by Jean Allen
So, Jesus just finished shutting up the Sadducees about life after death and along comes some Pharisees to test him some more. They ask him what the greatest commandment is and we all know his answer. His answer was in no way inflammatory; in fact, it was pretty mainstream in the Jewish religion having been given to them in Deuteronomy, which modern scholars believe was written 600-700 years before Jesus’s time. The commandments were preceded by the Shema: Hear, O Israel: theLord, our God, the Lord is one. ‘Shema’ means to hear.
The difference between Jesus and many of the Pharisees and Chief Priests regarding the two greatest commandments was that Jesus actually followed them and it was his following the commandments wholeheartedly that really irked the Jewish authorities. He loved God with his whole heart above everything and everyone else and he loved his neighbors to such a degree that there was huge disapproval of who he loved. To the Jews, ‘neighbor’ meant other upright Jews; to Jesus it meant everybody bar none. Tax collectors, prostitutes, Samaritans, Canaanites, prodigal sons and daughters, thieves…there wasn’t a soul who was not a neighbor to Jesus. My God! He was polluting the Jewish religion with his undiscerning love of his neighbor.
‘Shema’, or ‘Hear,’ doesn’t just mean to register sounds; it means to listen deeply and consistently act upon what is heard. It means meditating on and pondering the words and their meaning and then doing it! Many Jews wore tefillin, small black leather boxes containing a piece of parchment on which was written Torah verses. These boxes were bound to the forehead and to the arm. For many Jews, these phylacteries were probably more habit than anything and for some they were a proud sign that they were pretty spiritual. You can imagine their consternation when Jesus came along and actually acted upon what he had heard.
You can hear the words of the Gospel this Sunday and they may just fly over your head because you’ve heard them so often, or you can be like Jesus:
Shema the words.
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