GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 12:28
One Question
There are many important questions. I asked a girl, “Will you marry me?” I had laid a foundation for the question, but the answer was important. Standing in the personnel office of a steel company, I was, by implication, asking, “Will you hire me?” In the years before GPS, I was in another city and asked a service-station attendant how to find an address.
Following Jesus’ altercation with the Sadducees, St. Mark wrote, “And coming, one of the scribes, having heard them disputing and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, ‘Which is the first commandment of all?’” (Mark 12:28)
This nameless scribe, whose behavior won him a mention in the sacred text, heard Jesus’ reply to the Sadducees and saw that it was good. Based on what he had heard and seen, he came forward to ask Jesus an important question. It is likely that this scribe—a lawyer at the time—presented Jesus with a sincere question, for this was an issue debated among the scribes: which of all the commandments was the most important?
Some scribes taught that Moses had received 613 commandments on Mount Sinai. In Psalm 15, David reduced that to 11; Isaiah reduced the number to 6 (Isaiah 33:15); Micah reduced it to 3 (Micah 6:8); and Habakkuk reduced them all to one: “The righteous shall live by faith” (Habakkuk 2:4).So the scribe posed a sincere question to Jesus. The scribe’s question is still important.
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