“The Original International Man of Mystery” (Hebrews 7:1-3)

 

I wonder if anyone can tell me what is the Old Testament passage most frequently quoted in the New Testament…

You might think it’s something like Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” If you’re really into the writings of the minor prophets, you might come up with an obscure verse like Habakkuk 2:4, “The just shall live by faith.”

Depending on how you do your calculation, there are something in the range of three hundred quotations from the Old Testament that can be found in the New. But the quotation that tops them all is from Psalm 110, verses 1 and 4, which run like this:

The Lord says to my Lord:
    ‘Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.’ …
The Lord has sworn
    and will not change his mind,
‘You are a priest forever
    after the order of Melchizedek.’

The first place we find these words is in each of the first three gospels. They come up in the course of one of those nitpicking encounters between Jesus and the religious authorities. We hear them, not on the lips of Jesus, but from his opponents. They use them to try to debunk what people are beginning to say about Jesus: that he is the promised Messiah. Clearly, they recognized these verses as a messianic prophecy.

The next time we come across them is when they are quoted by Peter. They are to be found in the middle of his sermon on the day of Pentecost. He was addressing the large crowd who had gathered in the street when they heard Jesus’ followers praising God in what they recognized as their own languages. And after citing these same verses, Peter proclaimed, “Let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Messiah.” (Acts 2:34-36)

This in turn brings us to the Letter to the Hebrews, which we have been following now since the beginning of the year. So I will forgive you if you don’t remember way back in chapter 1, where this text is quoted once again. There, pointing to Jesus, the author asks the question, “To which of the angels has God ever said, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’”? (Hebrews 1:13)

Finally we come to the verse immediately preceding the passage before us this morning: Hebrews 6:20. There the author writes of Jesus as “having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek”.

When I was scratching my head early last week trying to come up with a title for this sermon, I thought of calling it “Who the heck was Melchizedek?” And perhaps that’s exactly the question you’re asking yourself right now! Well, the answer comes in the three verses which make up this morning’s passage from Hebrews.

The author takes us far back into the mists of history—in fact, to chapter 14 in the book of Genesis. Now here’s the scene: The rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah had been trounced in battle by the rulers of some of the neighbouring settlements. Among those whom they took as captives was Abraham’s nephew Lot. When Abraham found out about it, he pulled together his armed men and staged an overnight raid on the two rulers and their forces. The result was that Lot was made a free man once again and Abraham forged a treaty with the ruler of Sodom. And that is where Melchizedek enters the scene.

He appears to come to Abraham out of nowhere. He is the king of Salem (later to become Jerusalem) and the scene takes place in the nearby Valley of Shaveh. Melchizedek brings with him bread and wine and pronounces a blessing on Abraham. In response, Abraham returns to him a tenth of all his possessions. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, Melchizedek disappears into the mists of time.

Now I have to say that this scene is one of a few in the Old Testament that never fail to bring shivers down my spine. It is up there with the three mysterious visitors who later came out of the blue to visit Abraham as he stood at the entry of his tent. And with the fourth man who stood amid the flames with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego inside King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. I ask myself: Could it be that what those men witnessed—and what Abraham witnessed that day in the Valley of Shaveh—was a foreshadowing of the eternal Word, Jesus, who was with God and who was God from the beginning? I’ll leave it to you to come to your own conclusion.

King of righteousness

But back to Melchizedek. Our passage this morning tells us three things about him. The first is a translation of his name. It is a combination of the two Hebrew words melek, which means “king”, and tsedeq, which means “righteousness”. Put them together and Melchizedek’s name means “king of righteousness”—and as such he points directly to Jesus.

But before we go any farther, perhaps we need to ask, what does it mean to be righteous? Many people confuse righteousness with self-righteousness. In reality the two could not be farther apart. Jesus put the lie to what masquerades as righteousness when he told the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector who went to pray in the temple. You will recall how the Pharisee strutted in and parroted, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get…” That isn’t righteousness: that is shameless, delusional pride.

