Not Me!

Mark 14:12-26

by Daniel Harrell

The account of the Last Supper is a familiar one. Verse 12 tells us it was the first day of the weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread, of which Passover was a part. Jesus and his disciples were on their way to Jerusalem where every Jew desired to be for the festival. Thousands of pilgrims from across the known world crammed into the city. Added to the normal enthusiasm surrounding the remembrance of Israel’s divine deliverance from Egyptian slavery was a fervent expectation of future deliverance from current Roman oppression. Into this enthusiastic and expectant throng, Jesus sent a couple of his disciples to locate a man carrying a jar of water. Jesus instructed them to “follow the man and say to the owner of whichever house he enters, ‘The Teacher wants to know where the guest room is, that he may eat the Passover with his disciples.’ Then the owner will show you a large upper room, all furnished and ready. You make preparations for us there.”

I used to read this passage and imagine it to be like that scene from The Return of the Jedi where Luke Skywalker strolls into the lair of his nemesis, Jabba the Hut. With a mere wave of his force-filled hand, Luke compels Jabba’s bodyguard to unwittingly cooperate with him and his scheme to humiliate the Hut. “You will take me to Jabba now.” Against his better judgment, he does as instructed: “I will take you to Jabba now.” Surely Jesus, having calmed storms with the mere wave of his hand and fed thousands with a meager bag lunch, would have no trouble mysteriously maneuvering a man with a water jar and a homeowner to set a table for thirteen. When later asked by his wife why he did it, the homeowner would say, “I don’t know, I think we’re having company.” At which point the disciples would knock at his door.

Of course, Jesus was no Jedi. Magic was not his MO. More likely, both the homeowner and the man with the water jar were followers of Jesus and in on a secret plan. Why all the intrigue? Knowing that the Pharisees were out to get him, and that Jerusalem lay in their jurisdiction, and that he wanted to eat the Passover before they got to him, Jesus needed to enter the city undetected. I guess he could have just miraculously popped in as he would do a few days hence. But here Jesus exercises his human side and employs more pedestrian means. Carrying water jars was predominantly woman’s work, so having a man with a water jar signal the disciples would be easy for even them to spot. That the homeowner knows who the “The Teacher” is proves he was clued in. Most importantly, at least from Mark’s perspective, the secrecy darkens the treachery that is about to unfold. None aside from Jesus’ closest friends would know his whereabouts. Betrayal would have to be an inside job. It would be as the Scriptures portended, specifically the Psalm of David we read to open worship: “Even my close friend, whom I trusted, who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.” So went David, so would go the Son of David.

Granted, Jesus isn’t specific as to the Scripture. He actually says in verse 21: “The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him.” Referring to himself as “Son of Man” is often code for the prophecy of Daniel, chapter 7, where “Son of Man” refers to one victoriously arriving on clouds at the end of time. Jesus described himself as doing the same thing in Mark 13. Daniel writes that to the Son of Man was “given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” This sounds like Jesus. In Mark, Jesus adds that “he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.” But not wanting to get too apocalyptic, I’ll lastly mention that Daniel 7 also has the saints of God engaging in a fierce struggle with evil, which actually gets the upper hand for a time. This Last Days struggle between good and evil plays out at the Last Supper. In the gospels of Luke and John, evil takes the sinister shape of Satan who “enters Judas” to induce the betrayal. Nevertheless, Judas remains his own man. To be possessed is not to be coerced. He could have said no, it seems. But because he does not, Jesus bewails Judas as one who should have never been born.

Such ominous woe leaves little wonder as to why the disciples each frantically worried that he might be the traitor. One by one, they sought reassurance. “Surely, not I?” they say. Echoing Psalm 41, Jesus informed them that the guilty party would be “the one who dips bread into the bowl with me.” The unleavened matzo bread of Passover worked kind of like a pita chip with which you ate food served in large bowls spread on the table. However, I’m thinking at this point each disciple did all he could to avoid Jesus’ bowl so as not to get fingered. Maybe this is why John’s gospel has Jesus handing a piece of bread directly to Judas. Here in Mark, Jesus’ words about sharing bread serve mostly to accentuate the intimate friendship Judas and Jesus shared. They also accentuate a sacred cultural norm. Ancient near-eastern culture dictated that to eat with another was to foreswear ever doing him harm. Ancient covenants and peace treaties were often made over meals. Jesus declares this meal to be a covenant too―the one promised by Jeremiah: a new covenant between God and his people whereby God would transplant his law from stone tablets into their hearts. “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’” Jeremiah reads, “for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD.” The evil Judas perpetrates therefore crosses every imaginable line. It violates the bond of friendship, the bonds of society and the bond of God.

And yet, just as Jesus would extend forgiveness to his executioners as he hung on the cross, so he extends grace to Judas here, even as he accuses him. Mark doesn’t tell us, but it may very well be that the bread that gets dipped as an indictment of betrayal is the same bread that gets offered as Jesus’ own body broken. Grace is fundamentally an indictment. Pardon is only extended to those who need it. To forgive is first to blame. We chafe under the command to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors, begrudging Jesus for making us be doormats. We do so because we forget that to forgive is not to act as if the wrong never happened. Forgiveness fully acknowledges the wrong―but then refuses to press charges. Does this mean that Judas is actually absolved rather than doomed? No. Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. The waiting father forgives his prodigal son, but the parable’s not complete until the son returns to his father’s embrace. This is something that Judas never does.

In Matthew’s gospel, Judas is stricken with remorse. But rather than turn to Jesus, Judas returns to the priests who recruited him and tries to return their money. They haughtily refuse it. Judas throws the coins on the floor and then goes out and hangs himself. He dies before Jesus does. For many, this remains very disturbing. If Judas (as one of the Twelve) could so willingly betray Jesus for money, what chance do I have to be faithful? An August New Yorker article by Joan Acocella traces attempts made throughout history to rethink Judas. “Did Judas deserve his fate?” she asks. “If Jesus informs you that you will betray him, and then tells you to hurry up and do it [as he does in John’s gospel], are you really responsible for your act? Furthermore, if your act sets in motion the process—Christ’s Passion—whereby humankind is saved, shouldn’t somebody thank you? No, the Church says. If you betray your friend, you are a sinner, no matter how foreordained or collaterally beneficial your sin. And, if the friend should happen to be the Son of God, so much the worse for you.”

Because the church’s verdict only exacerbates the dissonance we feel, efforts at rehabilitating Judas have proved necessary, if only to relieve our anxiety. Recent efforts have been fed mostly by an ancient text entitled “The Gospel of Judas.” Hailing from the late second-century (at best), the Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic gospel about Judas that portrays him as Jesus’ favorite disciple, the only one who really understood him. It also portrays Jesus as wholly divine and not human, the good news being that Judas couldn’t have had him killed anyway. As fitting to Gnosticism (where anything physical is considered perverse), Judas actually does Jesus a favor by helping him get out of his bodily imprisonment. But then speaking of Star Wars, Jesus goes on to castigate the physical earth which was brought into being by a violent demiurge, Nebro, and his stupid assistant, Saklas. Any relief gives way to ridiculousness.

On the other hand, there are those who have dealt with Judas hitting too close to home by making him into something out of a monster movie, so hideously disfigured and disgusting that no human being could ever imitate him if he tried. Regrettably, such typecasting proved conveniently advantageous to early Christians seeking to cozy up to Roman political power. Knowing that access to such power meant having to dissociate from their rebellious Jewish roots, these early Christians did so by smearing all Jews as “sons of Judas.” Even the luminary church fathers Jerome and John Chrysostom joined in. Centuries of subsequent anti-Semitism, stoked by saints such as Martin Luther in his later years, fueled an already vicious succession of pogroms that achieved its climax in the Holocaust. Ironically, postwar recoil from the horrors of the Holocaust actually improved Judas’ reputation. Portrayals of him as a political operative, betraying Jesus in order to force the launch of a revolution against evil Roman oppression, appear in films like Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Acocella concludes that “the original, Biblical Judas may have had a bad influence on our politics [and our movies], nevertheless he does represent something true about our lives. Many of us, on many occasions, are not going to love one another.” I’d suggest that it’s worse than that. There is a human evil, a Satanic evil, that Judas represents. And it’s an evil that makes its way into us all. We are all complicit in Judas’ betrayal―in the trust we so often violate, in the relationship we wrongly ruin, in the conflicts we gladly nurture, in the deception and disloyalty and lies we relish. Scripture is clear that Jesus dies because of this sin, because of the perfidy we each commit individually and collectively.

In verse 24, Jesus calls the Passover wine “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.” Old Testament covenant-making involved sacrificing an animal to seal the agreement, symbolizing the extent to which a covenant-maker would go if ever he became a covenant-breaker. With his own death as sacrifice, Jesus seals the deal. But with his blood as poured out for many, Jesus also seals the breaches our treachery tears open. He forgives our treason.

And yet because our evil by nature so vigorously resists any blame, we regard God’s offer of forgiveness as offensive. Jesus knows as much, which is why, citing Zechariah, he announces to his disciples in verse 27: “You will all fall away.” Or as the King James puts it, “all ye shall be offended.” The Greek word is scandalized, and in the passive voice means: “to have your moral sensitivities insulted.” How can forgiveness ever be so insulting? My favorite illustration is that of a blind date. Imagine you’ve been set up. You’re then met at the restaurant by this person whom you’ve never set eyes on before in your life. She walks over and the first words out of her mouth are not “nice to meet you,” but, “I forgive you.” To forgive is to blame. To have someone forgive you implies that you are not a good person. To have someone be cursed and crucified on a cross for you implies you are a really bad person—“grievously sinful and perniciously wicked, provoking most justly God’s wrath and indignation”—just like the old communion prayers confess.

The apostle Paul himself admitted that to preach Christ crucified was “an offense to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” As for the disciples, gathered around that last Passover meal, they had to think it odd enough to hear Jesus call the unleavened bread his body broken. But then to be asked to eat it? What foolishness was that? No wonder so many early critics of Christians called them cannibals. Of course for those who made the connection to sacrifice― disturbing talk of Jesus himself as the sacrifice notwithstanding—to eat the body of the sacrificial animal was customary. The Passover Lamb, as was the case with most sacrifices, was not so much burned as it was cooked. The lamb that saves, also nourishes. (Fortunately for communion preparers ever since, Jesus did not take a lamb shank and say “this is my body.”) Bread made the symbolic point: Jesus would be the final Passover Sacrifice. That Jesus tied his death to Passover rather than to, say, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, made the further point that his sacrifice not only nourished and saved, but kept safe too. In Exodus, as God readied to unleash his wrath against Egyptian cruelty―indeed against all human wickedness―the Israelites were instructed to smear lamb’s blood on their doorposts as a safeguard against God’s avenging angel. Likewise, Christ’s blood safeguards God’s people from the wrath to come, when all injustice and oppression and tyranny will be dealt with for good.

Seen this way, you’d expect Jesus to instruct that the disciples smear his blood on their foreheads or something. But instead Jesus tells them to drink it. This is where Jewish offense comes in. If Torah prohibits anything it prohibits consuming (or even touching) blood. The reason is found in Leviticus; namely, that “blood is life” and all life ultimately belongs to God, the source of all life. The blood drained from sacrificial animals (and never eaten) was splattered against the sides of the altar in recognition of this reality. If the paycheck for sin is death, then the payback to God is blood for the life that was lost. It is only with blood that lost life can be redeemed. This sacrificial separation of blood from the body explains the language of the Lord’s Supper. Jesus speaks of “my body” and “my blood,” as opposed to, say, “my flesh and bones” or my “heart and soul.” But it still doesn’t explain why Jesus would say drink my blood. To drink an animal’s blood would be scandalous enough. To drink the blood of a person—even metaphorically speaking—is the purview of cannibals and vampires. It insults anybody’s moral sensitivities.

Jesus clearly does something radically new here. Rather than thinking of the blood of the lamb only in terms of taking away sin, Jesus seems to add the idea of taking on life; specifically taking on his life. Instead of blood as life for life, Jesus introduces his blood as life in life. Having saved us from death by shedding his blood, he gives us new life by our drinking his blood. “Since we have now been justified by Christ’s blood,” Paul writes, “how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!” Guarded by Christ’s blood and its guarantee of ultimate justice, we are freed to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors; forgiving them just as Jesus forgave us. We can do this because of Christ’s life in us. Satan entered Judas, but we drink in Jesus.

Paul calls it a mystery: “Christ in you, the hope of glory”―a glory Jesus alludes to in verse 25: “I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” By calling the cup “the fruit of the vine,” Jesus acknowledges that its contents are not literally his blood, much to the relief of the devoutly Jewish disciples. But by also announcing he would not drink again, Jesus indicated that his death was literal, and coming soon. However for those who made the connection between death and sacrifice, between blood and redemption, between death and resurrection, the hope of glory was evident. The offending cup of death and indictment ferments into the redeemed wine of gladness and victory―a new covenant in his blood shed for you. The same chapter in Jeremiah that promised the new covenant, paints a portrait of glory: “The Lord’s redeemed will come and sing for joy on the heights of Zion; their faces radiant over the lavish bounty of the LORD—the abundant grain, the new wine and the fresh olive oil, flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. They will be like a well-watered garden, and all their sorrows will be gone. … I will be their God, and they will be my people. … I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim Christ’s death and this hope, until the Son of Man comes again.

Out of Poverty

Mark 12:41-44

This familiar account of the widow’s two coins—or as the King James renders it, the widow’s mite—has become so familiar that it’s lost a lot of its power. Online you’ll find a website called theWidowsMite.net, which is a Christian jewelry store. You can purchase settings of authentic widow's mite coins excavated in Israel from the time of Jesus. Of course the jewelry goes for significantly more than the poor widow could have ever afforded, but that’s beside the point. The point, according to the website, is that: “Jewelry should mean something. When women rejoice upon receiving a beautiful diamond ring, the joy isn’t in receiving a rare crystallized form of carbon. The joy is in receiving a symbol—a symbol so powerful that a man is willing to spend a month’s salary on it to say ‘I love you.’” Without a trace of irony, the website then adds, “When you give the gift of the Widow’s Mite, you are saying to the recipient, ‘When you wear this piece of Christian Jewelry, you are connecting yourself to the poor.’” Nice. People actually fall for this shtick. I guess that buying a widow’s mite to wear is cheaper than giving all you have to God.

Giving can be an embarrassing topic. Even though from the earliest pages of Scripture, giving is how people show gratitude for God’s grace, how they express love and worship, how they acknowledge God’s place as the giver and Lord of all things, and how they acknowledge their own place as stewards rather than owners of God’s gifts. To give is to thank. To give is to love. To give is to worship. To give is to free yourself from money’s evils. Of the 500 plus references to evil in the Bible, none explicitly mention its origin save one. 1 Timothy 6:10: “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Jesus declared back in chapter 10 how it’s easier to thread a needle with a camel than to squeeze a rich man into God’s kingdom. And thus throughout Scripture, from the law to the gospels, the message is clear: let loose of your possessions. You don’t possess them anyway―they possess you, right? Give and you knock out the two greatest commandments at once. When you give to love God, you automatically love your neighbor. The money you give to the church becomes money used to reach the city and world with the gospel, to heal the sick, feed the hungry, care for the lonely, as well to teach and to train in the way of the Christ.

To give is to thank. To give is to love. To give is to worship―which is why we pass offering plates in worship. And yet at the same time so much of our giving gets run through a grid, mostly out of concern that we not give too much. We debate whether our giving should be pre- or post-tax, and whether tithing even applies anymore. “God doesn’t need our money,” we say, “what Jesus really cares about is my heart. Jesus says here that this widow’s two cents counted for more than the vast riches given by others. I put in two dollars!”

Now I’m not trying to get all televangelist on you, but the truth of the matter is that as Christians commanded to love God with all of heart, soul, mind and money, we’re pretty lousy givers. According to statistics, we each give on average about two percent of our income, significantly less than we spend on bottled water, music downloads or computer games. In recession-wracked America, where good water is free, we still spend almost 17 billion dollars on bottled. Not only would drinking from the tap be huge for the environment, but it would free up enough money to fully educate every single child in the developing world. If any of this makes you feel guilty, I told you that giving can be an embarrassing topic.

