Priority 1
Mark 12:28-34
September 1, 2002
“Jesus and the Lawyer”
There are people who swear by…duct tape! They believe that just about anything in the world—golf clubs, tennis shoes, furnaces, skateboards, blue jeans, toddlers—can be fixed by the wise application of duct tape. And they might be right! I once drove a car that I honestly believe had been patched up with duct tape and then painted over! It is truly a marvelous invention, and the home without a healthy supply is just asking for trouble.
But we are in the middle of a remodeling project. Part of the way we are going about this requires that, in our basement bathroom, there is exposed ductwork. And on that ductwork is a substance which I’ve been told is asbestos. I was also told that, if it were taped over, the asbestos would prove no problem. Well, it was ductwork, and so naturally, what does one get with which to tape up ductwork? Duct tape! But guess what? Though duct tape will fix almost anything, what I found out was that, try as I might, I couldn’t get the duct tape to stick to the duct! Duct tape apparently works on everything else except, it would seem, on ducts! Duct tape was designed for a purpose—but sadly, it seems to do everything except what it was designed to do!
The church of Jesus Christ, the church that He said He would build and which would not be beaten by the gates of hell, was designed for a purpose. The church, I would remind you, has nothing to do with a building, except as that building serves as a meeting place. Truth is that church is not something we go to, but something we are! The correct answer, when someone asks, “where is your church?”, is to say, “all over Mercer County!” And as we are all over Mercer County, we have a purpose, as individuals and as a collective body. We have a priority that outstrips all others. And it is that priority that we will be talking about for the next few weeks; it is “Priority One”. Read about it with me in Mark 12:28-34 (stand and pray!).
What can we do without, as a church? Let me ask a few questions…
Do we have to
1. Take the offering by passing a plate?
2. Sit in rows, in pews or chairs, looking at the backs of each other’s heads?
3. Sing praise choruses? Hymns?
4. Meet on Sunday morning?
5. Wear a particular type of clothing?
6. Have an order of service listed in the bulletin?
7. Have a Sunday School, or a children’s ministry?
8. Pray with our eyes closed?
9. Have hymn books in the racks?
All or most of these elements are things to which we are accustomed; it would feel odd to us if these trappings were absent! And yet, the fact is that none of these things or 1001 others are essential to our pleasing God! None! And yet, the Scripture we consider for the next few weeks details an absolute essential! Today, instead of preaching, I’m going to take a few minutes and detail the lay of the land, set the background for our study together over the next few weeks.
Pharisees and Sadducees were theological enemies. In modern parlance, Pharisees were conservatives and Sadducees were liberals. The Sadducees did not believe in a strict understanding of the Law, whereas the Pharisees, while they missed the deeper elements of the Law, were nonetheless committed to it. And yet, though they were opposed to each other, they were collaborators in their opposition to Jesus. In Mark 12, Jesus puts them both in their places; He first deals with the Pharisees and their question about taxes, and then He answers an absurd question asked by the Sadducees, who denied life after death. We can imagine the attitude of some of the Pharisees as they listened to Jesus debate the Sadducees; with football season coming, perhaps this analogy will help: they must have felt something like I feel when the Dallas Cowboys play the Oakland Raiders. If there were any way possible for both of those teams to lose the game, I’d be overjoyed! The Pharisees despised the Sadducees, but they despised Jesus as well!
After Jesus uses the Old Testament Scriptures to reason with the Sadducees and eventually close their mouths, one scribe, a lawyer in fact we learn from the parallel account in Matthew 22, steps forward from the crowd. This is our inquirer, a lawyer. No jokes, please. You know the problem with lawyer jokes, don’t you? Lawyers don’t think they’re funny, and no one else thinks they’re jokes.
I. The Inquirer – A lawyer
At any rate, this was a man who was skilled in his understanding of the Law. It is highly likely that this man was a “cream of the crop” kind of guy, a man highly admired, even, for his facility with the intricacies of the Law. If anyone could be a match for Jesus, perhaps this man could be.
He was likely a skeptic to begin with. Ostensibly, he too was the sworn enemy of Jesus as were most Pharisees. He had probably listened to Jesus looking for some opportunity to discredit Him. Jesus represented a threat, a danger to the power enjoyed by the religion boys, and frankly, Jesus is dangerous today, a threat to our established way of living. Shame on the church, on us, for presenting Him as anything less!
