Nothing Less Than Everything (Mark 12.28-44)

When I was about seventeen years old, my friend Emily told me she had a friend named Paige, and she wanted to introduce me to her. Paige lived in a nearby town, so I’d never met her, but Emily thought Paige and I would get along really well, and that we’d be a good match for one another. She showed me a picture of Paige that she had brought just for the occasion, to give to me.

I took the picture home, and I can still see it in my mind. It was a simple photo—she was just sitting on a hill in jeans and a t-shirt, smiling at the camera—but I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

So I called Paige, and we decided to meet up for an actual date. We planned it for the Friday of the following week, so I had about ten days to wait. For those ten days, I carried that picture with me everywhere, and I looked at it often, because I was totally convinced that when I looked at that picture, I was looking at the face of my future wife.

Ten days later, we finally met for the first time in person for our date. I remember that date far less vividly than I remember the photograph; the one thing I do remember clearly is that after the first five minutes of figuring out what we wanted to do, we realized we had nothing to say to each other. We didn’t have anything in common, it was really awkward, and the entire evening was one attempt after another to fill the silence so we didn’t have to sit in how weird it felt.

For over a week, I had walked around convinced I was in love with this girl. But of course I wasn’t, because I didn’t actually know her.

That is the dynamic at work in this text. The first part speaks of the love God deserves from us; the second part speaks of the impossibility of loving a God we don’t know.

The text we just read—Mark 12.28-44—comes as a bit of a relief—to me, at least—because Jesus has just spent basically a chapter and a half getting pushback from the religious leaders, responding to multiple attempts to trap him. 

But at the beginning of this text, we see something different. We see one of the religious leaders, a scribe, come to Jesus and ask him an honest question—not a trap, not an attack, but a real, genuine question. 

This question opens the door for Jesus to give one of my favorite of his teachings recorded in the gospel of Mark, because it’s so simple, and yet if we take it seriously, it changes everything. 

The Greatest Commandment (v. 28-34)

When we pick up the text in v. 28, we’re still in the middle of this day Jesus has spent in the temple. He has just spent a lot of time—all of chapter 12 so far—facing challenge after challenge from the religious leaders. They keep trying to ask him questions that will trip him up, that he won’t have answers to, or that will expose him as a fraud in front of the people. And every time, Jesus brilliantly evades their attacks and points out the flaws in the religious leaders’ thinking.

So the atmosphere in this place was tense, to say the least. The religious leaders are angry, Jesus is calmly defending himself, and the people are on the edge of their seats, listening to everything he says.

Which makes the next exchange we see all the more surprising.

V. 28: 

28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?”

This question, from this scribe who remains unnamed, could have been a trick question. Every question directed toward Jesus so far has either focused on his identity, his theology in general, or his interpretation of the law of Moses. This question could fall into either of the latter categories. It could have been a trap.

But as we saw last week, in v. 15, Jesus knows what’s going on in the hearts and minds of the people asking him these questions. So instead of answering the question with another question, or with a parable, Jesus gives a straight answer. V. 29: 

29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 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.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Jesus isn’t extrapolating here; he’s quoting from the beginning of Deuteronomy 6 and from Leviticus 19. Even so, his answer sounds a bit simplistic—there are so many commandments in the Old Testament that were really important, to the point where there were very serious consequences if people didn’t follow them. All the commandments about sacrifices and purity and worship were what you might think of first, because they’re things you do—they’re easy things to wrap your mind around.

But to his credit, the scribe talking to Jesus sees what he’s saying, and he agrees. V. 32: 

32 And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. 33 And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 34 And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.

It’s not hard to see the meaning behind this exchange. There is only one God—so he should be our primary focus. And this commandment to love God and to love others is the most important commandment because it summarizes the goal of all the others. God gives his law to display his character to his people, and that character will manifest itself in love.

But it’s really important to see that Jesus isn’t just saying, “Love God.” It’s easy for us, as modern readers, to conflate this command to love God with the emotion of love. When we love someone, there is emotion that comes with it, of course, but Deuteronomy 6 goes further than that: it describes the love that God demands. 

He says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” To put it simply, we are commanded to love God with everything we are. There should be emotions involved, yes—we love him with all our heart and with all our soul.

But there is also calculation: we love God with all our mind. We spend time thinking about God, considering who he is, and recognizing why he is worthy of our love. 

And there is also strenuous effort: we love God with all our strength. We’ll work hard at loving God. We’ll make choices that are thoughtful, choices that are coherent with our understanding of who God is and who we are, even if those choices are difficult.

