“God’s anonymous: a Scribe”
Mark 12:28
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Without a doubt, every sport has its share of rules and, along with all those rules comes a sport’s rulebook.
Take baseball, for example. Coming in at 172 pages long, the official baseball book of rules has rules of every imaginable kind, like “the infield shall be a 90-foot square” and “the distance from home base to the nearest fence, stand or other obstruction on fair territory shall be 250 feet or more. A distance of 320 feet or more along the foul lines, and 400 feet or more to the center field is preferable…the pitcher’s plate shall be 10 inches above the level of home plate. The degree of slope from a point 6 inches in front of the pitcher’s plate to a point 6 feet toward home plate shall be 1 inch to 1 foot, and such degree of slope shall be uniform.”
Or how about ice hockey? Their rulebook is even longer at 177 pages long! And there you’ll find rules like these: “The goal posts shall be set 6 feet apart, measured from the inside of the posts. They shall extend 4 feet vertically from the ice surface and a cross bar of the same material as the goal posts shall be extended horizontally from the top of the other posts”...and “A circular blue spot 12 inches in diameter shall be marked on the ice exactly in the center of the rink. Using this spot as a center, a circular blue, 2 inches wide, with a radius of 15 feet, will then be marked on the ice.”
And if all that isn’t enough for you, sports like wiffleball and racquetball have their own rulebooks, and so do carpetball and pickleball. Believe it or not, even the World Arm Wrestling League has its own rulebook too!
Rules, rules, rules. It seems that, no matter how hard we try, we just can’t get around them.
Even God’s Word, the Bible, has rules, in fact, quite a lot of rules! And in our text for today, we meet a man, a scribe, who knew every single one of them.
I’ll read the words of Mark chapter 12: “And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that He, (that’s Jesus), answered them well, asked Him, ‘Which commandment is the most important of all?’” (Mark 12:28).
Let’s step back for a moment, to see what’s going on.
Just a few verses before, back in verse 13, the Bible says, “And they sent to Him, (that’s Jesus again), some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians, to trap Him in His talk.” They said, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” (Mark 12:14). And absolutely sure that they had Him “impaled on the horns of a dilemma,” He replied, “Why put Me to the test? Bring Me a denarius and let Me look at it.” Then He said, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” “Caesar’s,” they said. And Jesus said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17).
Not to be outdone, a group of Sadducees came next with a question of their own. They said, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brothers. There were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and when he died left no offspring. And the second took her, and died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise. And the seven left no offspring. Last of all the woman also died. In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be?” (Mark 12:19-23).
And what did Jesus say? He said, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:24-25). Then He said, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27).
Then in the face of utter embarrassment and humiliation, one more man came to Jesus with a question of his own. As the Bible says, “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?’” (Mark 12:28).
“A scribe,” it said. What’s a scribe?
To put it simply, scribes, in Bible times, were the experts in Jewish life and Jewish law. They were the scholars, the learned guardians of the Law. And while every village in Israel had at least one, most of them lived in and around the capital city of Jerusalem.
Now if you don’t mind me glancing at the original language for a moment, in the New Testament, the word for “scribe” was “grammateus.” It’s a word that meant “writer.” And in the Old Testament, the word was “sopherim,” a word that meant “counter.”
What’s that mean? It means that, back in Jesus’ day, long before there were ever any copy machines of any kind, specially trained men would copy, by hand, the Word of God. That’s why the New Testament called them “writers” and why the Old Testament called them “counters.” Just to be sure they got it exactly right, they counted not only the words, but the letters of the Word of God!
And whenever they copied the Word of God, there were very specific rules they had to follow. For example, each column of writing had to be no less than forty-eight, and no more than sixty lines long, the ink had to be black, and of a special recipe, they had to say each word out loud while they were writing, and before they could even write the Hebrew name for God, they first had to wipe their pen clean and wash their entire body.
Then when they finally completed a manuscript, if there were more than three corrections, or if two letters even touched each other, the entire scroll had to be buried and redone.
That’s why scribes were so admired and so well-respected in Jesus’ day. They were, after all, the “people of the Book.”