But I believe that a subtle change had begun to take place in the heart of this man. Does this lawyer begin to entertain the possibility that this Jesus was indeed Who He said He was? We learn from parallel Scripture that the Pharisees had put the man up to the question; they emerged from their huddle with this lawyer, respected as he likely was, as their choice of spokesmen. But I believe that his attitude changed the more he listened to Jesus, and that while he might have initially been their pawn, he genuinely wanted to know the answer to this question!
And if this is indeed the case, then there is a lesson here for us as Jesus’ followers, and for some of you, it will come as a great reason for hope, and it is this: we cannot write off anybody for the cause of Christ! Here was a man whose purpose likely had been to serve as the front man for the Pharisees, but change takes place as he listens to Jesus; his heart begins to soften; his eyes begin to open; his mind begins to consider Jesus’ words. No, he is not in the Kingdom yet, but something is happening!
And there may be someone in your life right now toward whom the temptation you face is to write that person off. Don’t do it! This lawyer stands as a likely reminder that even those with seemingly the hardest of hearts may turn and consider the claims of Jesus. It’s interesting that Acts 6 records that many of the religious leaders were turning to faith in Christ following His resurrection; is it possible that this man was one of these?
II. The Responder – Jesus
The man has a question for Jesus about the greatest priority in all of life. He came to the right place! Oh, we don’t know for certain all of his motives in coming, but whether he knew it or not, he could not have come to a better person to ask his question. He came to Jesus, God in the flesh, to ask which commandment stood out above all the rest!
Jesus was there when the worlds were formed; it was His hand which traced out the heavens and formed the celestial bodies. It was His hand which created every living creature, which formed the man Adam and placed him in the Garden of Eden and which made Eve out of Adam’s rib. It was Jesus Who planned for life and redemption before the worlds began, and it was He Who gave the final word on how life ought to be lived. Who better to ask this question?
Our friend Phil Donahue is back; I’ll wait while you finish applauding! The other night, I caught only the very tail end of a segment of his new show, but the caption which told me what they had been discussing caught my eye and made me wish I’d heard the conversation. The question was, “No Jesus, no Heaven?” Of course, our buddy Phil was taking the side of “tolerance”, I’m certain, suggesting that it was quite intolerant to insist on Jesus being the exclusive way to Heaven. Count me as intolerant! Reading the New Testament, it is quite clear that Jesus is either the only way to Heaven or He is no way at all. If Jesus’ words are true, then any other means of reaching God is categorically ruled out; if Jesus’ words are false, He has mislead countless millions and is worse than the devil. Yes, it might offend Mr. Donahue’s delicate sensibilities, but Jesus is the uniquely qualified Savior, and He is the One Who can best answer this vital question. So what is the question?
III. The Question – “Which commandment is the greatest?
The Pharisees had found 613 commandments in the Scriptures; 248 were “positive” (“do this, do that”), and 365 were “negative” (“don’t do this, don’t do that”). For them, “a don’t a day” kept the devil away, I guess! 613 things to do and not to do; my, that was a little cumbersome, don’t you think, a little difficult to remember? My wife will tell me three things to do in the morning, like “take out the trash, get the car washed, and don’t forget to pick up Chiannon from school”, and as often as not, I’ll forget one or more of those things! I’m so forgetful that I have to use tricks to remember. For instance, when I’m packing for a trip, and I need to pack my toiletries, I don’t want to forget something, and so all I remember is the number “5”. I remember that I have to remember 5 items of toiletries, relating to five parts of my body:
1. “hair” (or what’s left of it), and thus I pack a comb and hair spray;
2. “face”, and so I pack my shaver and after shave;
3. “teeth”, and thus my toothbrush and toothpaste;
4. “eyes”, and thus my contact lens paraphernalia; and
5. “pits”, and thus I pack my Speed Stick.
If I didn’t have a system for remembering, I’d forget one or more of those items, and I’d get where I was going and be stuck without something needful! There’s nothing worse than being ready to go to bed in a motel somewhere and realizing that while you have your contacts in your eyeballs, you can’t take them out and store them because you have no contact solution! Imagine trying to remember 613 different laws in order to please God, much less do them! It drove many to anxiety, and others to despair. Legalism always does!
