In the twelfth chapter of the gospel of Mark one of the scribes comes up to Jesus and asks him to identify which commandment is the greatest.  The scribes in Jesus’ time were scholars of the law.  They studied the law and were called upon to help people to live according to the law of God.  Following God’s law was not merely a formal observance of certain precepts and written codes, it was above all an attitude of heart and mind that guided the everyday life and the decisions that people make each day.  The law was not meant to be written only on some stone tablets but should be inscribed in the hearts and minds of the believer.  A scribe was a writer of the law, but he did not write only in books, papers, scrolls or tablets but he wrote the law in human hearts, minds and lives.  Jesus responds to his question with the recitation of the “Schema, Israel”, a statement of total faith in God that the faithful Jewish person was to recite several times a day.  “Schema” means “to hear”, “Hear, O Israel” began the great Schema.  This “hearing” was not directed only to the ears of the listener but was directed to the heart, mind and will of the listener.  The Book of Deuteronomy contains the Schema and Jesus cites it as the greatest commandment, to love God with our entire lives.  Everything that we think and do should be guided by and directed toward our love of God.

    What begins the Schema is a call to total faith.  We are called to entrust our entire lives to God alone.  Our faith should be characterized by a single minded and single hearted belief in God alone.  There should not be many gods and many concerns to be considered in our lives but only one God alone that we serve.  In our modern lives we have all become multi-taskers and we juggle many different demands that are placed on our time and our efforts.  Often these other competing demands cause us to push aside our relationship with God and the practice of our faith.  People are constantly reminding us that there are many different things to be considered in every issue of our day.  We are instructed to make lists and prioritize things in our lives.  Usually we choose to attend to the most immediate needs that we see confronting us and seldom is God in an immediate relationship with us and so he is too often relegated to a distant place on our list and sometimes forgotten altogether.  Jesus instructs us to replace the “many” with the “One”.  The love of God is our one true concern and we should address the demands of God’s love before all other things that we do in our lives.  Rather than being “multipurpose” we are called to be of a “single purpose” and everything else should flow out of our love of God.  The Jesuits express this principle in their motto, “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”, to the greater glory of God.  Everything we do should be done for God’s glory – our marriages are lived to glorify God, our parenting should glorify God, our daily work should glorify God and even our leisure activities should glorify God.

    The other characteristic of the Schema that strikes us is the repeated use of the word, “all”.  There is a unity in God and there should be a unity that characterizes our response to God in our relationship with him.  True love of God calls for us to offer our entire life to him.  God merits more than a half-hearted effort from us.  Too often because of the many demands that are placed on us in our lives we end up giving God the left-overs of our life.  We pray, worship and serve God when we have available time in our lives to do so which is not very often in our world today.  Jesus calls us to make a total sacrificial oblation of love to God.  We are to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength.  The life of faith demands a total effort and complete integrity.  When we have given God this response with our lives then we “are not far from the Kingdom of God.”  To live our faith with complete integrity draws us out of the world of the many and the changing and into the Kingdom of God which is one and eternal.

    To the greatest commandment of the love of God, Jesus tacks on a second commandment from Leviticus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  As we would say today, “Jesus gets real.”  John tells us in his letter to the Church, “Whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.  This is the commandment we have from him:  whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (1Jn 4,20f)  We prove our love for God by loving one another.  Keep it real!