How many of us have had the experience of going away for the weekend, going on vacation, and not opening our Bibles the entire time? How many of us have had the experience of feeling like we need a “break” from God?

This temptation comes to all of us at some point or another, and we give in to that temptation when our love for God, and our understanding of God, are unbalanced.

The person who loves God the way Jesus describes here does not partition off his life into categories, some of which include God and some of which exclude him. There is no “time off” from this. We don’t take vacations from God, and we don’t want to, because God is good.

God doesn’t deserve a part of me; he deserves all of me. 

And Jesus adds that the second most important commandment is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” When God gets everything—when we love him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength—that love will overflow into love for those around us. When we understand who God is for us, the love and grace he has shown us, it becomes unnatural and unthinkable to not extend that love to others. We don’t deserve God’s perfect and unlimited love, but we have it—and the person who withholds their love from others shows that they don’t understand what they’ve received.

When the scribe responds to Jesus, he repeats what Jesus has said, but he adds one little thing that shows he really does understand what Jesus is saying. He says in v. 33 that loving God with everything we are, and loving our neighbor as ourselves, “is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” This was a daring thing to say, because much of the life of the religious leaders was centered around correctly performing these rituals. These things were really important to them, because they were really important in the law of Moses.

But without this all-consuming love for God that overflows into love for one’s neighbor, all these sacrifices and burnt offerings mean nothing.

And Jesus answers him by saying, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

The Poor Widow (vv. 41–44)

Let’s go down a little to v. 41—we’ll come back to the in-between part in a little while. Jesus describes what true love for God is in v. 28-34. But naturally we may have a hard time seeing what loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength looks like in practical terms.

We don’t need to figure it out for ourselves. We already saw one example of what that looks like in v. 31: love your neighbor as yourself. In v. 41-44, we see another, even clearer picture. 

V. 41:

41 And he sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. 42 And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. 43 And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. 44 For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

Jesus never tells us what this widow’s motivations for giving were, and he doesn’t comment directly on her faith. She serves a similar purpose as the fig tree back in chapter 11: Jesus is using her as a living parable, a picture, of what he said earlier—what it looks like to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

Several rich people come and put large sums of money into the offering box. Jesus doesn’t condemn them for doing this—he doesn’t say anything about their motivations. He only mentions them to highlight the contrast between them and the poor widow. The rich people gave out of their abundance, he says, while this poor widow gave everything she had. And, Jesus said, she gave more—not because of the actual amount she gave was bigger, but because of what the gift cost her.

Of course this passage isn’t really about money at all—Jesus isn’t saying you have to empty your bank accounts every time you go to church. 

He’s saying that our love for God cannot be measured by how we feel. True love for God can only be measured by how we live. True love for God will necessarily drive us to action—we love him with all our heart and soul, yes, but also with all our mind, and with all our strength. To put it another way, there is an inevitable link between “inside love” and “outside love”—between orthodoxy (knowing the right things about God) and orthopraxy (doing the right things for God). 

In the context of what we saw before, and in what Jesus says about the widow, he makes this point abundantly, uncomfortably clear, because he puts us before a very simple question: What is the cost of our obedience?

There are some commandments that are relatively easy for me to obey, because of my personality. I’m naturally a pretty understanding person, so I can be fairly patient when people don’t do what they ought to do. When I obey in that way, it’s a good thing, sure—but it doesn’t cost me much, because it comes naturally to me.

However, other commandments are a lot more difficult—for example, the commandment to call a brother to repentance if I notice sin in his life. That’s hard for me, because I hate conflict. I have no problem doing it from up here, because I’m speaking to all of you. But when I’m face-to-face with one person… Every bone in my body fights against that, because I hate conflict, and I hate uncomfortable situations.

Do you see what Jesus is getting at? You say you love the Lord—and that’s wonderful. But the question is worth asking: What does your love cost?

That’s how Jesus measures the widow’s love. “This poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box,” he says, “for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had.”

The Son of David (vv. 35–40)

So we have what true love for God is, and what true love for God looks like in practice. If that is all we had, this would be a pretty straightforward passage.

However, in between these two sections comes a moment of teaching that, at first glance, seems unrelated to the other two.

But if you’ve been with us in this series since the beginning, you know how Mark loves to structure passages like a sandwich—he’ll talk about one subject, then move on to something that seems different, then come back to the initial subject to show that the middle part actually is related.

So let’s look at this middle part, starting in v. 35.

Remember the context: after his exchange with the sincere scribe, Jesus is still in the temple, still teaching, and he brings up the question of the identity of the Messiah. The Messiah—also called “the Christ”; both titles mean the same thing—was the Savior whom God had promised to send to save his people. 

