Christ vs. Christianiness.

Mark 12:28-34

November 4, 2018

I.

Jesus is in Jerusalem, teaching in the Temple, when a scribe comes up to him.  Scribes are establishment religious professionals who usually have big problems with Jesus, and vice-versa.  This scribe starts out by watching Jesus debate some Pharisees, Sadducees, and representatives from Herod’s government, in which the Lord basically runs rings around them theologically and shuts them up in frustration.

So this scribe comes forward and asks Jesus which is the first of all the commandments in the Torah.  And Jesus gives the obvious and most orthodox answer: “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 Lord is paraphrasing from Deuteronomy 6.  It is the basic Jewish confession, which Jews to this day keep as the centerpiece of their faith.  Jesus also makes it a fundamental pillar of his own movement.  I say this verse often as a charge before the benediction at the close of worship.

That would have been enough, had Jesus stopped right there.  He would have satisfied everyone that he was a good Jew.  But Jesus insists on adding another, somewhat more obscure, verse to it.  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” from Leviticus 19, a chapter full of injunctions about social and economic justice, compassion, integrity, and fundamental fairness.  The chapter is summed up in this verse about loving our “neighbors,” which, as we know from Jesus’ teachings in other places, means everybody, all creation.  Leviticus 19 even has a short section on justice for trees.

The Lord means that, without the second commandment, our claim to be keeping the first is an empty lie.  And yet, Christianity has too often been quick to separate them, or at least to interpret the second in a self-serving manner.  We’re very good at saying how much we love God.  We’re not so good at actually loving people.  We even reduce Christian faith to saying the right words, and even performing the right ceremonies… while disregarding the Lord’s command to also perform the right actions.

Indeed, we have too often separated “belief” from behavior, as if the faith we confess has merely to do with our private cognitive opinions, but little to do with how we act.  It does not necessarily occur to us to take our faith into account when we make decisions about our relationships, our money, or our laws.  Or at best we find a loophole or another perfectly good, reasonable argument why Jesus’ teachings don’t apply to us in this particular case.

Indeed, I know people who long with nostalgia for a culture that looked and sounded all pious and Christiany… but who don’t want to be reminded about the kind of oppression, violence, hatred, fear, bigotry, and injustice that festered under the surface of that culture.  It is easy to prefer this superficial Christianiness to actual discipleship of Jesus. 

II. 

Last week I received a letter from someone in Newark naming himself as “Child of God,” with 3 pages of advice about how Christians should vote in the election on Tuesday.  All of his complaints were centered on his view that America no longer looks and sounds like the white-Christian-nation he fondly remembers.  He’s upset that we’re not verbally affirming our love for God anymore.  More importantly to him, we’re not forcing others to make the same affirmations.  As far as I can tell, this guy defined Christianity by who Christians hate, exclude, condemn, judge, and oppress.  

But that second commandment, about loving our neighbor as ourselves?  That wasn’t mentioned in that letter.  It’s like he wants a country where everyone affirms their love for God, where everyone goes through the motions of Christianiness… but loving neighbors by actually following Jesus?  Not so much. 

By connecting these two commandments, the Lord clarifies the whole difference between him and the establishment figures he has been arguing with.  They are about keeping to the superficial, pious letter of the Law; he is about doing the commandments and enacting the Spirit of the Law, which is always love.  They are about maintaining their national and religious identity, rituals, leadership, and institutions.  He is about doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God, to quote the prophet Habakkuk.  Even the scribe admits that Jesus is right, that compassion “is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.”  

The Lord says that if we think we are keeping of the first commandment while we systematically transgress the second commandment — that is, if we think we are keeping our religion, while we are oppressing, rejecting, harming, stealing from others, especially those already at the bottom and in need, then we really aren’t keeping our religion at all.  We are just using it as a pretext and a cover for our own fear, anger, and our own lust for money, security, and power.  

In the previous chapter Jesus made the point of throwing the exploitative commercial interests out of the Temple.  He’s been engaged for several days in these theological cage-matches with all the successful and prominent religious leaders.  Right after this passage he will blast the scribes as a class for their rampant greed while they steal from the poor.

The implication in the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves means that we can’t get away with doing something to someone and calling it “love,” — “tough love” is the usual term these days — if it is not something we would want done to ourselves in the same situation.  If we were refugees (and many of our ancestors were), would we want to be treated with hostility and violence?  Is that love for our neighbors?  If we were homeless or hungry, would we want pious sermons about personal responsibility?  If we were sick would we want our only options to be bankruptcy or death?  If our children were suffering and dying in war?  If we were suffering from addiction?  If we were Muslim, or transgendered or Gay?  How would we want to be treated?  What would we feel that “love” would look like for us?

III.     

Jesus here forces us to see God only through one lens, which is the suffering and need of our neighbors, the people with whom he identifies in coming to dwell in human flesh in the first place, and having that culminate in being executed on a Roman cross as a criminal.  Christian faith is that if we don’t see God in him, and in the people he is reflecting and representing, then we don’t see God anywhere.  If we do see God, then it is because we see God in the neighbor.

THIS is what it really means to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength.  Compassion is the expression, of the gospel.  One follows inexorably from the other.  We cannot love God and hate our neighbor.  If we deny these basic human requirements to anyone it is an expression of hate, not just for them, but for God, no matter what we regularly mumble in our religious creed. 

At the same time, the commandment about compassion is and must be rooted in and based upon the primary commandment about loving God.  I get nervous when the church veers too far in the direction of a mere social service agency or political lobbying effort, and is liable to forget its ultimate and necessary Source in the living God.  

I have seen how efforts to supposedly help the poor can devolve into bloated and ineffective bureaucracies.  I have seen high-minded activists burn out for lack of a moral compass and adequate spiritual nourishment.  I have seen comfortable and privileged people use “charity” in ways that really just cynically maintain inequality and their position of superiority.  Anything that is just another way to get something for ourselves, thereby separating ourselves from each other, is not the love of God.  

It is not even love for ourselves, but a cruel trick of our deluded ego-centricity to make us think that our doing well is itself doing good.  Jesus says that real self love, a love that empowers and manifests and realizes our true Selves in God, is expressed and discovered in compassion for, and identification with, others.

IV.

The Lord Jesus comes into the world to show us who we are and who God is.  He shows us the boundless compassion and forgiveness of the God who does love us so profoundly as to become one of us.  Compassion therefore is not just love for another, it is love for ourselves and God as well.  It is not just a statement of our religion and faith; it expresses our own true nature, revealed in Christ.  It expresses our deepest connection to each other which Christ revealed to us.  To love another as God loves us in Christ is to love ourselves and to love God, because love is One.

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