One of the teachers of religious law was standing there listening to the debate. He realized that Jesus had answered well, so he asked, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
Jesus replied, “The most important commandment is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The Lord our God is the one and only Lord. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”
The teacher of religious law replied, “Well said, Teacher. You have spoken the truth by saying that there is only one God and no other. And I know it is important to love him with all my heart and all my understanding and all my strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. This is more important than to offer all of the burnt offerings and sacrifices required in the law.” (Mark 12:28–33 NLT)
It can be easy in our fast-paced, modern culture to fall into the trap of operating via soundbites. Rather than read the full newspaper, we get the headlines emailed to us. Instead of reading the book, we look for the Cliffs Notes version. There is a lot of nuance we often lose when we choose the summary over the full-length thing. Yet, paradoxically, Jesus manages to summarize the entire Jewish Scriptures in just two short commandments.
As Scot McKnight writes in The Jesus Creed, “For Jesus, love of God and love of others is the core.” If you only have two tenets that you follow, these are it. The question then becomes, what does it mean to love? McKnight describes love as “unconditional regard for a person that prompts and shapes behaviors in order to help that person to become what God desires. Love, when working properly, is both emotion and will, affection and action.”
These two commandments are what McKnight calls the Jesus Creed – an expansion of the Jewish creed known as the Shema. It is, to McKnight, fundamentally about spiritual formation.
When we truly love God with all we are – not simply a passive “love toward” but an active love that seeks greater oneness and unity – we are allowing ourselves to be shaped into mirrors reflecting his nature. We begin to find some of our broken pieces being mended; we start to set aside the false masks we took up as protective measures, and we instead become more and more our true selves.
When we truly love our neighbors as ourselves, we seek their well-being as if it were our own. As John Piper puts it, this command “seems to demand that I tear the skin off my body and wrap it around another person so that I feel that I am that other person; and all the longings that I have for my own safety and health and success and happiness I now feel for that other person as though he were me.” When we truly love others, we are again being shaped by love. Through the grace of God, love of Jesus, and empowerment of the Spirit, we become a people who transcend our selfish natures.
When we love God and others as Jesus describes in Mark 12, we are being formed into something new. It’s a vulnerable process, because we don’t get to decide exactly what the end product looks like, but we can be certain it will reflect Jesus.
Michael Benson is the communications director for the North American Baptist Conference.