Of course at issue in tonight’s passage is not necessarily stinginess. As we read, the people putting money in the temple offering plates were putting in plenty―a good deal more than two percent I’d guess. Back then, if you loved (and feared) God at all, you tithed. This is what makes the widow’s act so odd. She had two coins―she could have kept one for herself. In fact, she could have kept both for herself. The same law that dictated God’s people give ten percent of their earnings instructed that a portion of that ten percent go to widows and orphans. We read in Deuteronomy: “The LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving them food and clothing.” And yet you’ll remember from last week that the ministers in charge of the temple offerings were “devouring widows’ houses” (verse 40), bilking poor women out of whatever dower they had inherited upon their husbands’ deaths. In chapter 13, Jesus will indict the entire Temple system, labeling it corrupt and doomed to destruction. And yet the poor widow gives to support the temple anyway because it’s supposed to be God’s house. And she doesn’t give a tenth or even half of what she has; she gives everything.

However, since two measly cents didn’t buy anymore then than it does now, skeptics might wonder why all the fuss? It wasn’t going to do her any good to hold onto it, so how hard could it have been to give it? It’s like the retiree down to her last quarter in Vegas. She might as well take one more shot at the slots. Maybe she’ll hit the jackpot. Or better, like the desperate person who figures she might as well pray to God when at the end of her ropes. What do you have to lose? God does answer those prayers. Maybe Jesus rewarded the widow’s desperate bid too. Maybe once she got back outside, she discovered a whole pocketful of change―like Jesus miraculously made appear in that fish’s mouth when he needed a coin to pay the Temple tax (see Matthew 17). Or like Christians find Jesus doing with unexpected checks in the mail for just the right amounts. If God takes care of the lilies of the field, which are here today and tomorrow thrown into the fire, surely he took care of this widow.

But the widow’s welfare is not the point of this passage. Jesus sees her humble act as motivated by neither resignation or desperation, but rather motivated by love. The widow’s gift decidedly sharpens the contrast between pretense and true piety. Unlike the shameless scribes and Pharisees, she was a poor widow who loved God wholeheartedly. As an impoverished, disenfranchised, uneducated woman, she represents the least and the last whom Jesus said would be first in God’s kingdom. As one who out of her poverty gave everything she had, the widow previews Jesus himself, who out of his own poverty—being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped—gives everything he had and more for the sake of love.

But it doesn’t stop with Jesus. Jesus did not give to release us from giving any more than Jesus died to release us from loving. To the contrary, “Christ’s love compels us,” the apostle Paul writes, “he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him.” And what does it mean to live for him? The widow is our example. The poor widow previewed Jesus’ giving, and she previews ours too. If it is the case that tithing no longer applies, it’s only because Jesus has upped the percentage from ten percent to a hundred. “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” That’s what Jesus told the rich man in chapter 10. Was Jesus just talking to rich people? Fine. Flip back to chapter 8: “If anyone would follow me you have to deny yourself and take up a cross to do it.”

Fortunately, thewidowsmite.net jewelry store can help you do that. Their ad reads, “Someone who wears a cross immediately associates him or herself with Jesus’ selflessness who willingly gave his life that we may live.” Take up one of their crosses and you’ll only have to deny yourself about fifty bucks.

Farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry points out two embarrassing questions that every reader of the gospels must face when confronted with the words of Jesus. First: If you had been living in Jesus’ day and heard him teaching things like “sell all your possessions” or “deny yourself,” would you have been one of his followers? Don’t be too sure, Berry cautions, “in Jesus’ lifetime even his most intimate friends could hardly be described as overconfident.” Secondly, can you be sure that you would still follow Jesus if it became excruciatingly painful to do so?

Wendell Berry goes on to recount the story of a 16th century Anabaptist in Holland named Dirk Willems. An Anabaptist was a Christian who insisted that only believers, and not infants, could be baptized. Today we call them Southern Baptists. Back then, Catholics and most Protestants considered Anabaptists to be heretics worthy of hanging, which many of them were, some right out here on Boston Common. Dirk Willems, a known Anabaptist, was fleeing arrest from the Protestant authorities, pursued by what was known as a “thief-catcher.” As one chased the other across a frozen body of water, the thief catcher fell through the ice. Without help, he would have drowned. But in addition to believers’ baptism only, Anabaptists were also stern adherents to the Sermon on the Mount, which on this day carried stern implications. Because the sermon on the mount teaches that we love our enemies and persecutors, Dirk Willems turned back, put out his hands to his pursuer and saved his life. The thief-catcher, who then of course wanted to spare his rescuer, was forced to arrest him nonetheless. Willems was brought to trial, sentenced and burned to death in a “lingering fire.”

Wendell Berry writes, “I, and I suppose you, would like to be a follower of Christ even at the cost of so much pain. But would we, in similar circumstances, turn back to offer the charity of Christ to an enemy? Again, I don’t think we ought to be too sure. We should remember that the ‘Christian’ persecutors of 1569 undoubtedly thanked God for the capture and death of their enemy, Dirk Willems the heretic.”

If you had been living in Jesus’ day and heard him teaching things like “sell all your possessions” or “deny yourself,” would you have been one of his followers? And, can you be sure that you would still follow Jesus if it became excruciatingly painful to do so? If we are honest, we cannot escape these questions. And if we are honest, Berry writes, “we cannot answer them either. We humans, as we well know, have repeatedly been surprised by what we will or won’t do under pressure. A person may come to be, as many have been, heroically faithful in great adversity. But as long as that person is alive, there is always a next time, and so the questions remain. These are questions we must live with, regarding them as unanswerable and yet profoundly influential.”

I agree with Wendell Berry that these two questions are profoundly influential, but are they unanswerable? Perhaps, but they don’t need to be. Here’s where other words of Jesus come to bear. In Matthew 11, Jesus said that “wisdom is proved right by her actions.” In Biblical parlance, a wise person is any person who loves God enough to trust him, but nobody can be said to trust God if they never do anything that requires trust. Wisdom is not the same as saying you love God or understanding that it’s good to trust God, or knowing the right thing to do. If “wisdom is proved right by her actions,” then wisdom only works when you act. Can you be sure that you would still follow Jesus if it became excruciatingly painful to do so? The only way to know is to do it.

Dawn and I have this running joke about how I’m 87% into everything. While this serves me well when playing sports (I always have something left in reserve), it’s lousy in relationships and most everywhere else. I’m continually haunted by a mentor of mine in high school who stood me in the middle of a parking lot many years ago and told me as I went off to college that if I never ended up making anything of my life, it would be because I’d learned to do so well by giving so little. “Until you hold nothing back,” she said, “you will never discover your true calling.” She was right. And while I’m still mostly 87% about too many things, those places in my life when I have gone all in have been places where I have discovered not only my calling but God’s trustworthiness and the strength that truly comes from denying myself. Dietrich Bonheoffer, the Christian martyr under Adolph Hitler, put it this way: “To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more of the road which is too hard for us… All that self denial can say is: ‘Jesus leads the way, keep close to him.’”

Which brings us back to the widow and her two cents. She was determined to stay close to God even though it cost her everything she had. Can you be sure that you would still follow Jesus if it became excruciatingly painful to do so? What if it was only mildly painful? The only way to know is to do it.

Paternity and Pretending

Mark 12:35-40

Not too many summers ago, after a particularly busy Sunday, I took advantage of my Monday off to play a round of golf. Since I’m not a good golfer, it can be somewhat relaxing to play, so I headed over to a local muni and joined a threesome of equally bad duffers—though they were the worst kind since they actually thought they were good golfers. Their delusion exhibited itself whenever they sliced or hooked a drive, shanked or chunked an approach or pushed a putt. Acting as if this was unusual, they’d let loose a string of expletives in Jesus’ name that had to make even the demons blush. Usually when I find myself in the presence of such scurrility, I refrain from revealing my vocation. It’s not that I’m embarrassed about being a minister―at least not most days―it’s just that I know how guys like this would react: first shock, then shame, then relentless, displaced ridicule at my presence for making them feel guilty. I’m all for suffering scorn for Christ’s sake, but it was my day off.

Being as bad a bunch of golfers as we were, it was inevitable that the foursome behind us would catch up. Sure enough, as we got ready to tee off on the fifth hole, the group behind us meandered over and stood behind us. Then one of them piped up: “Hi, Pastor Harrell!” It was one of you. My cover was blown. My three pagan golf partners reacted as I predicted they would. First they stared with alarm, silently tallying up all the times they had broken the Third Commandment. Then they looked down with embarrassment, only to then start compensating by starting in on me. With wry grins across their faces, they started calling me Father and wondering aloud why my God, my God had so forsaken me since I was driving my ball into the woods and missing putts too.

It was funny. I laughed. My being clergy elicited no respect whatsoever―which made me glad. The last thing I wanted was respect since according to Jesus, the worst kind of pastor is one who thinks he should be revered. In tonight’s passage from Mark, Jesus lets loose himself, chastising the religious professionals of his day for parading around in fancy robes, grabbing the front seats in worship and sitting at the head table at banquets. Custom that dictated people stand and address these religious leaders as “master” or “father” had clearly gone to their heads. Worse, they had used their position to exploit the poor and bereaved. Much like the televangelist who fakes some sacred-sounding sob-story in order to milk naïve viewers out of their hard-earned money, these scribes had filched poor widows out of house and home, not even feeling bad for taking from those who couldn’t afford to give. They then covered up their deceit with long-winded prayers, pretending to be the holy people they weren’t. Jesus says that “such men will be punished most severely.” They had failed on both counts of the greatest commandment which we looked at alst time in Mark: they had despised God and their neighbor.

I’m continuing a series in Mark’s gospel tonight, stopping in those places where the ink is red in some of your Bibles, indicating that Jesus has something to say. Tonight’s passage ends what has been an on ongoing verbal conflict between Jesus and religious leaders. It’s an emphatic ending that effectively shuts the scribes up. They do take what Jesus dishes out, only they don’t let it go. The next time we hear from these religious leaders they’ll be plotting about how they can get Jesus killed.

For Mark, the conflict between Jesus and the religious establishment had everything to do with Jesus’ identity. Mark begins his gospel by declaring Jesus to be the Son of God, but no way were the religious leaders of Jesus’ day going to believe that. Who would? Any vagabond carpenter from Nazareth who hung out with tax-collectors and sinners would be rightly dismissed as delusional for claiming to be Israel’s Savior.

Many years ago I paid a hospital visit to a dear lady from this church named Bea who had suffered a recent stroke. While still as vivacious as ever, the stroke did put a dent in her memory. She recognized me as someone familiar, but couldn’t recall my name. I found her in the cafeteria having dinner where she was chatting away with other residents. She beamed when I walked up, gave me a hug and said how happy she was to see me. The woman seated next to her inquired whether I was her grandson. Bea responded not as she intended of course, but in a way that surprised me and her dinner companion both. A huge grin on her face and a gleam in her eye, she spun me to face this other woman and announced, “This is the Lord!” Naturally, the other woman, a bit taken aback, stared me up and down, managing disbelief and disdain simultaneously. Bea gathered as much, so she repeated her introduction with gusto, “This is the Lord!” At first I’d been both too startled and amused to correct her, but having regained my own composure, I quickly admitted that no, I actually wasn’t the Lord but only a minister from her church. My admission failed to wipe the disbelief and disdain from the other woman’s face. Apparently I was as unimpressive as a minister as I had been as the Lord.

Likewise with Jesus, I guess, that is until he started to teach and to heal and cast out demons. He began to attract enormous crowds and became incredibly popular, much to the religious leaders’ chagrin. Convinced Jesus was a crackpot, the leaders felt it their duty to intervene and discredit him before things got out of hand. They tried tripping him up with Old Testament trivia, but it turned out that Jesus knew they Bible better than they did. They accused him of breaking the law and tried to get him in trouble with Caesar, but that didn’t work either. All they managed to do was further embolden his fans, delighted as they were at seeing the scribes get outwitted.

Finally Jesus decides to ask them a question of his own, one that goes straight to the matter of his identity. Verse 35: “How is it that the teachers of the law say that the Christ (or the Messiah) is the son of David?” It wasn’t a very hard question. Granted, there was no explicit mention of the Christ as the Son of David in the Old Testament, but the law and the prophets, as well as psalms like the one we read to start the service tonight; these all implied that Israel’s Savior would come from King David’s family. King David was Israel’s last great king and savior, personally chosen by God to establish Israel as God’s chosen kingdom on earth. God went on to promise David that his kingdom would endure forever,” meaning that the kingdom of God would always have a descendent of David on its throne. Not that there was any kingdom at the moment. At the moment Israel was subject to Rome. But everyone knew that God would keep his promise. And so they waited. Some of the crowds had already hailed Jesus as the coming king. Back in chapter 11, Jesus helped matters along by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey colt, just like Zechariah prophesied the Messiah would.

But then came the curve. Verse 36: “David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, declared in Psalm 110 (with which we began the service tonight): ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I have made your enemies your footstool.’ Since David himself called the Messiah ‘my Lord,’ how can the Messiah be David’s son?” What’s Jesus trying to get at? Is he suggesting that the Messiah is not a descendent of David? Well, that was biologically true. Jesus’ connection to David was through Joseph, Jesus’ stepfather. But stepson’s possessed all the legal rights of natural born sons, so that couldn’t be it.

For a clue, turn to the rest of Psalm 110 where David extols the Messiah as a mighty warrior, one whose scepter God would extend to rule over his enemies. There would be willing troops on his day of battle, arrayed in holy majesty. He will crush earthly kings, judge the nations and heap up the dead. Psalms like this were why the Jews of Jesus day expected their Messiah to eventually roll out the heavy artillery. Chafing under brutal Roman oppression, the prayers of the people were for national deliverance.

The picture David paints of “his Lord” in Psalm 110 is certainly one of a military leader. But David also tags his Lord with an unexpected line―“a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.” Here’s a name that hadn’t shown up since way back in Genesis. There, Abraham had just succeed in routing a cluster of rogue rulers who had captured Abraham’s nephew Lot and looted his hometown of Sodom. Out of nowhere appears this character Melchizedek whose name means king of righteousness and whose title is King of Salem, which many take as the precursor of Jerusalem. This king is also described as priest of the most high God, unusual since individuals never held both jobs―separation of church and state applied even back then. Even more unusual was that Abraham, the greatest of all Old Testament heroes, gives Melchizedek a tenth of the recovered plunder and then allows Melchizedek to bless him instead of the other way around. The New Testament author of Hebrews makes a huge deal about this, concluding that “without doubt the lesser person is blessed by the greater.” Thus not only does Psalm 110 make the Messiah out to be greater than David, but greater than Abraham too. And the only one greater than both David and Abraham was no mere son of David, he had to be the Son of God too.

The only one in Mark to see this connection between Son of David and Son of God had been a blind man, of all people. In chapter 10 a blind beggar named Bartimaeus cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” He’s the only one in the gospel who calls Jesus by this title, and Jesus doesn’t refute it. In fact, he rewards it. Jesus goes over to Bartimaeus and asks what he wants. Bartimaeus says, “Rabbi, I want to see.” Inasmuch as God was the only one with power to make the blind see, Bartimaeus believes in Jesus as a son of David greater than David. Jesus restores his sight, but not without Mark making the point that blind Bartimaeus could already see even before he got his sight back. He recognized Jesus’ true identity. Granted, Peter said it too back in chapter 9, when he called Jesus the Christ, but Peter never really saw it like Bartimaeus did. Remember, once Jesus told Peter what his being the Messiah would look like―one whom the religious rulers would actually kill―Peter freaked out like the devil.

I think what Jesus is asking the scribes here is not “How can you say that the Messiah is the Son of David?” But maybe, “How can you say that the Messiah is merely the Son of David?” when David himself, inspired by the Spirit, sees the Messiah as the Son of God? Mark intends for his readers, like blind Bartimaeus, to have the faith to see Jesus true identity. Peter would finally see it―once the Holy Spirit made its impression at Pentecost. In Acts 2, Peter preached, “God raised Jesus up from the dead, of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this Spirit which you see and hear. King David did not ascend into the heavens; but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make thy enemies a stool for thy feet.’ Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ [Son of God and Son of David], this Jesus whom you crucified.”

