Postmortem

Revelation 18

by Daniel Harrell

Perhaps you noticed the striking contrast in sermon titles on the board outside as you walked in this morning, bleary eyed from yet another night of stirring playoff baseball. Mine reads Post-Mortem while Gordon’s sermon for tonight is entitled Born Again. Clearly my sermon title was posted prior to Thursday night’s dramatic come-from-behind victory. “Just like you to always be looking on the dark side,” a friend remarked. Perhaps. But this morning my dark side actually has a bright side, and I don’t mean the Red Sox. My topic remains the wicked witch of Babylon, whom you may remember from last time. This so-called “The Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth,” bedecked in extravagant array and fine jewelry, managed to bedazzle even the apostle John with her witchcraft. Mercifully, an accompanying angel snapped him out of it so that John could see how what he thought to be glamorous was really ridiculous, that what seemed so desirous was in fact ludicrous. Here in chapter 18 her seductions no longer cause any dread because (ding dong) the witch is dead. Surprisingly, she was consumed by her own irredeemable accomplice, the notorious 666 beast on which she rode. The beast turned on her and devoured her, testifying to evil’s own proclivity for self-destruction. Though it was all God’s doing. Chapter 17 declared that: “God put it into their hearts to perform his purpose.” God executes his will through both the righteous and the unrighteous The harlot now lies fallen, we read in verse 2, her carcass a haunt for every detestable demon and spirit.

“All the nations had drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries,” verse 3, “and the kings of the earth committed adultery with her.” “Adultery” in common parlance is cheating on your spouse, but in Biblical parlance, the spouse is God. In the Old Testament, unfaithful Israel committed adultery whenever they practiced idolatry; whenever they worshipped other gods. Here in the New Testament, the old pagan idols are gone but not the idolatry. Golden calves gave way to golden coins—the lust for which explains the second stanza of verse 3: “the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.” Greed and excessive wealth are labeled deadly dangers throughout Scripture, mentioned more than practically anything else. “No servant can serve two masters,” Jesus said. Though given the marriage analogy he could just as well have said “no woman can have two husbands. Either she will hate the one and adore the other, or she will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot love both God and Money.”

The Harlot of Babylon as symbolic of greed, excessive wealth and the deceptive power it brings, led to its identification as the ancient superpower Rome. However, more than a mere polemic against ancient Rome; Revelation condemns every arrogant abuse of power whatever institutional or political form it takes. In light of Revelation’s (and the rest of Scripture’s) particular emphasis on the evils of monetary excess, and with our current worldwide financial crisis having been fueled by so much greed and arrogance, I went so far last time as to refer to Wall Street as an example of the mythic Harlot and her demise. The chapter 18 descriptions do fit. Verse 2: “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!” The Dow, the Dow, has fallen alright—some 5000 points from its high last October. In verses 9 and 10, the kings of the earth (aka the politicians) who shared in her luxuries bemoan her demise and the subsequent loss of their own power and prestige. We’ve seen plenty of that too, especially as dramatic government attempts at intervention have so far failed to do as promised. In verses 11-15, the merchants (the business sector) bewails their disastrous loss of capital and stock value. And in verses 17-19, seafarers likewise mourn, representative perhaps of people like you and me. Caught up in the high tide of bloated real estate prices, easy credit and a surging stock market, we all gave in to greed. And predictably, in no time at all, verse 17, all that “great wealth has been brought to ruin.” Verse 23: “By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.” I’d say that pretty much sums it up.

It’s not like Jesus didn’t warn us. Back in Revelation 3, the risen Christ dresses down the church at Laodicea, chastising them for loving too much the buzz of economic prosperity: “You say, ‘I am rich; I have everything I want. I don’t need a thing!’ Don’t you realize that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked? Take my advice and buy gold from me—gold that has been purified by fire. Then you will be rich. Buy white clothing from me to cover your shame and ointment to open your eyes. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent.”

And be quick about it too. Here in verse 4, shifting tenses from past to future, a voice shouts down from heaven warning God’s people to run for their lives because his judgment against greed and all evil stands at the door to knock it down. The warning echoes those given to Israel about historic Babylon. Jeremiah warned the Israelites to “flee from the fierce anger of the Lord.” Jesus issued similar warnings himself about Jerusalem: “Let those in the city get out, for this is the time of punishment in fulfillment of all that has been written.” Revelation paints mythic Babylon’s future doom with the past tense to underscore the certainty of evil’s fate. Her certain defeat elicits a song of joy, a victory chant in verse 20: “Rejoice over fallen Babylon, O heaven! Rejoice, saints and apostles and prophets! God has judged her for the way she treated you.” The glory and luxury with which she clothed herself came at the expense of those she exploited. Verse 24: “In her streets flowed the blood of the prophets and of God’s holy people and the blood of people slaughtered all over the world.” This stanza indicts Babylon’s disregard for human life; she blithely eliminated any who dared threaten her power while using the rest to supply her voracious appetite for more.

