by CCW | 16 October 2022 10:00
The context is controversy, and quite intense. It always is in matters of spiritual truth. Truth which unites frequently divides; yet it is only through the divisions of our hearts that a deeper unity may sometimes be grasped. Only when our hearts are broken and opened to view may we discover what truly matters, what is truly to be believed and looked for; in short, what belongs to the truth of ourselves. Sometimes it takes controversy to move us beyond our limited and partial perspectives and dogmatic attachments to a larger and more comprehensive understanding, to the truth which is greater than ourselves.
This is to say that we learn through controversy. “Which is the first commandment of all?” Jesus is asked by a member of the literary caste, the scribes. This scribe, about whom Jesus will ultimately say, “thou art not far from the Kingdom of God”, perceived that “[Jesus] had answered them well” in the context of reasoning and disputing with others. Who are they and about what? Well, first, there are “the chief priests and the scribes and the elders” (Mk.11. 27) who challenge his authority about what he is saying. This leads to the parable about the tenants or, as the King James version puts it more accurately, the husbandmen of the vineyard, the farmers (literally, ‘earthworkers’) who are supposed to be taking care of the vineyard for the Lord but instead beat up and kill those sent by the Lord including “his beloved son” (Mk. 12. 1-11). A kind of foreshadowing of Christ’s crucifixion as well as a commentary on Creation and the Fall, they see the parable as being told against themselves and so try to arrest him (Mk. 12. 12).
There are, secondly, “the Pharisees and some of the Herodians” (Mk. 12. 13), a curious coincidence of opposites – the Pharisees as the strict sect of Jewish law in its fullness and separateness from political life, and the Herodians, Jews who collaborated with the Roman authorities. They conspire “to entrap him in his talk” about whether “it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” (Mk. 12. 14), a question about our fundamental loyalties. Jesus replies with the famous “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Mk. 12. 17), thus cutting through the false dichotomy or divide which they both assume to the principle of God himself from whom all authority ultimately derives and which is delegated even to Caesar. As Jesus will say to Caesar’s man, Pilate, at his trial, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn.19.11).
There are, thirdly, the Sadducees, another division within Israel, who contested ideas current in late Judaism, like the resurrection and the immortality of the soul, and who were the wealthy elite within Judaism. They are portrayed as particularly hostile to Jesus. Here they seek to entangle him in a dispute about the resurrection. Jesus counters their arguments, saying that they “know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Mk. 12. 24) and emphasising that “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Mk. 12. 26) is “not the God of the dead but of the living”(Mk. 12.27).
Jesus’ rebuke of the Sadducees leads our unnamed scribe to ask the overwhelming question: “Which is the first commandment of all?”. He is, we might say, compelled by the truth itself in the context of controversy and animosity where at issue is power more than truth. “Jesus”, he thinks, “had answered them well” (Mk.12.28).
And he continues to do so in his magisterial “Summary of the Law”. The greatest commandment is the love of God and the love of neighbour; “there is none other commandment greater than these”. Powerful stuff. Irrefutable stuff. We know this and have heard this before from “a certain lawyer” in the preamble to the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10.27). But here we have it from Jesus himself. Is it really all about love? How can law be love? It seems counter-intuitive.
Yet the Law is nothing more than the expression of God’s will and truth for our humanity and if it convicts us of our own shortcomings, as it most surely does, especially from a Christian understanding, then it does so only to recall us to its deeper and inner truth. Such is repentance and prayer. But such, too, is the love of God moving in us. The truth here is the inseparability and the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour. Each is implicit in the other. They meet and have their unity and fullness in Christ. Love is really a kind of in-othering; we are in and with one another through our dwelling in the love of God, itself the divine co-inherence of the Trinity.
There are two forms of turning back to God: the one in thanksgiving, the other in repentance. Both acknowledge the truth of God which measures us. But that measure ultimately redeems and sanctifies our loves and our experiences. How? By bringing them to the truth of God without which “all loving [is] mere folly” as Shakespeare says.
Jesus responds to the scribe’s recognition of the truth of his words, saying that “thou art not far from the kingdom of God”. And “after that”, we are told, “no one dared to ask him any questions”. But Jesus himself goes on to challenge certain ideas about the Messiah, saying in effect that the Messiah of Israel is more than just “the son of David”, that is to say, of the royal Davidic lineage, and thus more than a political saviour, because he has a more transcendent, indeed, an eternal origin; as we say credally, He is “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God” and He is “made man” “incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary” (BCP, p. 71).
Jesus is the Messiah who is God with us, true God and true Man. In this lies the heart of the Creeds. They are not adds-on to the Faith but the very articulation of its essential meaning. The focus is on the utter uniqueness of Christ as one with the Lord God of the Old Testament to whom David, Shepherd and King, Poet and Warrior, is also subject. “Jesus is Lord”, after all, is the earliest form of credal statement that we have in the New Testament; a statement which we can only say “by the Spirit”.
Here Jesus sums up the Hebrew Scriptures. The commandment of twofold love is realised in Jesus himself. Something of the transcendent truth of God is made known even in the midst of controversy and it is made known through scriptural interpretation which is, at least, proto-credal in shape and substance.
We return to the Creeds and to the Scriptures credally understood, that is to say, understood through the primacy of the categories of creation, redemption and sanctification, and, even more, through the primacy of the love of God revealed as Trinity, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, through the Incarnate Son, the Word made flesh. In the primacy of these categories and in the embrace of the Trinity, we find the objective determinants of our humanity, and not otherwise. We find the radical truth of our humanity in the indwelling love of God; we in him and he in us.
This gospel would have us defined by the redemption of our desires, not by the assertion of our desires under the guise of rights and privileges. Love is the counter to the illusions of the autonomous self, alone and isolated “in the imagination of their hearts”, caught in endless contradictions. The controversies of our day are its contradictions. We are called into the love of God and into the love of one another in honesty and truth. For there is one who answered well.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVIII, 2022
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