by CCW | 19 October 2025 10:00
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.
Jesus is the Messiah who is God with us, true God and true Man. In this lies the heart of the Creeds. 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” is the earliest form of creedal statement that we have in the New Testament; a statement which we can only say “by the Spirit” just as it is “by the Spirit” that David himself calls him his lord.
It might seem strange that love is commanded but this is really a way of stating its necessity for our humanity in seeking the love of truth and in embracing the love of everyone in that love. As Augustine says, “it is from one and the same love that we love God and our neighbour; God, however, for his own sake, ourselves and our neighbours for God’s sake.” Mark ends this Gospel passage noting that “the common people heard him gladly,” suggesting an aspect of commonality and catholicity which will be known as the consensus fidelium, the consent of the faithful to the Faith taught and proclaimed. The radical nature of this teaching is perhaps best expressed by Austin Farrer.
He commands us to love him, because he will have us all to do so. He will not be deprived of any man’s love. Nor will he be deprived of any part of our love, for he commands us not merely to love him, but to love him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. The love of God holds out two hands to catch and take us: one is the commandment that we should love, the other is the act of his own love in the sacrifice of Jesus. He does not mean that we should escape him; see, he has taken us between his two hands.
It is a lovely image that speaks to the whole of our being. The late 4th, early 5th century preacher and bishop, John Chrysostom, explains.
To love God with thy whole heart means the heart is not inclined to the love of any one thing more than it is to the love of God … which we cannot do unless we withdraw our hearts from the love of worldly things. To love God with thy whole mind means that all the faculties are at the disposition of God: he whose understanding serves God, whose wisdom concerns God, whose thought dwells on the things of God, whose memory is mindful only of his blessings, loves God with his whole mind. To love God with thy whole soul means to keep the soul steadfast in truth and to be firm in faith.
To love God with all our strength is to love him in everything that we do with all that lies within our power. God calls us into communion with himself. With the one hand, he commands us to love him and all things as in him, and, with the other hand, he unites us to himself through the sacrifice of Christ. “See, he has taken us between his two hands.” Christ commands us to love because our truth and our good lies in union with him, the one who “hast said the truth,” which is our good – καλως. The master is literally the teacher who is “the truth, the way, and the life.” May we hear him gladly, too.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 18, 2025
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