LCC pastors' conference
Mk
12:28-37
11/2/15
Even a casual reader of the Gospels
can spot the difference between the Gospel of John and the synoptic
Gospels. The long addresses by Jesus,
the relative scarcity of miracle accounts and of course the language itself
soon sets it apart from Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Naturally, those of us who are in
the vocation of preaching on the Gospels work more carefully with them, and so
we also recognize that there are difference that set apart Mark from Matthew
and Luke as well. Matthew and Luke both
provide accounts that describe the conception and birth of Jesus. Both Gospels provide accounts of events that
occurred after the resurrection. And of
course, Matthew and Luke share common material that is not found in Mark, such
as Jesus teaching the Lord’s Prayer.
Mark is different. And when you
begin looking a little closer you find that it is a quirky Gospel, when
compared with Matthew and Luke. Mark
provides no infancy account for Jesus at the beginning of his Gospel. He just
jumps right into things with John the Baptist and his ministry. His ending is certainly unique. Every discernible criterion indicates that
the longer endings are not original. But that leaves you with a Gospel that
ends with the words, “for they were afraid.”
Not exactly what we expect.
Mark has been described as a passion
account with a prologue because one third of the Gospel deals with the events
of Holy Week. And yet while Mark
includes fewer individual pericopes, the ones that he does relate are in fact
usually longer than Matthew and Luke –
our text is a case in point of this.
And then there are the unique
features not found in Matthew and Luke.
Only Mark tells us about the spitting and touching of the tongue as
Jesus heals the man with a speech impediment in chapter 7. Only Mark tells about the two stage healing
of the blind man in chapter 8 who reports after the first stage that he see
what looks like trees walking.
The same thing is found in two
accounts in which Jesus interacts with someone – we hear something unique only in
Mark. In chapter 10 we hear about Jesus’
interaction with the rich young man, and only Mark tells us that Jesus “looking
at him, loved him.”
And then in our text tonight we hear
about Jesus’ interaction with the scribe during Holy Week. Here, only Mark provides the scribe’s very
positive response to Jesus’ answer. And
only Mark tells us about Jesus’ intriguing comment, “You are not far from the
kingdom of God.”
“You are not far from the kingdom of
God.” The kingdom of God is of course the central feature of Jesus’
teaching. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus begins
his ministry by going into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying,
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe
in the gospel.” Jesus announces that the
reign of God is present in his person as he turns back the forces of Satan, sin
and death.
That work of bringing God’s saving
reign is nearing its critical moment as Jesus is in Jerusalem during Holy
Week. He has been facing an onslaught of
attacking questions from groups as diverse as the Pharisees, the Herodians and
the Sadducees. We learn that one of the scribes came who had heard them
disputing with one another. We are told
he could see that Jesus had been answering
them well. Here was something
different. It was not frustration at the
inability to trap Jesus, but instead an appreciation for what Jesus had been
saying.
And so the scribe asks in our text, “Which
commandment is the most important of all?”
Our Lord responds with his expected and well known summary of the two
tables of the Ten Commandments as he said: “The most important is, ‘Hear, O
Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all
your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Jesus takes all of the Torah –
something that had generated a massive oral law which sought to explain and
apply it to life – and boils it down to two points: Love God with all that you
are, and love your neighbor as yourself. And then the scribe responded enthusiastically
that Jesus was correct. He said, “You
are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other
besides him. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding
and with all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, is much more
than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
We learn that when Jesus saw that he
had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of
God.” Not far from the kingdom of
God. Clearly the scribe was on the right
track. But he wasn’t there. And our location at this conference is a reminder
that being not far away and actually being there are very different
things. The United States border is not
far from here. In fact, when people who knew that I was going to speak to a
pastors’ conference of the Lutheran Church – Canada have asked about where in
Canada I was going, I felt rather silly telling them Niagara Falls. After all
that’s barely Canada!
But while we may not be far from the
United States, that distance makes all the difference in the world. When I agreed to come and speak at this
conference, it meant that I had a get a new passport. Mine had expired and I hadn’t used it in a
long time. I hadn’t been to Canada since
my college years at Concordia College, Ann Arbor, MI. At that time you could drive across from Detroit
into Windsor with no need of a passport.
But of course, the world has changed, and now without a passport the
fact that I am not far from the U.S. border doesn’t make any difference if I
want to get back home from here.
The scribe understood what the Torah
was all about. The genuineness of his answer no doubt indicates that he really
wanted to love God with all that he was and love his neighbor as himself. Yet Jesus is clear that this alone left him
outside the kingdom of God. It meant
that he had not received the saving reign of God.
The same thing is true for Christians
today. You know this. You preach it every Sunday to the members of your
congregation. You preach that the way of
the law – the way of doing – cannot produce fellowship with God. It can’t because they don’t; they can’t. You declare to others that they are curved in
on themselves; that they love themselves instead of God and neighbor.
But as those who still carry the
burden of the old man it is an unpleasant word that needs to be addressed to
you as well. You don’t love God with all
that you are, for you love things and so you grumble that don’t get paid more
as a pastor. You love what the world defines as success, and so you make
decisions that are gauged on the basis of how they will be received, rather
than on their fidelity to God’s Word. You don’t love your neighbor as yourself
– not even the neighbor who lives in your own house, your own family. You act
towards them in selfish and hurtful ways.
The scribe’s answer left him not far
from the kingdom of God. But that distance was the difference between salvation
and condemnation. You must look at your
life and confess the same thing. Your
love of self over God and neighbor leaves you in sin. If unaddressed it leaves you cut off from the
God. There is only one way to close the distance – to return to the kingdom of
God. That way is to repent, and then in
faith to move on to the second half of our text.
There, Jesus speaks about the Christ
and how the Holy Spirit through David had described him as David’s son who is
in fact David’s Lord. He describes the
Christ as the One seated at the right hand of God. The Christ is David’s son,
and yet he is so much more.
In Mark’s Gospel, Peter has
confessed Jesus as the Christ. Then Mark goes on to tell us, “And he began to
teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the
elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three
days rise again.” Jesus is the Christ,
David’s son who is also David’s Lord because he is God’s Son. He entered this world as he was conceived by
the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.
He loved God with all that he
was. He loved his neighbor as
himself. In fact he loved you more than himself because he sacrificed
himself on the cross in order to win you forgiveness for all of the ways you
fail to love God and neighbor. He
declared that, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give
his life as a ransom for many.”
By his death Jesus ransomed you from
sin – he won forgiveness for you. And by
his resurrection from the dead he defeated death. He began the resurrection of the Last Day. Through baptism you have shared in the saving
death of Jesus the risen Lord. And because of baptism you know that you will be
raised too. You look for the return of
Jesus Christ who will transform your lowly body to be like his glorious body,
by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
This is the Good News by which you
live in the present. And though perfect
love of God in body and soul will not take place until the resurrection of the
Last Day, already now through the work of the Spirit we seek to love God above
all things. We seek to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus’ life of service and sacrifice for us
becomes our model and pattern. As our
Lord told the disciples: “You know that those who are considered rulers of the
Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.
But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be
your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.”
This is not something that we can
accomplish on our own. It is not even
something that we can fully do at all times.
But with faith in the Christ who is David’s son and David’s Lord we now
approach this altar. We come in repentance
seeking forgiveness for the sins we have committed. We come seeking food by which the new man in
us is fed and nourished. For through the true body and blood of Christ, the
Spirit sustains and strengthens us in faith so that we can return to the world
as the forgiven children of God who seek to love God above all things and our neighbor
as ourselves.
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