The pride and fall of Babylon patterns the hubris and downfall of all systemic evil. The harlot failed to see herself as vulnerable. Verse 7: “I am the queen; not a widow. I will never mourn.” Again we hear Old Testament echoes. In Isaiah, the Lord said to historic Babylon: “You have trusted in your wickedness and have said, ‘No one sees me.’ Your wisdom and knowledge mislead you when you say to yourself, ‘I am, and there is none besides me.’” Likewise in Jeremiah: “I am against you, O arrogant one, for your day has come, the time for you to be punished. The arrogant one will stumble and fall and no one will help her up; I will light a fire in her towns that will consume all who are around her.” As in Jeremiah, Revelation inserts an object lesson as an exclamation point. Jeremiah tied his prophecy scroll to a stone and sank it in the Euphrates river as a sign of historic Babylon’s plummet. In Revelation, a mighty angel lifts an enormous boulder, evoking the historic culmination of all evil, and hurls it into the chaotic sea from which it came. The lights go out, verse 23, and the Harlot is no more.

This defeat of evil that Revelation portends has in effect already occurred. As theologian NT Wright reminds in his book Evil and the Justice of God, it is in the death of Jesus that evil is confronted, defeated and had its power exhausted, even though a continuing virulence persists. It is true that the beast remains on the loose, as does the false prophet and the dragon, Satan himself. But their days are numbered. Babylon’s doom will be theirs too. If the Bible teaches us anything, it teaches us that every evil power we confront on earth is already a beaten power—no matter how contrary it may seem to our experience.

And yet, it is this contrary experience that recurrently dogs us. We refer to it as the problem of evil. If God is great and God is good, why do bad things happen? If Jesus had evil by the throat on the cross, why not throttle the life out of it completely? Why leave it to torment and wreak such horrific havoc so many centuries hence? Why leave it to so severely obstruct those who might otherwise believe? Part of the answer to this dilemma has to do with recognizing this crucial aspect of God’s victory over evil: The supreme act by which God demonstrates his power is not an act of power but an act of powerlessness. Jesus defeats death by dying. He annihilates evil by exploiting evil—by using it to do God’s thing just when evil thought it was doing its own thing. I think this helps explain why God still allows evil to exist. The idea of evil may typically obstructs faith, but get a dose of real evil and even skeptics start believing in God in a hurry.

Trace back through Christian history and you rarely find evil addressed as a “problem,” that is, a puzzle to be solved or a question to be answered. The reason is because evil eludes reason. Evil makes no sense. Its incomprehensibility extends beyond the problematic. Its illogic is part of what makes evil so evil. Even if you blame the devil, what made the devil decide to become the devil? Adam and Eve, created as good by God, had no commonsensical reason for choosing evil. They just did it. And we’ve all suffered since.

The irony, or perhaps the tyranny, is that while evil possesses us, we remain responsible for the possession. Because we choose evil, evil proves the existence of free will, but this autonomy, this independence and freedom to choose, this greatest of modern goods only ends up the epitome of evil itself. The freedom to choose is really not freedom at all because as soon as we choose we are no longer free. As Paul made clear in Romans, our choices set boundaries, our unavoidably bad choices set inescapably tight boundaries that affect our futures not only in finite time and space but for eternity too. Our freedom constrains to such a severe extent that Paul could only speak of it in terms of enslavement. “I do not understand myself,” he memorably wrote, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” How can a person raised to new life with Christ still be so plainly buried in the dirt? How is it possible to be both lost and found, sinner and saint, old creation and new creation, dead and alive simultaneously? Saint Augustine argued that evil and good necessarily go hand in hand, because like cancer, evil gets its energy from the good it perverts. The language we use testifies to this notion: words like immorality or injustice or dishonesty or iniquity. Because evil is so inextricably entwined with the good things it perverts, evil becomes indestructible apart from destroying the good things too. God cannot destroy evil without destroying his entire creation—including you and me. Therefore the gospel declares that what God did instead of killing evil in us was to divert evil away from us and onto Jesus. The spotless lamb becomes the black sheep; the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world by taking on the sins of the world. Your sins and mine.