I had the privilege of attending a conference recently where the speaker was Jurgen Moltmann, one of the preeminent theologians of the twentieth century. Though eighty-four years old, Professor Moltmann’s mind remains sharp, and he consented to spend three days answering questions from a roomful of geeks like myself. His preeminent work is entitled The Crucified God, wherein he argues that Jesus suffers on the cross not merely to appease God’s wrath―which to many sounds like divine sanction for child abuse. Instead, he asserts that on the cross God suffers too. There is no difference between the Father and the Son, both act out of passion for human redemption. Both suffer, only they do so in different dimensions of the same event, and in this way they enter into the depth of human loss most fully. The Son suffers what it is like to die. The Father suffers what it is like to lose the beloved to death. Everything that makes death bitter to the one who dies—brutality, injustice, arbitrariness—heightens the terror and suffering of that death to the ones who remain. There is no impassive God who observes and accepts Jesus’ death. There is only the God who knows both the agony of losing one’s self at the cross as the Son and as the Father the agony of losing his beloved there. Let those who have seen the pain of a loving father and child, one dying and one living, judge which half of the broken heart is lighter.

Having grown up in a devout atheist family in Germany, Moltmann served as a Nazi soldier during World War II, drafted as a teenager into Hitler’s army. Consigned to the front as a lookout for Allied attack, he was there when the British bombed his position, killing everyone else around him. Surrounded by the carnage, the question that opened him to God was “why am I alive?” He was taken prisoner to Scotland, where for the next three years he labored in a British prison camp. It was here he learned of the Nazi atrocities against Jews, and surely expected retaliation in kind from his captors. But instead, the Scottish guards treated him with astonishing kindness. This and the ministry of the Scottish YMCA while a prisoner led him to Christ. And yet as a Christian, his horror at the violence of war only intensified. Grateful for having been spared, he still could not understand how God could allow the innocent to suffer so. He concluded that the only answer to “where is God in suffering” is in the suffering itself. Everyone suffers. Everyone dies. God saves us from neither. Instead, God suffers too. If you are looking for God? You will find him in the cross-shaped places of your life.

As to the “why” of suffering, Moltmann argues that no answer would ever suffice, which is why screaming “why?” is always met with silence. However what God does do is raise Jesus from the dead. Resurrection is God’s answer to suffering, turning the cross into the sublimely ironic emblem of hope. Jesus is both priest and king. As priest, he makes sacrifice for the sake of reconciliation. As king, he rolls out the heavy artillery. Except that the heavy artillery Jesus rolls out he aims at himself. The sacrifice he makes is his own life. He suffers and dies like everybody else, as did every other son of David. But as the Son of God, he conquers death by rising from it, establishing himself as a priest forever and king who rules over all. His enemies are made a footstool for his feet―making the horrific way of the cross into the glorious stairway to heaven.

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter J

Jerome

Thanks to all (20 of you) who voted for tonight’s J-Father on the blog. For the past twelve years I’ve devoted my preaching turns in July to the Church Fathers, those personalities who through the early centuries of Christianity shaped and codified our faith. I’ve tackled them a letter at a time, which brings me this year to the letter J (and yes, I can count, it just took me three years to get through letter A). I’ve taken some liberties in my definition of “church father,” having included both women and later saints in my survey. But tonight, due to your vote, I’m back on safe ground as I speak not only of an indisputable father, but one of THE Eight Great Church Fathers along with Augustine, Ambrose, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Basil and Gregories the Great and Nanzianzus. With 61% of the vote I bring you Jerome, the patron saint of librarians and scholars whose faithfulness gave us the Vulgate, the towering translation of the Hebrew and Greek Bible into Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Vulgate was the pew Bible in every church for more than 1000 years. Vulgate comes from the Latin word meaning vernacular or common language; the same root from which we also get the word vulgar. And Jerome could be that too. “A fat paunch never breeds fine thoughts,” he said, and “A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept” as well as “do not look a gift horse in the mouth.” Speaking of gifts, he had little tolerance for tightfisted Christians, mocking them with a takeoff on the words of St. Peter, “Faith and mercy have I none, but such as I have, silver and gold, in the name of Jesus Christ I don’t give you that either.” Likewise he mocked pretentious pastors who fancied expensive clothes and long beards, “The only thought of such men is their clothes—are they pleasantly perfumed, do their shoes fit smoothly? And if there is any holiness in a beard, nobody is holier than a goat!” Of these ministers he said, “It is bad enough to teach what you do not know, but worse to be ignorant of your ignorance. Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” Renaissance artists commonly depicted Jerome poorly cloaked in red, with a skull and crucifix nearby [ARTWORK]. An ascetic, the red denotes his being one of the great church doctors, the skull a reminder of mortality, and the crucifix the symbol of Christ’s redemptive suffering for sin. Moreover, these works always depict him hunched over his translation of the Scriptures. “Make knowledge of the Scriptures your love,” he wrote, “Live with them, meditate on them, make them the sole object of your knowledge and inquiries.” Here Jerome echoes St. Paul in Romans 15: “Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us,” verse 4, “so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” As Christians, the Scriptures are the source of our knowledge and hope in God. Park Street’s Statement of Faith, reverently receives and believes “the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” However I trust you know that the Bibles you hold in your hands are not themselves “the infallible word of God.” What I mean is that your Bibles do not contain the actual letter of Paul to the Romans, but rather an English translation which is a revision of a host of other English versions of translations, many influenced by Jerome’s Latin, based upon a Greek copy which is itself a copy of many copies of a many pieces of copies of manuscripts, the earliest piece of a manuscript, called P46, which dates from around the third century AD. We do not have Paul’s original letter to the Romans itself, which is why many Christians when speaking of an infallible Bible add the caveat “original documents” to distinguish the inspired authors’ work from those who copied and translated (sometimes erroneously) through the centuries. Jerome himself wrote, “I am not so stupid as to think that any of the Lord’s words either need correcting or are not divinely inspired, but the Latin manuscripts of the Scriptures are proved faulty by the variations which are found in all of them.” Jerome acknowledged his own fallibility and made a few translation errors himself. His most famous mistranslation had to do with Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai after meeting with God. Exodus describes Moses’ face as “radiant,” or more woodenly, that he had “rays of light” coming from his head. The Hebrew word “be radiant” can also mean “be with horns,” which is the meaning Jerome chose and why it is when you visit Saint Peter’s in Rome, Michelangelo’s famous 16th century sculpture of Moses looks like THIS. Jerome’s translation of Romans 15, our passage for tonight, is not that far off. The English version of the Vulgate, known as the Douay-Rheims (completed around 1610), renders verse 4 thusly: “For what things soever were written, were written for our learning: that through patience and the comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope.” Compare that to the King James Version, completed soon after the Douay-Rheims, and you can hear the influence of Jerome: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” Christened Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius, no one is sure how he came to go by “Jerome,” though most are glad that he did. By age 30 he was already considered the smartest scholar in Christendom, and remains the preeminent figure (and patron saint) of Bible translation. Born to rich parents near modern-day Slovenia in 347, he studied in Rome and was baptized there when he was 19. Getting a Roman education usually meant a lot of field trips, but what most impressed Jerome in his travels was not the Empire’s glamour, but rather the counter-cultural asceticism he witnessed in reaction to the Empire’s excesses. By Jerome’s time, Christianity had become the official religion of the Empire, which in the minds of many, only succeeded in making the formerly persecuted Christians soft. Worried that any faith legitimized by government only takes away its saltiness (as evangelicals in America are well aware), many serious Christians took off for the desert to live lives set apart from the emerging status quo. Though the desert had been the place Jesus was tempted, these early Christians viewed the desert as the only place to escape temptation. Jerome joined them, determined to become a hermit in the Holy Land. However he only made it as far as Antioch, in Greece, where he became very enamored with Greek and the classic literature of Cicero. During a near-fatal illness, Jerome experienced one of the most famous dreams in church history. Dragged before the throne of God, he was found guilty of preferring classic Greek pagan literature to the Christian gospel. “You are a follower of Cicero, not of Christ,” thundered the judge. Deeply disturbed, Jerome vowed never to read or possess pagan literature again (akin to one who burns all of his secular albums or erases them from his iTunes library―though apparently he snuck in some Cicero a few years later). Jerome departed Antioch for the Syrian desert, only to find the rigors of desert monastic life exhausting. “Though I was protected by the rampart of the lonely desert, I could not endure against the promptings of sin and the ardent heat of my nature,” he later wrote. “I tried to crush them by frequent fasting, but my mind was always in a turmoil of imagination.” The desert didn’t do it for him, so he eventually returned to Antioch where he studied under the Gregories Nanzianzus and Nyssa (letter G). He learned Hebrew, was ordained a priest, and eventually returned to Rome to become secretary to Pope Damasus. At the Pope’s urging, Jerome plunged himself into continued Biblical scholarship and translation. Concerned for the state of Biblical accuracy, the Pope told Jerome, “If we are to pin our faith to the Latin texts, it is for our opponents to tell us which, for there are almost as many forms as there are copies. If, on the other hand, we are to glean the truth from a comparison of many, why not go back to the original Greek and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering captionerations of confident but ignorant critics, and, further, all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake?” Jerome agreed and set to work on the Vulgate. But as any recent seminary graduate can tell you, diving so seriously into Scripture study can sometimes result in an ironic kind of self-righteousness. Jerome became a harsh critic of the clergy around him, sarcastically castigating what he saw as their shortcomings. He managed to offend so many people that when Pope Damasus died, Jerome was run out of Rome. Shaking the dust off his feet on the way out, Jerome called Rome the Babylonian Harlot and set his face anew for the Holy Land. Once there, he set up shop in a monastery a former student built for him in Bethlehem, improved his Hebrew and finished the Vulgate. All told it took him twenty-three years to do it. At first, Jerome worked only from the Greek texts of both New and Old Testaments (the Greek text of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint). But he later decided that for greater accuracy, he would have to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew. The Vulgate became so widely received and revered that in 1546, the Council of Trent (famous for taking on the Protestant Reformation) declared the Vulgate the only authentic text of the Bible. The Vulgate became so firmly ensconced that Latin remained the language of Roman Catholic worship long after Latin was no longer the language anyone spoke anymore—precisely the opposite of Jerome's original intention. Latin remained the language of the Roman Catholic liturgy up until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The Vulgate’s supremacy meant that no one attempted a translation from Hebrew or Greek again until the Reformation. By now, of course, the Bible has been translated into almost every known language and dialect. Wycliffe Bible Translators reports that only around 2000 dialects, mostly minor, remain. (Wycliffe, by the way, is named for John Wycliffe who was an early advocate for translating the Bible into the vernacular. He himself translated the Bible into the common English of his day from the Vulgate, in 1382.) Currently, Park Street missionaries are at work translating in Central Asia, Thailand, Cameroon and Mozambique. My wife Dawn’s aunt and uncle recently completed their Philippine translation of the Bible in Kagayanen, a project they began on the island of Palawan in 1976. My own first foray into missions was with bible translation in the Philippines back in 1981. I was sent by Intervarsity to illustrate literacy primers that were being prepared and used in the upper reaches of Luzon, the large northern island of the Philippines. The only challenge was getting there. Because the missionary plane was down, my itinerary included a jeepney (a souped-up World War II jeep with as many chickens and goats on board as people), a motorcycle that came within inches of going over a cliff after catching a tree limb in the road, a long solitary hike along a mountainous, robber-infested road until a passerby offered to accompany me, who could have been a robber for all I knew, but turned out to be a Christian sent by God who led me across a river I had to ford carrying all my luggage on my head, only to lose my balance and get swept downstream until rescued by this Christian guide who dove into the river and pulled me ashore. Jerome was right. Translation is fraught with peril. I doubt I could ever pull off that stunt again. As Jerome wrote, “Nearly everything that is excellent about the body changes with age, and while wisdom alone increases, other things decline. Young people endure many struggles with their bodies; just as fire is stifled by green fuel, so also when youth is stifled by the enticements of vice and the titillations of flesh, it cannot display its own brilliance. But certainly those who were taught about honorable pursuits during their youth and who meditate on the law of the Lord day and night become more learned with age, more experienced with practice, wiser with the passage of time, and in old age reap the sweetest fruits from past pursuits.” Jerome died in 419, leaving behind a legacy of scholarship that still inspires all who study and translate Scripture. While we do not possess the original letters of Paul or the gospel of Mark, because of the work of faithful translators like Jerome, we can approximate a text that is as close as humanly possible to what the originals would have looked like. Moreover, the wealth of translation we enjoy as English readers enables us to mine the meaning of Scripture in ways Jerome could have only dreamed. Because the Bible is for us the revelation of God, it is mandatory that we not only be able to read it but to understand it, and not only to understand it, but to put it into practice. In the end, the word of God is not ink on a page, but etched on our hearts and acted out in our lives as the incarnation of Jesus, the body of Christ on earth. “There is a mysterious and hidden wisdom of God,” Jerome wrote. “God planned it before all ages for our glory. And this wisdom of God is Christ; he is the power of God and the wisdom of God. In fact, in the Son are found all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; he himself hidden in mystery, was destined from of old, before the ages, predestined and prefigured in the law and the prophets… So tell me, to live in the atmosphere of these Scriptures, to think about them constantly, neither to know nor to look for anything beside them, is this not to live the kingdom of heaven already, here on earth? And do not be put off, in the Scriptures, by the simplicity and bluntness of language which may be the translator’s fault or even intentional. They are always set forth in such a way that whoever comes along can find instruction so that, in one and the same sentence, both the learned and the ignorant can find the plain meaning. I am not by any means making so wild and foolish a claim as to flatter myself that I understand everything in the Scriptures. This would be like trying to gather fruit from trees whose roots are fixed in heaven. But I confess that I long to understand and I am pressing on with my endeavor. So here on earth let us study these things, the full understanding of which is laid up for us in heaven.” O God who gave St. Jerome delight in his study of holy scripture; may your people find in your word the food of salvation and the fountain of life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter J

Justin Martyr

I spent the Fourth of July week at the Cornerstone festival in rural Illinois. Cornerstone is a huge music extravaganza that features some 500 bands, mostly of the thrasher metal variety with explicitly Christian undertones despite names like The Dark Romantics, Manic Drive, Gasoline Heart and The Classic Crime. Though I’d never heard of any of the bands, I did like mewithoutyou, All The Day Holiday and Becoming the Archetype—though I couldn’t understand everything they screamed or sang or even said. The Cornerstone Festival started 26 years ago and is still run by its founders, the Jesus People USA,a delightful group of 70’s holdover hippie types (with plenty of new folks) who apparently didn’t want the attendees at Woodstock to have all the fun. Also not wanting their festival to only about music, the Jesus People invite Jesus speakers each year to discuss a variety of topics, which is how I got on the docket. One of them had read my book of evolution inspiring faith and thought that would make for some lively discussion (which it did). However, in the course of issuing my invitation, the Jesus People also noticed from our website that I like to talk about the Church Fathers, so they wondered whether I would lead a seminar series on that topic too. The Church Fathers at Cornerstone. As you can see, the Church Fathers rock.

Twelve years ago I embarked on an annual sermon series during July concerning those personalities from the early centuries of church history who fashioned our faith and codified what we have come to embrace as orthodox Christianity. As there have been numerous noteworthy Church Fathers (and Mothers) it seemed sensible to tackle them a letter at a time. However, since many of the patristic heroes cluster around the letter A—Ambrose, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas—I’m only this year getting to Letter J. For those keeping track, I have looked at the Venerable Bede, Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairveaux, John Chrysostom, Catherine of Siena, John Calvin and the baroque painter, Carravagio. Then followed Dionysisus the Areopagite, Dominic and Dante; Jonathan Edwards, Meister Eckhart, and the 20th century poet, T.S. Eliot. Letter F featured the third century African slave girl Felicitas, Francis of Assisi and Charles Finney, with an all-Gregory-all-the-time series under letter G: Gregory Thaumaturgus, Gregory of Nanzianzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory the Great. Letter H brought Hippolytus, Handel, Hildegard and the poetry of George Herbert; while last year’s I-List included Irenaeus, Ignatius of Antioch and Ignatius of Loyola.

