Bible Passage: Deut 6:4-5
Rev. Dr. Prakash K George
The book of Deuteronomy is
the book that reveals and reminds the Israelite community that they are a
covenant community. The Covenant is an expression of God’s love and concern for
them. The Book of Deuteronomy tries to define and explain this covenantal
relationship of the people of Israel with God.
The Decalogue is part of it (Deut. 5:6-21) but through shema the
Deuteronomistic writer gives expression to this relationship in a different dimension
that is in the level of love.
Shema is the essence or embodiment of the covenantal relation between
Yahweh and Israel, following the Decalogue). It is self-evident that Jewish
communities throughout history continually reflected on the Shema. Later Jewish
and Christian traditions combined shema (Dt. 6:4-5) with the command love your
neighbor as yourself (Lev 19:18) and presented it as the summary of law and
prophets (Matthew 22; Mark 12, Luke 10). The Shema begins with the imperative Hear
O Israel. It is an address to the
whole community reminding them about their identity as a called out community.
Shema points to two distinctive marks of this community
Firstly The mark of the covenant community
is the ability to continuously hear the voice of God – it means constantly being drawn by the word of God and being
formed and re-formed by the voice of God.
'Hear, O Israel.'" Hearing—
listening—is the primary sense and skill that must be sharpened if we have to
remain as true people of God. One of the major themes of Deuteronomistic
writings is ‘listening’. These books make the recurring invocation to listen
both to the people of Israel and to her leaders. Israelite rulers are closely
tied to “listening to the words of Yahweh.” People of Israel are called to
listen to the prophetic voice as the voice of God. The Book of Samuel begins
with story of the call of Samuel in which he responds to God’s voice by praying
“Speak Lord, for your servant is listening”. In contrast the problem with King
Saul was that he could hear the voice of God but failed to listen to what God
was telling him to do. So Samuel tells him “surely to obey is better than
sacrifice; and to heed than the fat of the rams” I Sam 15:22. Many of Jesus
parables ends with the statement “Let anyone with ears to hear listen.” In the
book of revelation the messages to the seven churches each ends with the
declaration “let anyone who has an ear listen to what the spirit is saying to
the churches.”
Shema demands cautious
attentiveness; it is also the prime word of prophetic language demanding
serious attentiveness. For proper listening two things are essential- discernment
and trust. When there is no confidence
and trust in the other we won’t listen to the other. In John 10 we hear Jesus
saying that his sheep follow him because they know his voice (John 10:4). It is a strong expression of trust and
confidence in the relationship between sheep and the shepherd. Listening also means that you are giving
space to the other. As we listen to God we are allowing God to have space in
our lives. That is why in the Gospel portion for this Sunday Matthew 7:24-29 a
person who listens, discerns and does the will of Christ is called as a wise
person. The challenge of the faith community and the disciple is to listen and
to obey the words of Christ in the right spirit. The sagacious hearer listens
attentively to the words of Jesus and then attempts to act responsibly as he
"puts them into practice"; he is compared to the "wise man"
(Mat. 7:24). Praxis is the
word we see in theology and politics. Praxis points to how theory and practice
fit together.
The
failure of many men and women who are called to the divine ministry is their
insensitiveness to the voice of God. Discipleship means having the ability to
continuously discern and listen to the voice of God. The challenge before us is
to listen to God’s voice in the midst of dissonant dominant voices. Many leaders in the Bible failed to listen
to God because they obeyed the dominant voice of the people demanding them to
act against the voice of God. The word vocation, as is so often pointed out, is
related to voice. Thus, vocation involves God’s voice speaking to us. Our training
must help us to hear the faint desperate cries of the impoverished, the
vulnerable and the oppressed, for God often speaks to us through them.
We are living in a world where dominant
voices try to mould and manipulate realities into commodities.
Our critical studies, devotional life,
practical training and life in this community must help us to discern God’s
voice. For a minister God’s call to listen is not only a call to listen to God
but also to hear self, others and creation—to be a listening person. In a
consumerist world we are often tempted to focus first and foremost on
ourselves. The challenge before us is to cultivate the habit of listening so
that we may be drawn by the voice of God, formed and reformed by the word of God.
The second distinctive mark of the covenant
community is the their love and commitment to God
The Shema has its existential and
theological importance within the context of a theology of covenant
relations. Shema calls to express ones
unreserved and unqualified commitment to Yahweh. It is expressed through the
confession "the LORD is our God, the LORD alone". All other commitments, all other relations,
are to be relative and subservient to this one. Through this confession Israel
is invited to express their special relationship with God and their total
allegiance to Yahweh. One of
the prime functions of the Shema is “the corrective to all forms of allegiance
claimed by the world.”
