What Jesus Centers

When Jesus shows up on the scene in Galilee in the first century there were plenty of other traveling rabbis. They all had their hot take on what was most important in the scriptures and they all worked hard to frame the story of God and God’s people in a way that connected to their world. So it’s not surprising that Jesus, as a traveling rabbi, did the same.

So what did Jesus center? There were 613 commands in the Hebrew Scriptures for Jesus to choose from, but he consistently focused on two: loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength (Deuteronomy 6:5) and loving our neighbors as ourselves (Leviticus 19:18). If you take Jesus’s most famous message, the Sermon on the Mount (in Matthew 5-7), it’s essentially his reframing of the spiritual journey build around those two commandments.

What does it tell you about Jesus that he chose these two commands? (Is that a new idea to you that Jesus made a conscious choice about what to center from the Hebrew Scriptures?) How might that affect how you think about what you focus on in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures (often called the Old and New Testaments)?

If you had to summarize your hot take on what it means to follow Jesus and you had to boil it down to just two sentences (and you can’t copy Jesus’s two sentences!) - how would you say it?