Patristic scholars in the house rightly note that I have exceedingly stretched the definition of “church father.” Technically, to be a Church Father, you had to live in the first five centuries AD. But hey, we’re mostly evangelical Protestants here, our church history doesn’t go back a whole lot further than Joni whom we welcomed last Sunday (whose name does start with the letter J). Since I have only one Sunday left between now and my August vacation, I have a bit of a dilemma I’d like your help with again this year. I need to decide for next Sunday whether to introduce you to Jerome, considered one of the eight great “doctors” of the early church. Or Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century English mystic. To help me decide, I invite you up to the church blog to vote. I’m also open to write-in candidates, having already been chastised for not including the 16^th century St. John of the Cross, famous for his Dark Night of the Soul, a perfect way to celebrate summer. You have until Wednesday and I’ll preach the winner.

My rationale for taking an annual look at church history in the first place comes from my own conviction that our own faith derives in no small part from the faithful personalities who’ve lived it and wrestled with it through crucial moments in world history. While we Protestants may not venerate these important people as saints, we cannot separate their contributions from our own doctrines and practice. We may hold to sola Scriptura (the Bible alone as source of authority), but interpreting and obeying the Bible necessarily stands on the interpretive and obedient shoulders of past believers and thinkers. Tradition is the memory of the church. And as Augustine argued, we are who we are only through our memories.

Did you know that church tradition is actually older than the Bible you hold in your hand? The writings of the first fathers, such as Justin Martyr (tonight’s J-Father), precede the coalescing of the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments into a single authorized canon. This is not to say that Justin Martyr predates the Biblical authors, but his writing did contribute to the church’s affirming the books it did, while rejecting those books deemed heretical. We have the Bible we have in part due to the inspired discernment of the early church fathers.

Justin Martyr is so named for obvious reasons―he was executed for believing in Jesus. Among the earliest of the fathers from whom we have documentation, Justin was about as far from Jesus in history as we are from Abraham Lincoln. Born in Palestine to very pagan parents, his growing up in Palestine did make for a greater appreciation for Christianity’s Jewish background. An inquisitive lad, Justin sought meaning in life the way so many did in his day—through the discipline of Greek philosophy. Due to a variety of disappointments in his search, he was particularly open to an old man he met one day who wanted to know what Justin thought about God. Following some spirited back and forth, the old man began to explain to Justin his own faith in God as revealed in Jesus, a faith that had been foretold by the ancient Hebrew prophets. Justin wrote how “a fire was suddenly kindled in my soul. I fell in love with the prophets and these men who had loved Christ; I reflected on all their words and lives and found that this philosophy alone was true and profitable. And I wish that everyone felt the same way that I do.” Justin, like every philosopher in his day, took this newfound knowledge to the streets to share it. His adventure resulted in a text we possess called his Dialogue with Trypho.

Justin later moved to Rome and founded a Christian school―no small feat given that Christianity was a capital crime in Rome. Refusing to shy away from his faith, he wrote two bold apologies for it and sent them to Emperor himself. Far from saying you’re sorry, an apology is a fervent and rational defense of belief designed to address the hard questions and issues that Christian faith presents. As the apostle Peter famously wrote, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” Apologetics were big in the ancient world, as they have been at various points throughout Christian history. I remember attending rigorous debates in college between atheists and Christians with each side putting forward logical appeals as to why their particular worldview trumped the other. The point was to get to the actual truth, an unassailable right answer as to the existence of God or the validity of the gospel (though that rarely actually happened). In our own postmodern and pluralistic days, the very concept of actual truth is itself up for debate, though those debates rarely accomplish much either. The reason, I think, is as Augustine and Anselm asserted: We do not understand in order to believe in God. On the contrary, we must believe in order to understand. As Jeffery Pugh, Professor of Religious Studies at Elon College explains, the fact that we cannot think of God except as the very thought that lies at the outer limit of our understanding, means that reason detached from faith cannot achieve understanding [about God].”

This was Paul’s experience in his own apologetic before King Herod Agrippa and Festus the Procurator in Acts 26. Though Paul’s faith was substantially boosted by his direct encounter with the risen Jesus, his testimony of this encounter only succeeded in convincing Festus that Paul was crazy. Agrippa wasn’t persuaded either. In the end, Paul knew that only by faith could Agrippa understand, and only by prayer could Agrippa have faith. You can’t argue anyone into the kingdom of God. And yet, words still matter. But more than words. In verse 20 Paul said to Agrippa, “I preached that people should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds.” Rather than arguments won on the basis of their coherence and rationality, a genuine Christian apology of the gospel requires evidence of lives changed by it. Peter agreed. Be prepared to give reason for the hope you have, but do so “with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.”

Justin’s first apology to Emperor Antonius Pius insisted that the Christians Rome executed for refusing to worship the Emperor were the type of model citizens whose good behavior Rome should welcome. Abiding by the ethics of Jesus, Christians were honest in business, generous to the needy, responsible taxpayers and peacemakers. “For if those who learn the truth do not do what is right,” Justin wrote, “they have no defense before God. So we ask that the actions of those who are denounced to you be investigated in order that whoever is convicted may be punished as a criminal, but not as a Christian, and that whoever is shown to be innocent may be freed, committing no crime by being a Christian. Those who are found not living as Jesus taught should know that they are not really Christians, even if his teaching is on their lips, for he said that not those who merely profess but those who also do the works will be saved. … So we ask that you should punish those who do not live in accordance with Christ’s teachings, but merely say that they are Christians. We have been taught that only those who live close to God in holiness and virtue attain to immortality, and we believe that those who live unjustly and do not reform will be punished in eternal fire.”

However, in obedience to Jesus’ command to love our enemies, Justin also added, “We shall not ask you to punish our accusers, for they suffer enough for their own wickedness and their ignorance of the good.”

For Justin it was not enough to believe that Jesus died for your sins. Your life had to look like Jesus died for your sins. Such a life exhibits both a personal morality―freed from greed, lust, envy, hatred and the like―as well as the expression of virtues such as gratitude, hope, joy, justice and love. And in those moments when these virtues fail, sorrow and remorse taps into the power of grace to do better. Most profoundly, the Christian virtues of gratitude, goodness, hope, joy, justice and love display themselves amidst hardship and trial, as we witnessed last Sunday in Joni’s own story.

Justin wrote, “Christians learned true worship of God from the law and word that went out from Jerusalem through the apostles of Jesus and have fled for refuge to the God of Jacob and of Israel. Although we were full of war, of killing one another and of every evil, each one of us over all the earth has refashioned his instruments of warfare—swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks. We cultivate goodness, righteousness, kindness, faith and hope, which come from the Father himself through the Crucified One. It is evident that there is no one who can terrify or enslave those of us who have believed in Jesus. Although beheaded, crucified, thrown to wild beasts, placed in chains, fire and all other tortures, it is plain that we do not abandon our confession.”

The gospel rightly believed is the gospel rightly lived. Gratitude, hope, joy and love and the rest are not lofty theological ideals but earthy, ethical practicalities. Justin wrote, “Anyone who does not believe that God cares about [goodness and joy and justice] either manages to profess that he does not believe God exists, or makes out that God exists but approves of evil or remains unaffected like a stone and that virtue and vice are not realities, but that men consider things good or bad by opinion alone—this is the height of impiety and injustice. For we are firmly convinced that we can suffer no evil unless we are proved to be evildoers or shown to be criminals. You can kill us, but you cannot do us any real harm.”

Justin’s apology, like Paul’s before Festus and Agrippa, failed to turn the Emperor’s heart. Along with six other friends, he was beheaded for refusing to renounce his allegiance to Jesus. “You hear that we [Christians] look for a kingdom,” Justin wrote, “and you rashly suppose that we mean something merely human. But we speak of a kingdom with God, as is clear from our confessing Christ when you bring us to trial, though we know that death is the penalty for this confession. For if we looked for a human kingdom, we would deny it in order to save our lives, and would remain in hiding in order to obtain the things we hope for. But since we do not place our hopes on the present order we are not troubled with being put to death, since we all have to die sometime.” We call Justin, Justin Martyr, due to his death, but remember that martyr is merely the Greek word for witness. Martyr describes any genuine follower of Jesus who genuinely follows Jesus. The martyrs’ reward in heaven is not for their fatality, but due to their obedience to Christ. Martyrs don’t go around looking for ways to die. They just faithfully follow Jesus wherever he leads. The rest is out of their hands.

This goes for the persecution we sometimes suffer, but it goes for evangelism too. In college I remember talking and talking to a my pagan fraternity brothers about my Christian faith, but in the end none of it ever seemed to make much of a difference. However on the day before I graduated, I remember one of the wildest guys in the house, Jeff Shank, stepping into my room to thank me for trying. Not my trying to persuade him, mind you, but my trying to live by what I believed. He watched (as well as made sport). But somehow, my willingness to take it made an impact. In the end, to witness to Jesus is to speak truth and live truth as grace gives us the power to do it. The rest is out of our hands and in God’s hands, which is where it needs to be anyway.

Though Justin died, he was part of a collective witness that eventually succeeded. “Although beheaded, crucified, thrown to wild beasts, placed in chains, fire and all other tortures, it is plain that we do not abandon our confession,” he wrote. “As much as these things happen, by so much more do many others become believers and worshipers of God through the name of Jesus. It is like pruning the fruit-bearing branches of the vine in order to make other branches sprout, which become flourishing and fruitful. The same thing happens with us. For the vine, planted by God and Christ the Savior, is his people.”In time the Roman Empire would fall but Christianity would remain and grow.

Justin’s first apology remains best known for the picture it paints of early Christian worship. “On the day called Sunday there is a gathering together in the same place of all who live in a given city or rural district. The memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then when the reader ceases, the leader in a discourse admonishes and urges the imitation of these good things. Next we all rise together and send up prayers. When we cease from our prayer, bread is presented and wine and water. The leader in the same manner sends up prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people sing out their assent, saying the ‘Amen.’ Those who have means and are willing, each according to his own choice, gives what he wills, and what is collected is deposited with the leader. He provides for the orphans and widows, those who are in need on account of sickness or some other cause, those who are in bonds, strangers who are sojourning, and in a word he becomes the protector of all who are in need.”

Almighty and everlasting God, who found your martyr Justin Wandering from teacher to teacher, seeking the true God, and revealed to him the sublime wisdom of your eternal Word: Grant that all who seek you, or a deeper knowledge of you, may find and be found by you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

The End

Revelation 22

by Daniel Harrell

The end of Revelation has been a long time coming, both in terms of this sermon series (I’ve been going at it for 3 years) and in terms of Jesus’ return (2009 years and counting). The latter wouldn’t be a problem had Jesus not said “I am coming soon.” He said soon three times in this chapter alone. Some translate Jesus as saying, “I am coming quickly,” to square with his frequent analogy of coming “a thief in the night,” emphasizing the how rather than the when. Others, more troubled by Jesus’ delay, interpret “coming soon” as Jesus’ showing up in the crises of life or at the point of each individual’s death. The problem is that such an interpretation adds more difficulty to Revelation than it reduces, and interpreting Revelation is difficult already. For me the best solution to the problem comes from the apostle Peter who wrote, “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” I like that God waits in order that all might believe. The only problem here is that not all for whom God waits do believe. While those in verse 14 who “wash their robes” in the blood of the Lamb gain access to the tree of life, even at the end there remain dogs outside the gates; “people who love and live lies.”

Patience does have its limits. When the day of the Lord does come, Peter writes, it will come “like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare… but in keeping with God’s promise we look forward to a new heaven and a new earth, a world filled with God’s righteousness.” This new heaven and new earth came in Revelation 21. With it came an end to death and mourning and crying and pain. I use the past tense because John does, emphasizing the surety of God’s promises; so sure that they can be spoken of as having already happened. In the new world there is no more problem of evil because there is no more evil. In the new world God allows no more suffering because there is no more suffering to allow. For Revelation’s first readers, faithful Christians tortured by the Romans with unimaginable cruelty, these assurances of divine deliverance and divine retribution were like fresh water on parched ground. In time, the God who rules in sublime majesty would triumph in perfect justice. And in the meantime, as the crucified Lamb, the sovereign God would patiently endure injustice alongside his people. They would wait together.

One of the interesting things I hope you’ve noted about Revelation is the way it repeats itself, going over and over the same information again and again even as its imagery varies. Seven times in fact (seven being a good apocalyptic number) Revelation cycles its warnings and blessings. In chapters 1-3, Jesus called upon existing churches with forecasts of woe and weal, readying them for the apocalypse proper which commenced in chapter 4. Chapters 4-7 described seven seals of God’s judgment, which effectively rewound and repeated as seven trumpets in chapters 8-11. After that, in chapters 12-14, came a woman giving birth to a son whom a dragon awaited to devour. The dragon turned out to be Satan who introduced two beasts to the drama for an unholy trinity, one from the sea (the 666 antichrist) and another from the earth (also known as the false prophet). Next came seven bowls of wrath in chapters 15-16, which rid the world of its evil, epitomized this time by the wicked witch of Babylon. She falls again in chapters 17-19, along with the two beastly escorts and the rest of the world’s perniciousness. All that remains of evil is Satan, who meets his doom in chapter 20, which along with chapters 21 and 22 comprise the last of the seven cycles.

Chapters 20 through 22 portray the end as a glorious wedding between Jesus the Lamb and the New Jerusalem—representative of God’s redeemed people. It’s the Big Day not just for Revelation, but for the entire Bible. In Revelation 21, John writes, “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God”――just like the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost. The Holy City descends as a beautiful bride—an odd juxtaposition that we explored last time. The bride picks up on that ancient language of marriage between God and his people while the city imagery stresses his people as his dwelling place. There is no Temple in the New Jerusalem because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple, living among God’s people.

Chapter 21 provided most of the standard specs of the New Jerusalem: streets of gold and pearly gates; symbols of purity and worth. Here in chapter 22, the final details turn out to be the most significant. A river of life flows down Main Street, with the tree of life spanning the river and bursting with abundant fruit. The picture is intentionally Edenic; the Genesis curse has been reversed. In the New Jerusalem, God’s creatures no longer hide their faces in shame and seek refuge in the shadows. Instead, having had their sins washed clean by the blood of the Lamb, they freely step into the light to gaze upon God. The Old Testament had warned that nobody could see the face of God and live, a danger that mandated the high priest to identify himself with God’s name on his forehead and shield himself with smoke from burning incense when he annually stepped into the Temple’s inner sanctum. However in the New Jerusalem there is no more temple, no more smoke, no more shame and no more fear. Everyone wears the name of God on their foreheads here.

The river of life is a throwback to Eden too, but it’s an image picked up and expanded upon in Ezekiel, an Old Testament book that reads a lot like Revelation. Water is a prevalent image throughout Scripture—springs, streams and rivers of living water emitting God’s mercy find mention in the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel and Zechariah too. In the thanksgiving-like Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, prayers were offered for water as part of an elaborate water liturgy designed to solicit God’s provision of both agricultural hydration and spiritual healing. In the original tabernacle desert years, God miraculously slaked Israel’s thirst with water from a rock. The prophet Joel foresaw a miraculous provision of God’s Spirit to be “poured out” on His people, a prophesy fulfilled by Pentecost. For Zechariah, living water signaled the final triumph of God over evil: “On that day, living water will flow out from Jerusalem…The LORD will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one LORD, and his name the only name. …All nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up … to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles.” And in Ezekiel’s vision, what began as a trickle miraculously expanded into a river gushing out from Jerusalem into the Dead Sea transforming both uninhabitable desert and languid sea into a lush garden. With living water, God redeems all creation. “Where this river flows,” Ezekiel foretold, “everything will live.”

In John’s gospel—amidst all the fervor generated by the Tabernacles liturgy, a fervor enhanced by Roman oppression and the hope of God’s deliverance— a homeless, working-class carpenter audaciously stepped forward to announce: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within.” Jesus shockingly proclaimed himself to be Ezekiel’s river of living water bringing life wherever he flows. He is the Exodus Rock from which water gushed, saving rebellious wanderers from withering away forever. He is Zechariah’s Jerusalem in whom God fully resides and from whom living water drowns evil while drawing all nations to himself. Jesus embodied all of God’s great deeds past as well as God’s great promises for the future. He is the Alpha and the Omega, verse 13, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. He is the both the Root and Offspring of David, the bright Morning Star. To whomever is thirsty he will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.