And yet we still “we do the very things we hate,” demonstrating over and over that while evil may be a defeated power it is still powerful enough to harm. How long before fallen Babylon finally falls? This was the question posed back in Revelation 6 by martyred Christians, murdered by their Roman persecutors, whom John saw in heaven nevertheless complaining that God’s final judgment was too slow in coming. They called out in a loud voice of desperation, “How long, O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood?” Does your mercy endure forever? No, not forever, but it will endure for as long as it takes. Because evil is so inextricably entwined with the good things it perverts, God cannot destroy evil without destroying his creatures whom he loves. And thus the tardiness of God is not an abdication of justice, but a determination to save. As St. Peter put it, “The Lord is not slow about his justice, as some think of slowness, but is patient, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” God so loved the world that he gave his only son, humiliating Himself for the sake of the humiliated and for the sake the oppressed—but for the sake of their oppressors too. In Christ, God enters into the condition of the guilty. He does not die a natural death, but rather the violent death of a guilty offender. Jesus suffers the suffering of injustice; but he also suffers the suffering of condemnation. The spotless lamb is the black sheep; the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world by taking on the sins of the world. Yours and mine and theirs.

The evil Jesus crushes on the cross he crushes not by throttling its throat, but astonishingly, by forgiving it. And not only does God forgive, but he also forgets. “I am he who blots out your transgressions and remembers your sins no more,” he declares in Isaiah. And similarly in Jeremiah, “I will forgive their iniquity, I will remember their sin no more.” NT Wright goes on the add how by forgiving and forgetting, “God not only releases the forgiven world from any residual feelings of guilt, but also, so to speak, releases himself from always having to be angry with a world gone wrong. Not only evil, but all of its shadows are gone too, since with God to forgive is to forget.” But how is this vindication? How is this justice? How is this real comfort? If God is the God for the victims and for the oppressed, how can He forget their oppression, especially as long as the victims remember? Doesn’t this amount to a sort of complicity with the perpetrators? If God forgets sin, don’t the wicked in the end just end up off the hook?

No. Because the sin God forgets is forgiven sin. Because God is love, He exercises patience and relents from allowing us what our deeds deserve whenever we ask. God’s loss of memory regarding sin is what brings prodigals back into the unreserved embrace of their father’s arms—arms already outstretched because the father could not lose memory of the relationship. As long as anyone repents and asks for forgiveness, there is no sin God will not forgive. The only unforgiveable sin is the sin for which one refuses to repent. You can’t receive grace if all you do is reject it. The sins God remembers are the sins we won’t let him forget.

Which brings us back to Revelation 18 verse 5: “her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.” In the Old Testament and later Jewish writings, being lifted up or piled up was an idiom for the extreme degree of defiant sin. God remembers Babylon because she sticks her sins in his face. The tormenters whom God never forgets are the tormenters whom God never forgives because they never cease and repent of their tormenting. Therefore one day, verse 6, She will receive as she has given; even double for what she has done. She will receive “as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself.” Verse 8: “her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.”

Revelation 18 draws upon Biblical doom-songs, such as Lamentations, which are directed at the failure of those people, societies, governments, institutions, principalities and powers who refuse to acknowledge God’s mercy and yield to his goodness. Those who like the lukewarm Laodiceans of chapter 3, are lulled into complacency by their prosperity, or who find rejecting the mercies of grace a reasonable price to pay for the favors offered by the harlot.

In verses 9 and following, the kings, merchants and seafarers—power-hungry politicians, profit-hungry businessmen and seasick consumers—all mourn the death of their sugar-momma. In verse 10, they stand far off, terrified at her torment, and cry: “Alas, alas, O wonderful city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour it’s over! Your doom has come!” God’s mercy may feel like forever, but when it finally does end, the ending is quick. This mention of one hour in verse 10 refers back in chapter 17 where God gave the politicians authority for one hour with which to do the right thing. But they chose instead to pledge allegiance to the beast. The merchants could have done the right thing with their businesses, choosing to do good work and provide good products at fair prices and fair wages, but instead in verse 13 we read mention of human slaves—indicating not only that the merchants traded in human beings but in products manufactured by slave labor. The miserly merchants weep, not for the misery they’ve caused, but only for their own loss of profit. In verse 19, the seafarers heap dust on their heads, which is often a sure sign of repentance. Only here, as they witness the smoldering ruins of fallen Babylon, there is no change of heart; they don’t want to get their lives on the right track. All they want is their old life back.

