The Main Thing
Read Mark 12:28-34
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” –Mark 12:28
There’s an old illustration that I’ve used countless times with children or youth in ministry. For the illustration, you need a few simple props: a glass jar, three ping pong balls, and a bag of rice. The jar represents your life, or sometimes it might represent more specifically the number of hours in a day. The ping-pong balls represent the “big things” of lasting importance; the rice, in contrast, represents all the “little stuff” that takes up our time and attention.
The trick to the illustration is the order in which you add things to the jar. If you start by pouring in all the rice, you’ll fill the jar about halfway. But then, no matter how hard you try, you can’t get all three balls to fit in the jar. (Two will usually fit, but the third will inevitably roll off the top.) However, if you empty the jar and start all over, you can get everything to fit. The trick is to add the “big stuff” first (the three ping pong balls), and then pour in the “little stuff” afterwards. The rice will flow around the large balls, taking up all the available space, and sometimes you even end up with a little space at the top to spare!
Perhaps you’ve seen this illustration (or something like it) before. It is often credited to Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey’s third habit is to “Put First Things First”—to prioritize those tasks that are important over the urgent (but less important) things that demand our attention. Sometimes this third habit is paraphrased differently: “Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing.”
While Covey was speaking mostly about time management, it is easy to apply this illustration to the commandments of scripture. There were 613 commandments in the Old Testament. (In case you’re interested, there were 365 negative commands and 248 positive ones.) Add to this all the commands in the Talmud, the oral tradition of laws and commentary that were based on the Torah (but not set to writing until the destruction of the Second Temple). Think of these laws like the many grains of rice in our illustration, and then consider the question put before Jesus: Which of these laws is the most important?
Jesus’ answer was clear—drawing on the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-5), Jesus answered: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.” And then Jesus added a lesser-known law from the book of Leviticus (19:18): “Love your neighbor as yourself.” All the rest of the laws hang upon these two.
The Pharisees loved God’s law, and they devoted their lives to following it. But to go back to our rice-and-ping-pong-ball illustration, it was like they poured the rice in first. They were focused on Sabbath law, dietary law, and all the things that could make one clean or unclean. They forgot the most important commands, and sadly, in their zeal for the law, they squeezed out the “main thing”—love of God and especially love of neighbor.
In contrast, if we make loving God and loving neighbor the center of our lives, we don’t have to obsess over all the other 613+ laws of God. Love is the perfect fulfillment of the law, so when we make love the center of our lives, everything else falls into its proper place.
Forgive me, Lord, for all the times I am distracted by the competing demands of work and life. Keep my heart centered, O God, on loving You. May I live out that love in the way I respond to my neighbors? Remind me, O God, that when I seek Your kingdom first, all the other things I worry about “will be added unto me.” Amen.