The invitation to drink came originally from Isaiah, was offered by Jesus on earth, and gets reissued twice in Revelation. First in chapter 21, and then again here in verse 17. It’s an invitation to faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord. “Come and take the free gift of the water of life.” What happens when you do? Jesus says that streams of living water will flow out of you. Just like that old camp song: “I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me!” But what does this mean? John explains in the gospel how this river of life from within is the Holy Spirit; a spring of water welling up to eternal life. The Spirit, like the New Jerusalem, descended from heaven and filled the first Christians and fills every Christian since. But like any flowing course of water, it cannot remain stagnant. And thus the water that flows from Christ flows through Christians, a river of life from which others can drink as Christians speak words of truth and grace, as we love our neighbors and our enemies, as we serve those in need, and suffer for what we believe.

This is not always easy. In the King James Bible, Jesus is quoted in John’s gospel as saying, “whoever believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” The NIV omits the word belly (feeling perhaps that talk about anything flowing out of the belly may sound a bit too intestinal), but I like what belly implies. It takes guts to follow Jesus. It takes guts to be honest about your faith, guts to endure ostracism and skepticism, guts to speak against injustice and cruelty when you’d rather keep quiet and not draw attention; it takes guts to renounce materialism and free up your resources for the poor, guts to bypass lucrative, personal fame in order to serve others, guts to forgive those who’ve wronged you, guts to confess your sin to those you’ve wronged. It takes guts in our culture to save sex for your wife, guts to work on your marriage, guts to hold your tongue from gossip, guts to press on when hardship makes God seem so far away.

If the book of Revelation is about anything, it’s about having the guts to follow Christ. Interestingly in America, our paragons of faith generally remain paragons of success: the Christian who is also the accomplished scholar, the profitable businessman, the prize-winning athlete, the award-winning author, the soul-winning missionary, the popular preacher, the recovered addict, the patient restored to health, the parent of behaving children. Not that these sorts of people aren’t faithful, mind you; but imagine if they were the only portraits of faith John’s original audience got to see and hear. For these early Christians, doomed to suffer under the brutal persecution of Rome, their faithfulness looked more like failure and foolishness; more like suicide than anything approaching success. To believe got them singled out, insulted, abused, tortured and crucified. Their accomplishments were the horrors they endured. The God who saved them did not save them from suffering. The God who saved them, saved them through suffering. Their loss was their gain. To lose required courage.

One of the things that’s made it hard to preach Revelation is that there are so few illustrations of people who have to suffer for their faith in America. For the earliest Christians, “taking up a cross” meant being strung up on one. But for Christians in America, as I mentioned a few months back, in America, taking up a cross is more like taking up cross-country skiing. In theory it can kill you, I guess, but you’d have to be a real doofus. Mostly, nobody cares. Now, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I’m relieved most days that being a Christian in America (even a Christian minister) means that I’m generally considered irrelevant and harmless. I mean I could live in Pakistan where police recently opened fire on a Christian gathering. Or in Sri Lanka, where six pastors are currently being held prisoner. Or in Yemen, where three of nine people abducted with ties to missionary organizations were recently murdered. Or in Laos where thirteen Christians have been arrested without for believing in Jesus. Or in Saudi Arabia, where two Indian Christian workers remain imprisoned on charges of sharing the gospel.

The worse that ever happens to me is getting laughed at now and then. Each Thursday a group of us go out onto the Common where we feed the homeless, share our faith and conduct a little worship service. A couple of weeks back we stood and sang as it poured down rain. We sang “I’ve got a river of live flowing out of me.” The passersby, as they often do, stared at us like we were crazy. Some shook their heads, others rolled their eyes in disbelief. Every now and then we get to explain ourselves, thankfully. We’ve had to explain ourselves to the police a few times too. It takes some guts to stand on the Common and publicly worship God. Especially when you do it by singing badly. We can’t help but look like fools for Jesus some nights. And by the way, we could use a few more members if you’d like to join us.

Of course what ridicule we endure on the Common is a pittance compared to that endured by so many brothers and sisters around the world. Is it worth it? To read Revelation is to respond absolutely! Revelation paints a reward bursting with lavish abundance. A beautiful, bright city in which there is no more sorrow or trouble. No more night to fear, no more curse to dread. A limitless, gushing supply of water that ensures a cornucopia of plenty. The joy is endless and the company perfect. But can Revelation’s picture stir us as it stirred those earliest Christians? That depends. We live in a land where abundance is the status quo. We can get fresh fruit in the middle of winter and plenty of water at the turn of a spigot. Such abundance is not the global status quo. Many political scientists assert that coming world wars won’t be fought over who controls the oil, but over who controls the water. I’m reminded of a short term mission trip to West Africa many years ago where our water came from a Peace Corps well located a good truck’s ride away from our village. Once we pumped it and drove it back, it still required 24 hours of filtering before it was drinkable. One day, due to construction-induced dehydration amidst sub-Saharan temperatures as well as plain bad planning, we ran out of water a day before the water truck was due. Thirsty and afraid, our prayers took on a new urgency. Nothing amps up prayer like a crisis. As God would have it, the truck unexpectedly (and thankfully) arrived that afternoon, a day early.

The subsequent enormity of our gratitude reflected our prior desperation. Yet our desperation had been but day’s worth. Such desperation is every day life for the Africans who populate that desiccated countryside—just as is for those who live in so many other parts of the world. Ironically, getting back to the States rarely makes you grateful for the ample provisions we so enjoy in America. Instead, you tend to feel shame and disgust. I always feel it most fiercely in the supermarket. Many, upon returning stateside after stints in developing countries, break down crying when confronted by the endless aisles of groceries. It’s not the vast availability of food that’s the problem, but rather the blatant injustice of it’s all being here.

Verse 2 promises a tree of life whose leaves provide healing for the nations. On the one hand, as people through whom God’s river of life flows, the responsibility for this healing lies with us. Through ministries of relief and development along with evangelism and mission, the church is called to heal the nations. But Revelation’s vision stretches past our calling to Christ’s accomplishment. Ultimately, He will set all things to right. Amen, but when? We read about Pakistan, where the military’s battle with the Taliban is creating the country’s worst refugee crisis in 60 years. We read about Iraq, where at least seven bombs exploded Thursday amid an uptick in violence. We read about the developing world where the lives of 1.4 billion souls living in extreme poverty worsen with the recession. Is this why Revelation finds it necessary to reiterate its promises over and over again? In chapter 22, three times, Jesus insists that yes, he is coming soon, soon, soon.

In verse 7, “Behold, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy in this book.” Throughout Revelation, prophecy is known by what it does: true prophecy moves people to serve the true God and false prophecy draws people away from God. That people remain drawn away from God is evident in verse 11. “Let him who does wrong continue to do wrong; let him who is vile continue to be vile.” What reads like resignation to the state of things, or even like permission to go on doing what you’re doing, is better read, I think, as an acknowledgement of good and evil’s continued existence in the face of Revelation’s hope. This acknowledgement can be enough to make you lose hope, which is why Jesus speaks up again in verse 12. “I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what they have done.” This is bad news for the evildoer, good news for the one whom verse 11 describes as holy and doing right. While this is not about a salvation earned by good works, it is about a faith confirmed by good works. While you can do nothing to earn God’s grace, you still must do something to show you’ve received it. Living water that flows into you must flow through you too.

Jesus says, “I am coming soon, I am coming soon.” The Spirit and the bride respond by saying “Come on then,” to which Jesus assures one last time in verse 20: “Yes, I am coming soon.” John utters his own final “Amen” of trust. But then for good measure, he adds his own: “Come on Lord Jesus.” The final answer to life’s struggles and its evils do not lie in our ability to make a better world, but in God’s power to make a new one. Therefore, we pray it too, “Come Lord Jesus.”

Caesar Salad

Mark 12:13-27
by Daniel Harrell

One of my guilty internet pleasures is scanning entries at the FML website (some of you know what I’m talking about). On it, one father wrote, “Today, after the church service was over, my two-year-old daughter started to sing into the microphone. She said, ‘Here Dad, you sing.” I picked up the microphone and proceeded to sing ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ She took the microphone back and said, ‘No he doesn’t.’” Happy Father’s Day. I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when he said that the kingdom of God belongs to little children? Something about belonging to God brings out the exclusiveness in all of us. There is a nagging tendency among believers to treat God’s favor as favoritism and as license to snub those you’re certain Jesus could never love. In a conversation recently with a Christian political lobbyist, I was struck by the ease with which he vilified his opponents. I couldn’t help but wonder whether a bit more grace might win him a few more votes, and Jesus a few more converts. Perhaps such is just the contentious nature of politics. Privilege is power, and for the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, their power was threatened by this rogue carpenter who taught that God’s grace was for those who least deserved it―for the outcast and the sinner who needed it most. For the religious establishment, such unfettered accessibility to God’s favor threatened their hard-earned righteousness. If righteousness could be had for free, what good is a Pharisee?

Tonight’s the last, for now, in this series of Jesus’ red-lettered sayings from Mark’s gospel. We’ve been going at it for over a year, and will pick back up with a few more in the fall as we wrap up the church bicentennial year. Coming up for the rest of the summer is a chance to hear from several other members of our able church ministry staff, as well as the pleasure to hear Joni Eareckson Tada on July 12. As for me, I have a couple of Sundays I’ll devote to my annual church fathers’ series, this year starting with the letter J. I’m actually planning to tackle one father and one mother this year: Justin Martyr and Julian of Norwich.

As far as we know, Justin Martyr, the 2^nd century church apologist, was the first Christian author outside the gospels to quote tonight’s first set of red letters: “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” According to Justin, Jesus meant that Christians were to be model citizens in Roman society, refusing the emperor only one thing: their worship. Of course it was Justin’s refusal to worship the emperor that made Justin into Justin Martyr.

In Mark 12, the context is not emperor worship per se, but rather how to trap Jesus. The religious establishment has been gunning for him since chapter 3, but because of his rock star popularity, they couldn’t just gun him down. They either had to discredit him in the eyes of his fans, or goad him into breaking Roman law. Ergo the trick question in verse 14: “Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Answer yes, and Jesus offends the occupied Jewish masses for whom Roman taxes were both economically and blasphemously burdensome. Answer no, and Jesus incurs the wrath of Rome. Either way, the religious establishment strikes a major blow. What’s interesting is that you have the Pharisees and the Herodians working together. The Pharisees chafed under Roman rule and were offended by an Emperor with delusions of divinity. The Herodians, on the other hand, were Jews who’d hopped into bed with their Roman oppressors, setting aside convictions the Pharisees were so adamant about protecting for the sake of personal benefit.

Ironically, Jesus and the Pharisees actually shared a common faith. Both were of chosen stock, both traced their ancestry to Abraham, both worshipped at the Temple and regarded the Law as God’s sacred word, and both looked toward God’s deliverance from Roman oppression. And both remembered the Sabbath day and kept it holy. Yet their politics diverged deeply—evidenced most starkly in regard to the Sabbath. As much as sexual conduct headlines contemporary political news cycles, Sabbath conduct did so in Jesus’ day. Sabbath was a core aspect of Israel’s identity. It was the tangible thing that set them apart from their pagan oppressors. As with Christians who refuse to work on Sundays, Pharisaic Jews kept Sabbath as a way of drawing their line in the cultural sand. Yet since the Romans were apparently fine with letting their Jewish subjects keep their Sabbath for the most part, it wasn’t much of a line. For the Pharisees, however, strict Sabbath observance succeeded as a political ploy. By sticking to the Sabbath the Pharisees could look like they were sticking it to Rome. By keeping the Sabbath better than everybody else they could project an image that they were better than everybody else. They cornered the market on both prominence and piety―since to keep Sabbath kept you in God’s graces.

And they pretty much got away with it until Jesus showed up and started messing with their Sabbath setup. Of course the Pharisees, like any party in power, could not allow for this. And because politics makes strange bedfellows, they conspired with the Herodians about how to take Jesus out. For the Herodians, Jesus’ kingdom talk threatened Roman hegemony and thus their own security and status that was tied to it.

Together they suck up to Jesus in an attempt to throw him off guard and mask their scheme, calling him a man of obvious integrity and godliness. This is all true of course, but the Pharisees and Herodians don’t believe it for a minute. Mark notes that Jesus “knew of their hypocrisy.” He could smell a rat. Jesus says as much himself, asking in verse 15 why they are trying to trap him. He then gives his answer, using a Roman denarius as a prop. He asked them to identify the image on it. The coin bore the image of the current Emperor Tiberius Caesar. That Jesus uses words like image and likeness hearkens back to Genesis 1 where men and women are spoken of being made in God’s image. And thus “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” means that Caesar can have the money and all that goes with it, but God gets your very soul. This is how Tertullian, another early church father, understood it. As did Augustine. Jesus’ beef was not with the Romans. As he said to Pontius Pilate, “his kingdom was not from this world.”

Many have cited this passage as precedent for the American separation of church and state. However, that God’s kingdom is not from the world does not mean God’s kingdom has nothing to do with the world. Our faith should not be compartmentalized from other aspects of our life, political and otherwise. In the back of this sanctuary hangs a bronze plaque in honor of Arcturus Z. Conrad, pastor of Park Street for 33 years. He was quite the flamboyant figure, arriving at church Sunday mornings in his horse drawn limousine, dressed in white tie and tails underneath his preaching robe. His sermon topics typically engaged the social and political issues of his day: the necessity of prohibition, whether bank deposits should be guaranteed, the cost of coal, playing sports on Sunday, municipal corruption and graft, and the depraved presidency of FDR. Word has it that whenever Conrad caught wind of wanton legislation being debated up at the State House, he’d bolt out of the church and charge up Park St. to confront the governor and legislators head on. I guess that’s how Conrad understood “giving it to Caesar.”

Times have changed. Expectations that state government will heel to the demands of a local congregation are generally quite low—and perhaps even unwarranted. Entrusting Christian morality to secular implementation is always a dubious enterprise. Whenever Christian faith relies too strongly on governmental power to uphold its ethics, it’s life-changing power can easily dilute into a civil religion not worth its salt. And yet, there are times when God’s people are compelled toward more confrontational postures even if the expectation is failure. In Conrad’s words, we must at times “breathe that flame designed to consume us.” Such passion—albeit always infused with compassion—has been exhibited from many corners of the church as we’ve historically marshaled righteous opposition against slavery, hunger, poverty, racism, illiteracy, abortion, penal injustices, health care disparity, war and violence.

Not that this is what Jesus intends here. Here, the intention is to elude the trap. Which he does, thereby allowing the Sadducees to take their shot. Like the Pharisees, the Sadducees were members of the religious ruling council, known as the Sanhedrin. The Sadducees are mentioned only here in Mark, and unlike the Pharisees, are described as those “who say there is no resurrection” which is what made the Sadducees so sad, you see (sorry). The Sadducees rejection of the resurrection was not because the Sadducees were theological liberals. On the contrary, the Sadducees were extremely strict when it came to the law, adhering to a “Torah only” approach to Biblical authority because the Torah came straight from the mouth of God (through Moses—the Torah is the first five books of the Old Testament). For the Sadducees, if it wasn’t in the Torah, it wasn’t true. This is why Jesus answers their question from Exodus, the second book of the Torah.

The Sadducees’ question wasn’t so much to get an answer as it was to mock the idea of anybody rising from the dead―including Jesus. By this point Jesus had announced his own plans to come back to life. The Sadducees give him this silly song and dance about a childless wife with seven deceased husbands, attempting to show that once you bring in resurrection, Torah teaching on marriage no longer makes any sense. According to the Torah, a single man whose brother died without a son had an obligation to marry his brother’s widow. This provided for the widow in a society where no children and no husband meant no social security. It also guaranteed the continuance of the family line. However here, there is no line to continue because there were no children. So at the resurrection of the dead, which brother gets the wife?

Jesus replied that clearly the Sadducees understood neither the word nor the power of God―the very word and power, by the way, that paved the way for Jesus own resurrection. Jesus first teaches that there is no marriage in heaven—which explains why people say “until death do us part” in their marriage vows. Instead, as far as marriage is concerned, resurrected people will “be like the angels,” verse 25. This does not mean that we all get halos and harps and flit around eternally from cloud to cloud (as if that’s what angels do). Rather, like angels, we will enjoy eternal communion with God, the very thing that human marriage has always been intended to approximate. In Revelation 21, the New Jerusalem―representing the redeemed people of God―comes down to earth like a beautiful bride with Jesus as the husband. There’s no more marriage in heaven because everybody’s married to Jesus. As angels, they do not share in the marital bliss we humans do. But they are there cheering us on, which no doubt displeased the Sadducees since they didn’t believe in angels either.

