So then, how would you answer
that scribe’s question? Which commandment is first of all? Out of the
minimum 10 we were encouraged to memorize as children, which one would you pick
as our Judeo-Christian prime directive? Hesitant though one might be to risk
contradicting Jesus — and Paul, for that matter — what would you say?
Which of them do you think is the first (and here, we are not talking only
about the numerical order in which the Old Testament states them)? Which of
them is the greatest?
But then again — is it even valid to
declare one “greater” than the others — are they not all equally “great”? Or
might this be negotiable, according to different personalities, or in accord
with specific situations or questions of whose ox got gored. Could it be that
different commandments speak to different people or that different people might
need different commandments — out of all we’ve been given — to count for, to
stand in for, all of them? What is the motivation for the scribe’s question? What
is Jesus getting at, in his terse reply to the curious scribe?
The Decalogue offers a kind of
built-in answer to the scribe’s question. The first, and by implication the
greatest, commandment is given straightforwardly to us, by God, in Exodus 20:
“[Y]ou shall have no other gods before me.”1 This is the first of
the Ten Commandments numerically, but there is nothing in it about loving God
with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, as Jesus mentions in today’s
reading from Mark. This commandment importantly but simply acknowledges that
God is God and there is no other.
That is where it all begins, but
does it end there? Jesus, in his reply to that scribe, implies that it doesn’t.
Jesus doesn’t reference the Ten Commandments. Rather, he cites the opening of a
passage Jews call the Shema, from Deuteronomy 6. Specifically, he quotes verse
5 — “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your might” — but he adds to it, “with all your mind.”
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