“Get out of there,” Revelation warns, “run for your life! Do not share in her sins or you will share in her judgments.” “I am against you, O arrogant one,” says the Lord to Babylon and all her inhabitants, “your day has come, the time for you to be punished. The arrogant one will stumble and fall and no one will help her up; I will light a fire in her towns that will consume all who are around her.” If our own overly indulgent economy continues its fall, I can’t help but wonder, is God lighting a fire in us? What if God is teaching us finally to stop putting our trust in riches and trust him instead? What if we finally get it through our heads that the love of money is the root of all evil? What if we finally understand that we cannot serve both God and money? What if God makes us to care about the poor by making us poor? It wouldn’t be the first time. “Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline.” Jesus said. “So be earnest, and repent.” What if God by getting rid of your excess gets you to repent of your greed so that he might get rid of that too? The dark side can have a bright side. Rejoice over fallen Babylon. Her gloom is God’s glory, and it can be your glory too.

Jesus for President

Mark 4:21-25 by Daniel Harrell

A new novel is out entitled American Savior by Roland Merullo which has Jesus returning to earth to run for president of the United States. God knows we need him. As one reviewer wrote, “With a faultless candidate and foolish opponents, there is not much call for careful political strategizing. To his campaign staff of disciples, Jesus’ moves often seem impulsive, but the candidate’s instincts are perfect. His speeches are generalizations arguing that foreign policy must be founded on ‘moral rather than strategic imperatives.’ As president, he promises to apply the principle of the golden rule and to end greed and stupidity.” I’d vote for that. I haven’t read the book, but I do understand that Jesus wins the election. As much as I’d like to say that’s no surprise, if you turn to the gospels it’s hard to imagine Jesus winning any election. Oh sure, he scores big with the socially marginalized and outcast—Simon six-packs and hockey pucks—but among his supposed base—religious people—he’s treated like a heretic. He had them in the beginning, but as soon as he started claiming divine prerogatives for himself, like forgiving sin and working on the Sabbath, no way could they stay in his camp.

Most of us like to think that had we been devout believers living in Jesus’ day, we would never have written him off like the Pharisees did. We wouldn’t be like Jesus’ own family who thought he was crazy. If Jesus were running for President, most of like to think he’d have our vote. But imagine Jesus sharing the stage with Barack Obama and John McCain last Tuesday night. Tom Brokow asks a question about housing. Obama responds with tax credits and McCain talks about buying up bad mortgages. Jesus? “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” What about the war? Obama will withdraw troops and McCain will stay there for as long as it takes. Jesus? “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen.” How about education? Jesus says, “The Holy Spirit will teach you what to say.” Energy? “The wise take oil with them.” Healthcare? “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Really. How about global warming? “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!”

What about the current financial crisis? McCain and Obama both favor government intervention for Wall Street. Jesus is less charitable: “Woe to you who are rich,” he says, “for you have already received your comfort.” If only that were so. Perhaps you read about how AIG, the insurance company thrown an $85 billion life preserver with our hard-earned tax dollars, that just one week later plunked down $442,000 on a California resort retreat for some of its sales agents. The tab included $150,000 for food, $23,000 in spa charges, $10,000 in bar bills and $7,000 in greens fees. Jesus has something to say about that too, not only for the AIG sales agents but for people like me with their disappearing 401(k)s. His words come from our text tonight: “To those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

Here's what his campaign commercial might look like.

OK, there goes my vote. Jesus may win in a work of fiction, but no way he gets elected president for real talking like this. No way he wins in the gospels either. If you’ve been following along as I’ve walked through the red-letters of Mark (the red-letters indicative of the sayings of Jesus), then you know that all the religious opinion polls are running against him. Jesus still draws large crowds, but not the kind of crowds that matter much. Of course it’s just a matter of time before those crowds turn on him too. Even his campaign staff will desert him in the end, denying that they even know who he is. You’d think that Jesus, knowing his future looks doomed, would shift his message to rally his base and win over the undecided. But instead, he chooses to confuse everybody by talking in parables. Riddles. It’s as if he doesn’t want people to know the truth. Last week it was a farmer sowing miraculous seeds. This week it’s an oil lamp lit under a bed and the rich getting richer.

Puzzled by this themselves last Sunday, the disciples pulled Jesus aside and asked if he wouldn’t mind clearing things up a bit. Instead, Jesus only confused them more by telling them that, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.” And they’re like What secret? Remember that secret is not what we tend to think of it as; that is, something that is immanently unknowable. In Biblical parlance, secret or mystery is something hidden and yet to be revealed by God. In regard to the kingdom of God, the secret revealed is that God’s Old Testament promises of victory and justice are fulfilled through defeat and injustice; specifically through the defeat and unjust death of Jesus. In other words, Jesus’ success depended on his being a failure. The supreme act by which God demonstrates his power is not an act of power at all, but rather, an act of powerlessness. Jesus defeats death by dying. He takes away sin by taking it on himself. He annihilates evil by using it to do God’s will. Jesus wins by losing. As do his followers. “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it,” Jesus later says, “but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.” None of this gets Jesus elected president. It gets him crucified.

