The Great Commandment (Mark #42)
Today in Mark 12 we come to one of the most famous verses in all of Scripture.
There are plenty of famous ones. Many of you know John 3:16 — the verse on the banner someone holds up behind home plate or in the end zone. Some of you know Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. Go to a wedding and you’ll hear 1 Corinthians 13, love is patient, love is kind.
Today’s verse is every bit as famous — but this one comes from the mouth of Jesus. It’s so well known that churches have built their entire mission statement around this single sentence. Discipleship courses hand it to new believers as one of the first passages to memorize.
In fact, this verse is famous enough to have a nickname.
The Passage
In Mark 12:28–34, a scribe comes up while Jesus is disputing with others, notices that Jesus has answered them well, and asks which commandment is the most important of all.
Jesus answers that the most important is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.
The scribe replies that Jesus is right — that God is one and there is no other besides him, and that to love him with all the heart and understanding and strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is worth far more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.
And when Jesus sees that he answered wisely, he tells him: You are not far from the kingdom of God. And after that, no one dared ask him any more questions.
Why Jesus Said It at All
Before we work through verse 30, we need to understand why Jesus said it.
Two weeks ago we watched Jesus in conversation with some undercover Pharisees. They pretended to admire him and to be there genuinely to learn, but they had come to trap him. They asked about paying taxes to Rome. If he said yes, the Jewish people who resented Rome would turn on him. If he said no, Rome would arrest him. And we watched Jesus slip brilliantly out of the trap.
Which led straight into the next one. The Sadducees, who didn’t believe in the resurrection, tried to prove Jesus didn’t know what he was talking about with a puzzle about marriage in the afterlife. And again he slipped out beautifully.
Standing in the crowd listening to all of it is a scribe.
More Than a Copyist
We know very little about him. Not his name, not where he was from, not his age. What we do know is that he was curious — and that’s genuinely remarkable.
The word “scribe” is somewhat misleading. Yes, they copied the Scriptures. Back then the Scriptures were on scrolls, with no printing press, so scribes would open a scroll and transcribe it meticulously, letter by letter. A single error meant discarding the work and starting over.
But in that painstaking process, they became far more than human copy machines. They came to know the text intimately and deeply, until they were recognized experts. People consulted them. They drew up legal documents. When a theological debate broke out, they were the ones you went to for a ruling.
So a scribe was something like a lawyer combined with a priest and a seminary professor. Which meant high standing in the community. People listened to them and admired them, because they were the experts.
And experts don’t ask questions.
This one does.
The Debate of the Day
There was a live debate at the time: what is the greatest commandment?
God used Moses to write what became the Mosaic law, containing 613 commands. And in Jesus’s day, people argued fiercely over which of the 613 stood highest.
We do the same thing. Just within my lifetime I’ve watched Christians debate music, clothing, style, women in ministry, sexuality — and right now, race and abuse in the church. There’s always something being argued. It was no different then.
I suspect this scribe already had an opinion. As someone who had copied the text, studied it, and taught it, he’d surely discussed this with other scribes and rabbis and interested people in the community.
But then he watches Jesus escape the tax trap and demonstrate that the Sadducees aren’t nearly as clever as they think. And I suspect he wonders: could this man settle it? I have my ideas, but he’s brilliant. Maybe he knows.
So he does what you don’t expect from an expert. He asks.
One commentary I consulted argued that he was asking in the same spirit as the Pharisees and Sadducees — trying to trap Jesus — reasoning from the fact that the passage ends with no one daring to ask further questions. I’d gently disagree. I think this man is genuinely curious. He’s so impressed he can’t help himself and simply blurts it out. Notice he doesn’t do what the others did, opening with flattery to set up the snare. He just asks.
Jesus Gives Two Answers
And Jesus does something fascinating. Asked for the greatest commandment, he gives two.
The first comes from Deuteronomy 6:4–5 — the opening of what’s known as the Shema.
Shema in Hebrew simply means hear. Many assume it got that name because “hear” is the first word — and there’s something to that. In England, when a Christian writes a worship song, the title is typically just the first line, whereas in America we name songs after key words from the chorus. Something similar is happening here.
But I think it goes deeper. They’re genuinely saying listen — pay attention, this is crucial, what follows is central to our faith.
“The Lord Our God, the Lord Is One”
And what did they need to hear? That the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Understand the setting. When God gave this to the people, they lived among a wide variety of cultures and religions crowded with false gods. And because God is invisible, doubt crept in. They’d seen him work miracles in Egypt — but maybe he did those things back there and isn’t with us anymore. The temptation to drift toward other gods was constant.
