There’s an old story about a gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism. He went to Rabbi Shammai and said to him, “Take me as a proselyte, but on condition that you teach me the entire Torah, all of it, while I stand on one foot.” Shammai, insulted by this request, threw him out of the house. Then the man went to Rabbi Hillel, and Hillel accepted the challenge, saying, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary—now go and study!”[1]
The debate didn’t begin with Shammai and Hillel, and it didn’t end with them. According to Jewish tradition, 613 commandments were given to Moses. 365 negative commandments, answering to the number of days of the year, and 248 positive commandments, answering to the number of members of the human body.[2] Thus the commandments of God address the whole human person, every day of the year, and they cover all of life: what to eat and what to wear, when to work and when to rest, how to teach your children and how to treat strangers, how to lend and borrow, how to love your spouse and how to cook a meal, how to pray and how to farm—everything. Is there a way, students of the Torah wondered, to capture that totality in a single teaching? Is there one commandment that is something like the principle that is being unfolded in all the others, a central commandment, as it were, that anchors all the others?
The prophet Micah named three: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” The prophet Isaiah named two: “Maintain justice and do what is right.” The prophet Amos named one: “Seek me and live.” And the prophet Habakkuk named another: “The righteous shall live by their faith.”[3] Rabbi Hillel answered, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your neighbor.”
Last week when I stood in the candy aisle, wondering what to get for the neighborhood kids for Halloween, I said to myself, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your young neighbors.” So I didn’t get any candy corn, and saying that candy corn fits the category of what I don’t like, is putting it mildly. I also didn’t get what I do like, simply because I’m more than a few years past my prime as a connoisseur of kids’ candy. So I got some KitKats, some Hershey bars with almonds, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. But now my curiosity had been piqued: What is the most popular candy bar in the United States?
Lists, of course, abound on the internet, and I learned that M&Ms are the top selling candy in the United States. Yeah, I could have bought some M&Ms, I said to myself, but noticed with great relief that Peanut Butter Cups and Hershey bars came in second and third, and Kit Kat a very respectable fifth. I also learned that Candy Corn ranked sixth in Halloween candy sales last year, ahead of Snickers and Sour Patch Kids, which is just devastating.
But sales numbers don’t tell the whole story when it comes to popularity. Because what we buy and hand out may not be what the kids going door to door actually like. Somebody, of course, did a survey, with a cutoff at age 17, of U.S. kids’ favorite Halloween candies. The results? Let’s just say I won the candy aisle trifecta: Hershey Bar #1, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups #2, and Kit Kat #3. They also surveyed kids up to age 17 to find the most hated Halloween candy in the nation. Do I have to say it? It ranked #6 in sales and #1 in most hated: Candy Corn.[4]
When the scribe asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the first of all?” he didn’t have rankings in mind. He didn’t want to know which commandment Jesus thought was most important, followed by 612 less important ones. As a scholar of Torah he was interested in determining whether there was one commandment that was foundational for all the others, one stone, as it were, upon wich the entire edifice of devotion and obedience rested.
Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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.”
The greatness of the double love commandment, writes Amy Allen, “lies not in its surpassing value over and against all of the other commandments of Jewish law, but, rather, in its ability to hold up all the rest. It’s less about beating out all of the other candidates and more about helping them to do their jobs.” The rock upon which the whole structure rests is love.