But they did believe in the Torah, so when Jesus asks whether they’ve read the part about the burning bush (where an angel happens to appear), that had to make the Sadducees hot. Of course they’d read the part about the burning bush. OK, but had they understood it? In Exodus 3, God spoke to Moses out of that bush, identifying himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The context is Moses’ commissioning to go rescue God’s people out of Egypt, a mission Moses felt completely unqualified to do. God’s assurance of Moses’ success is based on God being the God of Abraham, et. al., the idea being that if God protected the patriarchs—who were the recipients of God’s promise to save a people for himself—then surely God will keep that promise and protect Moses too. And not just in this life, but forever. This is how it was that God could speak of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the present tense (and how Moses could show up at Jesus’ Transfiguration). If death got the last word, as the Sadducees believed, then God had broken his covenant promises. But since “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (verse 27), then Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must somehow still be alive.

But how can the patriarchs be raised from the dead if Jesus himself has yet to blaze the trail? If belief in Jesus gets you eternal life, how do you get it if there’s no Jesus yet to believe in? For the Old Testament saints, it was their hope in God’s salvation to come that comprised their saving faith. As the apostle Paul wrote regarding Abraham’s faith, “he believed God’s promise and it was credited to him as righteousness.” But how can they be raised from the dead if there had yet to be any resurrection?

In the book of Colossians, the apostle Paul describes the Colossians as “already raised with Christ” even as they still lived and breathed on earth. In doing so, like Jesus, Paul hints at a dual reality, an already-not-yet existence, an eternity that occurs even while earthly clocks still tick. According to some interpretations of Einstein’s theory of relativity, our experience of time as the constant tick-tock move toward the future is for the most part just an illusion anyway. What truly exists is a greater reality beyond the speed of light where no time passes and everything occurs in the conceptual present—whether past, present or future. God abides in this dimension unbound by time, interacting with all events of history simultaneously (sort of like a comic strip reader reading the comics). In the tick-tock of temporal time, our bodies and our selves return to the dust from whence they came, awaiting new creation. Yet in the dimension of eternity, we are seated with Christ in heaven already, just like Paul said. The day of resurrection has already happened on God’s clock; we merely await for our experience of it to catch up with it on that day when, as Revelation describes, the New Jerusalem finally comes down from heaven, and eternity and time compress together and God’s will is finally done on earth as it is in heaven.

The Sadducees were badly mistaken, Jesus said. And like the Pharisees and the Herodians, they fail to trap Jesus. That they eventually succeed at getting him killed is not a testimony to their own eventual cleverness. Instead, their eventual success at destroying Jesus only further demonstrates his authority. Not only does he teach that in God’s kingdom the only currency is sacrificial love, Jesus proves it so loving the world that he dies a sacrificial death. And not only does he teach the resurrection of the dead, Jesus proves it by doing it.

The Rejected Son

Mark 12:1-12
by Daniel Harrell

Throughout this survey of the red-letters of Mark’s gospel, the chief theme of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God was that by any earthly estimation, it wouldn’t be much of an earthly kingdom. Two weeks ago, in chapter 10, Jesus informed his followers for the third time how, as king, his coronation would look more like an execution. He would be betrayed, condemned, mocked, flogged and crucified. But then three days later, he would rise from the dead. And not only would he rise, but all who likewise took up crosses to follow him would rise from their own deaths too. I’ve told before how many years ago in this room, during a morning service sermon, an usher scurried up to the pulpit and slipped the preacher an urgent note. Turned out that one of our long-time members had just keeled over dead in his pew. The minister preaching that morning, our previous Senior Minister David Fisher, read the note and looked over and observed that sure enough, the pew spot which this longtime member occupied every Sunday—and had been sitting in when the sermon started—was now vacant.

David stopped his sermon and led the congregation in prayer for this man and his family. At the amen, we all looked over toward the empty pew where the longtime member who was dead, bless his soul, suddenly sat up. While we preach the resurrection of the dead in this church, none of us had actually ever seen one happen! (OK, the man had merely fainted, but it still looked like a resurrection.) The usher was embarrassed, but David Fisher went home feeling pretty good about his sermon that day.

Not too long after David’s miraculous sermon, it was my turn to preach and while in the middle of what I’m sure was an inspiring point, the back doors suddenly swung open and a stranger frenetically burst into the sanctuary and ran down the aisle shouting that he had a word from God for the church. The ushers tackled him and escorted him out. I ducked behind the big pulpit. The man yelled all the way out that he was a messenger sent by God. We never did get to hear what he had to say. Not that anyone remembered what I said that morning either (including myself). But I do remember this thought crossing my mind: “I sure hope he really wasn’t a messenger from God.” Having read enough of Mark’s gospel, I knew better than to write off the crazy-sounding man simply for sounding crazy.

I’ve skipped chapter 11 since we looked at those red-letters during Lent. You might remember my describing the episode of Jesus cursing a poor fig tree and clearing out the Temple in terms of a Mark Sandwich. Throughout his gospel, Mark often sandwiches one story of Jesus inside another in order to amplify the meaning of each. Jesus’ cursing a fig tree provided the bread for the Temple clearing meat. A hungry Jesus wanting some breakfast stumbled upon a fig tree that had no fruit. Like any of us might do when we’re hungry, Jesus got irritated and cursed the fig tree to death. Why didn’t he simply command the tree to pop out some breakfast? Instead, Jesus comes off as petty and petulant, picking off a helpless plant just because it had nothing to pick. But that was the point. Remember, the fig tree was figurative.

Throughout the Bible, God’s people are compared to fruit trees, expected to flower and bloom and produce fruitful deeds in accordance with their redeemed nature. Yet in accordance with their human nature, the chosen people resisted his grace, treating his favor as favoritism and as permission to do as they please. The prophet Jeremiah stood in the Temple centuries prior and conveyed God’s displeasure. “When I would gather you, declares the LORD, there would be no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered, and what I gave you has passed away from you.” Their sin ran deep―but the topper was the way they used the Temple system to cover their rear. Jeremiah (sounding like a crazy man himself) yelled, “Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to idols, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are saved!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?” Jesus quoted this last line in his own Temple tirade, intentionally reenacting Jeremiah. If you read “den of robbers” as “hideout for evil,” then you understand how the people regarded the Temple as a safe-house for their sin. No wonder Jesus got so furious.

However he finished the sandwich not with promises of retribution, but with prayers for grace. “When you pray, forgive, if you have anything against anyone,” Jesus told his disciples, “so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive your sins too.” For a Messiah in such a bad mood, this was a remarkable concession. He angrily killed a tree to predict the end of relationship between God and sinners, then prayed to throw the whole mountain of mess into the sea, only to turn around and forgive. Remember that whenever Jesus spoke of the Temple he also spoke of himself. Both were the dwelling places for God. And both would be destroyed. The curse Jesus put on the fig tree and the Temple was the curse Jesus put on himself. And yet the curse Jesus put on himself was one intended for you and me. And if you can accept that, then the grace of God will not only save your soul, but make you fruitful and raise your body once its dead.

Unfortunately for the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, accepting that from Jesus was out of the question. They viewed him as a flagrant blasphemer who was always interrupting their sermons claiming to have a message from God. It’s easy when you’re a religious professional, a master of divinity, having devoted all those years to training and study, having kept company with scholars of impeccable wisdom, having lived week in and week out with your head in the Bible, musing on the Greek and the Hebrew, acquainted with the nuances, the lingo and the theological terms—it’s easy to presume that you’d know a genuine messenger from God if you saw one. The religious types in Jesus’ day, presuming to know God inside and out, insisted that as far as Messiahs went, God would never send one with Jesus’ pedigree. The clincher came after he cleared the money changers from the Temple courts. The chief priests, teachers of the law and the elders stormed over to him demanding to know who told him he could behave as he’d behaved in God’s sanctuary. It obviously hadn’t been God. As usual, Jesus answered their question with a question they couldn’t answer―this one about John the Baptist and baptism―and then commenced to tell them the parable read from tonight’s passage.

It’s a story they would have already known. It came straight from Isaiah chapter 5: “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard… he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.” The priests and elders would have known the vineyard to be a metaphor for Israel, bad fruit a metaphor for Israel’s disobedience and the vineyard owner a metaphor for God. However Jesus, taking a few liberties with Isaiah’s imagery (which Jesus being Jesus was at liberty to do) shifted the focus off the bad fruit and onto the ones who grew it: a group of tenant farmers whom Jesus introduced into the story.

It was customary for prosperous absentee landowners to lease out land to tenants who would manage the vineyards, farm the land, turn a profit and then pay rent with a percentage of those profits. The absentee owner in this story happened to be very absent—off in some far country—so he sent a servant around at harvest time to collect the rent. The tenant farmers, for some inexplicable reason, decided they weren’t going to pay. So they grabbed the servant, beat him up and sent him away empty-handed. The owner sent another servant whom the tenants insulted then pelted with rocks. The owner sent still another servant and this one the tenant farmers murdered! It was ludicrous. Still, the vineyard owner kept sending servant after servant and the tenants kept beating and killing them all. The vineyard owner was either a sucker for sedition or unbelievably long-suffering.

Finally, all out of servants, the owner decided to send his only beloved son. (An obvious tip-off to those who’d been at Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration and heard God refer to Jesus that way.) “Surely they’ll respect my son,” the owner reasoned. But the tenant farmers had already gotten away with murder, why change their ways now? Instead the tenant farmers said to each other, “This is the heir to the vineyard! Come on, let’s kill him too and the inheritance will be ours!” So when the son arrived, they killed him and tossed his body out of the vineyard without even the decency of a proper burial. What sort of idiots were these farmers? Their lease arrangement was customary and profitable. Why did they brutalize the vineyard owner’s servants? Did they think the owner was that far away? Or were they trying to cover up the bad fruit their work had produced? And how did they figure they would inherit anything by killing the son anyway? They were tenants not kin! Moreover, the vineyard owner, the murdered son’s father, was still alive and well and soon to be breathing down their necks! What did they think that the vineyard owner was going to do to them once he finally returned? Jesus answers this one: “The vineyard owner will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” Mark adds in verse 12 how the religious rulers “knew Jesus had spoken this parable against them.” I’m sure they did.

Jesus rubbed it in. “Haven’t you read the Scriptures?” Of course they had. Having devoted all those years to training and study, they had their Bibles down pat. They would have been able to recite Psalm 118:22 by heart: “The stone the builders tossed out has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous, astonishing really.” No doubt the religious leaders and chosen people had always considered this verse to be speaking about them. But Jesus rejects that application and applies the verse to himself. He declares himself to be the rejected cornerstone―rejected by the chosen people themselves. The rejected become the rejecters. And yet the stone tossed out by the builders, like the beloved son the tenants tossed out of the vineyard, ironically ends up being the cornerstone of God’s redemptive plan.

The religious leaders committed a double sin: they not only rejected God’s beloved Son—along with all the servant-prophets who had previewed his arrival—but they outrageously ventured to usurp what belonged to God for themselves. Our tendency is to write off them off as corrupt, greedy, power-hungry malcontents whose illusions of entitlement blinded them into seeing themselves as immune from reaping what they’d sown. You feel no sympathy for them. Certainly no affinity with them. But still, the thought does cross your mind, would I have been so righteous and blind to Jesus too? While the gospels tend to group the religious leaders together as one insidious lot and label them Pharisees, there were surely those whose faith in God was genuine. Surely there were those who devoutly studied their Torahs, who worshipped sincerely, who cared for people, aided the sick, thoughtfully preached, who abided by the law while they eagerly and fervently awaited the coming Messiah. Yet surprisingly the gospels make no distinction between the faithful and the deceitful when it came to recognizing Jesus. The faithful priests and elders missed the Messiah too.

Yet if all the priests and elders weren’t in fact as deceitful as Jesus paints them in this parable, why does he use such a broad brush stroke? Understand that Jesus often employed hyperbole in his parables in order to elicit exaggerated responses which would then be turned back on the hearer’s head as either indictment or grace. In this parable, the tenant farmers’ over-the-line behavior elicits outrage. They deserved the punishment they got. The hyperbole, however, stresses not how all were equally evil, but rather, that all were equally ignorant.

And not only them. Just as surprising, if not more, was the fact that even some of Jesus’ own followers failed to recognize him even after he had risen from the dead. As startling as it was for us to see that longtime member sit up in his pew, it must have been terrifying for the disciples to see Jesus following his crucifixion. Luke reports that when Jesus showed up that Easter Sunday night, his disciples mistook him for a ghost. In John’s gospel, as I mentioned last Sunday morning, after the resurrection the disciples hilariously went back to their boats to fish, as if all they had been through with Jesus was nothing more than extended time off (“Wow, that was some trip. OK, now back to work.”). The resurrected Jesus showed up again, this time on shore to wave them in, basically saying “Hey guys, we’re not done!” Though I still think he should have walked out to get them.

The stranger who burst in on my sermon those many years ago probably wasn’t a messenger from God, but he made me wonder. He made me wonder about the times I do refuse to recognize the hand of God, the times I’m reticent to listen and quick to judge. I may not be as twisted and deceitful as Jesus’ parabolic tenants, but I can be just as ignorant. I can claim to see and still not get it. Rather than taking up my cross, I whine about my inconveniences and sufferings as though I deserve something better. I get bitter because life hasn’t turned out like I thought it should. I selfishly want what I want and disregard people in need. I forget that all I have is gift from God and how that should elicit from me gratitude, humility, generosity, and service. And I rationalize all of this based on perceptions of a Jesus who loves me just as I am—even though he was clear I can never follow him and stay just as I am.

And thus I return to the communion table, this fruit of the vineyard, to have my perceptions fixed; and I do so without presuming upon God’s grace, but confessing my genuine need for it. Join me.

The Big Day

Revelation 21

by Daniel Harrell

Happy Pentecost! I know. It doesn’t quite carry the same ring as Merry Christmas or He is Risen. Perhaps Happy Birthday would be more appropriate. After all, Pentecost is the official birthday of the church. Sadly, Pentecost doesn’t get all the attention that Christmas and Easter do. I doubt that many of you are exchanging Pentecost presents or heading out after church for a tasty Pentecost brunch. Part of the problem there could be that the Pentecost image of fiery tongues descending on people’s heads doesn’t really inspire many appetizing food options. It is a weird picture―though not necessarily any weirder than a virgin birth or a man rising from the dead. And it’s certainly no weirder than anything we’ve encountered so far in the book of Revelation. For three years I’ve been walking us through Revelation during my morning preaching turns, and we’re almost done. Chapter 21, while not a traditional Pentecost text, does supply its own dramatic descent. Only rather than flaming tongues coming down, John writes in verse 2: “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.”

For me the best part about weddings in when the bride comes down the aisle. Everyone is poised on the edge of their pews, phones and cameras ready. The mother of the bride dabs away happy tears. The organ swells and the back doors swing open to unveil the bride’s glorious presence. There’s always an audible gasp of delight, always a giddy gleam that crosses the groom’s face as he realizes “this gorgeous woman coming down that aisle is mine!” I’ve seen many a bride come down that aisle—but I’ve yet to see one single bride swing down from the balcony. That would be weird—though that’s sort of how she does it in Revelation 21.

Granted, the bride who descends in Revelation is not a woman but a city as big as nearly half of the United States. Weird again: envisioning a large city clad in a wedding dress stretches the imagination. Nevertheless, Jerusalem always held a special spot in God’s heart. From the time of King David, Jerusalem represented God’s people Israel, the Lord’s beloved bride. Jerusalem was the home address of God’s House; the place where he lived in his holy Temple. Interestingly here, the New Jerusalem has no Temple. It’s been replaced, or better, rendered obsolete. Verse 22: “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” Jerusalem’s Temple was God’s House, but it was not necessarily home sweet home. The Temple functioned more like self-imposed house arrest. Due to God’s righteous hostility toward infidelity and sin, God knew that if he ever left his house, his often unfaithful people were done for.