So God says: there is only one God. Don’t look at those others; they aren’t real. The Lord your God is one.
And that word translated “one” can also be rendered unique. As Christians we know our one God exists in three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. No other religion attempts anything like that. Our God is unique. And when you look at his character — compassionate, just, merciful, all-powerful, everywhere present — there is no one like him. Which means there is no one else worth our worship.
Love God With All Your Heart
Then God tells them how to love him. And the first is with all your heart — your affections, your emotions.
Last Sunday I shared that our family adopted a puppy. She’s adorable — though I love her somewhat less this morning, having lost about two and a half hours of sleep to her last night.
What I’ve discovered this week is how thoroughly she’s gotten into our emotions. She does something ridiculous and we can’t help laughing. My kids decided her name needed a middle name to reflect it, so she now carries “Joy.” When we hear that soft little whimper, it breaks your heart. When she runs toward you, you smile without deciding to. She has touched us — and we’re loving her with our hearts.
God wants you to love him with your heart. But notice: with all your heart. All your affections. All your emotions.
Which means you come and worship him in the good moments and in the terrible ones. Give him your triumphs and your tragedies. Your happiness and your disappointments. Your joy and your sorrow. He wants all of you.
Love God With All Your Soul
Second: with all your soul — your identity.
In America, when someone wants to know who you are, they ask for markers of identity. Your name. Your family. Where you’re from. What you do. Those things are good, and they’re genuinely part of you — but nearly all of them can change.
Your true identity is the core of who you are, and it doesn’t shift nearly so fast. What God wants is for that core to be bound up in him — not in your politics, not in your lifestyle, not in your hobbies, not in anything else.
So when someone asks who you are — and it would be strange to say this out loud, but inwardly — the answer forming is: I am a child of God. That’s when you know you’re beginning to worship him with all your soul.
This is the kind of love martyrs have. Their identity is so completely fused with Christ that when someone demands they deny their God, they simply cannot — because denying God would be denying themselves. So they lose their lives, because God is more precious to them than life. That is loving God with all your soul.
Love God With All Your Strength
Third: with all your might, or strength — your energy.
This means loving God in your daily activities, so that everything you do becomes worship. Whether you’re holding a baby, caring for an elderly parent, driving to work, or sitting and listening to a friend — whatever you’re doing, you can love God in it. You’re giving him your energy, your time, yourself.
The Word Jesus Adds
Now notice something. When Jesus quotes the Shema in Mark 12, he inserts a word between soul and strength: mind.
You could argue the mind is already implied. Strictly speaking, your heart doesn’t generate emotion — your mind does. Your mind directs your body’s energy. So a case exists that mind was covered.
But look who Jesus is talking to. A scribe. An expert in the law. A highly intelligent, deeply learned man. And Jesus does not want him to miss it: you are to love God with your mind.
That is loving him with your reasoning. So read the Scriptures. Study them. Read a book or listen to a lecture on apologetics. Go study a subject in depth — learn biology, learn mathematics — because God created all of it, and learning it deeply is a way of loving him with your mind.
Give all of yourself to him, including your reasoning itself.
The Second Commandment
The second command Jesus gives comes from Leviticus 19:18, which instructs the people not to take vengeance or bear a grudge against their own people, but to love their neighbor as themselves — and then adds, I am the Lord.
Notice that God tells them not to take vengeance but to love, and immediately follows it with a declaration of who he is. There’s a link between God and our relationships with people.
God tells us not to hold grudges and not to seek vengeance because doing so denies the image of God in us. Consider how God actually interacts with us. He does not hold grudges. He does not take vengeance on us. And if anyone ever had the right, it’s God.
Adam and Eve sin in the garden. God had every right to hold that against humanity — they had sinned directly against him. He had warned Adam that the penalty was death, and they did die spiritually in that moment, and eventually physically. But God did not lash out and snuff them out. That is not who he is.
Instead we see mercy. An animal is killed in their place, and they are covered with its skin to cover their nakedness. And we see it fully at the cross, where Jesus becomes our replacement, we are covered in his blood, and he becomes our righteousness.
God has not held a grudge against you. God is not going to take vengeance on you for what you did. He loves you, and he gave his Son for you.
So if a perfect and holy God doesn’t hold a grudge against us — who are we to hold one against a fellow sinful human?
The Assumption Hiding in “As Yourself”
There’s an assumption buried in the phrase love your neighbor as yourself: that you already love yourself.