If you’re serious about following Jesus, it gets you crucified too. Christ’s death for sinners is the death of sinners. The cross kills your sinful self, leading the apostle Paul to declare how he had been crucified with Christ and that it was no longer he who lived, but Christ who lived through him. Granted, among Jesus’ first disciples, losing your life also literally meant losing your life, which explains why they all initially ran once the Romans got out the hammer and nails. But for us, with martyrdom being fairly uncommon, at least in America, losing your life for Jesus isn’t nearly so daunting. Actual death is rarely required. But what if by losing your life Jesus also meant losing your lifestyle? You may recall the story of the rich and righteous young ruler. He comes to Jesus enthusiastic about inheriting eternal life. What must he do? Jesus says sell all your stuff, give it to the poor, come follow him and get riches in heaven. The rich ruler’s enthusiasm immediately evaporates; he sadly turns and walks away. Jesus shook his head and remarked to his disciples, “It is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” And just so he wouldn’t be misunderstood, he added: “It is easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God!” The disciples were blown away by this. In their worldview, not too unlike ours, piety coupled with possessions was usually construed as a sign of God’s favor. The disciples bemoaned: “If a pious rich guy is out, what chance do poor sinners have? Who the heck can be saved?” “Humanly speaking it is impossible;” Jesus replied, “but not with God. All things are possible with God.”

Some have taken this to mean that God can bail out the greedy too—just like the Federal Government. And they are right. Grace shows no partiality. But salvation of the greedy always entails salvation from greediness. And like salvation from every sin, it only happens through loss. I wonder if that’s what’s going on now? Unwilling—unable—to lose our lifestyles for Jesus, since humanly speaking that is impossible; I wonder if God is taking matters into his own hands. It is interesting to note how this current financial mess is being described by almost every news outlet as “global economic apocalypse.” If you were in church a couple Sunday mornings back, and heard me preaching out of Revelation 17, I went so far as to refer to Wall Street as the Whore of Babylon. Now I’m not one of those Biblical prophecy bloodhounds who scrutinize every social crisis for hints of end times, but I am one who’s willing to view world events through a Biblical prism. I’ll leave it to you to go up to the church website or blog for how I did that, but suffice it to say here, everything that goes on in Revelation and throughout Biblical history is ultimately God’s doing. All things are possible with him. The Sovereign Lord executes his will through both the righteous and the unrighteous; through both Israel and Babylon; through both the church and the world; through both good and evil, through the just life of Jesus and through his unjust death.

What if the current economic meltdown is a means whereby we finally learn to stop putting our trust in riches? What if we finally get it through our heads that the love of money is the root of all evil? What if we finally understand that you cannot serve both God and money? What if God makes us to care about the poor by making us poor? That’d be good thing, right? But wait, you might say, “I know God. He would never cause disaster or hardship to strike!” “God would never allow evil to succeed!” or “I know God! He would never make me poor or unhappy” –no matter that in Scripture God in fact does all these things. This was the Pharisees’ problem in Mark. They knew God so well that they couldn’t recognize him as Jesus. Now given the Pharisees’ past history, descended as they were from those faithless Israelites banished to Babylon and overrun by Rome for refusing to heed God’s word, you’d think that they might remember their past so as not to repeat it. But like every mutual fund prospectus: “past performance does not guarantee future results.” I mentioned a letter to the editor I ran across a couple weeks back where the writer bemoaned the stock market and housing meltdown. He asked: “Did anyone really believe that real estate could continue to sell at the crazy prices of recent years? … Yet as bad as it all is, the crash may bring us back to our senses.” The date of this letter was November 8, 1987.

Five years earlier in 1982 was the financial crisis year many pundits compare with this year’s crisis. The country was in deep recession in 1982, just as I was about to graduate college. Job prospects were bleak—which partly explains why I’m standing before you tonight. I was trying to take Jesus’ advice to store up my treasures in heaven by becoming a minister. My fraternity brothers thought I was crazy. Members of my family did too—and they were good church folk. It’s one thing to attend services and say your prayers, but to make it your career? I’ll confess that it does kill me sometimes to tell people what I do for a living. Sometimes it kills me just to admit I’m a Christian. Is that what Jesus meant by losing my life? If so, then coming clean is also what it means to follow Jesus. Which finally brings me around to our text for tonight: “Don’t bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed. Put it on its lampstand instead.”

