A Love You Can See

What does God actually want from us? It sounds like a simple question, but it sits at the heart of every religious pursuit humanity has ever undertaken. In Mark 12:28-34, a Jewish scribe cuts through the noise and asks Jesus to identify the weightiest of all 613 commands found in the Mosaic law. Jesus responds not with one command but two, and his refusal to separate them tells us everything. Love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. Together, these form what we have come to call the Great Commandment, and the reason they cannot be pulled apart is that they are really one love expressed in two directions. What makes this passage so striking is the setting. Jesus is standing in the temple during Passover week, surrounded by the full machinery of religious life, and a scribe looks around at all of it and concludes that none of it can substitute for genuinely loving God and loving people. That challenge lands just as squarely on us today. We can fill our lives with every form of religious activity and still miss the thing God is actually after.