Transcript
An Encounter with One of the Scribes
First Baptist Richmond, November 10, 2024
The Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 12:28-34
One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”
I didn’t grow up with computers.
I grew up with lined notebook paper and Number 2 pencils. If I made a mistake while doing my homework I would turn my pencil around and try to erase it, and if that didn’t work I might wad up the whole sheet of paper and throw it away. So I didn’t learn until much later in life that when you’re working with a computer, and it starts slowing down or freezing up, the best thing you can do is to “re-boot.” That is, you shut down whatever program you’re working on and then you turn off the computer, wait a minute, and turn it on again. According to the experts that “resets the system…and returns the computer to a clean, operational state.”i
I’ve learned a lot since I was a kid but I didn’t grow up with all that. I’ve spent many a frustrating hour working with a balky, malfunctioning computer. I finally had to teach myself to say, “When in doubt, re-boot!” And that’s how I feel today. After a campaign season in which two very different presidential candidates presented two very different visions for the future of America, and after an election that has left us more divided than we were before—with half the country marching down Main Street in a raucous victory parade, and the other half peeking out through the blinds anxious about what might happen next—I feel a
need to stop, power down, take a deep breath, and re-boot. And in today’s Gospel lesson we have the opportunity to do something like that.
Because the political world in which Jesus lived wasn’t that much simpler than ours. There were multiple factions with differing views of what would “make Israel great again.” There were:
§ The Essenes, who lived in a monastic community along the shores of the Dead Sea, who made copies of sacred Scripture, and washed themselves in the waters of baptism as a way of getting ready for the coming of the Messiah.
§ The Zealots, who thought they would bring in the Messianic kingdom another way, by participating in active, armed rebellion against the occupying Roman forces, often carrying short swords under their cloaks.
§ The Sadducees, the priestly class of ancient Israel, the wealthy elite who cooperated with the Roman government and tried to keep the peace on the Temple Mount.
§ The Pharisees, who were the most pious of all the Jewish sects. Their name comes from a Hebrew word that means “to separate,” and they tried to separate themselves from anything unclean or impure.
§ The Scribes, also known as lawyers, whose job it was to search the Law of Moses for anything that might be considered a commandment of God, eventually compiling a list of some 613 of them.
§ And then there was Jesus, who had a completely different political vision, who came into Galilee saying, “The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the Good News!” He came healing the sick as a way of showing them how things would be when God had his way
in the world. And he came telling parables of how the world would be turned upside down when God’s Kingdom finally came. Jesus seemed to believe that it would come voluntarily: that people would willingly get down off the throne of their lives and let God sit there instead. And some did. They began to follow Jesus. His movement began to gain momentum. And it made the leaders of all those other movements anxious.
When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday the Roman soldiers saw what a disturbance his disciples were making, and how some were saying that he was a king. For them there could be no king but Caesar. They began to look for a way to stop him. The Pharisees began to draw near, asking questions that would expose Jesus as a fraud. The Sadducees came right behind them, trying to trip him up with their words.
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 first of all?” meaning, “Which commandment is the greatest, which one is the most important?” And I like to think that he asked the question because he had tried to keep all 613 commandments and found that he couldn’t do it. It was too hard, too exhausting. It didn’t leave him with time for anything else but commandment-keeping. And so he wanted to know, “Rabbi, if I couldn’t keep all the commandments, if I could only keep one, which one would it be?”
And Jesus was ready with an answer. Where did it come from? Straight out of the Book of Deuteronomy. It’s the Shema, that sacred sound bite every faithful Jew is required to recite every day: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5). But just as that scribe was about to nod his
head and agree Jesus went one further. He said, “The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Which must have been just what that scribe was thinking. Because he says, “You are right, Teacher! You have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; 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’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices!”ii
I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me in the past—not often, but sometimes. I remember being in a week-long workshop at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, with Barbara Brown Taylor, recognized as one of the greatest preachers of our time. She had been teaching us everything she knew about preaching during the week and now we were at the end, at the question-and-answer period. I asked, “How do you make a sermon?” thinking that if I asked it in that way, instead of saying, “How do you write a sermon,” she would answer by saying something clever like, “The same way you make a salad, by finding all the best ingredients and putting them together in one big bowl.” But she didn’t. She said, “The same way you make a soup. You look in the fridge to see what kind of ingredients you’ve got and then you put them all together in one big pot.” And I was like, “You are right, Teacher! You have truly said that you make a sermon in the same way you make a soup, and that there is no better method than to see what you have in the ‘refrigerator’ and put it all together!”
