This Sunday’s Gospel presents a stunning breakthrough during Jesus’ exchanges with Jerusalem officials. Chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians had been probing Jesus with hostile questions, trying to catch him out of bounds with respect to the Law. Finally, a scribe comes forward who has allowed himself to be impressed with Jesus' wisdom.
He poses a question that turns out to be not so much a test as an honest inquiry: “Which is the first of all the commandments?” In response, Jesus bypasses the famous Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Instead, he goes to another place in the Torah, a passage that later Jewish tradition required every male to recite daily, Deut 6:4-5. Named after its first Hebrew word, the passage is called the Shema (accented on the second syllable, the word means “Hear!”): “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” (Following the mandate of Deut 6:9, it has been traditional for many Jewish households to place a copy of this text, along with Deut 11:13-21, on one of their doorposts in a capsule called a mezuzah [“doorpost”].)
Thus Jesus’ answer is simply a recitation of a Scripture passage that the scribe himself had likely recited from memory that very day. But since covenant love entails love of one's fellow human beings, Jesus hastens to add a passage from another part of the Torah, Leviticus 19:18—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Amazingly, the scribe not only affirms Jesus’ response; he goes even further to say that love of God and neighbor “is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
Obviously, this scribe has been listening to Jesus all along. For, on a number of occasions, Jesus had shown himself an exponent of a strand of Hebrew prophetic tradition that viewed love of God and neighbor as more important than Temple sacrifice (see, for example, Hos 6:6; Isa 1:11-17; Jer 7:1-15; Amos 5:21-24; Ps 40:6-8; Ps 51:16-17). It is Matthew’s Gospel that illustrates this aspect of Jesus most abundantly, with the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about interrupting your participation in Temple worship to reconcile with a brother (Mt 5:23-24) and Jesus’ citation of Hos 6:6 (mercy not sacrifice) at Mt 9:13 and Mt 12:7. But only moments before in Mark's narrative, after the demonstration in the Temple, Jesus had taught his disciples that if they had sufficient faith in God, they could say to this mountain, “Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,” and it would happen.
The context suggests that Jesus was not talking about the manipulation of tectonic plates but about surpassing the power of “this mountain,” understood here as the Temple Mount which they were viewing as they walked down from Mount of Olives toward Jerusalem. For Jesus proceeds to teach about the power of personal prayer when it is accompanied by faith in God and forgiveness of neighbor (Mk 11:23-25).
Two things stand out in this remarkable exchange between Jesus and the scribe: how very Jewish is Jesus’ teaching and how important this teaching is for Christian life. We hear Jesus the Jew quoting the Hebrew Scriptures to another Jew. After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, the Pharisees worked to help their people realize that they could “domesticate” the former Temple worship by how they lived in their homes. Paul made a similar point in Romans 12, when he urged his fellow Christians to “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.”
The ordinary life of using their gifts to build up the body of the community would thus be a “spiritual worship.” This does not replace the need for our explicit eucharistic worship, but this way of understanding our lives helps us recognize that the love of neighbor is an integral part of our worship and praise of God.
