Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our reading from Mark 12 this morning, a scribe comes to Jesus and asks him, “What commandment is the first of all?” He’s asking, of course, not which is the first in the list of commandments, but about pre-eminence, importance…actually, it’s more than that: he’s asking what commandment is the source and wellspring of the others.

Interestingly, Jesus’ response isn’t cribbed from the Ten Commandments—he quotes instead from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 which begins: Hear, O Israel, ADONAI our God, ADONAI is One. Called the Shema (which is the Hebrew word for “hear”), this confession is fundamentally important to prayer, life and identity in Judaism. Its importance, in fact, suggests that our prayer, our life, and our identity are all actually one and the same thing.

God is One. This isn’t merely saying that God is numerically one. As Pseudo-Dionysus will affirm, God is beyond all of our concepts of numbers and numbering and can’t be grasped by any of them. More than mere oneness, then, God is One means that God is irreducible, whole, complete, the singular and singularly unique source of all subsequent multiplicity, the supernal coherent and incomprehensible Fact that formed and preserves anything that is, has been or will be.

God is also, somehow, ours. This doesn’t mean that God belongs to us, that we can lay some exclusive claim to God, or that God is a thing we possess. To the contrary! If we’re to be who we’re meant to be, we must put no obstacles in the way of God completely holding and possessing us! God is ours, then, means that God is for us. God has planned, desired and willed love, goodness and grace for us. Which is to say: God has planned, desired and willed God’s own life for us. God is ours because the ground of our being and our becoming is in God. God is ours because God loves us and has given us all that we are. God is ours because we belong to God. God is ours because God is love.

These realities of God’s Oneness and God’s lovely, lovable and loving ourness are realities we need to hear, which is to say, they are things to which we need to hearken, to listen…because if we’re actually listening, if we’re actually being attentive to the Heart of Love from which all things spring, then we’ll respond to what we hear. Moreover, we’ll respond in a way that is worthy of Love, that is, in fact Love working in and through us. The proclamation of the Shema is not, then, mere information, but a prayerful acknowledgement of a reality of relationship that necessarily comes from Love and blossoms into love: love of God, and love of neighbor.

Technically, you might say, technically the first commandment is to Love God, and the second is to Love Neighbor. But I think Jesus’ quoting of the Shema reveals that it undergirds both commandments: that the Shema is the condition that makes the commandments possible; the Shema is the wellspring from which they come.

Hearkening today, particularly in prayer, to the fundamental Reality of Love that is God’s nature—to the One who is Lover and Beloved and the Love they share—how might we be transformed more fully into Love’s own likeness?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+