So much in today's readings. "Commit your way to the LORD." (Psalm 37:5) In Leviticus 19, this is all about how to love our neighbor. Including the aged and the foreigner. So often we miss that this culture, and Scripture, sets up a social security for its people; the fields were not allowed to edge up against one another. Why? If they did, each field wouldn't have edges, and it is the edges from which those who could not provide for themselves were able to glean. (We might call these "entitlements" today.) In this culture, everyone was to be provided with food to eat. God reminds these people that they too, in Egypt, were the "other," the "foreigner," the poor and defenseless. Love your neighbor as your self.
In Mark 10, it is still about how to love our neighbor. In marriage, in society, within the followers of Jesus. Jesus's focus in marriage is on the equality of marriage intended in the Creation stories. That both parties enter into a covenant of sacrificial love. Jesus dismisses the view of marriage in this patriarchal society where a man can simply leave the woman, leaving her without shelter and securty. Furthermore, Jesus declares that those with the lowest status in this society, the children, belong in the Kingdom of God. Jesus reminds us that while we think we keep God's ways, if we are clutching possessions and making life choices in order to keep them or secure them at the cost of others, we are living outside God's ways. And Jesus reminds his followers, reminds us, that in God's Kingdom being a servant is the blessing, not being served. " . . .whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all." (10:44)
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