NOTES for Mar 12:28-37
Speaking about the two commandments the Lord gave us in today's reading, one wants to pay attention to Christ's words about their likeness. At first they seem understandable: indeed, in both cases the matter is love. But let us think about this again. Love for God and love for a human being - how different these things are! We express love for God in prayer. We express love for a human being in labor. Every layperson (in the sense of someone who is not a monastic) who lives a life of prayer knows well that prayer takes time away from labor, and labor takes time away from prayer (especially if the labor is intellectual). That means these are two different principles standing in opposition to each other. Why, then, does the Lord speak of likeness? What does He put into these words?
Looked at from this side, these words cease to be a simple statement that in both cases the matter is love. In general, we must always be extremely careful when something in the word of God seems simple to us. Most often this is an apparent simplicity connected with the fact that we have not penetrated the text deeply enough. After all, the Lord had little time, and He understood this, so He could not waste it on obvious things. What, then, is the meaning here?
Perhaps what is being affirmed here is the ideal of likeness reaching the point of indistinguishability between labor and prayer. This is precisely what we must strive for: that prayer would be labor for us, hard labor, and that labor would be prayer for us. But of course this in no way means (as one often has to hear from secular, unchurched people who are accustomed to working much and intensely) that labor is prayer, a word by which they try to justify themselves before the Most High, dimly perceived by a soul that has not learned to love God.
It is precisely when we live in the tension between these two poles, labor and prayer, unconfused yet inseparable, so inseparable that they manifest a unity, that we fulfill God's commandment.