By Michael Walsh, MM
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Dt 6:2-6 | Heb 7:23-28 | Mk 12:28b-34
One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him, ‘Which is the first of all the commandments?’ (Mark 12:28b)
It is hard to say for sure what the scribe intended as we read in today’s Gospel. So often, when scribes or Pharisees pose a question to Jesus, they have something in mind; they are contriving a rhetorical or theological trap – some way of getting Jesus to say something they can challenge on practical or religious grounds, thereby undermining him. Perhaps the scribe awaits an answer from Jesus that is in line with the scribe’s teachings, and maybe the scribe will use Jesus’s agreement to insinuate that it amounts to agreement with the overall position, and therefore authority, of the scribes and Pharisees.
But in this Gospel, we see once again that this encounter with Jesus leads the scribe, and the other witnesses who are with the scribe, beyond the usual limits of teaching and custom. The scribe is led to observe that the first (and with it, the second) commandment is “worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And that, as Jesus observes, takes the scribe much closer to the Kingdom of God. For implied in the scribe’s remark is the idea that the era of ritual sacrifice is over. But the whole edifice of Israelite religious practice and public life depends upon ritual sacrifice. If that is over, what can replace it? How is sin to be rectified? The stage is thus set for the understanding of Jesus’s mission, and the Gospel foreshadows not only Jesus’s identity as the Son of God, but also his death as the final and definitive reparation for sin. He, as the second reading suggests, is both priest and sacrifice. And as the first reading proclaims that the essence of God is love, so too we can see that Jesus’s sacrifice is not only reparation for sin, but is the ultimate act of love. For just as the commandments mandate reverence for and love of God, with the life and death of Jesus, God’s love and reverence for us is fully and completely made manifest.
“But what’s in it for me?” the modern person might ask. What is there for us, beyond these abstract notions of God’s love and sacrifice? It is the second commandment – slipped in rather quietly, perhaps, but unavoidably so. Our part in the mystery. And that is to endorse Jesus’s sacrifice, and so validate our own existence, by similar acts of love. The word “neighbor” encompasses all manner of people we might otherwise casually ignore or even despise. But God has paid for us with blood, demanding that we, too, “love them as ourselves.”
To read other Scripture reflections published by the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, click here.
Featured image: Image d’Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), from the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century. (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art)
