Mark 12:18-34

Bringing the sermon home:

The attacks from the religious establishment of Israel continued as a group of Sadducees challenged Jesus. The Sadducees denied any form of an afterlife, and thus were fixated on the things of this world, including wealth and political power. Part of their problem was their belief that only the five books of Moses possessed supreme authority. Against this, the Gospels show that Jesus clearly affirmed the entire Hebrew Bible as being the very words of God. Those who are truly part of God’s flock hear the voice of their Shepherd speaking through His Word. This is the dividing line between the sheep and the goats.

Even with their wrongly restricted set of Scriptures, Jesus demonstrated that they still should have known and believed in the coming resurrection of the dead. If the god you worship is different than the God of the Bible, then you are worshiping a false god. This is why it was not unloving for Jesus to call out their errant beliefs, declaring “You are quite wrong.” Despite what our culture insists, it would have been unloving to affirm them in their error or to ignore their error. Jesus is showing us what love of neighbor looks like. This is what love demands of us all.

A scribe then comes to question Jesus about “which commandment is the most important of all,” and Jesus shows us that the entire Law of God hangs on loving God and loving others. In fact, as we see throughout Scripture, love for God is expressed through loving what He loves: the people He has created. May we press on to know the Lord through the study of His Word, and may this knowledge increasingly lead to loving God by loving others as ourselves.