Perhaps you have come this morning thinking that, in order to please God, you have to keep a bunch of rules. Perhaps you view God as being in Heaven just waiting, hoping, that you’ll screw up so that He can zap you good. Perhaps your understanding of God is that there is something that some people do which automatically disqualify them from the possibility of His grace, that maybe you’ve committed one sin too many or one sin too bad. Perhaps you wonder if there is any way to even the score. Relax! Here’s the answer to that: all your sin is bad! It all stinks to high Heaven! There is nothing you can do to ever possibly even the score with God! In your own power, you’re hopeless, you’re sunk, you’re out of luck! There aren’t enough rules for you to keep to make it right with God, and if there were, you couldn’t keep them anyway! Look at how many people mess up the Ten Commandments, and there are only ten of them!
And so what the Pharisees did was to argue back and forth over categories of sins, which sins were worse and which sins weren’t so bad. We do that today; our Catholic friends classify sins into two categories, mortal and venial. Let’s not be so hard on them, though; we evangelicals do the same thing, but without giving them categories, though! We dismiss some sins as being almost inconsequential, sins like gossip, greed, and back-talking; we treat other sins as though God’s grace isn’t big enough to handle them, like child-molesting or homosexuality. News flash: right there in Romans 1, just after Paul has talked about the sin of homosexuality, know what else is there? “Gossips”. “Disobedient to parents”. “Greed”—why, greed is an American family value these days, almost! And yet Paul says that those who practice those things are worthy of death, because they break the law of God. If you see a world of difference between your sins and the sins of those folks down the road at the Mercer Regional Correctional Facility, then you have little idea of the holiness of God; you have scant concept of the ugliness of your own sin!
And the lawyer asks the question, “what is the greatest commandment?” The basis for distinguishing between lesser and greater commandments involved the nature of the demand, as well as the appropriate propitiation necessary to atone for one’s transgression of the commandment. Both the question and the presuppositions behind it flowed from an orientation which suggested that we could become right with God on the basis of our own law-keeping, or failing that, on the basis of settling score with God through some kind of penance. But even these men who categorized sins and argued over which laws were “weighty” and which were “light” couldn’t agree; some even argued that the most important commandments concerned the fringes to be worn on garments!
Here is the question: “what is the most important commandment?” To be sure, the man asked it hoping that the keeping of it would lead to eternal life; we understand that it is not by law-keeping, but solely by God’s grace, that we are saved. But the answer to this question will be instructive to us! What is the greatest commandment? What is the most important thing? What is the organizing principle around which to schedule my life? What is priority 1?
People today organize their lives around a host of wrong principles, do they not? There is the philosophy of
Materialism – “Get all you can, and then can all you get!” “He who dies with the most toys wins!” This is the American way, conspicuous consumption. People build their lives on this priority.
Hedonism – “If it feels good, do it!” Splattered all over our media is this philosophy which suggests that physical sensation, in whatever form and through whatever means, is the sum total of existence.
Rationalism – The idea that one must have ironclad proof in order to believe. I’ve got news for you—you have to put faith in something, whether it is God, or Darwin, or Tom Brokaw, or the federal government, or your own ideas.
Selfism – “Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all.” “This above all, to thine own self be true.”
All around us we see people building their entire lives on these and other philosophies.
One of the most important things we can do in life is to ask the right questions. This man asked the right question. What we do with the answer makes all the difference. Over the course of the next few weeks, we are going to take an in-depth look at Jesus’ answer. The question for this day, for us to ponder afresh, is this: what is the organizing principle around which your life revolves?
At the cathedral in Milan, there are three inscriptions over the respective doorways. Over the right-hand door there is this motto: “All that pleases is but for a moment.” Over the left-hand door the words read: “All that troubles is but for a moment.” But over the central door there is a simple sentence: “Nothing is important save that which is eternal.” Priority 1: are you willing to examine the priorities by which you guide your life?
Points to Ponder:
1. Judging by the way you lived your life over the past week, what might another person say wold be your answer to the question “What is the greatest commandment?”
2. As we begin our study of the Great Commandment, make it your regular prayer that God would demonstrate to you those areas of your life in which it cannot be said that you are loving Him and loving others.