In Deut 5-11, the Israelites are repeatedly commanded to love YHWH.
Deuteronomy is characterized by repetition, and it is precisely the repetitious
phraseology on the micro-structural level that makes the book so memorable and
effective. According to the Jewish interpretations "With all your
heart" means a loyalty that is undivided . . . "With all your life
[or soul]" means commitment to God even to the point of death. And
"might" denotes the individual's "substance, wealth,
property," all of which must be expendable in the service of God.
In contrast, the early Christian exegesis .
. . viewed the three terms as designating complementary attributes of the human
personality, together comprising the whole 'inner man'. The three terms do not
specify different "modes of expressing love," but are three different
ways of saying the same thing. The command of love has both affective
(emotional) and cognitive dimensions. With all your heart" is equivalent to
saying "in all your thoughts and decision making."
The Bible affirms
love as God’s gift and as goal of authentic Christian existence. In other words
love comes from God and is commanded by God. Love always implies an encounter
with the other – whether it may be God or neighbor or God’s creation. Love in
all its forms offers us the potential to transcend our lives in the meeting
with the other.
In Deuteronomy we
see this connection between God’s love and human love and a wide horizon for
divine human praxis of love (Deut 10:17-20). Love of God and love of neighbor
belongs together. They need to be distinguished but not to be separated.
In the Bible love is relational praxis. We are
formed through facing God and also by facing our neighbor. Only when we face
the other it opens before us special revelatory moments. The very word Moses
uttered first to God in his theophany experience at Mount Horeb was hinneni (here
I am). Later we see Moses ministry as a continuous response to God and human
sufferings by saying Here I am. For Emmanuel Levinas the hghest form of
encounter is the face to face encounter with God. God addresses Israel face to
face (Deut 5:4). Moses had the regular face to face experience with God (Deut
34). Meaning of this encounter must be extended and recognized in the meeting
with the human other, with the orphan, the widow and the stranger.
Karl Barth also highlights the same point of
view. Barth argues that in Christian theology, the neighbor is not the abstract
other but God in our own image facing us in the other. He further adds to love
my neighbor as I love myself means accepting the future that is shaped by the
reality of my neighbor. We are in fact given to one another in order to benefit
from each other, to find the restoration that is only possible because of each
other, and to find our respective identities through each other. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 401
fl.
Jesus stands in
this enduring tradition when he recites the Shema in the Gospel of Mark
(12:28-33). The Shema has been affirmed, embraced, and developed from
Deuteronomy to its later appropriation by Jesus in the form of the double-love
commandment (see Matt 22:34-40; Luke 10:25-37), which became a supreme teaching
of all commandments for subsequent followers.
Life of Jesus is the model for our ministry.
His ministry was rooted in love and his ministry was always other centered,
always considering the betterment of the other. It involves respect for the
other; no one is looked down or humiliated but everyone finds his space, worth
and place. Holding the other in love was the mark of his ministry (13:1-15).
We are living in a context where many
ministers are conscious of building up their image rather than taking up a
ministry of life giving, risk taking, inspiring and all embracing. Felix
Wilfred narrate the story of a bishop traveling from north of Sri Lanka to the
south during the period of war and violence there. Bishop was travelling with
his secretary and a sister seated in the front of the car. Car of the bishop
stopped by the military at several points for routine checkups and everyone had
to come out of the car for this security inspection.
At one check points when the vehicle was
stopped sister to spare the bishop from inconvenience of getting down and
undergoing check, communicated in a telegraphic language to the soldier who
knew no English. Trying to make the soldier understand in his own language she
said pointing to the Bishop – “church captain”. Hearing this, the soldier let
go the car. But as they continued the journey the Bishop was very upset. He
asked sister “Sister don’t you know who I am? I am not the captain of the
church but the General”. The paradox is that he had that of much of rank
consciousness when the country was burning with violence, when thousands of
people were suffering and dying.
A comment the Gospel writer of John makes about Jesus life and ministry as
an introduction to Jesus last discourse with his disciples in that John 13: 1,
“He
loved them to the end”. NIV and NEB translations translate differently
“he now showed them the full extent of
his love.” The grammar of this sentence is the grammar of his whole life.
This love for the disciples and his knowledge of kairos leads him to service of
washing the feet of his fellow disciples, showing the true model of service.
Jesus ministry was like a pendulum of a clock that swings continuously to his
father and to the people whom he served and loved.