Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 3, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Hear O Israel!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.
In The Holiness of God R. C. Sproul points out the impossibility of keeping this commandment. “All” our heart, soul, mind, and strength eludes us every time we try to corral it. This “all” is not corral-able. Martin Luther saw this clearly. Sproul points to Martin Luther’s six hours daily in the confessional. Was he insane or a genius? Over-anxious or just honest?
Most people do not think that way. None of us keeps the Great Commandment for five minutes. We may think that we do in a surface way, but on a moment’s reflection it is clear that we don’t love God with our whole heart or our whole mind or our whole strength. We don’t love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We may do everything in our power to avoid thinking about this at a deep level, but there is always that nagging sense in the back of our minds to accuse us of the certain knowledge that, in fact, we violate the Great Commandment every day.
Like Isaiah, we also know that no one else keeps the Great Commandment either. Herein is our comfort: Nobody is perfect. We all fall short of perfect love for God, so why worry about it? It doesn’t drive sane people to the confessional for six hours a day. If God punished everyone who failed to keep the Great Commandment, He would have to punish everyone in the world. The test is too great, too demanding; it is not fair. God will have to judge us all on a curve.
Luther didn’t see it that way.
Until Luther’s revelation that salvation came by grace, he lived in bondage, defined by his sin and not his freedom. He missed the meaning of Paul’s first verse of Galatians 5.
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”
The scribe who came to Jesus in Mark 12 did not defend the 600 plus commandments developed over time by the priests of Israel. He simply acknowledged what Jesus called the “greatest” commandment and the golden rule that followed from it. Jesus was surprised and pleased.
You are not far from the kingdom of God. And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
Like the scribe, like Luther, my aim is to go home after the vision and live out what I know to be true. My sin does not define me, but my forgiveness. Salvation allows me to return to the original blessing, to the person God made me to be all along. The original sin changed everything EXCEPT God’s original blessing, which reminds my heart that I love God. That love stays put, never ends, and frees me forever.
Whoever loves me will keep my word, says the Lord, and my father will love him and we will come to him.
(Deuteronomy 6, Psalm 18, Hebrews 7, John 14, Mark 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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