Several years ago one of my brothers had new neighbours move in next door. In an effort to be friendly, he went over and invited them over for a barbecue. He was taken aback by their response: “Oh no. We couldn’t do that. Our church forbids us from sharing meals with outsiders.”

As Jesus’ followers we need to be so careful not to radiate that false brand of righteousness, the one that gives the impression that we see ourselves as better than other people. True righteousness is what we find in the tax collector, who crouched in a shadowy corner of the temple where he was barely noticeable. And not having the boldness even to lift up his eyes and look towards heaven, he murmured, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:9-14)

The truly righteous recognize their constant need of God’s grace. They seek to live in daily dependence on him. And this is what we see in Jesus, who said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” And again, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.” (John 4:34; 6:38)

We call Jesus righteous in a unique sense, though, because he did what no other human being has ever done: he lived a life of perfect, uninterrupted communion with his Father. Jesus is the true King of Righteousness. In him we are able to see all that it means to live in a relationship with God.

King of peace

The second fact about Melchizedek that our passage this morning points us to is that he was King of Salem—and Salem in Hebrew is the same word as shalom, which means “peace”. My Bible dictionary informs me that that word shalom involves a much broader understanding than what we commonly mean by “peace”. It carries with it a notion of “completeness”, “soundness”, “well-being”, “safety”.

So it was that, on the night before they were to face what would be their greatest trial, Jesus could comfort his followers with the words, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you… Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (John 14:27)

A few days later, as they gathered in fear for their lives behind locked doors, suddenly Jesus was in their midst again with the familiar words, “Peace be with you.” (John 20:19) And today Jesus comes to us with those same words, “Peace be with you.” Peace as we face tragedy and suffering. Peace as we run into broken relationships and conflict. Peace as we seek to negotiate the storms and setbacks that are an unavoidable part of life in in a fallen world. And in all of those circumstances, Jesus is able not only to give us inner peace. He also empowers us to be makers of peace. After all, peace is one of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Yet there is more to it than that—infinitely more! The peace that Jesus gives us in the here and now is only a foreshadowing of the real and lasting peace that he will bring with him in the new creation. This is the peace that we read about in the prophets:

“No more shall there be…
    an infant who lives but a few days,
    or an old man who does not fill out his days…
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
    they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
    they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
    and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain
    or bear children for calamity,
for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the Lord,
    and their descendants with them…
The wolf and the lamb shall graze together;
    the lion shall eat straw like the ox,
    and dust shall be the serpent’s food.
They shall not hurt or destroy
    in all my holy mountain,” says the Lord. (Isaiah 65:20-25)

That is a picture that never ceases to amaze me! (And what a stunning contrast it is to the images that we see in the news daily right now of bombed-out buildings and desperate refugees fleeing for safety in Ukraine!)

Yes, Jesus does bring us peace as we lay our troubles before him. But the real peace he came to bring is the shalom of the new heaven and the new earth, when all creation will thrive as it hasn’t since the Garden of Eden, in the light of his unending glory. And it is the vision of that peace that calls and arouses us to be makers of peace in the here and now.

Our eternal high priest

Thirdly, Melchizedek was a high priest. Abraham recognized this when he gave him a tenth of all that he had. We don’t know what kind of sacrifices Melchizedek offered in his high priestly role. But we do know the sacrifice that Jesus offered for us in his own life’s blood poured out for us on the cross.

Words are not sufficient to describe what Jesus accomplished for you and for me on that first Good Friday. The closest I can find are from my Anglican Prayer Book when it speaks about what Jesus has done for us through his death as “a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”.

The Letter to the Hebrews will have a good deal more to teach us about Jesus’ eternal priesthood in the succeeding chapters—and I don’t want to steal from what preachers might be led to say in the Sundays that follow.

