At first look our readings might seem a little dry; I certainly thought so when I started wrestling with them. Then, as I read a commentary on the original text, I was blown away at what is being said to us in the Scriptures. I will try my best to give you the clifnotes.
In the first reading, it appears Moses is mainly telling the people a whole bunch of rules. "Fear the LORD, your God, and keep, throughout the days of your lives, all his statutes and commandments which I enjoin on you.” How many laws and commandments were there? Most of us would say 10 because we remember that great story where Moses comes down the mountain with the two stone tablets inscribed with the commandments. Ah, but that is not all of them! Over time, there would be 613 commandments from the law of Moses. Why so many?! Remember the story of Adam and Eve? God gave them only two commandments: “Be fruitful and subdue the earth, and eat of any tree except the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil.” We know what happens. They can’t even honor those two commandments. And pretty quickly, humanity chooses sin and runs away from God. As this happens, God has to introduce more and more commandments to keep us from hurting ourselves and others. Think of God’s commandments as guardrails to keep us safe…and we are really bad drivers!
The speech we hear from Moses is one of the most holy and important scriptures for the Jewish people, even to this day. "Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” This prayer is called the Shema, which is the first word of the passage in Hebrew, and it gave them their identity. At the time of Moses, no one worshiped one god. You would worship a whole bunch of gods and let them fight it out to see which one was better. The Chosen People were different. They belonged to one God and him alone they served. But they kept messing up and wandering off. And so God would give them more commandments and laws to bring them back in line.
Today Moses is reminding them of this reality once again so they can enter the Promised Land. So how do they stay faithful?
The first word for us to pay attention to is “hear” which is that Hebrew word shema. In Hebrew, this word is not just listening for a sound, it also the word to obey. Unlike English, there are not two different words. So, if you truly hear someone, including God, and you shema them, you obey them. And of course it’s not possible to hear and obey the one true God while at the same time hearing and obeying all those other gods that Israel kept sneaking off to serve.
This prayer was everything to the Jewish people: it would be whispered into a baby’s ear when it was born, it would be spoken in the moments when someone was dying, and it is one of the prayers worn on the forehead in little boxes by Orthodox Jews as well as the Mezuzah, displayed in every Jewish home.
But obedience isn’t all. Moses tells them to love God as well, in the same way someone would love his or her spouse. Time and time again, God will compare Israel to a spouse who keeps running off with strangers who don’t love her. Jesus constantly uses spousal images as well. How are we called to love God? Like a husband, like a wife.
With all your heart is not just feelings or emotions. That’s not what heart means in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew word for heart is “lavav” and means a place of decision, a place where we meet God face to face, and choose who we will serve. The word for heart means to decide to serve.
Nephez is the word for soul and it means “personality” “weirdness”, “quirks”. So we are called to love God with all our strangeness and uniqueness that makes us who we are. That is the full meaning of loving him with all our soul.
Mayod is the Hebrew word for strength and it is not actually a word. It is the equivalent of 5 exclamation points. So put it all together it means: “make a decision, before God, to serve him with all my personality, and weirdness all bold type with 5 exclamations points!!!!!
Psalm refrain picks this up and uses this Mayod word again, “I love you Lord my strength”, my mayod, my exclamation point.
The Shema, this most important prayer of the Jewish people was what Jesus tells the scribe in today’s gospel when he asks which of the 613 commandments is the most important. Interestingly enough, Jesus adds one additional thing to loving God with your whole heart, soul, and strength. He adds that we must also love God with all our mind too. Why? We cannot choose to love God or serve him until we know him. And it is with our mind that we come to know who God is and how best to love him with all that we are.
As any good teacher would, Jesus ties everything together as he connects loving God and keeping the commandments with loving our neighbor as ourselves. We can say we are holy and such great people and do all these things for God but if we treat each other like dirt, then those religious gestures and practices mean very little to God. The Lord wants to see us integrated, consistent in how we practice our faith and worship. The scribe, who is seeking truth, recognizes immediately that Jesus has revealed something special and life-changing and Jesus lets him know, “you are not far from the kingdom of Heaven.” Only one thing separates this scribe from perfection; now he needs to follow Jesus. It’s not enough simply to know him, we also have to hear, to obey, to Shema, the Lord.
Reflecting on the richness hidden in the original text of today’s readings leaves us with some challenging questions:
Do I hear the Lord as he speaks to me in Scripture and the teachings of the Church? Do I hear in a biblical way, meaning do I obey him?
Do I love the Lord with a free, total and conscious decision or only when I feel like it?
Do I love him with all my weirdness and uniqueness that makes me me?
Am I willing to make my love for God, the equivalent of Mayod, five exclamation points, my everything?
Will I incorporate Jesus’s addition to use my mind to know and love God and not just rely on my emotions?
Last and perhaps most important, as I work on these things, will I follow after Jesus, wherever that following may take me, even if it leads to the cross?
More than likely we have some work to do. I know I sure do!
