SO CLOSE, YET SO FAR AWAY
MARK 12:28-34; DEUTERONOMY 6:4-9; I JOHN 4:15-21
--by R. David Reynolds
In One Church from the Fence, Wes Seelinger writes: “I have spent long hours in the intensive care waiting room . . . watching with anguished people . . . listening to urgent questions: Will my husband make it? Will my child walk again? How do you live without your companion of thirty years?
“The intensive care waiting room is different from any other place in the world. And the people who wait are different. They can’t do enough for each other. No one is rude. The distinctions of race and class melt away. A person is a father first, a black man second. The garbage man loves his wife as much as the university professor loves his, and everyone understands this. Each person pulls for everyone else.
“In the intensive care waiting room, the world changes. Vanity and pretense vanish. The universe is focused on the doctor’s next report. If only it will show improvement. Everyone knows that loving someone else is what life is all about” [--Hugh Duncan Boise, Idaho. Leadership, Vol. 16, no. 1.]. In today’s text Jesus teaches us how to live this way before we find ourselves in the intensive care waiting room. Andrew Murray in his With Christ in the School of Prayer summarizes it this way: “My relationship with God is part of my relationship with men. Failure in one will cause failure with the other” [--Andrew Murray in With Christ in the School of Prayer.
Christianity Today, Vol. 35, no. 5.].
In the twelfth chapter of Mark first a group of Pharisees and Herodians engaged Jesus “in order to trap Him in a statement” (Mark 12:13), and they a group of Sadducees came to question Him concerning the Resurrection. Our text begins at this point. A scribe who had heard all of these conversations was pleased with Jesus’ answers; therefore, he asks the Lord the question, “What commandment is the foremost of all (Mark 12:28)?”
The scribes were experts in the written law. They copied, preserved, interpreted, and taught it to disciples; and they were judges in cases were people were accused of breaking the Law of Moses. Most of them belonged to the party of the Pharisees. In the time of Jesus the Scribes and Pharisees were pulled in two different directions concerning the law. Many of them were so overwhelmed at keeping every detail of the written and oral law that they were constantly expanding its scope while others believed that the law could be summarized in simply form. The scribe who asks Jesus the question, “What commandment is the foremost of all (Mark 12:28),” evidentially adheres to the school that believed in a more simplistic interpretation of the law.
Jesus responds to his question by quoting Deuteronomy 6:4-5, “The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel! The LORD our God is one LORD; 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.” Jesus appeals to the traditional Jewish confession of faith, the basic statement of the Jewish Law, in giving His answer. He quotes the Shema. Shema is the Hebrew word of “Hear,” and is the first word in the Deuteronomy quotation. Even today the Shema is the opening affirmation of faith in the synagogue service. The word Shema, or “hear,” literally means to “keep on hearing,” “Keep on listening,” “Keep on obeying.” It is a declaration that The Lord is not first among many Gods, but the one and only God, Creator, and King of the Universe.” There is no other God but the Lord God of Israel.
The Shema is a call to keep on loving, listening to, and obeying the One True God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. In other words, the greatest of all commandments calls for the Believer to continually and absolutely surrender his entire being in full commitment to the One True and Living God. Such commitment and love involves the total person, spiritual, intellectual, and physical. One who truly loves God holds nothing back from Him.
Senator John McCain tells the story of the final years of his imprisonment as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. “The North Vietnamese moved us from small cells with one or two prisoners to large rooms with as many as 30-40 men to a room. In our cell was one Navy officer, Lt. Commander Mike Christian. Over a period of time Mike had gathered bits and pieces of read and white cloth from various packages. Using a piece of bamboo he had fashioned into a needle, Mike sewed a United States flag on the inside of his shirt, one of the blue pajama tops we all wore.
“Every night in our cell, Mike would put his shirt on the wall, and we would say the pledge of allegiance. This had been going on for some time until one of the guards came in as we were reciting our pledge. They ripped the flag off the wall and dragged Mike out. He was beaten for several hours and then thrown back into the cell.