Yet allow me to say that, unlike Abraham’s response to Melchizedek, we can’t be satisfied with giving just a tenth. Jesus demands our all. As he said to his first disciples, he says to you and to me, “If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) The apostle Paul said much the same thing a generation later when he wrote to the believers in Rome: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1)

Switch now for a moment to the twentieth century, to 1937, when the Nazi party had all of Germany in its oppressive grip. A young Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat down to put together a study on the Sermon on the Mount. He could not have known that eight years later he would die as a martyr to Hitler’s brutal régime. Nor could he have known how prophetic his words would be when wrote, “The cross is laid on every Christian… When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”[1]

As we focus our thoughts this morning upon Jesus, the King of righteousness, the King of Peace and our Great High Priest, the only response that enters my mind comes to me in the words of the hymn writer Isaac Watts:

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

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[1]     The Cost of Discipleship

“The Lord our Dwelling Place” (Psalm 90)

Here we are, standing at the cusp of yet another year. It’s an annual opportunity to stop and think for a moment about the passage of time, and not just about time in general, but our time, the time that has flown past (for many of us all too quickly and for some not quickly enough) and the time that stretches ahead of us, for some filled with opportunities and new adventures, for others perhaps bringing a sense of apprehension about what may lie ahead. To help ourselves put all of that in perspective, I don’t think there are many more appropriate passages of Scripture than the psalm we have just read—Psalm 90.

We tend to think of the psalms as the work of King David. In fact, of the one hundred fifty psalms in the Old Testament, seventy-five are ascribed to him. However, the psalm we read together a few moments ago is unique in all the Old Testament in that it is attributed not to David but to Moses. If you turn to it in your Bible you will see it has the superscription, “A prayer of Moses the man of God”.

Some scholars question this attribution, but as I have read this psalm over and over and meditated upon it during the last couple of weeks, it makes a lot of sense. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations…” It is not difficult for me to imagine that these are the words of a man who has spent the better part of forty years wandering through the wilderness with his people, with no home to call their own. Yet throughout that time the Lord has been with them, visibly witnessed through the cloud that led them by day and the pillar of fire at night. But he had been with them long before that, as they toiled as slaves under the searing Egyptian sun, with Joseph and Jacob and Isaac, and going back to Abraham as he answered the call to journey from the banks of the Euphrates to the land that God had said would belong to him and his descendants.

So picture Moses, if you will, late one night lying back and looking up into the clear desert sky. My son Simon and I had the opportunity to do this in Libya on the edge of the Sahara several years ago and it was a memorable experience. Gazing into a sky uncluttered by pollution and the glow of city lights, he knew that behind all those innumerable stars that paraded across night after night, mightier than the mountains that surrounded him, reaching back past the ages beyond the dawn of time, there was God. “In the beginning, God …” And in this morning’s psalm: “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” 

 

God’s Eternity

If you take a few moments to go online and visit the NASA website, you can see an amazing photograph with Saturn’s rings in the foreground. Not far below them you can discern a tiny, almost insignificant, softly glowing dot. That dot is our planet earth, as seen from a distance of nearly one and a half billion kilometers[1]. The image gives us a picture of the vastness of our solar system, which itself is only a tiny dot within the Milky Way, which in turn is another tiny dot in the seeming limitlessness of the created order.

Moses certainly did not have access to any of the kinds of sophisticated astronomical data that are available to us today. But he didn’t need them in order to find himself overwhelmed by the limitlessness of God. The Bible tells us that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20). And we could spend all morning just considering the wonder of God’s eternal nature. We find it sprinkled throughout the Bible, in Psalm 104, for example:

Lord my God, you are very great;
     you are clothed with splendour and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
     he stretches out the heavens like a tent…
He makes the clouds his chariot
     and rides on the wings of the wind. (Psalm 104:1-3)

Or again, in one of the most exalted pieces of poetry in all of Scripture, from the prophet Isaiah:

Do you not know?
     Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
     Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
     and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
     and spreads them out like a tent to live in…
‘To whom will you compare me?
     Or who is my equal?’ says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
     who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
     and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
     not one of them is missing. (Isaiah 40:21-22,25-26)

And how about that unforgettable catalogue of questions with which the Lord peppered poor Job?

