by being lived in love with God and with the people put in our path.  As hard as it may be, it is worth it.  Love is what matters most to Jesus--the determination to put the good of the other before your own needs or comfort. And  simply put, if we dare to follow Jesus, then such love is what will matter most to us as well.

Lord Jesus, having heard your call to us to love God and our neighbor, now enable us to do that in this day, and to find the fullness of life even when it is not easy to do.