Only These Two

By

Reverend Litton J. Logan

November 5, 2006

Scripture:

Mark 12:18--34 (NRSV)
¹⁸Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question, saying, ¹⁹“Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. ²⁰There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; ²¹and the second married the widow and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; ²²none of the seven left children.  Last of all the woman herself died.  ²³In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her.”

²⁴Jesus said to them, “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? ²⁵For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. ²⁶And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? ²⁷He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong.”

The First Commandment

²⁸One 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?” ²⁹Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; ³⁰you 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.’ ³¹The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” ³²Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; ³³and ‘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.” ³⁴When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question.

Sermon:

In today’s scriptures, we again see Jesus being tested and his authority questioned.  The challengers are a group of Sadducees, who blatantly confront Jesus, and a lone scribe, who politely questions Jesus.  Jesus’ answers fix his authority clearly within the Old Testament scriptures and within rabbinical Judaism.  Jesus’ response to the Sadducees and the scribe would have been common, rabbinical interpretations of passages from the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Old Testament.  The Pentateuch—the so-called written Laws of Moses—you many recall were the only scriptures that the Sadducees recognized as authoritative for Jewish life.  These confrontations between the Sadducees and the scribe and the subsequent interpretations of scripture would have been important for Mark’s predominantly Gentile church as it tried to sort out its moral, spiritual, and ethical roots in Judaism as disciples of Jesus, a Jew, and the Christ of the World.

          These Sadducees, the aristocratic, priestly class in charge of the Temple cultus, did not believe in the resurrection of the dead or in the scribes’ and Pharisees’ oral traditions of interpreting the Pentateuch.  The Sadducees approach Jesus thinking they have devised a clever, hypothetical, and mocking trap concerning the Law of the Levirate Marriage.  The Law of the Levirate Marriage required that a brother must marry a deceased brother’s widow and give her a child, generally understood as a son, if the deceased brother had no male offspring at the time of his death.  The underlying idea of the Levirate Marriage seems to center around continuing the name or the lineage of the deceased brother while ensuring that the brother’s property did not pass to heirs who where not his descendants or outside the family.  It is important to note that since the Sadducees didn’t generally believe in an afterlife, their only chance of immortality was through their male offspring and their good name and deeds among the people.

Seven brothers die before siring a male offspring by the widow, who then dies.  Personally, if I were brother number three, I would have been a little hesitant about marrying this woman, law or no law. The question: On resurrection day, whose wife will she be?  (Notice the resurrected wife does not have a say in the matter.  I mean she may have liked husband number five more than she may have liked any of the brothers.  If she has to be married when resurrected, she may want to be with brother number five, but she doesn’t seem to have a voice in the matter. Well, she didn’t according to the Sadducees.)

Jesus responds to the Sadducees’ challenge by implying that such a question not only reveals the Sadducees’ disingenuous intentions, it also reveals why they are wrong about the entire topic of the resurrection of the dead.  Jesus also exposes their limited understandings of God’s power as well as tells them they lack a true understanding of the nature of the resurrected dead. 

As is Jesus’ custom in such confrontations, he turns to scripture as the source of his answers and his authority.  In so doing, he sets a trap of his own.  Jesus’ response to the Sadducees is a reference to Exodus 3:1-16—passages from the Pentateuch--wherein God reveals the divine-self to Moses as the God of the patriarchs.  If God, speaking in the present tense, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then they must be alive in some way, somewhere.  Here Jesus makes a case for human immortality in general. Jesus’ trap is to imply that the Sadducees by denying the resurrection of the dead are in fact setting limits on God’s power. Therefore, you mean to say God, The Creator of the Universe, couldn’t raise the dead if God chose to do so.  Not, only this, but Jesus recalls a references from the book of Daniel concerning the resurrected dead as angels--creatures that possess a unique and divine nature not subject to the limits and desires of human nature.  We hear the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 amplify this idea of the uniqueness of the resurrected in detail.

Jesus shuts the Sadducees down and they withdraw from the scene.  He has turned their intent and their scriptures back on them.  Jesus’ actions remind me of the story of the college professors whom an arrogant and presumptuous student tried to bribe for a good grade.

A professor was giving a big test one day to his students. He handed out all of the tests and went back to his desk to wait. Once the test was over, the students all handed their tests back in. The professor noticed that one of the students had attached a $100 bill to his test with a note saying "A dollar per point." The next class the professor handed the graded tests back to the students. The student who attempted to bribe the professor got back his test and $56 in change.

Next, we see a scribe, who has overheard the confrontation between Jesus and the Sadducees, approach Jesus and commend him.  However, he too seeks to test Jesus’ authority further from within the rabbinical traditions.  The scribe asked the question: “Which commandment is the first of all?” Here again Jesus uses scripture from the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy 6:4-5.