That the Temple curtains ripped in two at Jesus’ crucifixion was not an invitation to an open house, but represented open season on sin. The curtains tore as the righteous anger of God against evil finally escaped and tore into Jesus—the Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world by taking sin onto himself. The Temple was now obsolete. The crucified Lamb made it possible for God to dwell among his people and not kill them. From the earliest chapters of Scripture, God promised that one day he would live and walk among his people again―just as he had done at creation. With new creation, it finally happens. In verse 3, a loud voice announces from the throne that the dwelling of God is now with his people. The wedding is on.

Chapters 20 and 21 portray the big day not just as the big day for Revelation, but the big day for the entire Bible. Revelation is not so much Biblical prophecy as it is the fulfillment of prophecy. Way back in Isaiah, the Lord declared, “Behold, I will create (future tense) new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. Be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.” In Revelation 21, John writes, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth (past tense), for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. I saw the Holy City (past tense), the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God… He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” The past tense indicates the surety of God’s promises, so sure that their fulfillment can be envisioned as having already happened. Verse 6 confirms this: God says, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.’” This too fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy; already rehearsed by Jesus with the woman at the well. “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters,” Isaiah said. “Whoever drinks the water I give him never thirst,” Jesus echoed, “The water I give will become a spring of water within (read the Holy Spirit here) welling up to eternal life.”

On the one hand then, Revelation is nothing new. Yet on the other hand, God is making everything new. “New” is this buzzword here, so much so that we probably should call the end times the new times, or even better, the good times, given what finally transpires. There’s no more death or mourning or crying or pain, all these things are gone. No more terminal illnesses, no more incurable diseases, no more fatal accidents or funeral services. There’s no more problem of evil because there is no more evil. God allows no more suffering because there is no more suffering to allow. There’s no more struggle between faith and science and reason because we “see face to face.” There’s no more doubt because “the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (to cite Isaiah one more time). There’s no need for sun and moon anymore because the glory of God provides all the light―a light that so shines in the darkness that darkness becomes as day.

It’s literally heaven on earth. Note that unlike popular depictions, heaven comes down to us, we don’t fly away to it. That John sees a “new heaven and a new earth” means that he sees them together as one. The sea―that satanic abode of chaos, disorder and darkness that kept them separate―is all dried up. Heaven and earth wed as the New Jerusalem, a city enormous enough to encompass all of new creation. “New creation” does not imply “brand new” as if the very good of God’s original work somehow went bad. The earth is not a throwaway planet any more than our bodies are mere jars of clay to be discarded when we die. Christians hold to the resurrection of the body, modeled after Jesus’ own resurrected body, by which we mean the ultimate healing and restoration of our actual selves. Paul describes it as a glorified body, freed from the fallout of finiteness. What is true for the creature is true for creation. The dust of creation to which all living things return when they die is the same dust out of which resurrection and new creation rise. There is a fundamental solidarity between creatures made in God’s image and the creation in which God’s image dwells. There is a fundamental continuity between creation and new creation. In the New Jerusalem, the Lord’s prayer gets answered: God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven because earth and heaven are one.

As with Ezekiel in the Old Testament preview, John gets an architectural tour of the New Jerusalem. Its 12,000 stadia dimensions make the New Jerusalem a thousand times larger than what Ezekiel saw―demonstrating that God doesn’t just keep his promises―he surpasses them. The 12,000 stadia city has twelve angels at twelve gates on which were written the names of Israel’s twelve tribes atop twelve foundations inscribed with the twelve apostles. (Twelve is clearly a very important Biblical number). The city sparkles with every sort of precious jewel: jasper, sapphire, agate, emerald, onyx, topaz, amethyst and the rest (12 in all, of course). There are plenty of pearls too, which make for the Pearly Gates. Unfortunately, once you add the streets of gold you soon start visualizing that stereotype of heaven where everybody wears white robes and wings, plays the harp and flits around from cloud to cloud. Why anybody would want to spend eternity like that is hard to say. Cartoonists depict long lines of people eager to get in with St. Peter at the reception desk doing his best imitation of St. Nick ―checking his list twice to find out who was naughty or nice.

My own recent survey of New Yorker cartoons on this theme found people saying to Peter things like, “You’re kidding! You count S.A.T.s?” or “Wait, those weren’t lies. That was spin!” However, the best lines come out of Peter’s own mouth: “No, no, that’s not a sin, either, silly. My goodness, you must have worried yourself to death.” or “You had more money than God. That’s a big no-no.” or “Yes, but you were the defender of the wrong faith.” or “You’re a theologian? You guys are always fun.” Or “Bad timing. He’s in one of his Old Testament moods today.”

Of course there is no Peter at the gate in Revelation, though there does seem to be a list. Verse 27 mentions “the Lamb’s Book of Life” which presumably does not contain those people listed in verse 8: namely “the cowardly, the faithless, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters and all liars.” If you’re like me, you read verse 8 and get a little worried. Maybe I never killed anybody, but I have been a chicken when it comes to my faith. I’ve told a lie or two as well. And then there’s my flat screen TV that could get construed as an idol. In chapter 20 a great white throne split earth and sky and all of the dead, great and small, stand before the throne as these books were opened. The dead were judged according to what they had done. This reminded me of being taught how on Judgment Day, God would replay my life as a movie for everybody to watch. It would not be a pretty picture. Which is why the Psalmist asks, “If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, who could stand?” Except that here in Revelation, God pulls out his record book. It appears that we’re doomed.

And we would be―if not for Jesus. In Jeremiah, God promised a new covenant, one that Jesus sealed with his own blood, shed for you. This new covenant (not brand new but renewed) made it possible for God to promise in Jeremiah, “I will forgive your wickedness and remember your sins no more.” Thus the Psalmist could answer his own question: “With you, O Lord, there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” The Lamb’s Book of Life is not the book of good behavior, but the book of undeserved grace. The record books of chapter 20 provide corroborating evidence. As Jesus often said, “you can only know a tree by its fruit.” The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian believers, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” This pronouncement of final Christian judgment tacitly indicts that ancient tendency to take God’s grace for granted and treat salvation as a free pass to do as you please. While it is true that you can do nothing to earn God’s grace, you still must do something to show you’ve received it. Salvation may have no requirements (aside from a desperate need for it), but it does carry ethical obligations. Revelation labels the faithful as those “who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.” “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom,” Jesus warned, “but only those who do the will of my Father.” You can tell a tree by its fruit.

And yet the Bible also speaks of such fruit as fruit of the Spirit. The God who promised in Jeremiah to forgive and forget also promised to write his law on your heart. And since that might not be enough, God promised through Ezekiel to provide you with a new heart too. What salvation demands, God provides. God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and carefully keep my laws.” We see this at Pentecost as a band of timid disciples turn into inspired apostles. Between the resurrection and Pentecost, the disciples had hilariously gone back to their boats to fish, as if all they had been through with Jesus was nothing more than extended time off (“Wow, that was some trip. OK, now back to work.”). The resurrected Jesus showed up on shore to wave them in, basically saying “Hey guys, we’re not done!” Jesus then had to take off for heaven, but promised to send help: help that comes at Pentecost. Overcome by the Spirit, the disciples become the ones in verse 7 who overcome by the Spirit and thus inherit everything God has to offer.

To overcome is to live for Jesus like Jesus lived―to turn the other cheek, to do good to those who hate you, to pray for those who mistreat you and even lose your life (or at least your lifestyle) for the gospel―things that in this life tend to get you little more than two bloody cheeks, a doormat for a backbone, more mistreatment, less money and an early grave. To overcome, to conquer, is ironic victory. Still, in Revelation, these victories make up the fabric of your bridal gown. Chapter 19 described how “‘Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.’ (Fine linen stands for the righteous deeds of the saints.)” This same fabric is also the foundation for the New Jerusalem. Back in chapter 3, Jesus said, “I will make the ones who overcome pillars in the city of God… the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from God.”

What seems like such an odd juxtaposition of metaphors now makes more sense. In verse 9 an angel invites John to come see the bride but shows him the holy city. Those who overcome are both a people and a place, or more specifically, the redeemed people of God are the place where God dwells. Rather than us dying and going to heaven, Christ died and comes to us by his spirit so that when we do die, we will abide with him forever, an eternity that has already started. John writes, “I saw the Holy City (past tense), coming down out of heaven from God――just like the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost. We’re in the final descent――all that awaits is a safe landing and the joyous reunion.

Dawn, Violet and I fly south to visit family tomorrow to celebrate my parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. We’ll go through that familiar drill as the cabin is prepared for arrival. Seatbelts fastened. Seatbacks and tray tables in their upright and locked positions. Land. Listen for the ding so you can leap from your seat like a runner out of a starting block. Knock people in the head with your carry-on luggage. Oh, and call somebody on your cell phone as soon as possible (if only to pretend that you actually have friends in town).It used to be that you couldn’t fake that. Not only were there no cell phones (as hard as that may be for some of you to believe), but they also used to let people through security without a boarding pass. That meant that friends and family would be waiting to welcome you as you came through the jet-way. I used to love the way you’d see all those smiling faces―and scan the crowd to find the ones looking for you, get all happy and hug when you found them. I loved it so much that it made me sad for people who had nobody waiting and looking for them.

So sad, in fact, that as a teenager (living as we did in a rather boring town), a bunch of us kids, for fun, would go out to the airport to greet lonely people as they came off their flights. We’d stand there with wide grins on our faces, waving and looking until we spotted someone who had nobody there to welcome them home. We’d walk up to these perfect strangers, our arms outstretched, and give them a big hello and a hug, telling them how happy we were that they had arrived safely, and how was their trip, and have a nice day in our boring little town or wherever your final destination may be. They’d look at us all confused―“do I know you?”—and no doubt think we were crazy, and yet nobody refused the hug, overcome as they were by our spirited welcome. After their initial confusion, they’d usually hug back, say thank you and then leave the terminal with a shake of the head and smile on their faces―smiles that I like to think they passed on to others.

OK, it was a weird thing for a bunch of kids to do (like I said, our town was boring), but really no weirder than a city in a wedding dress or flaming tongues falling down out of the sky. Overcome by the spirit, the disciples surely had smiles on their faces as they ran out into the streets of Jerusalem to overwhelm everyone else with the gospel (in their own languages no less). The new covenant expanded the original boundaries of God’s people to welcome all nations―strangers and aliens with no one to welcome them home. Everybody thought the disciples were crazy―and drunk. And yet few rejected God’s embrace that day. The good news of God’s grace not only put smiles on their faces but salvation in their hearts. The prophets had predicted this too. In Isaiah we read of the new Jerusalem, “In the last days the mountain of the LORD’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it…. I will build you with stones of turquoise, your foundations with sapphires. I will make your gates of sparkling jewels, and all your walls of precious stones. In righteousness you will be established … you will have nothing to fear.” This has Revelation written all over it. The light of God’s city, the light of God’s spirit within his people beckons all to enter its gates―gates that are always open with lights that never go out.

What Do You Want?

Mark 10:32-52
by Daniel Harrell

Tonight marks Ascension Sunday on the Christian liturgical calendar—the seventh and last Sunday of Easter. Jesus’ ascension into heaven is not something we think about too much. Among the Gospel writers, only Luke records the event―twice—once in his Gospel and once in the book of Acts. Mark mentions it, but only in the tacked on verses at the end of chapter 16 which Mark himself didn’t write. After appearing to his disciples and others post-resurrection, Jesus “was taken up onto heaven” before their eyes, sort of like the prophet Elijah got carried away from earth, only Jesus didn’t require a chariot of fire. His going up on Ascension Day readies us for the Holy Spirit coming down (with tongues of fire) at Pentecost next Sunday. Though we don’t think about it too much, the Ascension provides a core source of our hope and confidence as Christians. Not only did God raise Christ and seat him at his right hand in heaven, but as Paul wrote to the Ephesians (while they still were on earth, mind you), “God has raised us up and seated us with Christ in the heavenly places.” The implications are significant. By faith in Jesus, not only is your seat in heaven is already saved, but as far as God is concerned, you’re already sitting in it!

“You have been raised with Christ” already, Paul reiterated to the Colossians, “therefore set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God”—and where you’ll be seated someday too. In the meantime, since your future is already set, you might as well go ahead and live like it now. As for what this looks like, Paul presents both positive and the negative aspects. As for the positives, Paul lists compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness and above all love, “which binds them all together in perfect unity.” As for the negatives, he lists sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed. It is interesting that this mostly sexual list ends with the economic sin of greed, which Paul calls idolatry (Biblical code for serious commandment breaking). Both economic and sexual sin are fundamentally matters of covetousness—which was what kept the rich young ruler out of the kingdom last Sunday. Covetousness turns love on its head, perverting self-sacrifice into self-gratification. Similarly with anger, revenge, malice, slander, abusive language and lying which are also parts of Paul’s negative list. We covet and do not get, so we get angry and get even, and we lie to make ourselves appear better than we are.

As the global economy continues to sputter and people struggle with losses of every kind, I’ve been intrigued in reading the various opinions behind the causes. Last week I mentioned Bernie Madoff, whose diabolical Ponzi scheme embodies many of the meltdown’s traits: “the illusion of expertise, the belief in getting something for nothing, the mirage and subsequent evaporation of wealth.” But as Nick Paumgarten observes in his most recent New Yorker article on the economy, Madoff is in some ways a distraction, a cover for the more systemic and serious flaws that reach down to the very core of human nature itself. The most insidious root of all human failure―economic and otherwise―remains what it has always been―base covetousness. Wanting more. As one financial analyst turned philosopher put it, “There are two things about human nature that we know for sure. One is that every person wants to be the center of the universe. And the other is that we all want to see what we own go up in value all the time.”

This desire for personal greatness and value—this covetousness—lies at the center of tonight’s red letters from Mark’s gospel. For the third time, Jesus informs his followers what following him entails—giving them, perhaps, once last chance to change their minds. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God alright, but he would not be the kind of Christ that the crowds wanted—no superstar, no superhero, no political leader or war general. Instead (or as a result), Jesus Christ would be betrayed, condemned, handed over, mocked, flogged and crucified. And then three days later, he would rise. James and John, eyewitnesses to the Transfiguration back in chapter 9, decide that rising from the dead is no longer outside the realm of possibility. They overlook Jesus’ gruesome descriptions of his demise and go straight to the punch line. If the seats in heaven are already set, James and John want to ride shotgun. Mark makes no attempt to soften their audacity, though he does report the remaining disciples indignation. However I don’t imagine that they’re angry about James and John’s request as they are at themselves for not thinking of it first. To envy is to covet too.

Jesus can’t believe what they’re asking. Had they not been listening to anything he said? “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” While wine and water may seem harmless enough, especially for those of us who’ve been baptized and taken communion a million times, for Jesus the implications were dire. Recall that throughout the Old Testament, the metaphor of the cup symbolizes the apportionment of God’s blessing, as in “my cup runneth over,” but also his curse. Jeremiah, Revelation and elsewhere describe this cursed cup as one “filled with the wine of God’s fury” to be poured out on all evil. In Gethsemane, the cup Jesus sought to eschew was the one brimming with God’s wrath against sin. For Jesus to drink this cup was to take on the full freight of God’s judgment. Likewise with water. The two Old Testament water episodes referred to in the New Testament as baptisms—Noah’s Ark and the Red Sea Crossing—are both judgment events. Like wine, baptism is the watermark of God’s wrath. Apropos to Jesus, the cup and the baptism are symbols for the cross.

Had James and John appreciated the dark side of wine and water, perhaps they would not have answered Jesus with such enthusiasm. After all, when the wine and water do eventually flow, James and John scatter and hide along with just about everybody else in Mark. Nevertheless, Jesus affirms that in time they will suffer for his sake. However, to reserve the best seats on either side in glory was not up to him. Jesus said, “These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.” As far as we know, the only ones who ever actually got placed beside Jesus were two criminals crucified on either side.

