Sometimes you get the sense that someone else is simply trying to pin you down.  They ask what news agency you follow, what authors you read, who you voted for in the last election.  Their intent is to label you, jam you in a box, usually with the intent of writing you off.

Conversations around disagreements turn into a my tribe/your tribe contest.  We are less concerned about who might have the truth, and become more concerned about who might be us and who might be them.

The Greek Scriptures speak of Jesus facing this very thing. In a series of accounts in the Gospel of Mark, we see nearly everyone trying to pin him down.

First it is the head priests and law teachers, in reaction to Jesus healing and delivering people from evil, “By what authority are you doing these things?…Who gave you this authority?”

Because that’s more important.

And then come Pharisees and Herodians, who despised each other, but suddenly come together to attack Jesus, “Should we pay (the imperial tax) or shouldn’t we?”  

Total trap question in First Century Palestine.

And then Sadducees show up, setting up this crazy situation where a woman is married seven different times because the husbands keep dropping dead, “At the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”

Give me a break.

Lastly, a biblical scholar comes to Jesus and asks, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

You can almost hear Jesus saying under his breath, “Finally.  I though you’d never ask.”

Here is what he actually says, “The most important one is this…’Love the Lord your God with all your heart…soul…mind…strength.’  And the second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Notice that Jesus was asked which one command was the most important and answers by giving two.  Perhaps because Jesus saw them as deeply connected.  As if to say, “You can’t understand how to do the former without practicing the latter.”

We love God by loving people.

With all these different groups trying to see if Jesus was on their side, trying to pin Jesus down with all these peripheral questions that seemed like the most important things—power, taxes, afterlife—Jesus ends all the questions with “love God by loving your neighbor.”

“And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions,” Mark writes.

The mic had been dropped, and everyone knew it.

When we find ourselves being flame-broiled over a myriad of hot topics and sound bytes and fear fests and litmus tests, we are invited to run back to “love God by loving neighbor.”

When we are asked to explain what we think about gun control and abortion and homosexuality and armed conflict and which is the best party and and and and…

Love God by loving neighbor.

Yes, that straightforward.

This should be the litmus test, the measuring line, the multiple choice answer.

It should be the lens that teases all the other questions out, rather than allowing the questions to be the lenses that tease out loving God and neighbor.

The order is important.

And, of course love can be watered down to mere sentiment.  Of course we can make love mean something that it doesn’t.  Love doesn’t force itself upon us.  It waits for us to submit to it.

Willingly.

Submission, in fact, might be how we best learn what love is.  Jesus’ first students defined it like this, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”

And in the Scriptures, everyone is meant to be our brothers and sisters.

Love might be straightforward, but it isn’t simple, or easy.

It just happens to be everything.

According to Jesus.

Eugene Peterson captures it like this,

“No more questions. No more answers. No more godtalk. Go and love. No more detached discussions of Scripture interpretation, no more using religion (or Jesus!) as a way to avoid or dismiss the actual men and women who are in our lives.”

Go and love.

This must be the center that shapes all else that spins on the periphery.

This is the thing that we must pin down when everyone else is trying to pin us down.