And Jesus didn’t name just one commandment, but two, implying that the will and desire of God for God’s people cannot be reduced to a single principle; all the commandments are rooted in a set of relationships. Love of God and love of neighbor go together, inseparably, so that we cannot be in right relationship with God without being in right relationship with each other, and we cannot love each other well without giving over our whole and broken selves to God—heart, soul, mind, strength. These two love commandments come first in the law because it is on them that all of the rest of the commandments of the Torah rest—all that God asks of God’s people, God asks as a response to and expression of love.[5] Together they reveal the meaning and orientation of the Torah as a whole.[6]
Most of us think we know what love is and that we are all talking about the same thing when we say the word—but we’re not. Love is about affection, desire, commitment and belonging, and the constellation of these elements shifts from relationship to relationship and from season to season. In our twenty-first century world love has widely been reduced to having good feelings about someone or something, and it has lost much of its core as a call to faithful action. Douglas Hare reminds us that,
In an age when the word ‘love’ is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary component of … love [in the Bible] is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that [the commandment] demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment. Similarly, to love our neighbor, including our enemies, does not mean that we must feel affection for them. To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seriously.[7]
Love is a deep loyalty to another, the kind of loyalty Ruth shows her mother-in-law. And when Jesus highlights the intimate link between loving God and loving our neighbor, he’s not telling us to have warm feelings for friends and strangers alike, but to commit ourselves to their wellbeing. Your neighbor, according to Jesus, can literally be your next-door neighbor who might be tired of eating alone or who might need somebody to rake the leaves for her. Your neighbor may be your father and mother who, after so many years, need you in unfamiliar ways that almost reverse the relationship of parent and child. Your neighbor is every person you encounter, and to love them is to take their desire to flourish no less seriously than you take your own. Think about that. To love them is to take their desire to flourish no less seriously than you take your own.
We know that there are all kinds of love. There is a covetous love that simply takes what it wants, but that is far from neighbor love. There is the love between equals, a love that thrives in mutuality and reciprocity. And there is a kind of love that is self-giving without a thought of reciprocity, a love whose sole concern is the other person’s well-being. Neither love reflects a merely emotional state, but rather, points to the relation in which one person lives toward another. One can perhaps be described as true friendship, the other as a holy selflessness that borders on recklessness. There are different words for these loves in New Testament Greek, but the two cannot be neatly separated. We often experience them together, be it as friends, lovers, parents, or neighbors, and at times we live out one more fully than the other.
Jesus calls us to follow him and to move continually from a self-centered way of being in the world to one centered in complete devotion to God and in those whom God gives us as neighbors. Jesus leads us from apathy to love.
The scribe said to Jesus, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; 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,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
Significant as the temple liturgy, offerings, and sacrifices are, giving ourselves completely to God and giving of ourselves to each other is much more important. The scribe agrees with Jesus. This remarkable scene is the only one in all of Mark’s gospel where a religious authority agrees with Jesus. Throughout his ministry, Jesus has encountered strong opposition from temple leadership—the chief priests, scribes and elders—and now that Jesus is in Jerusalem, the conflict between him and them continues to escalate. They are already conspiring to have him arrested and put on trial, and any questions they are asking him are designed to trip him up or trap him.
Except for this scribe who breaks the hostile pattern by asking a sincere question. He transcends the party strife and the us vs. them mentality. And Jesus answers him in an equally non-combative way. The scene itself illustrates what love of neighbor, in particular love of the challenging neighbor, might look like. In the middle of the brewing storm the two make room for each other and for each other’s honest questions and honest answers, for the pursuit of a deeper understanding of God’s will for God’s people—and the moment sparkles like an oasis of friendship in a wasteland of hostility and fear.
“You are not far from the kingdom of God,” Jesus says to the scribe, and that, in Mark’s telling of the gospel, is as close as it gets for any of us who await the kingdom’s consummation. Not far from the kingdom, closer to the truth and peace of God, closer to life in fullness.
[1] See Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a
[2] See Babylonian Talmud Makkot 23b-24a
[3] Micah 6:8; Isaiah 56:1; Amos 5:4; Habakkuk 2:4
[4] https://blog.galvanize.com/candy-crush-figuring-out-favorite-sweets-with-data/
[5] Amy Lindeman Allen https://politicaltheology.com/the-politics-of-the-greatest-commandment-mark-12-28-34/
[6] Eugene Boring, Mark, 345.
[7] Douglas Hare, “Matthew,” Interpretation Commentaries, 260.