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says this to prod his followers to live their faith for the world to see. He says, “Let your light shine before people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” Here in Mark, the lamp is Jesus himself. But if it is the case that you have been crucified and Christ lives in you, then the difference between the lamp as Jesus and the lamp as you should be pretty much indistinguishable. In John’s gospel Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” He also says “you are the light of the world.” Jesus did not come to hide, but to reveal himself. Likewise with us. Verse 22: “Nothing is hidden except to be disclosed; nothing is secret except to come to light.” He did not speak in riddles to keep people in the dark, but to show us the light.

But then he tells another riddle. Verse 24, “With the measure you use, it will be measured to you—and you will receive even more.” If you understand measure as weight, as in a “measure of wheat,” then it’s easy to interpret Jesus as saying “the rich get richer,” especially when coupled with what he says in verse 25: “To those who have, more will be given.” But if instead you understand measure as weigh, as in “weigh what you hear,” then I think you’re closer to what Jesus intends; especially when coupled with what he says in verse 23: “If anyone has ears, listen carefully to what you hear.” Measure Jesus’ words carefully. Take seriously what he says. And how do you do that? In Hebrew and Greek, the verb to hear is the same as the verb to obey. What you believe is not what you say you believe. What you believe is what you do. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and do it”—whether that’s losing your life or just losing your lifestyle.

In this vein, “those who have” are those who hear and do something about it; to them “more will be given.” They will be blessed. By contrast, “those who have nothing” are those who do nothing, to them “even what they have will be taken away.” As to exactly what will be given and taken away, Jesus doesn’t say. But if you flip to Mark’s version of the rich young ruler, Jesus says “I tell you the truth, no one, who by obeying me and the gospel, loses home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or property, will fail to receive a hundred times as much now (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and property—and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life.” Jesus throws in “persecutions” so that you’ll know his is no prosperity gospel. So then what does he mean by saying you’ll get back “a hundred times” what you lost now? Last week when Jesus told how a farmer sowed seed in good soil that produced a hundredfold crop, folks thought that was ridiculous. Only miracle seeds could grow that much. But Jesus wasn’t talking actual seeds then and here he’s not talking private property or actual biological mothers here (one of those is enough). But he is talking about miracles. He’s talking about us. We are the hundredfold fruit. As in chapter 3 when Jesus said “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother,” the hundredfold increase in family and houses and property are those who heed Jesus. To follow Christ makes us family. Brothers and sisters in Jesus. My house is your house and your house is mine. It adds up quick. This is a good thing. Because if this economic collapse continues, I might need a place to stay.

The Riddler

Mark 4:3-20

by Daniel Harrell

We’re back to the red-letters of Jesus tonight, the words of Christ spoken in Mark’s gospel. I’ve been working through these words since last May, spurred on by a book entitled Red-Letter Christians by sociologist Tony Campolo. He asserts that Jesus’ words carry political implications, significant as our country barrels toward election day divided as ever over which presidential candidate has the goods to deliver us out of the dual disasters of war and financial collapse: Barack Obama or Sarah Plain—I mean, John McCain? The lines over who would be savior were as starkly drawn in Jesus’ day. Oppressed by Roman military and economic power, first century Jews eagerly awaited a coming king in the ilk of the renown King David—slayer of giants and builder of nations. Facing that prospect is an unknown, untried carpenter from Nazareth, a wonder worker with a few tricks up his sleeve to be sure, yet who has undermined any credibility by audaciously asserting that he forgives sins like God. And on the Sabbath no less. He claims that deliverance has already come and that he’s the one bringing it, as absurd as politicians claiming they are bringers of real change to politics as usual, even as they practice politics as usual.

Who wouldn’t be skeptical? Even Jesus’ family thought he was crazy. They showed up in chapter 3 and tried to take custody of him—out of concern and probably embarrassment too. “He’s lost his mind,” they said. Others likely agreed once they heard Jesus respond to being informed his mother and brothers were waiting for him outside. He acted as if he didn’t even know who they were. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. “Dude, you don’t even know your own mother” And then sounding even more bizarre, Jesus turned to the ones seated around him: poor fishermen and prostitutes, despised tax-collectors and outcast sinners, people who had left their own families to follow him. Jesus points to them and says “Behold my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God, that’s my brother and sister and mother.”

