Communion Service & a Brief Reflection - The Greatest Commandment or Greatest Promise? - Mark 12:28-34

COMMUNION SERVICE - Audio Recording

Video Reflection on Mark 12:28-34

Greatest Commandment or Greatest Promise? - Mark 12:28-34 
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​In today’s reading from Mark, Jesus gives us what he calls the greatest commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength,” and the second, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” These words are often heard as commands. But Frederick Buechner an American author, Presbyterian minister, preacher, and theologian, offers us a new perspective on them when he writes these words: “The final secret I think is this, that the words ‘You shall love the Lord your God’ become in the end less a command than a promise.”

When we hear Jesus’s words as commands, they may feel like a weight on our shoulders, one more thing we must do in an already full life. But Buechner suggests that love for God is not so much something we must strain to produce or impose upon ourselves—it is, in the end, something promised to us. It is a relationship with God or the Divine that, over time, invites us to experience God’s love so deeply that loving God back becomes as natural as breathing. This promise implies a gentle unfolding of God’s love within us rather than a rigid rule imposed upon us that we have to live up to. Love is not so much something we have to live up to, but rather a Divine Promise that we must learn to live into.

In this view, we might hear the words of Jesus as an invitation and a whisper of possibility rather than an obligation. The promise of loving God with all our heart, soul and mind is one that God fulfils within us as we open ourselves to the Divine presence in our lives. Seeing these words of Jesus in this way shifts the focus from the question "How much am I loving God?" to "How much am I letting God love me? “How much am I opening my heart to the Infinite and Boundless Love of God”


But Jesus in fact remind us that the Kingdom of God is within us, which suggests that this Divine Love of God already resides within us and is woven through the fabric of all things. From this perspective Rumi, the Sufi Mystic’s quote rings true when he says: “I looked in temples, churches, and mosques, but I found the Divine in my heart.”

This promise extends also to loving our neighbour as ourselves. The more we experience the vastness of God’s love flowing up from within and through our own hearts, the more naturally that love flows out to others. Loving our neighbour, then, becomes less about exerting our will to be good and more about an overflow of the love we’ve received. In 1 John, we read, “We love because God first loved us.” The command to love, then, is ultimately a promise that we will grow in compassion, kindness, and empathy.

If love of God and love of neighbour are promises rather than demands, then faith becomes an invitation to rest and trust rather than strive and labour. And in resting and trusting in the Divine Love, we find ourselves gradually transformed, growing more capable of love in ways we might never have thought possible, becoming more loving not so much by effort, but by letting God’s promise of love take root in our lives.