Sunday Gospel Reflection (Nov 3, 2024)

Mark 12:28-34

This Gospel ends with a narrated *mic drop* as the author states that “no one dared ask [Jesus] any more questions.” This is not because Jesus had put a challenger in his place, actually affirming that he “was not far from the kingdom of God,” but because Jesus had spoken definitively on a difficult meta-ethical question. 

Meta-ethics, briefly, is not the study of what action is right or wrong, but rather how one understands and evaluates the ethical systems that inform those questions of particular actions. Though questions of meta-ethics seem highly abstract and impractical, their answers have consequences for when one faces real moral dilemmas and, perhaps equally important, wants to live contentedly with those decisions afterward. If you want to live a consistent ethical life, you have to have a solid meta-ethics reasoned out. 

The most popular meta-ethics question is that of the famous trolley problem. Presented first by Philippa Foot, there is a trolley rolling down a track that cannot be stopped. There are five people on the track. You can only pull a lever to redirect the trolley to another track, but that one has one person on it. Do you pull the lever? Your answer, while important, pales in importance to the reasoning for whatever answer you give. Your reasoning answers your question of meta-ethics. 

The False Dilemma

One of the biggest issues in modern meta-ethics has to do with the pendulum swinging between two extreme theories of how one makes ethical decisions. On the one side there is utilitarianism, simply defined as doing the most good for the most people. On the other, deontology, which appeals to one’s sense of duty to some authority, even if that authority is one’s own predetermined “law,” made up by one’s conscience. 

In the Gospel reading, the scribe is operating under these two extremes as well. He asks Jesus for the “first,” indicating a subjective sense of priority, which utilitarianism does in its determining the morality of an action. There is a latent, unrealized but assumed metric that must go into every decision. Also, by emphasizing the “commandment” to Jesus, the scribe is also appealing to one’s sense of obedience, the “deontos” of deontology. Life is following orders. 

Love, and do what you will

Jesus, sees through this false dilemma by presenting the third option that rises above these two man-made systems. In saying that “love” that is utterly complete is what is required, Jesus is emphasizing the virtue of charity. Virtue ethics as a system precedes both utilitarianism and deontology historically and is preeminent to them in priority. Both utilitarianism, in its reliance on an objective “good” beyond one’s own desires, and deontology, which is an overemphasis on the virtue of obedience apart from its proper relationship to the other virtues, rely upon virtue ethics to even work.

Finally, because charity as a virtue (as distinct from the theological virtue of charity) is a participation in the fullness of goodness itself, which is God, whenever someone participates in the virtue of charity one is participating in a real aspect of God’s nature. This is why Jesus could say that love was “worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” Those are just gifts returned back to God, but our love is a participation in God’s nature, which is love itself (cf 1 John 4:8). 

Sacrifices of animals are offerings of servants, but our self-transforming love makes us the sacrifices. However, instead of killing the object being sacrificed, we become more fully alive.