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
     Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
     Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
     or who laid its cornerstone –
while the morning stars sang together
     and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors
     when it burst forth from the womb, …
when I said, “This far you may come and no farther;
     here is where your proud waves halt”?
Have you ever given orders to the morning,
     or shown the dawn its place … ?
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
     or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
     Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
     Tell me, if you know all this. (Job 38:4-18)

In Psalm 8 his consideration of God’s creative power and eternal majesty leads the psalmist to ask a question:

Lord, our Lord,
     how majestic is your name in all the earth! …
When I consider your heavens,
     the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
     which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
     human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:1,3-4)

And that is precisely the question that burns through the middle section of our psalm this morning.

Human Mortality

The main preoccupation of the psalm is not much with God’s eternal nature as it is with its contrast to our human mortality.

A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

But Moses was not the only one to recognize this. Poor old Job cried aloud to his friends,

My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,
     and they come to an end without hope.
Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath… (Job 7:6-7)

And Solomon mused,

Everyone comes naked from their mother’s womb,
     and as everyone comes, so they depart.
They take nothing from their toil
     that they can carry in their hands. (Ecclesiastes 5:15)

Nearing the end of his life, the apostle Paul wrote to his young friend Timothy, “We brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it” (1 Timothy 6:7). And Jesus exemplified that truth in his parable of the rich fool. Many of you will remember his story of the man who kept having to build bigger barns to store his surplus grain. But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you” (Luke 12:13-21).

Isaac Watts put poetic expression to this morning’s psalm in the hymn we’ll be singing in a few minutes’ time:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
     Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
     Dies at the opening day.

Now isn’t all this a cheerful way to look ahead to the New Year? I hope I haven’t thoroughly demoralized you! But before you sink too far into depression, there’s something else we need to see in this psalm—and that is that it recognizes, indeed it laments, that none of this is the way things should be. You know those puzzles that ask you to spot what’s wrong with this picture? This psalm has something like that in it. The hints come out in verses like these: “You turn people back to dust…” “You sweep people away in the sleep of death…” “We are consumed by your anger…” “All our days pass under your wrath…”

The psalmist is painfully aware that things don’t have to be the way they are—that the power of life and death lies in God’s hands. All of this leads to the desperate cry in verse 13: “Relent, Lord, how long will it be?” The verb in Hebrew is shub. It means to turn around. It is as though God has his back towards us.

So you see there is something deep within the psalmist’s heart—something in all our hearts—that protests, that cries out this is not the way it’s supposed to be. As we read in Ecclesiastes, “He has set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). So it is that C.S. Lewis reflected,

We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal…[2]

Eternal Habitations

Turn with me now to the second-last chapter of the Bible, where the seer John gives us a picture that is so breathtaking that it cannot be compared with the sky even on the most glorious starlit night. There, John is given a vision of the new heaven and the new earth. He looks on with awe as the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, descends from the skies, “prepared,” as he describes it, “like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband”. Then a loud voice booms from God’s throne with the words, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their 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” (Revelation 21:1-4).

Now shift the scene to the night before his crucifixion, as Jesus gathered with his disciples in the upper room. There he gave them the promise, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3).

And now in this Christmas season we remember how the Lord of time and eternity, he who has been our dwelling place throughout all generations, the eternal Word, became flesh and made his dwelling among us. “We have seen his glory,” John declares, “the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). It is in Jesus that we see life as God truly intends it to be. It is in Jesus that we find our eternal dwelling place in the heart of God.

