Deuteronomy 6:2-6; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 12:28-34; Psalm 18
October 31, 2021
Marvin Hamm
Love God/Love neighbour
Shema Yisra’el, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad
Or in English,
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.[a]
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
In Judaism, this prayer from the passage in Deuteronomy is called “the Shema”. It is recited in almost every synagogue service. Devout Jews say these words every day, when they wake in the morning, and again before they go to sleep at night. These words have been called the spiritual centre of Judaism. This is what God asks of God’s people. This is, in a nutshell, the calling and purpose of our life before God -
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
The word “love’ here has both an inner dimension and an outer dimension. To love God is to have an emotional feeling for God - affection, devotion - and it is also to take action - It is to follow God’s way, to do God’s will. You can say that you love God by living the commandments, by living the Torah.
What strikes me here is the absolute allegiance that God asks of us.
Love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your might.
Everything we are, all dimensions of our being, and all we possess, and all we do - all of it - is to be turned toward loving God and living God’s way.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus is asked “what commandment is the first of all?” Which is the most important one, which is the centre from which all the other commandments flow? And Jesus answers - it is the Shema.
In this Jesus agrees with traditional Judaism - the centre is the call to Love God with all your heart and soul and might.
Then Jesus adds a second commandment - “you shall love your neighbour as yourself”. Now much has been made of Jesus adding a second commandment - some say he is correcting the tradition or expanding on it. But I see what Jesus says here as more of a reminder.
In this second commandment, Jesus is quoting directly from Leviticus Chapter 19 - and Leviticus 19 is an elaboration on the Ten Commandments - with an emphasis on caring for the poor and vulnerable, on treating others fairly and honestly, on not taking vengeance on your neighbour. This of course is already a part of theTorah, but Jesus - like the prophets before him - recognizes the peoples’ tendency to focus on the religious ritual and the worship and the prayers - and to neglect God’s commandments when it comes to relating to your neighbour. Jesus is saying - no, - loving God involves all of your life - especially how you treat other people.
So Jesus and the Jewish tradition agree - the most important thing - is to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might, and to love your neighbour as yourself. All of our being, all of who we are, and all we do - all parts of our lives - all are to be centred on these two commandments.
So I ask - what does this mean, in practice? What does it look like - to live like this? It is hard to answer this in the abstract. A better way to ask this is to ask “Who does this look like?”. This complete dedication and commitment to God and to our neighbour - we can only understand when we see it embodied in a person’s life.
As I pondered this, the person who came to my mind was my grandmother.
Tomorrow is All Saints Day. This is the day when the church remembers all the saints - the known saints and the unknown saints. I think of a saint as a person who, by the quality of their living, points us or draws us to God. There are the known saints - like St Theresa and St Francis - but in my life I have also known a handful of these unknown saints. The first of these in my life was my grandmother. Maybe it is presumptuous to call her a saint - but certainly, by the quality of her living, she drew me toward God.
Her name was Maria Hamm. She was born in 1906 in the village of Neubergthal, near Altona. She died there in 1989.
An aside - Neubergthal is now officially a Canadian historical site - as an example of a traditional Mennonite village, and they have restored several of the old buildings in the village, including a original house-barn. That house barn was built by my great-grandparents, and its the house my grandmother grew up in. Which is pretty cool, I think.
When I was kid, my brothers and I had many sleepovers at my grandparents, and we got to roam freely on the farm and through the village - which I loved. But I only really got to know my grandmother when I was a young man, and she was old, and in a wheelchair, often in pain, and often lonely. I visited her a lot in those years, and I would come in the evening, and she would inevitably be lying on the couch and listening to her radio preachers. (My father used to complain that she gave most of her money to these radio preachers). But one time I came and she was sitting up and watching TV, and she was clearly quite emotional. What she was watching was a series called Shoah - which is a documentary of the Holocaust. She had been watching it every evening that week. She said it was very hard to watch, but she felt she had to, because this had really happened. She needed to know about it. That made an impression on me - that she willingly opened herself to embrace the suffering of others.
In these years, she could no longer do much work in the garden, but she still got her daughter - my aunt - to plant for her. Long rows of potatoes, I remember. My father always said he hated working in the garden, because when he was growing up, Grandma would have a garden almost an acre in size - and he would be made to pull the weeds in it. And at the end of the season she gave lots of the produce away to her neighbours - which annoyed him to no end. But when he retired my dad took up gardening again - and he gave away most of what he grew.
My grandmother was generous, she was compassionate, she was unpretentious and honest, she was devout. The memory that comes clearest to me is this. When I would visit and it was time to go, she would get in her wheelchair and come with me to the door and often her parting words were “Marvin, mutst emma baede.” Marvin, you must always pray, or it could mean, “you must pray without ceasing”. That is what she did, and she wanted the same for me.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And love your neighbour as you love yourself.
In my life, my grandmother comes closer than most to embodying this call
I wonder, who are the saints in your life who have shown you how to live this way?
I wonder, will our lives show others how to live this way?