Homily for June 4th, 2020: Mark 12: 28-34.
Which
commandment comes first? Jesus is asked in today’s gospel. It was a standard
question amongst rabbis in Jesus’ day. Jesus answers by citing two well known
Old Testament texts, from Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, about loving God and
others. The question is still being asked today, when people want to know is it
more important to worship God, or to serve the poor? The shortest answer is:
both are important.
If people want
to know which is primary, then the answer
is, worship. But if our worship has no consequences in daily life,
however, it is hypocrisy which cries to heaven for vengeance. On the other
hand, service of others which is not performed for love of God, but for the
uplifting feeling of serving a noble cause, or some other human ideology, is
not genuine service. Those “served” in this way experience not the warmth of
compassion, but the cold impersonalism of bureaucracy, which undermines so many
of the best-intentioned efforts of the welfare state to help the poor and
disadvantaged.
We
followers of Jesus Christ are called to live at the intersection of the
vertical and the horizontal. That is where Jesus lived. It is also where he
died. The cross, which is itself the literal intersection of the vertical and
the horizontal, tore Jesus apart and killed him. For us too the attempt to live
where the vertical and horizontal intersect will mean pain, rending asunder,
and ultimately death. But this is precisely that dying-in-order-to-live of
which Jesus himself speaks often in the gospels. For behind the cross
Christians have always seen, and we must always see, the open portals of the empty tomb – the sign and proof that
death is not the end. Death was not the end for Jesus. It will not be the end
for us; it will be rather the gateway to new life, unbelievably more wonderful
than this one. It is Jesus’ resurrection which enables us to live as people of
hope – and above all as people of joy.
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