A Life of Wholeness
Proper 26 B
In his book Life on the Vine, Phil Kenneson discusses a problem that is all too familiar to those of us who live in the modern world: the divided self. He discusses the ways we divide our commitments and our allegiances among various parties, the ways we are forced to divide our time and energies, often in ways that stretch us to the point of burning out or breaking up.
In the midst of all of this, he poses a vision of fullness, shalom. It’s a vision that is rooted in the very nature of who God is. After all, we serve a God who is three-in-one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A God who, despite his various manifestations and his manifold wisdom, is never anything less than whole, is never in danger of splintering into factiousness or breaking apart.
It’s also a vision that is rooted in who God created us to be. When God made us from the dust of the earth and then breathed life into us, he made us whole, in body, spirit, soul, and mind. When God saw that it was not good for man to be alone, he made a helper for him, a companion, and then he joined Adam and Eve together as one flesh, revealing that it is not God’s will for those made in his image to be fragmented in their relationships or to live among one another in patterns of brokenness and dissension.
And yet, as compelling as it may be, at every turn, we resist this vision. The world we have built for ourselves, the context in which we live, increasingly makes the sort of demands on us that draw us apart from God, from one another, and even from ourselves.
In Mark’s gospel, in response to a question from a scribe about the first commandment in the Law, Jesus answers in a way that not only challenges the expert (along with the rest of us) to confront the claims that God’s commands place on our lives, but also presents us with a vision of fullness, coherence, abundance; the kind of life that God desires for his children.
Jesus’ first and greatest commandment, of course, echoes the words of the Shemafound in Deuteronomy chapter 6. Israelites were told to engrave these words on their hearts, to inscribe them on the doorways of their houses, to talk about them when they walked along the road, when they went to bed at night and when they got up in the morning. They were to teach them to their children and to their children’s children, because these words reminded the children of Israel who God was and why it mattered. And look what it says in the very first sentence: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” God is not fragmented or fractured. God is one in his wholeness.
And so, the commandments of this God, the most important commandments of this God, point to this oneness. These commandments call his people to be one in the way that they seek him, the ways that they serve him, the ways that they worship him. This is not a God who wants us to parcel out little portions of our lives, dividing up our days and our nights, our loyalties and our allegiances, our energies and our commitments, only to give him a small share, or even to give him a big share, of what we come up with. This is a God who wants it all. This is a God who isn’t content with our scraps, our leftovers, or with our divided selves. This is a God who asks, even commands, that we give him everything.
While this might seem like a tall order, or even a heavy burden, it is, in reality, an enormously precious gift. It frees us from the compulsion to please anyone and everyone all the time. It frees us from the compulsion to check off all the boxes that will tell us whether we’re good enough, or to try to serve every master that sets up in front of us in a vain attempt to win the approval of those who don’t really care about us. Jesus reminds us that the first and greatest commandment, the first and most important thing that we can do, is to love with our whole hearts a God who loves us completely, with an eternal and sacrificial love, to love with our whole soul a God who created us and oriented us to long for him in that deepest part of ourselves, to love with our whole minds a God who knows our every thought, a God who knows our words before we even speak them, a God who knows us better than we know ourselves. For those of us who struggle against fragmentation, this first commandment shows us a better way, a way in which we can be made whole in the one who is whole, a way in which we can silence the voices that seek to lead us in a thousand different directions by listening to the one voice who knows the way we should go.
Which brings us to the second of Jesus’ great commandments. This one comes from Leviticus chapter 19. In this passage of the Mosaic covenant, there are commands about stealing, and lying, commands against holding back wages from workers and commands about leaving the crops on the edge of the field so that the poor can glean what they need. And then, tacked on to the end of a command against revenge, and an instruction not to bear grudges, are the words, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But in calling attention to these five words, going so far as giving them a central place in the new covenant he’s inaugurating, the Kingdom way of life he has come to initiate, Jesus reminds us that this kind of love has been a part of God’s plan for us all along.
From the beginning, we were never meant to live at odds with our neighbor, or be in division or dissension with our brother and sister. When God created a partner for the man, he made them one flesh. But as soon as they ate the fruit of disobedience, they turned on one another. What had been a relationship of communion and mutual love became one of blaming, shaming, and attacking one another. So when Moses speaks these words to the Israelites all those generations later, urging them to love their neighbors as they love themselves, he was speaking to a people who had long been immersed in practices of alienation, violence, and fragmentation. But these five words, spoken by Moses and now repeated by Jesus, are a call back into a life of wholeness.
When our great High Priest came into this world, entering the most Holy Place bearing the sacrifice of redemption, he came to bring reconciliation. It is only through his grace that we can give ourselves completely over to this vision he holds out, that we can love God with everything we have and everything we are, and that we can love our neighbors as ourselves, in the process finding the fullness, the wholeness, that eludes us.