And most of you do. You got up this morning and put fuel in your body. Many of you showered and cleaned yourself up and got dressed. Later today some of you will give yourself something good — ice cream, an evening of television — because you love yourself.
But some of us genuinely struggle here. Some of us are relentlessly negative inside, beating ourselves up, insisting we’re not good enough, that we’re failures. Some of us, because we don’t love ourselves, put substances into our bodies that are destroying them. Some overeat because why does it matter? Some barely eat at all, subsisting on energy drinks. We don’t care for ourselves because we don’t love ourselves.
And when you don’t love yourself, you’re essentially telling God he got this one wrong. You messed up. I’m not worthy.
Listen: you are worthy of the blood of Jesus. Why? Because God’s image is in you. So take care of this body. Take care of yourself. Love yourself.
I’m not telling you to love yourself selfishly. Love yourself so that you’re able to give yourself away in loving your neighbor. Because if you don’t love yourself, you won’t be able to go and love them. You have to care for yourself, because you have work to do — a mission to go love your neighbor as yourself. Honor what God has done for you. Honor the cross, so you can go be a blessing to others.
Why He Couldn’t Stop at One
Jesus takes the Shema and Leviticus 19 and binds them together, because in his mind they’re inseparable. Asked for one great commandment, he can’t stop at one — loving God naturally spills into loving others as you love yourself.
John, one of Jesus’s closest disciples, puts it starkly in 1 John 4:20–21: anyone who claims to love God while hating his brother is a liar, because a person who does not love the brother he has seen cannot love the God he has not seen. And the commandment we have from him is that whoever loves God must love his brother.
In the minds of the biblical writers, your theology about God comes out in how you love people. They’re linked. And they believed that because it’s what Jesus taught them.
Which Is Hard, Because People Are Hard
If you say you love God — if you say you follow Jesus — you have to love others. And that’s difficult, because people are difficult.
It means loving someone whose politics differ from yours. Someone who lives differently than you would, raises their children differently, conducts their marriage differently. Someone who says inappropriate things at work. Someone who talks nonsense.
Loving them doesn’t mean endorsing everything. But it does mean respecting them, finding some way to honor them, finding some way to listen, finding some way to let them know you care.
Because think about it. You have held opinions God disagrees with — and Jesus loves you. There have been things in your lifestyle that did not honor God — and Jesus loves you. You have thought and done things that dishonored him — and Jesus still loves you.
That’s why, even with genuinely difficult people, we have to find a way. It may take a great deal of prayer. They’re worth it — because Jesus decided we were worth it.
The Scribe’s Remarkable Reply
Now hear how the scribe responds in verse 32.
On first reading it sounds like he’s simply repeating Jesus back to him. And he is repeating it — but not word for word. He isn’t parroting or mocking. He’s responding in a way that says: I get it.
And then look at what he adds at the end. All of this — loving God, loving others — is worth far more than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.
Consider who is saying that. This man has spent his entire life devoted to the Scriptures — copying them, teaching them, explaining them. And within the Mosaic law’s 613 commands there is an enormous body of instruction about burnt offerings and sacrifices. He knows it intimately. He knows which sin requires which animal, how the blood is to be applied, which grain offering fits which situation, what must be burned when. He knows this material cold.
And he hears Jesus and says: you’re right. The Shema and Leviticus 19:18 matter more.
Because he realizes you can go to the temple, go to the synagogue, perform every sacrifice, bring every burnt offering — and if your heart isn’t being given to God, it’s all for nothing.
You can show up on Sunday in your best clothes with a Bible under your arm and worship music playing on the drive in, and still be harboring hatred toward someone. And it’s all for nothing.
God doesn’t want the outward action. He wants you.
In that moment the scribe sees that underneath all 613 commands and all the detail about sacrifices sits this: God wants you to love him and love others. Because when you’re fully devoted to him, genuine worship comes out. The Jewish people would have found themselves far more eager to bring sacrifices while loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength. And they’d have found their community relationships transformed, because loving God had begun producing love for one another.
That’s what we need to grasp. Jesus doesn’t pluck two commands at random. He grabs these two and says: this is the key. And it reaches far past the Mosaic law into our own day. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength — and love your neighbor as yourself. To do that is to love like Jesus loved and live like Jesus lived.
Takeaway One: Start With God
Don’t mishear this — I’m not telling you to ignore people while you work on loving God. Please love the people around you.
But sometimes, in an effort to prove to God that we’re worthy of love, or to prove our love for God, we go do nice things for people — and we’re actually doing them for ourselves.
