Hey, There's a Point to All of This, People!

In the men's group I'm a part of, we're reading a commentary called The Gospel of Mark by Mary Healy. (Hey, how did that woman get in the room?) The chapter we just covered reflects on Jesus' interactions/arguments w/the scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees.

When one of the scribes asks which of the 613 commandments of the Torah is most important, Jesus responds with the primacy of the two great ones. “The first is this: '. . . You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Healy says that the Jews – in a religious world of polytheism – was the first people to say that there is only one God. She further states that “Jesus is the first one known to have explicitly combined these two commandments. But they are the foundations underlying the first three and last seven commandments of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) respectively. His implication is that they are inseparable: our love for God is concretized and expressed in our love for (our) fellow human beings. To love others 'as yourself' means to make their well-being as high a priority as your own – a very demanding standard. Although in its original context 'neighbor' meant one's fellow Israelite, elsewhere Jesus makes clear that our love must extend to every person without limit, since the one God is God of all.”

She goes on to say “Jesus concludes there is no other commandment greater than these. The rest of the law merely spells out how to love God and neighbor. To fulfill this twofold commandment perfectly would be to fulfill the entire law”

Now, I don't know the Torah and I'm painfully aware that I have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight here, but shouldn't this have been a no-brainer? What else could possibly be more important? And to some degree, in spite of the enormous benefits of our Christian faith, doesn't loving God and neighbor trump even that? It seems to me that one could be the most fervent and pious Christian, yet lacking love for God AND neighbor defeats the purpose of that religious belief. Of course, from the Christian perspective, better to have both. In fact, having Christian faith, it would seem to me, puts and even greater onus on us to love both God and neighbor. Why is it that in the Christian world we see so much evidence that the great twofold commandment is so largely ignored?