Deuteronomy 6: 1-9; Mark 12: 28-34
Context is important when it comes to understanding most things. That’s true with these texts.
There are several layers of context to consider when we look at any scriptural text. The book of Deuteronomy begins with the people standing on the border of the promised land, which they are about to enter and occupy. That’s the storyline context- Moses and the people who have wandered the wilderness, preparing to conquer the land. The book of Deuteronomy is presented as a speech from Moses to the people before they enter the land in which he summarizes all the laws.
There’s another layer though. You see, the text wasn’t written down in 1300 BCE. It was first written down many centuries later, somewhere between 700 and 400 BCE. Deuteronomy was written in the context of foreign domination, just before, during or after the time we think of as the Exile. It’s important to remember that for most of Israel’s history they didn’t have their own kingdom with a temple and priests and so forth. Israel has nearly always been occupied land, dominated by various Empires—the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British.
The 10 commandments are found in the chapter right before today’s reading. The law is to be observed, “so that it may go well for you, so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey.” The original writers, in the 7th to 5th Century BCE, and the listeners or readers through the centuries that followed—even up until today— would have had the benefit of history to understand that text.
We know something about colonization, invasion and occupation. When we step back a bit and read the text with a historical mindset rather than the simple storyline view of it, we see the dangerous link between religion and politics. If we keep reading we find these words…
When the Lord your God has brought you into the land—a land with fine houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves you did not plant, when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
When God is used as justification for the subjugation of one people by another, things don’t go well for anyone. Whether that means the Israelites conquering Canaan during the period called the conquest, or the early white immigrants in what is now Canada and the US claiming the first nations’ peoples’ land through manifest destiny and the doctrine of discovery, or the Spanish conquistador’s domination of the Mexica or Aztec people, or the fighting over the Holy Land in our own times–when God is used as an excuse for domination and war, life becomes anything but a land of milk and honey. Contextual reading calls us to remember God as the liberator of slaves from Egypt and letting that understanding prevent the enslaving of others.
There are even more layers of context to consider though. A few hundred years later, after the text in Deuteronomy was actually written down, the words were interpreted again in a new way. During the Hasmonean dynasty, from about 140 BC, after the Maccabean revolt—from which the holiday of Hannukah arises—until 37 BCE, the Jews experienced a rare period when they enjoyed freedom and self-rule. It was during that time that Herod the Great had the second temple built. It was during that time period that the practice of reciting the Shema developed.
The Jewish people have a prayer called the Shema, after the Hebrew word for hear, with which the prayer begins. As familiar as the Lord’s Prayer is to Christians, Jews, everywhere, twice a day, cover their eyes with their right hand and recite,
Shema Israel, Adonai elhenu, Adonai achad. Hear, O Israel, The L-rd is our G‑d, The L-rd is One.
They continue in a softer tone,
Blessed be the name of the glory of G-d’s kingdom forever and ever,
followed by the words from our Old Testament lesson for today.
You shall love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.
They often pray standing to show respect and deference and cover their eyes to prevent distraction. Their words express the belief that nothing exists outside of God, that all this exists is a veiled manifestation of God, that all is connected and interdependent, that life is continuously being re-created.
It was during that Hasmonean time that the use of phylacteries emerged. Still, today, some Jews take those words literally and they physically bind onto their foreheads and around their arms little leather boxes with long straps called phylacteries or tefillin. Those boxes have the words of the Shema printed within. They also place a little thingamajig on their doorposts, a mezuzah, which also holds the text of our lesson today. Jews touch the mezuzah as they enter and leave their homes.
Twice a day, Jesus would have recited the words,
Shema Israel, Adonia Elhenu, Adonai Achad!
As I said, Shema! translates roughly to Hear! Or Listen! But it carries much more weight than that in Hebrew because there is no separate word for obey. Hear means Listen and Do! It’s sort of like that familiar parental command. Listen to me when I’m talking to you! It means: Listen and DO what I say. It’s why Jesus sometimes said Let those who have ears Hear, or They have ears but do not listen! When he is asked what the greatest commandment is, his response is simply an elaboration of the word, Shema. Love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart, soul and might and love your neighbor as yourself! Shema!
So that brings us to the next layer of context. The setting for our gospel reading for today is Jesus’ encounter with the scribe, during what we think of as holy week. Jesus had already entered Jerusalem on a colt to shouts of Hosanna! During the next few days, he was met with one challenge to his identity and authority after another. The Chief priests, scribes, elders, the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Herodians have all argued with him and tried to entrap him. They each reacted to him with questions, disagreements, or doubt. In our text a scribe engages Jesus in the only civil conversation of the week. That’s the story-line layer of context of our gospel—Jesus’ encounters during the days before his crucifixion.
In his and the scribe’s words we can hear all the previous layers of context, the 1300 BCE storyline, the exilic period when Deuteronomy was written down, the Jewish identity shaped by centuries of domination and movement, the Maccabean revolt, the new temple built by Herod the great that would have been standing in Jesus’ own time, the practice of recitation of the Shema, all underlaid by the liberating history of God’s deliverance and blessing, the various factions within Judaism and the Roman power structure during Jesus’ lifetime, the roles they each played in his trail and death.
Then, bear with me, there’s yet another layer. Mark wrote his gospel some 30 years later, during another period of unrest. There were four main factions of the Jewish world around 65 to 70 AD, the Zealots, Pharisees, Essenes, and the Sadducees. They were basically engaged in civil war with each other, not to mention coping with the new sect of Judaism—Christianity that was emerging.
Nero was the Roman Emperor. In 68, he sent his best general, Vespasian, to crush the rebellion of the Jews in the northern region of Galilee. Vespasian then became the new Emperor in 69 and sent his son, General Titus, to finally put down the revolution by besieging Jerusalem. Unrest and rebellion against the Roman authority had been the order of the day. The internal division weakened the cohesion of the Jewish territory and meant that the Roman army could put down the rebellion and eventually destroy Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD.
That was the contemporary context of Mark’s writing. When Mark includes the various challengers to Jesus’ authority, Mark’s community would make a connection between the opposing factions of their own time.
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus responds to the scribe’s question by reciting the text from Deuteronomy 6, and adding to it another command, from Leviticus, And love your neighbor as yourself. His words call to mind the eternal dilemma of exclusive faith and universal love, the challenge faced by every time and people, that of loving One’s own God while maintaining a love toward those who love another God.
Certainly, there is yet one more context to consider—today. How do we hear these texts on November 3, 2024? It is two days before an historic election in the United States, a nation challenged by division and the threats of Christian Nationalism and civil unrest. The nation of Israel is at war, a complicated situation nearly impossible to unravel even as the cities are being destroyed there, once again. The good news of Jesus Christ speaks to us, through the layers of history, with words of profound conviction and challenge.
Before I close today with a prayer in poetic form by Walter Bruggeman, included in his 2008 book Prayers for Privileged People. It is titled:
Post-Election Day
You creator God
who has ordered us
in families and communities,
in clans and tribes,
in states and nations.
You creator God
who enacts your governance
in ways overt and
in ways hidden.
You exercise your will for
peace and for justice and for freedom.
We give you thanks for the peaceable order of
our nation and for the chance of choosing—
all the manipulative money notwithstanding.
We pray now for new governance
that your will and purpose may prevail,
that our leaders may have a sense
of justice and goodness,
that we as citizens may care about the
public face of your purpose.
We pray in the name of Jesus who was executed
by the authorities. Amen.
The greatest commandment speaks through all the layers of history and can guide us onward. Love your neighbor as unconditionally as you love God, as God loves you. No historical situation, ethnicity, politics or religion is greater than this.