Essay 16 (1-9-04)

THEY CALLED IT THE SHEMA

Hear, O Israel!: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! – Dt. 6:4

When Jesus was asked which commandment of the law was the greatest of all, it was a question the scribes had debated for generations. There were 613 statutes that competed for preeminence. Repentance always ranked high, and of course there was the Sabbath. The one Jesus named as the greatest was not even listed among the 613. He not only drew upon a commandment from Scripture – rather than one from a renowned rabbi – but the very one that lay at the heart of the Jewish faith. It was one that Jesus himself had almost certainly quoted daily from childhood. They called it the Shema as quoted above.

The word means Hear! It introduced what came to be a profession of faith. In a pagan, polytheistic culture the Hebrews professed Yahweh, the God of Israel, to be not only the supreme God, but the only God. The New Jerusalem Bible renders it: "Listen, Israel: Yahweh our God is the one, the only Yahweh." The other nations may have had so-called gods, but they were false God. The God of Israel is the only God!

It is one of the Hebrew words that every Christian can easily learn –Shema! – pronounced shem-ah. We can also make it an expression of our faith, and it is appropriate to use in praising God in our prayers, again as our Lord did. We use a few other Hebrew words in this way, such as Hallelujah!, which means "praise Yahweh." In our increasingly pluralistic, secularistic society it behoves us not only to praise the God of heaven, but to honor him as the only God. We must declare to our world that its many gods are false gods that can neither hear nor act.

But Jesus used the Shema in a context quite different from its traditional use. He not only named it the greatest or first commandment, but named the second commandment as well. The first commandment was implied in the Shema: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength." The second commandment grew out of the first – it is "like" the first, Jesus said: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Neither was this on the list of the 613 considered by the rabbis!

It is impressive that Jesus gave such preeminence to these commandments. Not only did he say there was no commandment greater than these, but that "On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets" (Matt. 22:40). According to Mark, it was in this context – to a scribe who saw the significance of what Jesus was saying – that our Lord said, "You are not far from the kingdom of God" (Mk.12:34).

Is that the way we see it? Do we believe that people out there whose religion is to love God with all their heart and to love their neighbor as themselves are not far from the kingdom? Might they be even closer to the kingdom than ourselves?

Jesus is saying that love of God and love of humanity are the essence of revealed religion. All that the law says, and all that the prophets preached, are summed up in these two commandments. All ritual in temple or church yield in significance to love of God and man. To put it another way – and this may be what Jesus was saying – ritual, worship, and ceremony must be expressions of our love for God and others.

Another thing in our Lord’s reference to the Shema is the uniqueness he attributes to God. He made no reference to himself in naming the greatest commandment. It is Yahweh, the God of Israel, who is the one and only true God. This conforms to his general teaching and behavior – he always pointed to God more than to himself. He even refused to be called good, for "No one is good but One, that is God" (Mk. 10:18). And in his prayer to the Father in John l7, he clearly distinguished between God and himself: "This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent" (v. 3). This is consistent with repeated instances in which he yields his will to the will of God, as in Lk. 22:42: "Father, if it is your will, remove this cup from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours be done."

While I believe in the divinity of Christ, I have a problem with such theology as "the trinity, "the triune God," and "God in three persons." These are not biblical terms, and they may not be biblical concepts. I believe as Peter did when he confessed: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Mt. 16:16). It is an identity that Jesus accepted. He blessed Peter for his insight, and told him that it was given him of God. Again and again God had declared from heaven that Jesus was his Son, and this is what he revealed to Peter. Peter would no more have confessed Jesus to be God than Jesus would have accepted such identity.

The writers of the New Testament emphasize the divinity of Christ, but appear hesitant to clearly identify him as God. He was in "the form of God" and "equal to God" (Philip. 2:6). He was "the image of the invisible God" (Col 1:15), and he was "the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person" (Heb. 1:3). He was "in the beginning with God," his glory was "the glory of the only begotten of the Father," and he was "in the bosom of the Father" (Jn. 1:2,14,18). These indicate that the writers saw the nature of Jesus as the nature of God. But the influence of the Shema was so strong – that only Yahweh is God – that they could hardly bring themselves to say unequivocally that Jesus was God.

A few passages appear to identify Jesus as God, but they have their problems. John 1:1 says "the Word was God," but since the Greek article does not appear before both nouns, which would be required to make them absolutely equal, some modern translators, including both Goodspeed and Weymouth, chose to render it, "the Word was divine." However that might be, one who would write "the Word was God" might not write "Jesus was God." Even if one ventured to affirm "Jesus is God," he would hardly say, "God is Jesus"!

Then there is 1 John 5:20, where Jesus appears to be referred to as "God blessed forever," but it depends on how the verse is punctuated, and so the versions differ. Titus 2:13 may be calling Jesus "our great God and Savior Jesus Christ," but again it depends on how it is punctuated, and so translations differ. But there is no question about what Paul is saying in 1 Cor.8:6: "For us there is only one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live."

That is our faith, the faith of the Shema: there is only one God, the Father. It is also our faith as Christians that there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ our Savior. The apostle says the same in Eph. 4:5-6 – "one God" and "one Lord." One is the Father, the other is the Son. The distinction is clear and unmistakable.

We would do well to observe that when the apostles preached repentance to a lost world they urged sinners to "turn from these vain things to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them" (Acts 14:15). Paul described the pagans in Thessalonica who became Christians as having "turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God" (1 Thess. 1:9). In teaching the Corinthians about the nature of idols, the apostle referred to the faith of Shema: "there is no other God but one" (1 Cor. 8:4). Basic to their proclamation was "repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20:21).

I am not saying that we are to talk about Christ less, but that we are to talk about God more. To be Christ-centered we must first be God-centered. That is the way it was with Jesus our Lord – he was always talking about God!

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