Pay Attention. Be Engaged.

Mark 12: 28-34

Place any person who has attained any degree of prominence or influence in a room with others, and soon he/she will be answering a series of questions. People like to question persons who have attained prominence in life because they want to get ideas, they want to pick their brain, they want to get their opinion, they want to hear their story; they want to learn from them. And there are times when they ask questions because they want to trap them.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus was constantly being asked questions, and he was asked questions for all of those reasons. In today’s reading from the gospel as recorded by Mark, we have another instance where Jesus was being questioned.

Jesus seemed to have had a rather contentious and antagonistic relationship with the religious leaders of the day. (I wonder what his relationship with many of us religious leaders of today would have been like if he were physically present – I suspect that it would not have been very different, but that’s for another time.)

Shortly after Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, the religious leaders plotted to kill him (Mark 11:18) For his part, Jesus charges the temple leadership with corrupting the temple (Mark 11: 15-17), he tells a parable that indicts the priests, scribes, and elders as murderers of God’s prophets (Mark 12: 1-12) and he challenges the scriptural interpretation of some of them. (Mark 12: 24-27).

It’s in this conflict-ridden context that today’s reading is located, and where we see one of those leaders standing out for the positive nature of his interaction with Jesus.

One of the scribes (sometimes referred to as lawyers because they were considered as experts in the laws of Moses), impressed with how well Jesus acquitted himself when questioned by those whose intention was to trap him, asks a question of him. His intention was not to trap Jesus, whom he had obviously come to respect, but to learn from him. He wanted to know which among the 613 commandments that were contained in the law, is the most important.

It was an important question then, and it is an important question now. It sought to find the most pivotal and fundamental principle and value from which all else is derived, and upon which all else depends.

Here is this Jesus who is giving amazingly penetrating responses to challenging questions, who faces hostility with courageous integrity, and who makes people really think about where their life is going. And he wanted to learn from him what is that thing, that principle, that value, around which he should center his life; what should be the foundation upon which his life his built?

Have you ever felt life tugging at you with similar questions? Especially when you are going through challenging and difficult times? What is life all about? What is at the heart of being human? What is it in our living in families, in our communities, in our country, in our world that matters most? What is it in our faith that matters most?

In answer to the Scribe’s question about which is the greatest commandment, Jesus says the first is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” And there’s another that goes hand in hand with that; it is to “Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these."

Here’s what’s interesting in this exchange between the scribe – this lawyer, and Jesus. The lawyer agrees with Jesus. He says to him " Teacher, you are right, you have truly said that 'God is one, and besides him there is no other'; and 'to love God 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."

Jesus and the lawyer were in agreement, and that should have been the end of the matter. But Jesus made it clear that it wasn’t. While he commended the lawyer for his correct understanding of the law, he also made it clear that there’s more to it than that. Understanding the law is good, but that will only take you so far - it comes short! It comes short of what life with God is all about, and it comes short of what true humanity ought to be. It comes short of what love is all about, for love is much more than that.

Sometimes it's hard to know what it means to "love" someone, whether God or our neighbor or even ourselves. We may think it means to have warm and cozy feelings about them, which we all know simply isn't going to happen all the time -- even for people we deeply and truly love. The love of God and neighbour which Jesus identifies as the greatest commandments, is not just about warm sentiment or disposition, it about action - action on behalf of the loved one's greatest good.

But what does that embodied action involve?

Peter Michaelson noted several years ago that "Love is lots of things, but one main one is a commitment to pay attention." And I would add it’s a commitment to be engaged – to be engaged in what is right and good. It's easy to see how that plays out with human beings. For example, it's no good to give a homeless person a refrigerator. What good would that do? Paying attention to the situation and needs of others would lead us to be engaged in appropriate and meaningful ways, and that’s what love does.

It's the same way with loving God. We must pay attention to God - to what God is saying and doing. We must spend time learning from Jesus and getting to know God whom we worship and serve. And then we must engage ourselves in the work of God in our world.

To rightly love God and our neighbor, we must pay attention, we must be engaged. The lawyer was in general agreement with Jesus, but that was not enough, he was fallen short of the kingdom of God – there was a next step to take, and that was to put love into action.

Many of us feel more comfortable being in general agreement with Jesus than we do following him into the world. Many of us would be satisfied to have all the right instincts about the homeless, or the hungry, or the abused, or the vulnerable, rather than to seek to build relationships with them. That’s good, but it’s falls short. We have to put love into action.

Barbara brown Taylor in her book “Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, explores how our faith must lead to action. Speaking about how we use the Bible. She writes:

“If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink on the page more than I love the encounters that give rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that that I am much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape. …The whole purpose of the Bible it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written words down, in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake.”

That is what it means to love God and neighbour – to give attention and be engaged in sincere and meaning ways.

As you pay attention to the testing situations in which you find yourself, as you pay attention to God and to others and to your own being and needs, as you hold all of these in honest and attentive compassion, you will find something amazing happening. You will find that you are not just correctly interpreting the written word, but that you are living those words in the world for God’s sake, and when that happens, the church succeeds at who and what we are meant to be. When that happens is when we truly begin to “Love the Lord our God with all our heart, and soul, and mind, and strength, and to “Love our neighbor as ourselves.”