What is the will of God? Well, first and foremost it’s the willingness to forgive those who hurt you by calling you crazy or anything else. Jesus does that, providing for his mother even as he hangs on the cross to die —an outrageous move of extreme grace that paid dividends in Mary’s case. By the time we get to the first chapter of Acts she’s numbered among the believers. As for the chief priest and Pharisees, chiefly responsible for Jesus’ death, he forgives them too—implying that to follow Christ is to forgive your enemies even if they never accept your overtures or ever apologize for their offenses. A number of you approached me after preaching this last time, wondering if such forgiveness had a shelf life. You may remember the apostle Peter asking the same question. Jesus responded with “seventy times seven” which is just another way of saying you always have to forgive (seven being the number of fullness and completion). Besides, if God forgives you every time you screw up, how could you ever withhold forgiveness from those who hurt you over and over again?

But what if God doesn’t forgive every time? Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right. God has to forgive, doesn’t he? In Hosea, God says, “My people are determined to desert me. They call me the Most High, but they don’t truly honor me. But how can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like an enemy? How can I treat you like my foe? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” And then in Jeremiah, “I will forgive your wickedness and remember your sins no more.” “If anybody confesses their sins,” the apostle John writes, “God is faithful and just to forgive and to cleanse from all unrighteousness.” So the trick, it seems, at least as far as God’s grace goes, would be to keep your enemies from confessing their sins. Make them oblivious to grace and then they’ll never ask for it. How? Do what Jesus does. Start talking in riddles. Stop shooting straight. That way, verse 12, “they’ll see but never perceive, they’ll hear but never understand; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven.” Wow. Hard to imagine Jesus saying that.

But he does. He says it right here in the context of one of his most familiar riddles. The Parable of the Sower. Some of us have heard this parable so many times, that it’s hard to hear it anymore. You’re automatically programmed to ask yourself, “OK, what kind of dirt am I? Birdy, rocky, thorny or good?” Jesus starts by emphatically insisting everyone “listen!” but then he goes on to tell a rather pedestrian agricultural tale. A farmer scatters seed and it goes everywhere. On the road, on rocks, in briar patches, and your first thought is: “What a doofus. He can’t even throw straight!” Of course if you lived in first century Palestine, you’d remember that sowing comes before plowing; farmers scatter seed indiscriminately knowing that they’d till it into the ground later. That birds or rocks or thorns would get to some of the seed wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was Jesus saying that seeds that fell on good soil produced a yield of thirty, sixty and a hundred times what was sown. In a day when a sevenfold yield would have been bumper, a hundredfold meant you had some seriously engineered seeds—in a day when there was no such thing as genetically engineered seeds. Was this some kind of joke?

Presumably some people laughed off the joke. Seeds don’t multiply that much. Others, since it was Jesus saying it, may have tried to do the math. But most people at least got that Jesus was not talking about literal seeds. “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear,” Jesus said, which was just another way of asking, “Do you get it?” Jesus’ disciples, who were supposed to get it, didn’t, which is why, when they got Jesus alone, they asked if he wouldn’t mind clearing things up. Instead, Jesus only confused things more by telling them that, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.” Secret? What secret? “But to those on the outside everything is said in riddles.” The outside? Outside of what? Riddles? Why riddles? And then he quotes the prophet Isaiah: “May they be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” So what you’re saying is keep the secret confusing for outsiders so that they’ll never know to ask God to forgive their sins? That way you don’t have to forgive them? Obfuscate. Complicate. Equivocate. So that when your enemies burn in hell for refusing to repent, they can’t say you didn’t tell them? Wow. Is this some kind of joke?

A few definitions might help. First off, secret is not what we tend to think of it as; that is, something that is immanently unknowable. In Biblical parlance, secret or mystery is something hidden and yet to be revealed by God. In regard to the kingdom of God, the secret revealed is that God’s Old Testament promises of victory and justice are fulfilled through defeat and injustice; specifically through the defeat and unjust death of Jesus. As for outsiders, the first three chapters of Mark have drawn strict boundary lines. There are those who believe in Jesus as Kingdom bringer (insiders) and those who don’t, can’t or won’t (outsiders). Mark says Jesus’ family was waiting for him outside. To them, Jesus speaks riddles—not ­because his parables in and of themselves are incomprehensible, but because if you refuse to believe in Jesus as the Kingdom-bringer, you’ll never understand what the parables mean.