The religious leaders at the time had various views about what the details, but what everyone agreed on was this: the Messiah—the promised Savior—would be a human deliverer from the line of the great King David. They expected the Messiah to be a man, empowered by God, a warrior-king belonging to the family of David. So a great man, absolutely, a man sent by God—but still, just a man.

The problem Jesus highlights here is that these religious leaders have their hopes set on only part of what is actually promised. 

V. 35: 

35 And as Jesus taught in the temple, he said, “How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David?”

Let’s stop there for a second, because that’s a weird question. “How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David (that is, a descendant of King David)?” Well…because the prophecies said he would be! The scribes are right when they say that, and Jesus knows it.

So why ask the question? It’s not to say the scribes are wrong about the Christ being the son of David, but rather to show that their beliefs around the Messiah are only half-complete; they’re leaving out one really glaring fact about the Messiah—a fact that comes from David himself.

V. 36:

36 David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared,
                  “ ‘The Lord said to my Lord,
                  “Sit at my right hand,
      until I put your enemies under your feet.” ’
37 David himself calls him Lord. So how is he his son?” And the great throng heard him gladly.

This can be a little confusing at first, because you have one Lord talking to another Lord, and without context you don’t know who is who. In v. 36, Jesus is quoting Psalm 110, which nearly all Jews at the time accepted as a prophecy about the Messiah. And in the context of the psalm, it’s clear that the first “Lord” is God himself, and the second “Lord” is the promised Messiah. (We know because the words in the original language are different.) We could reword this verse by saying, “The Lord God said to Christ, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.”

David gave this prophecy, in which God himself gives the Messiah a place at his right hand: the place of highest honor and power—a place normally reserved for someone of equal nature and authority.

Jesus quotes this psalm to point out the glaring omission in the religious leaders’ thinking, despite the fact that they knew this psalm really well. In this psalm, David puts himself in a place of submission: he places himself under God, obviously—but also under the Messiah; he calls him “my Lord”. This was a very odd thing for David to do, because the Messiah was going to be one of David’s own descendants—one of his great-great-great (and so on) grandchildren.

And at this time, in this culture, the patriarchs of a family were the ones who received the honor. If anyone in a family line was to be called “my Lord,” it would be the father, not the son. That’s how it worked in ordinary human families. 

But David treats the Messiah, the Christ, who would be his own descendant, with even more honor and more reverence than he reserved for himself. In no conceivable human family would the son be called “lord” instead of the father.

The point is, this Messiah is a human being, yes—but he is much more than that. The Messiah is of the line of David, yes—but he is much more than that. According to family lines, he’s the son of David; but really, miraculously, he is the son of God—sitting at God’s right hand, equal in nature.

You see, Jesus is showing that for everything the scribes know about Scriptures, their conclusions about God’s plan are wrong. No one at the time believed the Messiah would be anything more than a human being. A great man, a great warrior, a man sent by God—but still, just a man. The idea that the human Messiah would claim to also be divine was blasphemy; it was unthinkable.

But it shouldn’t have been, because it was right there, in Psalm 110. “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand…’” A human being, given divine authority. It was there in Psalm 110, and it was there in Daniel 7, and elsewhere. They should have known better, but they didn’t—either because they didn’t understand about the promises they say they believe, or because they just couldn’t bring themselves to accept what Scripture says.

Now, in itself, what Jesus says here is interesting, but it might seem as if it has little to do with us, or what we saw earlier. Not many people in our churches today will think about the Messiah the same way the religious leaders did; not many of us would deny the idea that Jesus is both the “son of David” and the son of God.

In reality, though, what he says absolutely applies to us. Look at what Jesus says next, in v. 38: 

38 And in his teaching he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and like greetings in the marketplaces 39 and have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, 40 who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

It’s strange, isn’t it? He’s talking about the Messiah’s identity—David’s descendant, yes, but also David’s Lord, the Son of God—and in the same teaching, he speaks of the scribes and their hypocrisy and pride: how they do a lot of the right things on the outside, and they love the recognition it gives them, but in reality, behind closed doors where the crowds can’t see, they’re hurting the people they’re meant to serve. 

Why does Jesus put those two things together? 

In the two bookends of this text, we saw Jesus expose what true love for God is, and then show what it looks like in practice. And in this center section, he does the same thing. He exposes the fact that the scribes refuse to accept what Scripture actually said about the Messiah, and now he shows what their deficient theology of Christ looks like when it’s lived out. It’s not just a question of intellectual understanding—it’s a question of pride, keeping them from accepting what’s right in front of their eyes.

And although it may look different today, this problem is still very present.