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
     Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
     Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heav’n, stoops heav’n to earth…[3]

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[1]     https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17171

[2]     Reflections on the Psalms, 114,115

[3]     Richard Crashaw (1612-1649), “An Hymne of the Nativity”

“What does he mean?” (John 16:16-24)

I wonder how many of you may have seen Martin Scorsese’s film Silence when it was showing earlier in the year. Sadly, it has received far too little attention and was a failure at the box office. Yet I believe it is one of the most profound films to have been released in years. I won’t tell you too much about it, except to say that it is based on a novel by Japanese Christian author Shusaku Endo.

The story takes place in the late 1600s, with two Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe journeying to Japan to try to find their former mentor and fellow priest, Father Ferreira, who is rumoured to have abandoned his faith in the heat of the vicious persecution unleashed against Christians. Suffice it to say, the film is gruelling to watch, as the situation becomes bleaker and bleaker for the two priests, not to mention the Japanese peasants and villagers who have embraced the Christian faith.

Here at First Congregational you have been making your way through what are almost Jesus’ final words, spoken to his disciples as they shared their last supper together in the upper room. I can’t help but think that, as in the film Silence, there must have been an overpowering, almost palpable, sense of foreboding, indeed of bewilderment, as Jesus donned a servant’s towel and washed the disciples’ feet, as he warned that there was one among them who would betray him, as sent Judas Iscariot off into the night, and not least as he used the bread and wine of Passover to speak of his own body being broken and his life’s blood being shed for them.

No wonder, then, that the evening was filled with confusion and questions: “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” “Lord, who among us would ever betray you?” “Lord, where are you going that we cannot follow?” “Lord, how can we know the way?” “Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?” And now, in this morning’s passage, “What does he mean? We can’t make head or tail of what he’s saying.” (Notice that at this point the disciples’ confusion has reached the stage where they don’t even bother to address their questions to Jesus any longer, but to one another.)

So it is that into the midst of this gloom and confusion Jesus speaks once more: “In a little while you will see me no more…” “You will weep and mourn…” “You will grieve…” Hardly words to instill confidence and hope! Yet I believe that as we look into them, as we take time to examine them, we will find that they are words bursting with a richness that is scarcely possible to fathom. So let’s turn in our Bibles to John 16, verses 16 to 24.

The Wonder of the Cross

The passage begins with Jesus saying to his disciples, “In a little while you will see me no more…” As I’ve suggested already, these words must only have added to their confusion. Twenty centuries later we have the advantage of hindsight. It is clear to us that what Jesus was speaking to them about was his death on the cross. Within a few short hours Jesus would be forced away from them to be humiliated in a series of mock trials before the religious council and the secular authorities. He would be savagely beaten and then subjected to the cruellest form of execution the Roman Empire had managed to devise—the slow, painful process of hanging exposed on a cross gradually to asphyxiate to death. By the time it came to that, however, all but one would have left the scene. Both through the wicked actions of the authorities and through their own weakness, the time was swiftly coming when the disciples would indeed see Jesus no more.

In my mind’s eye I can picture them on that first Good Friday going back to the places where they were staying or possibly to the upper room, their bowed heads and stooped bodies bearing silent witness to the profound dismay and utter bewilderment that filled their hearts. “You will weep and mourn,” Jesus warned them. “You will grieve…”

Yet little did they know that as their hearts were being ripped apart, so too was the veil of the Temple, the thick curtain that separated the Holy of Holies—revered as the very dwelling place of God—from the rest of the Temple. So holy was this place that only the high priest could enter it, and he only once a year, on the Feast of the Atonement (Yom Kippur). He would have a rope tied around his waist, so that if he happened to die or become incapacitated while performing his duties he could be dragged out and nobody need enter to rescue him.

What happened that day on a physical level, dramatic as it was, was only a sign of what was also taking place on a cosmic level. Through his sacrificial death on the cross Jesus had breached the separation between God and humankind that had been a reality since the days in the Garden of Eden.

