Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Moses convened all Israel, and said to them: Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, October 8, 2023
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: God calls us to embody—to immerse ourselves in—loving God and loving one another.
What is most interesting about this passage from Chapter 12 of Mark is that Jesus is subverting the scribe’s question as much as he is answering it. In giving two commandments when the scribe asks only for one, Jesus is making the argument that nothing about God can be boiled down to an easy checkbox or line item. Nothing about God involves clean lines or cutoffs. Living a life of faith must demonstrate the love between us and God and the love between us and other people, all the time and all at once.
That’s where the 10 Commandments come in. Moses describes these commandments to his followers as a covenant that God made with all of them. While many variations of covenant existed in the Ancient Near East, the implication Moses makes here is that this is an unbreakable, unshakeable, and binding promise between God and God’s people that God’s people will live their life according to their faith, and that God will bless them for generations.
You’ll notice that the first, framing commandment emphasizes the connection between God and God’s people. The second and third can technically stand on their own, but they could also be interpreted as sub-points of the first. Commandments Four through Ten outline the connection between God’s people, telling us what to do (and what not to do) with regard to each other. God charged God’s very self with putting into words the most foundational and distinctive tenets of a faithful life—Yahweh’s Big Mac Special Sauce recipe, if you will—and the only things that are truly on God’s list are to love God with all of your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else falls into the realm of details.
Moses does something very interesting to end his proclamation of the 10 Commandments. He tells the crowds to keep these words in their hearts. To recite these words to their children. To start and end each day with these words. To keep them on their persons. To post them in their entryways. Because God’s greatest commandment (which is actually twofold) is such a big, abstract and complex idea, Moses wants to be sure that people are internalizing it. Remembering it. Finding ways to work it into the little things. When they do that, they might also start to recognize the blessings that God has promised them will spring forth from this kind of internalization.
The important thing for us to hear this morning is not just the commandments, themselves. The important thing for us to hear is the same charge that Moses gave the crowds around him: to immerse ourselves in the love of God and the love of other people. To let God’s love seep into our bones. To look for the ways that God’s grace changes our day to day. This is where we will find blessings all of these generations later.