I wish Barbara Brown Taylor had looked at me in that moment and said, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God!” She didn’t, but that’s what Jesus said to that scribe. He could see that he was sincere, that he had thought about this,
and realized it wasn’t enough to keep your eyes lifted toward heaven all the time. You had to look around. You had to look on the suffering of your fellow man. You had to do something about it. “Yes!” Jesus said. “That’s it! That’s what the Kingdom is made of!”
But one of the things that struck me in reading this passage last week is the way Jesus said, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God,” as if the Kingdom were something you could move toward. Here at First Baptist we often talk about bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to Richmond, Virginia, and if you ask me how to do it I will say, “Just look around for anything that doesn’t look like heaven and then roll up your sleeves and get to work.” I really believe that will bring God’s kingdom closer to Richmond, that is, it will move the kingdom toward us. But here Jesus says to the scribe, “You are not far from the Kingdom,” as if he were moving toward it. I hadn’t thought about it that way before. It reminded me of that old saying that if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the mountain. If we can’t bring the Kingdom any closer to Richmond maybe we can bring ourselves closer to the Kingdom. How? It’s as simple as loving God and loving neighbor.
Any questions?
Well, yes. There’s a place in Luke’s Gospel where a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. And Jesus says, “What is written in the Law? What do you read there?” And he says, “That you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus said, “You have given the right answer. Do this and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself the lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” And this is when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan,
which seems especially relevant after a campaign season in which we’ve talked so much about immigration.
Some of the language that has been used to describe the people who come to this country from other countries is the same kind of language that would have been used to talk about the Samaritans in Jesus’ time, because they were the people most despised by the Jews. When Jesus told a story about a Samaritan he seemed to be looking for an example of the last person the lawyer would think of as a neighbor. But then, when he described what this Samaritan did—how he showed compassion on a Jewish traveler who had fallen among thieves, how he bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, how he put him on his own donkey and took him to an inn and cared for him, and then how, before he moved on, he provided the means for his continuing care—Jesus forced the lawyer to recognize that even a Samaritan can act like a neighbor, and then told him to go and do likewise.
So when we talk about loving our neighbors we need to go beyond the idea of taking an apple pie to the nice lady next door. We need to look at the word neighbor through the eyes of Jesus. We need to see the ones he sees as our neighbors. And when we talk about loving God we need to go beyond the idea of hanging a religious plaque on the wall. We need to look at the word God through the eyes of Jesus. Because for years now it hasn’t been enough for me to say that I believe in God. I have to say that I believe in the God revealed in Jesus. The author of John’s Gospel would agree. He writes, “No one has ever seen God,” which leaves us with all kinds of room to make God in our own image, a God who fights our battles and shares our prejudices. But the author of John’s Gospel continues, “The only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, has made him known.”
So when we Christians talk about loving God and loving neighbor, we’d better be talking about loving the God we see through the eyes of Jesus and loving the neighbor we see through the eyes of Jesus. There’s no room in that love for a vengeful, hateful god, and there’s no room in that love for ignoring the needs of our fellow humans. Somehow this scribe, in all his close reading of the Old Testament scriptures, began to see things the way Jesus did: this love for neighbor, this recognition that a neighbor is anyone in need, the fact that God doesn’t make distinctions between people the way we make distinctions between people. Jesus looked on him with admiration and said, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God!” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.
There were times when I was still learning about computers that I would be working on some big paper for graduate school and my computer would just freeze up. I couldn’t get it to do anything, no matter how many buttons I pushed. I couldn’t even get it to save the document I had been working on. And finally I would have to do the only thing I knew how to do which was to re-boot, even if that meant pulling the plug on my computer and losing all my work. Maybe we’re not at that place in America, but maybe we are. I wonder what would happen if we just pulled the plug on all the news shows that we watch, and all the social media we consume, all the podcasts we listen to and all the blogs that we read. I wonder what would happen if we forgot all that we have “learned” from those questionable sources. What if we just powered down the entire system of information and misinformation until there was nothing but a blank screen in front of us. And then what if we plugged the system back in again, and watched it come to life, and held our breath as four words appeared:
“Love God. Love Neighbor.”
Could we do that? Could we just do that? I’m not saying it would be easy. Loving the God Jesus loved may lead you to the Garden of Gethsemane from time to time. You may hear yourself saying, “Father, if it be possible, take this cup away from me.” But you might also hear yourself saying, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” And when it comes to loving neighbor I agree with Frederick Buechner who says that loving your neighbor doesn’t mean liking them. It means acting in their best interests no matter what, even if, personally, you can’t stand them. I’m not saying it will be easier to re-boot the entire system and get back to loving God and loving neighbor, but it will be simpler, and in times like these there’s something very appealing about that, about waking up tomorrow morning and thinking, “All I have to do today is love. That’s all. That’s it.” And hearing Jesus say,
“You are not far from the Kingdom!”
—Jim Somerville © 2024