Centuries before, the prophet Isaiah had proclaimed, “Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you…” (Isaiah 59:2) Now, because of Jesus’ death on the cross, the church can proclaim, “Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain…, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings…” (Hebrews 10:19-22).

Clearly all of this was far beyond the grasp of the disciples. Indeed theologians today still ponder over it with amazement. American preacher Fleming Rutledge spent eighteen years working on her more than 600-page book The Crucifixion. New Testament scholar Tom Wright, who himself has just published a book on the crucifixion, has written, “I am under no illusions that, even if I were to write a thousand pages on the subject, I would never exhaust it.”[1] Surely in the end our response to Jesus’ death on the cross can only be one of amazement and praise. In the words of Isaac Watts,

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

The Wonder of the Resurrection

However, back to the disciples in the upper room… Jesus had warned them that their hearts would be filled with sorrow. But he also promised that they would be filled with exultation. “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me… You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.” And so the scene shifts from Good Friday to the first Easter morning, from Calvary to Joseph of Arimathea’s garden. If those first disciples could not come to terms with Jesus’ crucifixion, how were they to handle his resurrection?

It was only with great difficulty and after considerable persuasion that they came to believe the reality of Jesus’ resurrection after it occurred. They dismissed the women’s reports of the empty tomb and the angels as old wives’ tales. When Jesus appeared before them in the upper room, they at first assumed he was an apparition. So no wonder Jesus’ words about their sorrow being turned to joy and about not seeing him and then seeing him only left them befuddled and confused! I know for certain that I would have been.

Yet within a few short weeks they would be proclaiming, “You … put [Jesus of Nazareth] to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead… Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:23-24,36). The resurrection points to Jesus as an individual utterly unique in the course of history. And that alone would have been enough to blow the disciples’ minds—or anyone’s mind for that matter. But dare I say that that is only the tip of the iceberg?

Look at what Paul writes in his famous chapter on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15: “But Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). You see, Easter was only the beginning. Because of Jesus’ resurrection we can look forward to that day when, as Paul again writes, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

It’s Jesus’ resurrection that assures us that all the injustices, all the seemingly pointless suffering, the atrocities and the horrors that human beings are subject to will one day be gloriously, mysteriously redeemed. Climatologists warn us that human existence may come to an end when our pollution of the environment reaches the point where human life is no longer possible. Astronomers warn of a collision with a comet of the proportions of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. Still others see us all being sucked into the oblivion of a black hole. None of them is a pretty picture. But Jesus’ resurrection tells that there is more, that God has greater plans for his creation than we could ever imagine—in Paul’s words, “that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18).

Now that does not mean that we are not to seek justice, to minister to the downtrodden, or to care for the environment. Quite the opposite: Jesus’ resurrection calls us to be outposts of that new creation that is to come, to be glimpses, even if ever so weak and glimmering, of the light that is to be revealed.

The Wonder of Communion

If all of that were not enough, Jesus reveals a third point of wonder for the disciples. The first is the wonder of the crucifixion; the second, the wonder of the resurrection; and I was going to call the third the wonder of prayer. But on reflection I think it is better to call it the wonder of communion. Listen to Jesus’ final words in this morning’s verses:

Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. In that day you will no longer ask me anything. Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.

On the surface it almost seems like some magical formula—the kind of thing we read about in fairy tales: “Make a wish and all your dreams will come true.” Yet I suspect that all of us have had enough of an experience of prayer to know that that just isn’t the case. Nor is it what Jesus is speaking about here. For prayer, as we all know, is not some mechanical formula—put a loonie in the slot and down slides a candy bar. No, prayer is a conversation, and like all conversations it is an expression of a relationship.

When we begin to see it in this way, we also begin to recognize that asking something in Jesus’ name is not just a matter of tacking those words onto the end of a petition—“… in Jesus’ name. Amen”—as though that makes our prayer valid in a way that it wouldn’t be without them. No, it seems to me that to pray in Jesus’ name is to pray the prayer that Jesus himself would pray. And that in turn means that a significant element of prayer is seeking his will. It means coming to him and allowing him to come alongside us, and to be with him in the Garden of Gethsemane as the disciples soon would be, where they would hear him utter, “Father, not my will, but yours, be done.”

