Jesus Boiled It Down - Day 34

The Jews had a lot of rules and regulations and commandments. They catalogued them. They compared them and ranked them. They wrangled and argued over them. They set up political parties and ecclesiastical sub-groups over them.
That is the background to one of the scribes coming to Jesus and asking him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” (Mark 12:28f) We don’t know if the scribe really wanted to know what Jesus had to say or if he was only trying to draw Jesus into a never-ending and going-nowhere theological debate.
Jesus was very clear about the answer: “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 souls, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
There it is. Jesus boiled it all down. Love. Love God. Love your neighbor. Love yourself.
Love God because God is love and because God is worthy of love. When you don’t love God you are separated from God and from how God designed you to be. Love your neighbor because your neighbor is a child of God, because you neighbor is made in God’s image, and because you need your neighbor and your neighbor needs you. Love yourself because you too are a child of God and because you need love and deserve love and want love.
I started with how the Jews had lots of rules and regulations and commandments, and how they compared them, ranked them, and set-up parties over them. I am, of course, not just talking about them. I am, of course, talking about many of us. I am talking about so many of our churches. I am talking about so many of our church debates and even how such theological issues get worked at times in our political process.
Jesus, though, boiled it all down. Love. Is there some place in your life where you would do well to do the same? Just boil it down. I am not asking you to live a simplistic life. But sometimes our complexity is self-induced. Sometimes all of our complexity—like that of the scribes wrangling the relative importance of each law—is a way of avoiding what we most need to do, and that is to love God, love our neighbor, and love our self.