⁴ Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.  ⁵ You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.  (NRSV)

The word love used here in Jesus’ response and his follow on comments is agape.  The Hebrew word for love in Deuteronomy as well as the Greek word agape originally meant love in its most general form, including sensual love.  However, over time the Hebrew and the Greek words used in Deuteronomy, Mark, and later in rabbinical and Christians writings take on the loftier meaning of loving one’s fellow human being as a family member not unlike God’s parental love for Israel as God’s people.  I would say that agape used in today’s scriptures means loving one’s fellow human being with a deep passion as a family member with no expectations of reciprocity.  Upon such love of God, the neighbor, and the stranger the Book of Deuteronomy builds its whole sense of the people of God and their relationship to God and to all humanity.

It is interesting to note, that Jesus unbidden gave the scribe what many rabbis would have considered the second greatest commandment from Leviticus 19:17-18.  Was Jesus anticipating the question about the second greatest commandment or did he want to make sure the scribe understood the implications of the first and greatest commandment at its most practical level by citing the second?

Could Jesus have been like the employer who hired the young man and said to him that his first job is to sweep the floor.  The young man looked at him in dismay and stammered, “But, but, I am a college graduate!”  “Oh,” said the employer, “Then give me the broom and I will show you how.”

I think Jesus wants to be sure the scribe and all his disciples, ancient and modern, understand how to love God with one’s entire being.

¹⁷You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. ¹⁸You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (NRSV)

Verse 34 of the same chapter of Leviticus points out that brotherly love or familial love is extended beyond one’s kin and fellow Jew to include the alien or stranger.

³⁴The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

Later rabbis would maintain that since God is the creator of Adam and Eve, the first people, then all humans are in fact family members and should be thought of as such and loved as such.

There is a long, long rabbinical history extolling the fact that brotherly love or familial love is the defining characteristic of what it means for a Jew to truly love God.  Story has it that the great Rabbi Hillel, the founder of one of the major rabbinical schools in existence during Jesus’ day, once responded to a heathen who requested him to tell him the entirety of the Law while standing before him on one foot: “What is hateful to thee, thou shalt not do unto thy neighbor.  This is the whole of the Law, the rest is only commentary” (Shab. 31a)[1]  Therefore, Jesus’ interpretation of the scriptures on brotherly love, [familial love, my addition] like many of his interpretations, falls clearly in the school of Rabbi Hillel.  Only Rabbi Hillel used the Hebrew word for “creatures” when teaching on brotherly love. [2]

The scribe affirms Jesus’ teaching as authoritative and as more important to God than all the burnt offerings the Sadducees could offer at the Temple.  Thus, we see another put down of the Sadducees and the Temple cultus.

My friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, Rabbi Jesus taught nothing new in his lifetime.  He more often than not came down on biblical interpretations and understandings from within the liberal, rabbinical school of Hillel, except on the matter of divorce, and he tells his audience why he does this. However, his life gave witness to his understanding that to love God one must love one’s fellow human being or fellow creatures without regards to race, gender, socio-economic status, or state of health.

What is so important for Christians to see in the scriptures we’ve heard read to day is that as Jesus heads to Jerusalem and Calvary these scriptures summarize his entire life and ministry and set the pattern for his disciples for all times.  These passages summarize the source of Jesus’ authority and ours—our faith in God as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, rightly understood.  It reveals Jesus’ degree of commitment to God, and to humanity—a life of servanthood and possible sacrifice.  Jesus the divine and just man in his love of God gives himself over to evil and corrupt circumstances because he loved his neighbors near and far, then and now. 

Let me say it another way, a true disciple of Jesus and a citizen of God’s kingdom is determined solely by a our ability and willingness to love God by loving others even if it kills us.  Kingdom citizenship is not determined through human reason or theology, but by the mysterious and indefinable capacity of divine and human love. 

Beyond a thorough understanding of these two commandments in their spiritual and practical aspects, nothing else matters nor can we impose any human, religious requirement upon a person in God’s name.  I remind us that Jesus took great exception to the imposition of human laws, ordinances, and statutes as divine test of faith and fellowship by the Pharisees and the rigorous, cruel, and uncompassionate interpretations of Mosaic Law by the Sadducees.

In our Christian churches and denominations, we may require different things for inclusion into our religious groups and some of these requirements may be okay things, but remember this--only God determines kingdom citizenship and according to Jesus, God’s determinations are based solely upon how a person lives out these two great laws of love.  Please, please, let us never forget that these two great laws have at their core the human capacity to love and be loved.  For us to add anything to these two great laws is to become stumbling blocks to others with all that may mean.

Does anyone have any questions about these two laws and their interpretations?  Well, neither did the Sadducees or the scribe because after having spoken thus no one dared question Jesus any further.  When one truly understands the laws of love there are no questions, we can ask about how we are to be in relationship to God and others.