Mark 12:28-34, from Proper 26(31). Also: John 11:32-44, from the All Saints Day readings
Christians have two Gospel readings this week, one about love-infused life, and a second about life-infused death.
Together, they illustrate how the Gospel challenges – and, more than challenges, refutes – the way we all-too-easily slip into thinking about both life and death.
A lot of fast-forwarding has happened between the last Gospel reading and Mark 12:28. Having healed blind Bartimaeus outside Jericho, Jesus has ridden triumphantly into Jerusalem, tossed the money-changers out of the temple, and has argued with, and made enemies of, just about every upstanding member of Jerusalem’s religious elite: the chief priests, the teachers of the law, the elders, the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees. Mark 12:28-34 signals the end of this phase of the story. A teacher of the law who is impressed with Jesus (in Matthew’s version, the teacher seems to have darker motivations) asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest one. Jesus responds by picking the top two. First, he quotes from the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength (Deut. 6:4-5).” Then he quotes from Lev. 19:18: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” These two, Jesus says, are equally important and at the top of the list.
In John 11:32-44, meanwhile, Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead, not so much as a favor to Lazarus (“You, my friend, get to die twice. You’re welcome!”) than as a declaration that he is the resurrection and the life. Not will be the resurrection and the life at some future point in time, as Martha makes him out to be, but is the resurrection and the life, here and now, which is about the only conclusion one can reach while watching him summon, right out of a tomb, a man who has been stone-cold dead for three days.
These two stories are simply impossible to square with life and death as we typically understand both. The perspective that drives our day-to-day choices 99 percent of the time – mine, at least, because perhaps a saint like you runs on a different mindset – holds that everyone dies eventually, some sooner than others, so the smart money is on grabbing as much life as one can, and for as long as one can, perhaps even if others come up short as a result. We say we are Christians, but we work, vote, deal with others, speak and act like people who think loving one’s neighbor is oneself is stupidly impractical compared to hoarding, and death is the dreaded, tragic end of everything.
But the Gospel declares both of these assertions wrong. We Christians should have no dread of death, because we should be dead already. We should be dead to ourselves, but raised by him to walk in true life – life that loves others with the abandon that comes only from having infinitely more life than one could possibly spend on oneself.
Next week: Proper 27(32)