“Later that night, as wee were settling down to sleep on the concrete slabs that were our beds, I looked over to the spot where the guards had thrown Mike. There, under the solitary light bulb hanging from the ceiling, I saw Mike. Still bloody and his face swollen beyond recognition, Mike was gathering bits and pieces of cloth together. He was sewing a new American flag” [--John McCain. From the files of Leadership.].
If a prisoner of war can love his country with such commitment as this, a Christian can love His Lord and God no less. The Disciple must not withhold anything from Jesus. As His disciple “all that I am, do, and have must be used to love God.”
However, Jesus does not stop by simply answering the Scribe’s request. The Scribe only asked for the “Foremost” Commandment, but Jesus adds, “The second is this, ‘You Shall Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Now this is a quotation of Leviticus 19:18, “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord.” Why do you suppose Jesus went beyond the Scribe’s request in answering his question? I think the answer may lie in part with the fact that the parallel account given by Luke in Luke Chapter 10 goes on to give the “The Parable of the Good Samaritan.”
In the King James translation Mark 12:31 reads, “And the second is like . . . .” The word “LIKE” means “on the same par.” It means that what follows, “the second commandment” Jesus is about to state, is on the “same footing, the same level,” has the same “standing” as the first. The two commandments to love God with my whole being and to love my neighbor as myself go hand and hand; they can not be separated. Indeed, a Disciple can never love God and hate his neighbor by any means. We are reminded in I John 4:20-21, “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother too.” Jesus also reminds us once more in John 13:34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” A Disciple simply can not love God and hate another human being.
Note that Jesus gives new meaning to an old commandment when He says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In the original text of Leviticus the meaning was “Love your fellow Israelite, your fellow Jew!” That text reads: “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.” To the Scribe and the Pharisees “neighbor” meant “fellow countrymen,” but in the Parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus makes it clear that “neighbor” means “a fellow human being, any member of the human family, regardless of race, colour, nationality, social status, or creed. To love my neighbor as myself means by the power of the Holy Spirit we live the words of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right . . . .” A Disciple can not love and continue to harbor malice, seek vengeance, or bear a grudge.
In our text, the Scribe agreed with Jesus. He said, “Right, Teacher; You have truly stated that He is One, and there is no one else besides Him; 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 himself, is much more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices (Mark 12:32-33).” To this Jesus replied, “You are not far from the kingdom of God (Mark 12:34).” He was “so close, yet perhaps so far away as well.” He knew the Scriptures, but He did not live them by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Luke tells us, “But wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor (Luke 10:29)?’” He was willing to love his fellow countrymen, but what about the Samaritan, the Roman soldiers, Caesar, publicans, lepers. How about us? Are we willing to love the homeless of Decatur, love the Arab as well as the Jew, and love the black as well as those who are white like we are? Can we love those who have wronged us? Billy Graham has said it well, “Skin color does not matter to God, for He is looking upon the heart. When people are standing at the foot of the cross, there are no racial barriers (--Billy Graham, evangelist. Men of Integrity, Vol. 1, no. 1.).” I would take that one step further, “When people are standing at the foot of the cross, there are no barriers at all.”
Michael Tait, a black member of the Christian music Group DC Talk, shares this testimony, “I recently went to the Smoky Mountains with some friends to do some rock climbing. We came to a small town near Knoxville, Tennessee, and pulled into a little country store.
“I walked in. Three white guys sitting there gave me, a black guy, looks I’ve never seen before. One of them said, ‘You don’t belong around here—boy.’
“At first I couldn’t believe he was talking to me. Then I couldn’t believe my ears when he said, “Stick around here after dark and we’ll hang you.’ I was thinking, Man, we’re sending rockets to Mars and there are still people living in this kind of blind racial ignorance. Suddenly, I was experiencing hatred, the kind of bigotry I’d only read about or seen on TV. I’ll never forget how I felt in that little country store. Less than human. Alone.
“Fortunately, I didn’t lash out; I knew Jesus wouldn’t have. I knew God wanted me to keep my anger under control. So I calmly explained to that man that racism is a thing of the past. I even surprised myself at the restraint I showed (--Michael Tait, member of Christian music group DC Talk. Men of Integrity. Vol. 1 no. 1).”
“If someone says, ‘I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen (I John 4:20). “So close, yet so far from the Kingdom of God?” Where are you?