Jesus takes the opportunity to calm everybody down by reminding them again about the distinction between the greatness to which James and John aspired and that which they would actually achieve. Jesus said, “You know that those who are regarded as great ones among the Romans throw their weight around and exercise authority.” (Yeah, they knew―the Romans treated them like their slaves.) So Jesus said, “whoever wants to become great must be a servant and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” And before they could object and complain about being treated like doormats, Jesus reminded them that “even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Most Christians have heard this stuff so many times that it hardly even registers anymore. We nod, resolve to do better, but don’t change too much because deep down we still want to be the center of the universe. Sure, we admire those who’ve managed to take Jesus seriously, people like Mother Theresa or, well, like Mother Theresa (and she’s been dead twelve years). Or like Henri Nouwen. The late Henri Nouwen was a very popular and powerfully inspirational writer who made his name writing about Jesus’ name. In one of his best-known works entitled In the Name of Jesus, Nouwen wrote that, “The way of the Christian is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on a cross. This might sound morbid and masochistic, but for those who have heard the voice of Christ and said yes to it, the downward-moving way of Jesus is the way to the joy and the peace of God, a joy and peace that is not of this world. To follow Christ is to follow in weakness and humility wherein the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. I am not speaking about a psychological weakness in which Christians are simply the passive victims of the manipulations of their milieu. No, I am speaking of a weakness whereby human power is constantly abandoned in favor of love. True followers of Christ are people so deeply in love with Jesus that they are ready to follow him wherever, always trusting that with him, they will find life and find it abundantly.”

Nouwen practiced (and experienced) what he wrote in the latter days of his life, shunning whatever literary fame he had achieved in order to serve the severely disabled in a community outside Toronto. I remember taking a class on Christian Spirituality with Henri Nouwen years prior to that. I was recounting recently how on one occasion, just before a spring break in what turned out to be an unforgettable object lesson, he asked us as a class who among us didn’t have any plans for the ensuing vacation week. A few people timidly raised their hands (basically admitting they had no plans and no friends) and Nouwen asked whether they’d be up for flying to Haiti to spend a week working among the desperately poor at a Catholic mission there. Oh, and you’ll be leaving to tomorrow. Nonplussed, the ones who raised their hands said OK (you couldn’t say no to Henri Nouwen). The rest of us, relieved that our spring breaks were left intact, were then asked by Nouwen to get out our wallets. He pulled out a big bucket and passed it around and told us to empty our wallets in Jesus’ name. He used the money (our spring money money) to buy the plane tickets for the others along with supplies and sent them to Haiti the next day.

Several years ago I heard a talk by the late Mike Yaconelli, another writer and minister who was deeply influenced by Nouwen’s writing, especially this book, In the Name of Jesus. Yaconelli had this nutty practice of tracking down living authors whose work had an impact on him, and then traveling to wherever the author lived in order to thank him or her personally. So Yaconelli located Nouwen in Toronto and made an appointment to visit. Unfortunately, his flight got delayed and he was unable to let Nouwen know he’d be late―something to do with misplacing a phone number. He finally arrived in Toronto, but over three hours late.

Having read many of Nouwen’s other books, Yaconelli was fairly familiar with what to expect as he finally made it to Nouwen’s door. Henri Nouwen’s grace and compassion were legendary. Yaconelli knocked. He heard a melodramatic stomping followed by a violent ripping open of the door revealing not the love of God but the wrath of Henri Nouwen. Irate, Nouwen lit into Yaconelli: “Where the hockey puck have you been!? Why didn’t you call?! Do you know you’re three hours late?! I have a schedule to keep! Do you think that you’re the most important person in the universe?” Yaconelli was for a second dumbfounded, but mostly just offended. A lifetime youthworker, he knew how to react in the face of temper tantrums. He barked back to Henri: “HEY, IN THE NAME OF JESUS, DUDE! REMEMBER?”

For you Nouwen fans, you’ll be relieved to know that he apologized and went on to have an enjoyable visit with Mike Yaconelli. But for Yaconelli, it was that initial, stressful encounter that proved most instructive. Not because it tarnished Nouwen’s reputation, but because it reinforced how hard following Christ truly is—even when you’re doing it. Jesus agreed. It is hard―as hard as threading a camel with a needle. As hard as hanging on a cross.

Tonight’s passage concludes with Jesus, his disciples and the crowd coming upon a blind beggar named Bartimaeus. Having heard the rumors that this may be the long awaited Messiah of God, Bartimaeus gives him a shout out: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Using the title “Son of David” was Bartimaeus’ way of saying he believed the rumors were true. He’s the only person in the entire gospel who ever uses it. Many in the crowd berate Bartimaeus, they tell him to shut up and get lost. But what more does he have to lose? So he yells all the louder: “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus, not refuting the title, calls him over and asks him in verse 51, “What do you want me to do for you?” which if you’re paying close attention, is the exact same question he asked James and John back in verse 36. The contrast is intentional. Throughout Scripture, sight and blindness are metaphors for genuine faith and the lack of it. James and John wanted to be great in the eyes of others. Bartimaeus wanted eyes to see true greatness. Jesus obliged. “Your faith has healed you,” he said. Or as it literally reads, your faith has saved you. In other words, blind Bartimaeus could already see—even before he got his sight back.

The contrast between the request of James and John and that of blind Bartimaeus is intentionally stark. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether Mark intends more than merely contrast. If it is true that we each want to be the center of the universe and have our values rise even as Christians, then Jesus’ invitation to servitude and slavery is useless. We’re just not going to do it. Sure, we’re happy for Mother Theresa and Henri Nouwen, but their servitude made them famous. Most of our good deeds just go unnoticed. I was amused by the story about one church’s noble attempt to get its congregation to serve more. The pastor challenged each member to “outserve” the other for a year with the “winner” (the one who served the most people) getting a cash prize at the end. Reportedly the church never helped so many needy people as it did that year. And no one considered this the least bit ironic. I read about it in a column devoted to “good ideas for pastors to use.” Greed as motivation for love. I don’t know, didn’t Jesus himself caution against any kind of recognition or reward when it came to obedience? Something about not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing?

But what good is doing good if nobody sees it? I want to be noticed. And thanked. And appreciated. And applauded. Maybe this is why Mark puts Bartimaeus right behind James and John. Not so much as a contrast, but as a corrective. When it’s greatness we crave, what we need to do is ask for is mercy.

The Ponzi Gospel

Mark 10:13-31
by Daniel Harrell

One of the recurrent problems for modern-day Christians in America is figuring out what losing your life for Jesus’ sake looks like. Throughout Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ reddest letters have to do with his announcing his own demise and then inviting us to come along and do likewise. For the earliest disciples, taking up a cross for Jesus left little to the imagination. In a time when Roman rule demanded worship of the emperor, losing your life for Jesus meant losing your life. Going to church was hazardous to your health. However these days, with actual martyrdom being fairly uncommon, losing your life is easy since you know it ain’t going to kill you. But what if by losing your life Jesus also meant losing your lifestyle?

Tonight’s passage is a chronically discomfiting one. A man runs up to Jesus and falls to his knees. “Good teacher,” he asks, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Many presume the man to be seeking some prescribed formula for salvation, an accomplishable to-do-list for getting into heaven. Perhaps. However, by asking in terms of inheritance, he seems to get that eternal life was not something he could earn or purchase. Jesus characteristically responds by changing the subject. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” This may have been Jesus’ indirect admission of his own secret identity, but it also seems to emphasize that “goodness” is very hard to reach. Jesus asks about the Ten Commandments, which the man insists he had kept since his youth. Loving the guy for his enthusiasm, Jesus nevertheless lets the air out of his self-delusion. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell however much you have and give it to the poor. Then come, follow me and you will have treasure in heaven.”

At this point in the story, everything the man had could have been a small amount. It’s not until afterwards we learn that the man was wealthy, and apparently it was his wealth that he worshipped (so much for his keeping Commandments One and Ten). The man went away sad, leading Jesus to remark how hard it is for rich people to get into heaven―harder than it is to thread a needle with a camel. The disciples were shocked by this since for them wealth was a sign of God’s favor. If this purportedly pious rich guy couldn’t squeeze through, what chance did poor sinners have? Who the heck could be saved? Jesus assured them that God could do anything, but whether that meant saving this particular rich man is anyone’s guess. We never hear from him again.

Jesus had said back in verse 14 that the Kingdom of God belonged to little children—which is why the Bible always refers to believers as children of God rather than adults of God. Interpreters traditionally highlight childlike qualities of simplicity, innocence and trust as those intended by Jesus, but these characteristics were likely foreign to most first century people. Simplicity, innocence and trust, while admirable, ran a distant second to a whole set of other childlike characteristics such as ignorance, frailty, immaturity, puerility and foolishness. It was customary to view children as insignificant little weaklings who, if anything, needed their inherent weaknesses beat out of them so that they could become contributing members of society. If it was status you were after, better to cultivate relationships with people whose power, money, influence and connections could raise you up a rung or two. Becoming like a little child would be like, well, like selling all of your possessions, giving the money to the poor and running after Jesus.

Now it’s not that prosperity is a Biblical vice. Diligence at work, good stewardship, education and faithful relationships—these are all Christian virtues that can result in financial gain. Yet with gain always comes the expectation of generosity. “From everyone to whom much is given, much will be required,” Jesus said. The issue is never that God’s people sometimes prosper, but that in their prosperity they adopt the attitudes of their newly acquired socio-economic status and afterward ignore or even despise those still clinging to the ladder’s lower rungs. Instead, Jesus insists that we receive the children, do unto the least and love the loser in his name―but not because the child and the least and the loser are weak, least and lost. To love is not to look down and have pity on those less fortunate but to recognize your own true identity among the weak and the lost. The best way to love the needy is to recognize yourself as needy too—receiving a child requires becoming like one.

It might help to understand what the Bible often means by prosperity. The Proverbs speak of prosperity as the “reward of the righteous,” which is why, like the disciples, many tend to equate financial gain with divine favor. But the word actually denotes a kind of contentedness independent of one’s bank balance—good news given the state of most people’s bank balances these days. Biblical prosperity typically manifests itself ironically. The most prosperous people in the Bible are often the most monetarily impoverished. As the apostle Paul expressed it to the Philippians, “I have learned the secret of being content whatever the circumstances, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” Jesus’ invitation to the rich young man to sell whatever he had was not a call to poverty, but a call to genuine faith and trust in him.

Worried, perhaps, that his own salvation was at stake (if not his reputation), Peter pipes up in verse 28 to remind Jesus, “Lord, you know we have left everything to follow you!” Jesus assures Peter that “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age―along with persecutions―and in the age to come, eternal life.” What puzzles most people about Jesus’ promise here is not that persecutions get included as a return on our investment (we all know we would suffer more for our faith if ever we really behaved what we believe). No, what puzzles most people is the hundredfold return Jesus promises “in this present age?” “Eternal life in the age to come” we get, but what’s with multiple homes and family and fields here and now? Who’s ever got that? Is this some kind of Ponzi scheme?

I don’t know if you happened to watch the PBS piece on Bernie Madoff this past week. He’s the swindler who somehow managed to dupe hundreds of otherwise responsible charities, pensions, foundations and friends to the tune of 50 billion dollars. In a classic Ponzi scheme, Madoff paid returns to investors from money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned. As soon as the economy tanked and everybody needed to cash out, Madoff’s jig was up. People bothered by Jesus’ insinuations about rich people and hell have no trouble sending Madoff there. Some accuse Christian health and wealth preachers of pulling off the same stunt. They promise believers that God will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams if they give generously and just believe they will receive back a hundred times over, citing Jesus’ own words as guarantee. At least when Bernie Madoff promised big returns he actually delivered (if only for a moment). Health and wealth preachers don’t even do that.

Now it may be that the reason you haven’t personally reaped the kind of return Jesus promised is because you really haven’t given up anything to follow Jesus. On the other hand, Peter and the rest of the disciples gave up everything, and nowhere do we ever see them raking it in. Biblical prosperity is not about the money. There is a contentedness and confidence that comes with Christ that money cannot buy. Moreover, there is a community too. Jesus promises not only a hundredfold return in homes and land (code words for contentment—think “a house and a yard”), but brothers and sisters and mothers as well. Who are these people? If you remember back to chapter 3, you’ll recall Jesus was preaching to a packed house when his family rolled into town. Unable to squeeze through the door, his mother and brothers got a message to Jesus saying that they were looking for him. Jesus responded by asking, “Who is my mother?” ―which must have made Mary faint right on the spot. And if that wasn’t enough, Jesus then turned to the motley crew packed around him―poor fishermen and prostitutes, despised tax-collecting losers and outcast sinners―and said “Behold my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God, that’s my brother and sister and mother.”

What’s Jesus saying? Look around. We are each other’s hundredfold return. We are each other’s reward. (Let me give you a minute to process that one.) … I can imagine the disciples thinking the same thing. They took a look at each other and thought, “I left all I had for this?” It must have been a little disappointing―and that’s before tacking on the persecutions. Ask almost anybody to describe a Christian and the adjectives typically include words like hypocritical, self-righteous, judgmental, selfish and downright spiteful sometimes. There’s the running joke that churches would be great places if it weren’t for the people. If only we could have Christ without Christians.

Turns out that maybe you can. A bunch of us from the ministerial staff traveled to a seminar a couple weeks back where a sales rep was brought in to promote a product called Monvee (from the Latin meaning one life, or something like that). Monvee is a web-based spiritual assessment tool that allows you to customize your own personal walk with Jesus. You answer a few questions, click a few buttons, and boom, Monvee will do the rest, designing a personal walk with Jesus based on the way God has wired you to walk. Persecutions not your thing? No problem, Monvee will map out a less painful path. Prefer to keep your possessions for yourself? OK, Monvee will steer you clear from those guilt-inducing commands in the Bible. Monvee’s designer described it as “the eHarmony for your spiritual life, but instead of finding a mate, monvee helps you know how you’re wired and how you best connect with God.” The best part is that monvee lets you find G-Harmony all by yourself! No more hypocritical Christians. No more boring church services. No more messy small groups. No more needy people. Just a few clicks and you’re on your way to righteousness. (I should mention that Park Street Church declined the opportunity to become a Beta site for the Monvee launch.)

OK, so maybe I am just a cynical old man who wouldn’t know a life-transforming technological advance if it hit him in his Blackberry. Maybe a programmed relationship with God is better than having to wait and pray and trust and accept all the ambiguity. Just like Facebook, Twitter and other social networks can beat awkward or time-consuming face-to-face conversations with friends that could end up, you know, with having to help them move or drive them to the airport or listen to them go on and on about all of their problems.

This month’s Atlantic ran a cover article on the famous Grant Study, a 72-year longitudinal study of a group of men at Harvard, along with another group from inner-city Boston and a group of women from California. Typical psychology studies look at a single moment in life and can be terribly misleading―a man at 20 who appears impossibly wounded may in fact be gestating toward amazing maturity. Longitudinal studies take in the entire life span and see how everything fits (however they’re very expensive and obviously time-consuming). The goal of the Grant Study was to determine the key to “a successful life.” You can read the article online for all the details, but suffice to say, when asked this past March what he learned from watching the lives of over 300 people across seven decades, the project’s chief researcher, George Vaillant reposnded: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Look around. We are each other’s reward.

And yet, Professor Vaillant tells the story of one “prize” subject, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came one hundred single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. His wife put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

Maybe this helps explain our addiction to Facebook kinds of friends. They require little more than coming up with clever status updates. The problem with actual love is not only what it demands you give to people in need, but also that it exposes you as needy too. But that’s not a bad thing. Again, the best way to love the needy is to recognize yourself as needy.

One of the people in my Thursday night small group (that hangs out with homeless folks on the Common) was complaining about having to listen to one of the guys go on and on about this same problem he’s been having for months. An older member of our church heard the complaint and replied how that is the tough thing about friendship: being there to listen to a friend when he’s in a crisis. And it can be frustrating. But the great thing about friendship is that there will be times in your life when things aren’t going so well for you either. And then you’ll have someone there to listen to you.

“No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields―and with them, persecutions.” What if Jesus’ words are not merely some idealistic declaration, but an actual invitation, or even a provocation to us to become each other’s hundredfold return. What if we are each other’s reward, each other’s brother and sister and mother and child? You would have hundreds. What if his mention of persecution is a further invitation, or even a provocation, to step into the harder, more difficult aspects of these relationships, sharing one another’s troubles in ways that cost us something—if not a loss of life, at least a loss of lifestyle or some loss of time? I think if we consistently made that kind of investment, it’d be hard for anybody to use adjectives like hypocritical or selfish to describe Christians anymore. The only adjective that would fit would be rich.