Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 3rd November 2024.
Lectionary Readings:
Deuteronomy 6 v1-9; Psalm 119 v1-8; Hebrews 9 v11-14; Mark 12 v28-34.
The most important commandment.
One of the teachers of the law of Moses….. asked Jesus “What is the most important commandment?” Jesus answered “The most important one says: ‘people of Israel, you have only one Lord and God. You must love him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. The second most important commandment says: ‘Love others as much as you love yourself. No other commandment is more important than these.”(Mark 12 v28-31)
The man agreed and added: “These commandments are more important than all the sacrifices and offerings that we could possibly make.” When Jesus saw that the man had given a sensible answer, he told him, “You are not far from God’s kingdom. (v33b-34a).
The ‘Law of Moses’ is a term that refers to the first five books of the Bible and covers God’s teaching and instructions for Jewish people. Jesus criticised the Temple leaders and ‘Teachers of the Law of Moses’ for making ‘obedience of the law’ an impossible burden for many. Jesus emphasised the spirit of the law rather than man made rules concerning how worship should be conducted.
For Jesus, the most important aspect of religion was the quality of a believer’s relationship with God. Being in a loving relationship with God, accepting God’s love and forgiveness and making oneself open to the flow of God’s love towards others was far more important than participation in religious rituals and practices.
Adrian Smith, a Roman Catholic priest writes about the value of personal experience of God’s love in his book ‘Tomorrow’s Christian’.
Adrian comments that ‘There are loyal churchgoing Christians who observe faithfully the law of God as taught by the Church and carry out all their religious practices punctiliously, but their religious life is lived at a surface level because their heart is not touched: they have not had an experience of God. They know a great deal about God, but they do not know God.’ (p 87).
Jesus himself had such a vivid consciousness of God that he explained it as God-in-him. “The Father and I are one” (John 10 v30). (p 88).
‘For tomorrow’s Christians the ultimate authority for accepting the validity of Christian belief is not the word of ecclesiastical authority – needful though that is for guidance – but personal spiritual experience. Bishop Richard Holloway writes, “Experiences of God are self evidencing to the participant. They operate within their own integrity, follow the logic of their own experience and require no external authority to validate them; they validate themselves.” (p89).
‘From what is said above, it might be inferred that a spiritual experience is always extraordinary, a peak experience. But this is only one aspect. The Spirit can be experienced in any situation. She can be experienced in ordinary everyday life, in love, in compassion, in pain and hardship, even in the chasm of despair. The Spirit never abandons us. She can break through into our lives at the oddest moments.’ (p89).
Jesus wants us to know that God’s love for us is personal, to feel that love in our own heart, because each of us is precious to God.
Bible quotations are taken from the Contemporary English Version.