A meteorologist on TV had a terrible record of forecasting what the weather would be.
He became a local joke when the local bloggers began keeping a record of his predictions. When he reached 100 wrong predictions in a single year, he was fired.
So he moved to another part of the country and applied for a similar job. The job application asked why he left his previous job. He wrote: “The weather didn’t agree with me.”
Jesus never stretches the truth to fit the situation. Jesus tells it like it is. In today’s Gospel (Mark 12:28b-34)) a scribe asks Jesus what is the first commandment. Jesus winds up giving the best definition of religion we will ever have. Jesus uses a couple of quotes that had been around for a couple of thousand years.
Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, with your whole soul and with your whole mind. This is the first commandment.” Then Jesus quotes Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Jesus was the FIRST person to put the two of them together. People thought that if they went to temple and prayed and tithed and showed God that they loved him, they could go out and treat their neighbor like dirt, curse at people and gossip about anyone they would like.
What Jesus is saying is: “You can’t really love God and not really love your neighbor.” And if you are really and truly loving your neighbor, in effect, you are really and truly loving God because you are loving God’s children.
How have YOU struggled to unite the love of God with the love of others who feel differently than YOU do about politics or the vaccines?
JESUS DIED FOR YOU IN PUBLIC, SO DON’T ONLY LIVE FOR JESUS IN PRIVATE!
