Proper 26, Year B: Mark 12:28-34
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
October 31, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“It’s the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled.”
Hearing Loki’s proclamation from the third episode of this summer’s new What If…? series on Disney+ probably makes your skin crawl when its delivered in a church, especially here in the United States. We Americans don’t like being told what to do, and I imagine the rest of the world isn’t particularly fond of it either. Bring in the concept of subjugation, and you’ll have a real mess on your hands. We hold our ideas of freedom dear, and many of us go to rather extreme measures to express them—sometimes even to our own harm. We demand to do what we want, and woe be to anyone who might step into our way. Perhaps the dark figure from the end of the first Avengers movie was right when he reassessed Loki’s conclusions and told his master that humans “are unruly, and therefore cannot be ruled.”
But there is something to be said for Loki’s appraisal. His observation of human behavior was solid, but as an outsider to human society, he misinterpreted his data. Humans don’t crave being controlled. What we crave is order. We like things to be predictable, and we frequently establish systems of hierarchy meant to provide that order. Everyone wants to know the consequences of their choices and actions, so we try to spell out every “if this…then that” detail we can dream of, not so we can be exploited, like Loki thought, but so we know what to expect from one another in different situations.
The first response after your mom tells you, “Don’t hit your sister,” inevitably revolves around the question, “What if?” “Well, what if she hit me first?” Finding the answer is still “no,” we try again. “But what if she was being mean to me?” “What if she was chasing me with a stick?” “What if a bad guy was trying to get her and the only way for her to escape was for me to punch her so she fell out of the way?”
No matter how clear we make our initial statements, how carefully we devise our structures and rules, or how thoroughly we define our terms, we immediately begin to imagine—and, if we’re honest, hope for—new exceptions, each leading us into a fresh multiverse of what-if’s. As our search for loopholes and inconsistencies keeps feeding itself, eventually our hierarchy becomes so complex that it’s hard to find our way back to the idea behind the original statement. In our quest to understand comparative scales of importance, to organize the perfect decision tree, we often end up undermining the very thing we were trying to clarify in the first place.
Just before this morning’s reading, Jesus spent the day parrying questions with representatives of various points on the religious and political spectrum of then-current Jewish thought. “What if I don’t want to pay taxes to our oppressive foreign government?” “What if someone was legitimately married half-a-dozen times under Torah?” After hours of listening to debates about the intricacies of laws, instructions, interpretations, and customs, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise when an astute audience member finally pipes up with, “Well then,
…which commandment is the first of all?”[1]
The question isn’t unreasonable. Rabbinical lore identifies at least 613 commandments in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible alone.[2] It’s hard for most of us to process that many rules in one lump, so narrowing down the most significant is an important task. Recognizing it as sincere but realizing how highly charged and dangerous this question could become, Jesus does a quick sidestep and responds with two answers. In doing so, he sets up the simple hierarchy we still hear people proclaiming in churches and on Christian radio: “love God, and love your neighbor.”
Or does he?
We can certainly read Jesus’ words as a statement of order, a way to resolve what-if’s that might come up in day to day life. What if helping my neighbor means I have to miss Bible study? What if I have to choose between feeding a hungry person or giving some money to a special mission project? What if my commitment to God forces me to mistreat someone else? In the end, most of these what-if’s come down to a single question: What if I have to choose between loving God and loving my neighbor?
The standard answer is the hierarchical one. Back in Sunday School my teachers explained that our choices should follow the pattern of JOY: Jesus first, Others second, and You last. Overall, it’s a simple tool, handy enough in most situations. But I don’t think that’s quite what Jesus had in mind.
That’s because the Greatest Commandment isn’t an either-or. Technically, it’s not even a both-and. It isn’t an ordered list or any kind of decision hierarchy. It’s a restatement. Loving God doesn’t just look like loving your neighbor: loving your neighbor is loving God.
You’ll never find yourself in a what-if situation while following the Great Commandment because there is no conflict to be found within it, no crack just waiting to split off into a new reality. If you love God, you will love your neighbor. And by loving your neighbor, you are loving God. So if you have to choose between helping someone or making it to a church event on time, loving God is helping your neighbor. If you find yourself deciding between giving money to a special cause or feeding a hungry person, loving God is helping your neighbor—the individual nearby, the one with the immediate need.
That isn’t to say that you won’t ever run into situations where you feel conflicted, but that dissonance isn’t rooted in any real distinction between serving God and neighbor. The perceived difference is an illusion. Our religious what-ifs might appear to force various choices, but the only one that truly does—what if following God leads me to reject or harm my neighbor?—hides an entirely different thought. It isn’t really about choosing between God and neighbor. It’s about choosing between my beliefs about God—my understanding and interpretation of what God wants—and loving my neighbor. It might appear similar to what Jesus and the scholar were talking about, but it’s a completely different creature: a decision between preserving my own sense of order and security—of serving myself—or genuinely and practically loving God in real life.
Every day offers us new circumstances that force us either to love our neighbor or to reevaluate our understanding of God, but there is no situation where you will have to choose between loving God and loving your neighbor. The Gospel, and the Great Commandment, are clear.
So then, what might happen if we drop our false hierarchy, our distraction of imagined if-then’s and either-or’s of honoring God? What if we begin to recognize the apparent conflict we feel for the deception it is? What if we learn to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, and all of our strength by loving our neighbor as ourselves? Imagine the possibilities waiting to be explored.
What if…? indeed.
[1]Mark 12:28b | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.