Years ago, before our church had ever held a public gathering, my wife and I were meeting people in town. We’d connected with a couple who didn’t attend church anywhere, and they owned a trailer. Someone needed help moving, so I asked if we could borrow it. He said sure — he’d haul it over and help.
He jumped right in. We loaded the woman’s belongings, moved everything, and afterward I thanked him profusely for lending us the trailer and giving up his day.
And he said: “Glad to do it. When you help someone, it makes you feel good.”
He was serving her so that he would feel good. Now, when that feeling is a byproduct — wonderful. When it’s the motivation — not so wonderful. Serving and loving other people isn’t about you. It’s about them.
That’s why I say start where Jesus started: with God. Because when you focus on God, you see his heart for us. You see his unrelenting love. You see that he placed his image in you, that Jesus died for your sins, that he has given you his Spirit. And when you see everything he has done for you, it compels you outward. You no longer serve to feel good about yourself. You serve because God served you. You love because God loved you.
So practically: find ways to worship him with your heart — worship music, time outdoors, a devotional that actually moves you. Find ways to get your identity wrapped up in him — Scripture on the bathroom mirror, verses memorized, maybe something tucked in your wallet next to your driver’s license reminding you that before any government recognizes you as anyone, you belong to God. Find ways to give him your energy — possibly in exactly what you’re already doing, simply by praying before you begin: God, use me in this next moment.
Takeaway Two: What Time Is It?
The second thing I want to leave you with is a memory device.
Years ago when I was a young adult pastor at a large church, we didn’t have traditional Sunday school. We had adult Bible fellowships. The difference is that a traditional class is usually content-driven — we’re studying Acts, or Revelation, or finances, and the material is the draw. Our fellowships were relationship-driven, organized by life stage: college students, young singles, young marrieds, parents of small children, empty nesters.
So when someone new came to our church, we’d help connect them into the group that matched their season of life.
Within a year of starting, we realized we had thirty to fifty young single professionals in the church and no group for them. So I assembled a leadership team and we started planning — and one thing we needed was a name.
Some of our groups had plain names, like “the college group.” Others got creative. One group of young parents called themselves Homesteaders. Another group approaching the empty nest called themselves Trekkers — not Trekkies, they weren’t science fiction fans, but people trekking through life together.
So we’re in a meeting, and the guy I’d asked to lead the group is at the whiteboard collecting suggestions — some silly, some bland, a few creative. And someone says, “How about 12:30?”
He stops and says, “No, we meet at eleven, not 12:30.”
“Not the time. The verse. Mark 12:30. The Great Commandment.”
Several people loved it immediately. Then someone objected that everyone would assume it was a meeting time. So they solved the problem by appending the actual time.
The group became known as “12:30 at 11.” They thought they were geniuses. The rest of the church found it hilarious, and we were the laughingstock of the building.
But in that moment I picked up a memory device I’ve never lost. I have never once forgotten that Mark 12:30 is the Great Commandment.
It’s 12:30
So here’s what I want you to do. Ask yourself — or ask someone in this church family — what time is it?
They’re not asking you to check your phone. They’re reminding you not to forget the Great Commandment.
And it works on yourself. Going through something brutal right now? It’s 12:30. Something wonderful happening? It’s 12:30. Driving to work? It’s 12:30. Getting ready for bed? It’s 12:30.
Whatever you’re doing, day or night, in joy or sorrow, Monday or Friday — it’s 12:30. Country music may insist it’s five o’clock somewhere. For Christians, it’s 12:30.
You may walk out of here at 10:30. You may go to bed at 9:30 and get up at 6:30. But no matter what the clock says, it’s 12:30. It is time to love the Lord your God with all your heart and your affections, with all your soul and your identity, with all your mind and your reasoning, with all your might and your energy. And it is time to go love your neighbor as yourself.
A Prayer
Father, make us 12:30 people. Not a church with a clever memory trick, but a church that actually lives this — so that no matter what is happening, we love you with all our affections, all our energy, all that we have and all that we are. Put yourself first in us, and let that push us out to be a blessing in this community.
Help us love our neighbors, our coworkers, our spouses, our children, our parents — everyone around us, including the difficult ones. Because you did that for us. Jesus, you came to this earth while we were weak, while we were sinners, while we were your enemies, and you died for us. You did for us what we could not do for ourselves. You loved us with your whole heart, your whole identity, your whole strength.
So make us like Jesus. Help us love him fully, that we might become more like him. And help us live every day as though it is 12:30. Amen.
