Day: October 19, 2025

“Well, Master, thou hast said the truth”

There are two ways of turning back to God, the one in thanksgiving, which we saw last Sunday, the other in repentance. Both are an acknowledgment of the truth of God which measures us and not the other way around; both are a kind of redire ad principia, a return to a principle. That measure redeems and sanctifies our loves and our experiences. How? By bringing them to the truth of God without which “most loving [is] mere folly,” as Shakespeare notes in As You Like It (Act 2, sc. 7).

Paul in the Epistle gives thanks to God on behalf of the people of Corinth for the grace of God which has been given them which enriches them “in all utterance – speech – and in all knowledge.” In the Gospel, we see the idea of repentance as the turning of our minds to the truth upon which our thinking and being ultimately depend. In both readings, love and understanding are interrelated and speak to the truth of our humanity as intellectual and spiritual beings; in short, to the interplay between knowing and loving that belongs to “follow[ing] thee the only God, with pure hearts and minds” over and against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil”, as the Collect puts it, reminding us of the baptismal renunciations.

The Gospel comprises two parts: first, an intriguing dialogue between Jesus and one of the scribes and, secondly, Jesus’ powerful teaching about the Christ, the anointed one, or Messiah as more than just a son of David, that is to say of the royal Davidic lineage and therefore more than a political saviour. Drawing on the Psalms of David, he points to what David himself says about the Lord by the Holy Spirit, calling God his Lord therefore acknowledging God’s transcendent and eternal nature, ultimately just as we say in the Creed that Christ is “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.”

Two things are intriguing about the first part of the Gospel: first, it is a positive and not a negative encounter between Jesus and one of the scribes, and secondly, here in Mark’s account we have Jesus himself proclaiming the Summary of the Law, unlike what we heard five Sundays ago in the lead-up to the Parable of the Good Samaritan where the cynical lawyer who tried to put Jesus to the test was compelled by the truth itself to pronounce the love of God and the love of neighbour, and through the parable, its meaning. Here it is given by Jesus: Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord. In our liturgy, Matthew’s ending rather than Mark’s is added that “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Here Jesus himself sums up the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, and at least hints that the commandment of twofold love is summed up in himself. This is what Paul will recognize and proclaim: love as the fulfilling of the Law in Christ. Something of the transcendent truth of God is being made known through conversation and dialogue and debate. It is made known through scriptural interpretation that is itself proto-credal in shape and substance.

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