31st Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B
Deuteronomy 6:2-6; Psalm 18; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 12:28b-34
One small word can make a gigantic difference.
Just ask Barack Obama and Mitt Romney,
each of whom hopes that the small word you say to him on Tuesday
will be “yes.”
And if you’re visiting us today from Ohio, Virginia, or Florida,
then each of our candidates, I would venture,
is begging you to say that same small word, and not one even smaller.
There are also times when a single letter wields enormous power.
We are about to pay our weekly homage to one such instance when we profess our faith
in Jesus Christ, whom we call “consubstantial” with the Father
or, in the Greek, homoousios
Should we ever find ourselves grumbling about a word choice in our liturgy today,
we can be sure that we are not alone:
at the Council of Nicaea,
people were ready to go to their 4th century foxholes
over whether that word should be homoousios or homoiousios.
There, one letter did make an iota of difference.
I suggest that the same is true in today’s reading from Deuteronomy,
two verses of which are repeated nearly verbatim in our gospel:
“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.”1
The two points Moses makes are clear enough:
The LORD alone, YHWH, is Israel’s God; and
Moses’ hearers, the nation of Israel,
ought to love God with reckless abandon.
What I offer for our reflection today is the connection between these two points,
a connection that gets made by a single Hebrew letter.
The name of the letter is waw,
and it is among the most frequently occurring consonants in the Hebrew alphabet.
More often than not, it simply means “and,” that small conjunction.
In fact, of the 14 English bible translations I consulted,
the majority of them rendered the waw at the start of verse 5 in precisely this way:
“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone!
and you shall love the LORD…heart…soul…strength….”
None of them translated the verse the way we just heard it from our lector:
1
Deuteronomy 6:4-5.
“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone!
therefore you shall love the LORD…heart…soul…strength….”
As much fun as I am sure we would all have in teasing out the semantic range of this waw,
a more pressing question awaits us:
How does a command of love get derived from YHWH’s status as Israel’s God?
Or, in other words, why is there a “therefore”?
It did not have to be that way.
“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone…
and…God picked a command out of a hat…it was love…so get to it!
Or if we insist on the “therefore,” why not,
“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore…
obey!
bow down in fear!
mend your ways!
offer sacrifice!
But that is not what this text says.
When we hear that YHWH is our God,
we remember that YHWH’s only way forward is the way of loving kindness,
and therefore, this must be our way too.
This sort of remembering lies at the very heart of Deuteronomy,
a book whose Hebrew name is actually “Words.”
This is not a misnomer.
For 34 chapters, Moses addresses the nation of Israel,
giving them what the Greeks would later call “the second law,” or, Deuteronomy.
In the chapter preceding what we just heard, Moses uses some of those words to say this:
“The LORD our God made a covenant with us at Horeb;
not with our ancestors did the LORD make this covenant, but with us,
all of us who are alive here today.”2
Nice try, Moses.
The group gathered before him in Chapters 5, 6, and beyond
were the grandchildren of those women and men
with whom the LORD first made a covenant.
Indeed, hardly any of these people in Deut. were alive for the Horeb event.
Moses knows this.
And what is more, Moses is helping his hearers make present,
he is making them re-member YHWH, the one who brought them
out of Egypt “with a strong hand and outstretched arm.”3
He is grounding the “second law” in the story that has been unfolding
since the first verse of Genesis: Israel’s God is a God of relentless loving kindness.
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3
Deuteronomy 5:2-3.
Deuteronomy 5:15.
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This sort of remembering has implications.
For when Israel makes present again all that YHWH has done for them,
and when you and I stop to think of God’s loving kindness in our lives,
the conclusion, the “therefore,” is simple enough:
“Go and do likewise.”4
I imagine that, in today’s gospel, the scribe pieced this together for himself, and thus,
he walks away with two of the biggest gold stars Jesus ever hands out:
Jesus perceives that he “answered with understanding,” and says to him,
“You are not far from the kingdom of God.”5
What was it?
What did he understand?
I know that the technique of taking what the teacher says and simply
repeating it back to him works in grad school, but does it work in the gospel as well?
Of course not.
The scribe was not far from the kingdom of God,
he answered with understanding,
because he knew that these commandments of love were not
really commandments at all,
at least not in the way we usually conceive of commandments.
They were not random pronouncements from on high or
whimsical orders handed down by a bored God.
They were and they are tools to help us remember who God is,
and therefore, to remember who we are and who we are called to be.
And who is God? Who are we?
Ones whose way forward is the way of loving kindness,
the way of fidelity.
We, like our God, are ones who love our neighbors as ourselves,
and who love ourselves as we do our neighbors.
This, the gospel says, is not what we do or what God does,
but who God is, who we are.
This gospel, this good news, is worth remembering.
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5
Luke 10:37.
Mark 12:34.
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