The scribe in Mark’s Gospel (12:28-34) stands for all those who seek to know how to become truly human. He had listened to Jesus’ previous conversations with various groups and had thus found the courage to ask him what is most essential. What is most essential? How does it enter into my life and the lives of all of us? That is a faithful rendering of the question this scribe addresses to the Lord. Jesus does not answer by citing his own ideas on the subject. He has no ambition to become known as one who thinks what has never been thought before. He points the way to Holy Scripture and reveals it as the center from which every perplexity of interpretation is to be resolved. He points the way to the word of God, to the primordial words that are preserved in the third and fifth books of Moses -words about the love of God and neighbor.
When we hear these words, we observe first of all that they begin, not with a commandment, but with a profession of faith in something that is already known. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Mk 12:29). t is the core of Israel’s belief, and Jesus makes it the fundamental core of Christian belief as well. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Every one of these words is important.
Before doing comes hearing – comes acceptance of reality. Man is a being that answers. If we are to act rightly, our gaze must first be pure and our ear open. It is impossible to act rightly without truth. That is why the will to know the truth, to seek it humbly and with readiness to learn it, is the basic prerequisite of all morality. Where profit or success leads to the neglect of truth, the world is fragmented into interest groups because profit always depends on the viewpoint of the one acting. However well-meaning the question may be as to what is profitable, what is effective and progressive for society, if it is divorced from the standard of truth, from God, it imperceptibly establishes power as the primary standard of mankind. But truth is superior to human power; it must set the limit and be the standard of all power. Only if it does so can we become free and good. The fact that listening to the truth must precede all our actions means also that the will of God is superior to all our plans and projects.
In the words of Jesus, the primacy of God is made abundantly clear. The first commandment is truly first among the commandments. If, in view of something apparently more important, we push God to one side in order to give precedence above all else to the happiness of the human person, we do not thereby become more free to establish right order in the world, but rather lose the standard and eventually come to despise mankind. Only one who regards humanity from God’s perspective is capable of loving mankind – even the most wretched, the weakest, the defenseless, the battered, the unborn, the inept. That is why the “Hear, O Israel” stands irremovably at the beginning of all our ways.
From: Predigt aus Anlass des zehnjahrigen Pontifikatsjubilaums von Papst Johannes Paul II, Oct. 30, 1988, Rome, Deutsche Tagepost, November 5, 1988