It’s pretty frightening to see how many Christians today say that Jesus is Lord, without actually giving him what he deserves as Lord. They say he’s the Son of God, but they accept him mainly as their ticket to heaven, or the person they can turn to when they’re feeling lonely, or the one they pray to when they need to get out of a painful situation.

Most of us wouldn’t say that Jesus, the Messiah, was just a human being descended from David. But we might well be living as if it were true. We might well be living in a way that says, “Jesus is my Savior…but he’s not my Lord. Jesus is my helper…but I decide what I do with my life. Jesus is my friend…but I’ll decide whether or not to do what he says.” 

Our theology of the Messiah may not be the same as the religious leaders’, but all too often, it’s just as shallow, just as deficient.

And what happens when we live according to such a view? 

We keep Jesus safely in the category that’s most convenient to us—he is always our helper, but rarely our Lord. If Jesus is just David’s son—just a human deliverer—or if he is just a helper, just a friend, then we can go to Jesus for help, but we don’t have to submit to him. We can admire Jesus, but we don’t have to bow to him. 

We keep Christ small, so we can stay big. We can keep Christ on the sidelines, so that we can stay central.

And when we stay big, when we stay central, pride is inevitable. When Christ is not seen and acknowledged as supreme in our lives, the vacuum of glory has to be filled. And every time, there we are, ready to fill it.

We keep Christ small, so we can stay big.

A small Messiah doesn’t demand much of us. A small Messiah doesn’t take up much room. He can be conveniently slotted into the few empty spots we have left in our calendar; he doesn’t have to define our lives. 

Our pride loves a small Messiah, because a small Messiah lets us “manage” our faith instead of being mastered by Christ. A small Messiah submits to us, instead of demanding we submit to him.

Loving a God Worthy of Love

Do you see where Mark is going with this—where Jesus is going?

When we allow ourselves to settle for a small vision of who Christ is, our lives might become easier, sure—but they’ll also be emptied of the one thing that actually makes life worth living: access to the one true God, who alone is worthy of the love he commands.

Think about that for a moment. The command Jesus repeats in verse 30 is astonishingly bold:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

You shall love him with everything you are, everything you have, everything you desire.

A commandment that all-encompassing can only mean one of three things.

Either it means God doesn’t exist and humans made him up to gain power—in which case, we should run for our lives.

Or it means the God who gave it is a tyrant—an egomaniac who needs our total approval to prop up his own fragile sense of self. If God isn’t actually worthy of the love he demands, then he’s completely unhinged—and again, we should run for our lives.

But of course, we don’t believe either of those things, because we’ve come to know God. Which leaves only one possibility: that our God really is worthy of that kind of all-consuming love—that he truly is worthy of our whole lives.

And if he really is worthy of every aspect of every life of every person who belongs to his people… then how good must our God be? This commandment should set our imaginations on fire—because how good, how glorious, how powerful, how breathtaking must he be to deserve that kind of love?

The command to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength is, in reality, an invitation to spend our lives contemplating the one being who is so good and so glorious that such love will never be wasted on him. He deserves it—because he really is that good.

Of course, loving God as he deserves isn’t easy. There’s nothing wrong with finding it hard to give God all that we are. No one does it perfectly, because we’re still imperfect human beings.

What scares me, though, is how many Christians don’t even think to ask the question.

Why do we live the way we live? Why do we make the choices we make?

Maybe we live the way we do out of pride. We know what people will think of us if we don’t act a certain way—and we know what they’ll think if we do. We know which mask to wear, and we know how to make sure no one sees us take it off.

Maybe we live the way we do simply because we want to chase our dreams. When we were younger, we had a picture of what we wanted our life to look like—and now, as adults, we’re just making decisions that help us get there. A lot of what we do as adults is really just us keeping promises we made to ourselves when we were kids.

Or maybe we don’t even know why we do what we do. We just act on instinct, on desire, on impulse.

All those motivations for living the way we live are perfectly normal—and utterly deadly.

The only truly good motivation for everything we do is a genuine love for God, expressed in action.

And so he calls us—to come to Christ as he truly is (not the little “Messiah” so many people try to make him into), and through him to know God as *he* truly is.

He calls us to grow in our love for him.

And he calls us to work hard to cultivate that love—in every decision we make, in every opportunity to obey, no matter how costly that obedience may be.

He calls us to know and love Christ—because he loved God with all his heart, all his soul, all his mind, and all his strength… and he lived it out so perfectly that he gave himself for us.

So then—what are we going to do?

How will we live?

How will we love our God?

That’s the question he puts before us today. So let’s take a few moments to stand before him—and ask him to help us answer it.