Which brings us to the quote from Isaiah chapter 6. If you’ve ever been to a Missions Conference, you know Isaiah 6 as that chapter where God seeks someone to send to speak in His name. Isaiah famously responds, “Here I am Lord, send me!” We usually stop reading there and jump right to our calling as Christians to spread the word everywhere like the farmer spreads his seed. But if you read on in Isaiah, to the next verse, you come to the verse Jesus cites. In the Hebrew, the Lord says to Isaiah, “Go and tell this people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be forgiven.” So much for the great commission. But then you remember that Isaiah’s audience is not an unreached world, but unfaithful Israel. Having lavished them with grace, God’s people inexplicably spurn it by chasing idols and mistreating others, like the unmerciful servant who refuses to forgive his debtor even though his master has forgiven his debts. Just like that master who throws his ungrateful servant in jail, God deports his people to Babylon until they can come to their senses. They don’t, of course, which is why they end up in Roman captivity. So God decides to come down and talk some sense into them himself. The only problem is how he does it. How could they believe that this scraggly-looking, poor, unemployed carpenter was God in the flesh? It’s ridiculous.

There’s a new movie out this week that combines the word ridiculous with the word religion. It’s called Religulous, and it stars satirist Bill Maher. I’ve only seen clips shown during an interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. One has Maher preaching in a London park, going on about how “space aliens brought people here 75 million years ago, stacked us up in volcanoes and blew us up with H-Bombs and how we have to rid ourselves of the implants from the extra-terrestrial dictators.” The camera zooms to his listeners obviously thinking he’d lost his mind. What was he talking about? That human beings are actually immortal spirits called thetans now trapped on earth in “meat bodies.” This is a basic tenet of Scientology. This is what Tom Cruise believes.

Weird, you think. But Maher quickly adds that it’s not so different from Christianity. It’s just that we’re used to Christianity. Imagine you’ve never heard the story before. Someone comes up to you and says “God had a son, he’s a single parent, and he said to his son, “Jesus, I’m going to send you to earth on a suicide mission, but don’t worry, they can’t kill you because you’re really me! But it is going to hurt for a hot minute, I’m not going to lie about that. You’re going to hate me but it’s the best thing for you son, I mean the best thing for me, because I’m you, you’re me. Here’s the plan, I’ll go down to earth and see if I can find a Palestinian woman to impregnate so she can give birth to you, I mean me…” “It’s just the silliest thing you’ve ever heard,” Maher concludes, “And this is a monotheistic religion!” OK, I laughed a little. I mean, when you put it that way, Christianity does sound ridiculous. But that’s not how the gospel goes. However it is clearly how Bill Maher hears it. It’s how the Pharisees heard it too. Even though they witnessed Jesus firsthand.

“Ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” You can imagine Jesus shaking his head as he says it. Isaiah was right. Some people just can’t get it.

But then sometimes even people who do get it still don’t understand it. Like the disciples, even after we’ve heard it over and over again, we’re like, “So, what kind of dirt am I?” forgetting that Jesus’ parables are rarely as much about us as they are about him. “The seed is the word,” Jesus says. The word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Christ is the Word, the bringer of the Kingdom, God’s promised salvation and justice. God sows his seed in his people. His people are dirt. The birds are the devil. Rocks are fear. Thorns are worry and greed. When it comes to believing the word; the devil, fear, worry and greed can all impede. But these are amazing seeds.

A few observations. First, the sower sows indiscriminately. The word gets spread even to those sure to reject it. This was clearly the case in Isaiah’s time, the same in our own. “God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good,” Jesus said, “he sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.” Secondly, Jesus chooses farming as the metaphor for the coming kingdom, upending every militaristic, nationalistic or political expectation people may have had about God’s justice. Just when you’re hoping God will get even with evil by blowing it away, Jesus says “a farmer went out to sow his seed.” Thirdly, seeds are seemingly insignificant little things. And yet they grow into magnificent things, and these seeds into miraculous things. But only after they are buried in the ground. Jesus gives a hint of his death and miraculous resurrection. Fourth, the word does the work. Even the seeds that fall on the path do their job. It’s just that other stuff gets in the way. We may wonder “how is that possible? How can evil or worry or greed ever succeed over grace?” But then we remember, “oh yeah, that happens all the time.”

But again, you also have to remember, and this is crucial: The supreme act by which God demonstrates his power is not an act of power but an act of powerlessness. Jesus defeats death by dying. He takes away sin by taking it on himself. He annihilates evil by exploiting evil, by using it to do God’s thing just when it thought it was doing its own thing. Ironically, this may help explain why God still allows evil to exist. Jesus equates the devil with birds, which need not be completely insulting. After all, the demons knew who Jesus was even when people didn’t. Likewise, birds recognize good seed for what it is even when the pavement doesn’t. The devil might try to ingest the word and turn it to crap, but as any horticulturist will tell you, bird crap is one of the most effective means of spreading seeds. The idea of evil typically obstructs faith, but get a dose of real evil and even skeptics start believing in God in a hurry. Though at times sowing seems fruitless, in God’s ecology, the harvest is always abundant.