But for all of their love and devotion to the Word of God, somewhere, sometime, something changed. For whatever reason, they came to believe that, instead of being a book of hope and promise, of love and redemption, the Bible was a book of laws and rules that we had no choice but to follow--613 laws to be exact. And you better follow each and every one, or else!
But while most everyone admired and respected the scribes, Jesus had a far different opinion--which, as you can imagine, He made perfectly clear.
For example, He said in the book of Luke: “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love greetings in the marketplaces and the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation” (Luke 20:45-47).
And in the book of Matthew, He said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces” (Matthew 23:13). “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, yet have neglected justice, mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, who outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead men’s bones” (Matthew 23:27).
No wonder then that, just as soon as they had a chance, as Mark records, “the chief priests and scribes sought to arrest Him and kill Him” (Mark 14:1).
But somewhere among this group of legal experts, these learned guardians of the Law, there was one who was different. Not only did he respect Jesus, he admired Jesus. He had heard Him speak and had perceived His wisdom. So when he came to Him with his question, he didn’t try to trap Him or to threaten Him like everyone else. Instead, he asked a question that not only puzzled him, but every other teacher of the Law. He said, “Which commandment is the most important one of all?” (Mark 12:28).
And that’s a good question! After all, since scribes believed there were as many as 613 commands, (that’s 365 negative and 248 positive), they often debated as to which one was the most important one. To put it another way, if there was any one command they should be most careful to obey above all the rest, which one would it be?
So which one would it be? Would it be “Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt not steal” or “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”?
But for Jesus, it was all very simple. He said: “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.” Then pressing it one step further, He added: “And the second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:30-31).
“Love,” He said. “Love fulfills the Law.”
In the book of I Corinthians, the apostle Paul had something to say about love. It went something like this: “If I speak with great eloquence, conviction, and beauty, but do so without love, my words are little more than a loud, banging tambourine. I could speak for God and understand all mysteries and every kind of knowledge. I may even have the deepest faith, strong enough to move mountains. But if I don’t love, I’m nothing at all. I could give away everything I own, and even sacrifice my body in the flames. But if I don’t love, I’ve gained nothing.”
If I could, let me take you back for a moment to your middle school math class to ask you a fairly simple question. What do you get when you multiply 1,000 times 1,000,000. The answer is, one billion. What comes after a billion? A trillion. What comes after a trillion? A quadrillion. And what comes after a quadrillion? A quintillion. (That’s a one followed by eighteen zeroes). That’s a big number!
Now what would you get if you multiplied one quintillion by zero? You get zero. Now let’s do it the way children do it. What do you get if you multiplied the biggest number in the world, infinity, by zero? You get zero.
It doesn’t matter what you start with. If you multiply anything by zero, the answer will always be zero.
And that’s exactly what Paul meant to say in the words of I Corinthians 13--life without love is zero. You can pile up all the good deeds and all the noble works you could ever imagine. You could be smart, beautiful, educated, rich, famous, and as strong as strong can be. But without love, it all equals zero.
A husband can provide a beautiful home for his wife. He can be the most handsome man on the planet. He could buy the perfect present every Valentine’s Day. But if he does it simply out of obligation and duty, he’s just wasting his time.
And a wife can cook a perfect meal for her husband every night, and be the most beautiful fashion model alive. But if she doesn’t love her man from her heart, it doesn’t mean a thing.
It’s hard to say exactly who started it, but right about twenty years ago, “love locks” started appearing on bridges across Europe, and then the rest of the world. It’s where two sweethearts write their names or initials on a padlock, lock it onto a bridge’s steel cable, then throw away the key. And from the looks of some bridges, there’s quite a lot of love going around!
When God wanted to show His love for us, He first gave us metal in the mine, then He gave us trees in the forest. He gave a miner skill to dig deep into the earth to find that metal, and a woodsman skill to chop down trees. Then a blacksmith took that metal and formed it into a spike, and a carpenter formed that wood into a cross. And when the cross was ready, God sent His Son, Jesus, who stretched out His arms onto that cross where He died for you and for me, that we might be forgiven. That we might have eternal life.
As the apostle John once wrote in his first epistle: “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love…We love because He first loved us” (I John 4:8, 19).
Thank You, Father, for Your Word of strength and hope, of power and promise. Help us to love You first and others too, because You first loved us, for Jesus’ sake. Amen