Now Hear This

Scripture Reading: Mark 12:28-34

Now hear this. I didn’t know it when I titled the sermon, but the phrase “Now hear this” originates with the U.S. Navy. When proclaimed over a ship’s public address system, the words “Now hear this” instruct all personnel to give heed to a command that’s about to follow.

Something like that happens in today’s reading from Mark 12. When Jesus is asked by a scribe which commandment is the greatest of all, before answering he first recites the words of a well known Jewish prayer that begins, “Hear, O Israel.” In other words, before Israel is commanded to do anything, they are first told to listen, i.e., to ready themselves, to be still, to be receptive to what God is about to say to them.

After leisurely pacing ourselves through Mark 10 over the previous four weeks, today we skip over chapter 11 entirely and jump right into the middle of chapter 12. What did we miss? In chapter 11 Jesus and the disciples finally reach Jerusalem where Jesus is greeted like a hero to shouts of “Hosanna,” which translates to “save us, we pray.”   

Jesus immediately enters the temple and upon seeing the rampant commercialism therein flies into a righteous rage and proceeds to disrupt the ordinary course of business by overturning tables and chasing out the moneychangers with a makeshift whip. It’s quite the scene, and one that we’ll explore in detail next year in the run-up to Easter.


After cleansing the temple, Jesus is met with hostile questions by various groups of religious authorities who view him as a threat. First the chief priests, scribes, and elders who oversee the temple challenge his authority. Then the Pharisees and the Herodians—two groups normally opposed to one another—unite in an attempt to trap him with a question about paying taxes to the emperor. Then yet another group, the Sadducees, attempt to embarrass him with a patently ridiculous question that would seem to have no good answer.

Having observed Jesus successfully navigate all these challenges to his authority, a lone scribe approaches him with a question of his own. Unlike all these other groups, the scribe doesn’t seem as though he’s trying to entrap or embarrass Jesus. If anything, he seems genuinely impressed at how Jesus has handled himself in the face of so much hostile questioning.

His question appears simple on the surface, but it runs miles deep. His question: “Which commandment is the first of all?” This is not a trick question. He’s not asking about the order of the commandments, as in which comes first. His question is about first principles. Basically, he’s asking, What is the most important commandment? Or to put it another way, if we were to distill the law down to its essence, what would that essence be?


This scribe is a learned man, as all scribes were. Scribes were well versed in the scriptures. They could cite chapter and verse without looking up the text on their smartphones. This scribe would have been familiar with the more than 600 commandments found in the Hebrew scriptures (613 to be exact). It was common for religious scholars such as scribes and Pharisees to discuss and debate the scriptures. So, in asking Jesus which is the first commandment, this scribe is not so much putting Jesus to the test as treating him as a peer, someone whose insight he is interested to hear.

But Jesus is a tough interlocutor. I would not have wanted to question him. When asked a question, he almost never gives a direct answer. When Jesus is asked whether it’s lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he holds up a coin and asks whose image appears on it. When the Pharisees ask him whether it’s lawful for a man to divorce his wife, he replies, “What did Moses tell you?”

Now, when the scribe asks him which commandment is first of all, he doesn’t cite any one of the hundreds of commandments in the scriptures. Instead, he answers with the opening line of the Jewish daily prayer, known as the Shema. The prayer begins, Shema, Israel. In Hebrew shema means to hear or to listen. “Hear, O Israel.” Or “Listen up, my people.” Or “Now hear this.”


I imagine that the scribe is expecting Jesus to cite one of the many commandments. After all, the scribe had asked which commandment is first of all. But before citing any commandment, Jesus begins by reminding the scribe that before God issues any command, God first tells the people to listen. Before the people are told what they, as God’s people, are expected to do, they must first be prepared to hear what God has to say.

Listening doesn’t come easily to most of us. We’d rather speak our mind, and it’s never been easier for us to do so, what with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”), YouTube, and various and sundry forms of social media. We’ve all become broadcasters and content creators. But if everyone’s speaking, who’s listening?

Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself is NOT the gospel, it’s the law.

Culturally speaking, listening has never been our strong suit. We’re a nation of doers and achievers not listeners. Why should we spend time listening when there are things we need to get done? There are only so many hours in the day. Chop chop! Time’s a wasting!


Just so you know, I’m speaking to myself here as well. With all the work that’s been done around the church lately—new bathroom, new entrance ramp, electrical work, plugging holes in the roof, Department of Health inspection—I look around the building and the grounds and I just see projects that need to get done. And I don’t have a lot of patience. I want to get started yesterday.

When we began the garden project a year ago, things were moving so quickly—the overgrowth was cleared, the hill was fortified, the staircase was being built—I felt a sense of instant gratification. And then the village building inspector put a halt to everything. He told us we needed to submit a site plan to the planning board (for a garden!). We needed approval before we could put a shovel into the earth. We had to stop what we were doing and listen to him.

This isn’t a perfect metaphor because I’m making the building inspector out to be God, but the larger point stands. It’s not easy to sit still and listen when we’d just as soon go and get things done. And yet, before even the commandment to love the Lord your God, God calls upon the people to ready themselves for what they are to do by first listening.


Why am I making such a big deal about this? Isn’t the point of this passage all about what we’re supposed to do? We’re supposed to love God with our whole being and love our neighbors as ourselves. Isn’t that the heart of the gospel? Why am I telling us to slow down and listen when there is work to do, when there are neighbors in need and ministries to undertake?

But you see, that’s just it—love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself is NOT the gospel, it’s the law. And if we’ve learned anything about the law in however long we’ve been Christians, it’s that we’re no good at obeying it. Yes, the law tells us what God wants us to do—for our own sake and for our neighbor’s sake. But let’s remember Paul’s brilliant insight—the law is absolutely powerless to make us obey it. The law can say “do this,” but it can’t make us actually do it.

The law can say love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself, but it can’t actually make us love God with our whole being, and it certainly can’t make us love our neighbor who speaks a different language, or whose values don’t align with ours, or who votes for the wrong candidate. And if we can’t, in fact, obey the law, then all the law really does is convict us…unless the law is not the last word that we hear from God.


Fortunately for us, God does speak another word to us—a word of grace. Whereas the law says, “Here, do this,” grace says, “Now hear this.” Grace is God’s proclamation that God has taken the matter of salvation out of our hands and placed it entirely into the hands of Jesus Christ, the only one who could obey the law with perfect obedience and therefore fulfill it once and for all. In this way, grace overcomes the fatal flaw of the law. The grace given to us in Jesus does for us what the law was powerless to do—-save us.

If all we needed was a reminder of what the law tells us to do, then Moses would have sufficed. There would be no need for a savior. No need for the cross. No need for Jesus to suffer, be rejected, and crucified. No need for Jesus to be raised again on the third day.

But Jesus was not Moses. He was not like any of the prophets of old. Jesus was more than a prophet; he is a savior. So, yes, the law is God’s word to us, and the foundation of the law is love, but the law is not enough. We need to hear another word. We need to hear a word of grace. NOW HEAR THIS: that word comes to us in the form of Jesus Christ who is God’s first and final and forever word.

John Schneider