The Lord Our God, the Lord is One

March 8, 2024 | By Katherine Becking Cornell ‘25

image description: barren trees amid a desert landscape

Today’s lectionary reading begins with Hosea 14, in which God calls the people of Israel to repent of attributing His work to other forces, saying:

“O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?

It is I who answer and look after you.

I am like an evergreen cypress

from me comes your fruit.” [1]

This theme runs throughout the book of Hosea. Clearly, the Israelites don’t understand that God is the one who provides for them. When the Israelites experience prosperity, they give thanks to false gods that they crafted with their own hands. When they are threatened, they look to foreign powers such as Assyria for protection. They have conveniently forgotten that God is sovereign over all of creation and humanity.

We are no better than the Israelites. Although most of us don’t worship idols of wood and stone, we are quick to credit our successes to our own hard work, forgetting that God is the one who enables us to work at all. We are grateful to professors, doctors, and firefighters for their services to us, but we too often neglect to thank the One who placed those people in our communities and gave them their talents in the first place. Furthermore, we often trust in our own wisdom to guide us through life, rather than relying on God’s Word. God actively sustains the world, but in our sinfulness, we are too nearsighted to see His hand behind everything around us.

God desperately wants us to recognize that He is the source of life and that He alone has the power to save us. To put it more simply, He wants us to know that He is God, and we are not. When we internalize this truth, it enables us to praise Him when we receive blessings, rather than attributing it to some other power or taking the credit for ourselves. In Psalm 81, God says,

“Oh, that my people would listen to me,

that Israel would walk in my ways!

I would soon subdue their enemies

and turn my hand against their foes.” [2]

God promises to bless the Israelites if they hear Him. He is eager for His people to recognize Him as the one who saves them so that He can shower them with even more reasons to glorify Him. God’s eagerness to bless His people is echoed in Hosea 14, where God says He will “heal their apostasy” and “love them freely.” [3] He wants Israel to know who He is and that they will flourish under God’s providence and protection.

More than 400 years later, Jesus reiterates these ideas in Mark 12, when a scribe asks Him which commandment is the most important. Jesus first quotes Deuteronomy: “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” [4] I tend to skip over this line, thinking of it as little more than decoration for the more important verses to come, which contain the two greatest commandments. But its placement before the summary of the law is intentional. Here again, we see God’s desire for His people to listen to Him and understand who He is. For, how can we love God with all our hearts if we don’t know that the “Lord is one” – that there is no other ultimate force, power, or authority apart from Him? And how would we know these things about His character unless we are attentive to God’s words in Scripture and to the created world that reveals God’s majesty? Actively hearing and understanding are a part of what enables us to love God and neighbor. They are more important than we tend to think.

After Jesus’ statement of the greatest commandments, Mark provides us with the scribe’s response. I have always wondered why. He agrees with Jesus, and then basically repeats what Jesus says: “to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings.” [5] Why do we need to hear this a second time? It is likely because the scribe provides an example for us to follow. The scribe’s detailed paraphrasing of what Jesus just said reveals that he has been listening closely, treating Jesus’ words as the precious pearls of wisdom that they are. The scribe even takes notice of the preface that I often ignore, acknowledging that “[God] is one, and there is no other besides him.” [6]

While I may see this response as repetitive and unnecessary, Jesus saw it as wise. Because truly, if the scribe had come up with a more creative response, he could not have said anything more worthwhile than what Jesus said. What if we, like the scribe, had the humility to listen and repeat, instead of trying to say something impressive? To move towards wisdom would be to acknowledge the superiority of God’s words to our own and to rightly credit Him for all of our victories.

References:

[1] Hosea 14:8 [ESV]

[2] Psalm 81: 13-14 [ESV]

[3] Hosea 14:4 [ESV]

[4] Mark 12:29 [ESV]

[5] Mark 12:33 [ESV]

[6] Mark 12:32 [ESV]