In that gift of prayer, that gift of communion, of being able to come into his presence, of knowing that he is with us even when we are not conscious of it, Jesus has given us something again that we will never fathom, never understand, yet to those of us who have entered into its mysteries, a gift more precious than words could ever express.

The disciples asked, “What does he mean?” And like them, our minds will never fully grasp the mysteries into which our faith in Jesus leads us. But more importantly he who has died for us, who is the first-born from the dead, and who is ever-present with us—he has grasped us, and he will never let us go.

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[1]     “The Cross and the Caricatures”, Fulcrum, Eastertide 2007, https://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/articles/the-cross-and-the-caricatures/

"When Time Stood Still" (Mark 15:1-39)

If there is a distinguishing feature of Mark’s gospel (you might even call it Mark’s signature), it is the word “immediately”. You find it peppered all through its sixteen chapters. When Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, he immediately comes up out of the water (1:10). Then, immediately the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness (1:12). Jesus calls Simon and Andrew to become fishers of people and immediately they drop their nets and follow him (1:18). Jesus and his disciples go to Capernaum and immediately on the Sabbath he goes to the synagogue and teaches (1:21). Then, immediately, a man with an unclean spirit begins shouting and Jesus rebukes it (1:23). Immediately after that, Jesus goes to the home of Simon and Andrew and heals Simon’s mother-in-law, who is sick with a fever (1:29). A leper begs Jesus to make him clean. Jesus touches him and says, “Be clean,” and immediately the leprosy leaves him (1:40-43). At this point we haven’t even left the first chapter! In all, we find the word in forty-two places—ten times in the first chapter alone.

Thus it seems that throughout Mark’s gospel, far more than the other three, there is always a sense of motion—not of hurry, not of things moving more quickly than they ought or being out of control, but always moving. The final point at which we encounter the word “immediately” is in the opening verse of this morning’s Gospel reading. Unfortunately you won’t see it in very many of our English translations. However, rendered literally, Mark 15:1 sounds like this: “And immediately, very early in the morning, the chief priests, with the elders and scribes, and the whole council, held a consultation…” And that is the last time we hear it. Suddenly, it seems, time slows down.

The foreknowledge of God

Mark compresses three years of Jesus’ life into fourteen chapters. He does not even give any account of Jesus’ birth. Now he devotes an entire chapter to just nine hours. I find myself asking, why is this so? One idea that comes to my mind takes me back many years ago to a winter morning when I was driving on the open freeway out in the countryside. Suddenly, a considerable distance away, I could see that all the traffic had come to a halt. I tapped the brakes and realized that I had no control whatever over my car. I was driving on black ice. I put the car into neutral and tried to steer it gently to the side of the road. But nothing I did had any effect. Unable to do anything to prevent whatever was going to happen, I found myself beginning to feel more like a helpless observer than a driver. As my car glided toward the vehicles ahead of me, I had an eerie sense that time had slowed down. The interval between first spotting the stopped cars far ahead and when I finally crashed into the back of a school bus that had gone off the road seemed not like the few seconds that it was, but minutes.

So I ask myself, is this the way that it was for Jesus’ disciples? As events took their course on that fateful Friday morning, there was a sense of inevitability, that now there was nothing they could do to intervene in the series of events that was unfolding before them. Looking back on it, we can say they should have known. On more than one occasion, going all the way back to the time when Peter had proclaimed him the Messiah, Jesus had warned them that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed…” (Mark 8:32). At what should have been a celebratory event—the Passover meal—there had been the sadness that had hung over everything like an ominous cloud, when Jesus had taken the bread and said, “This is my body, broken for you,” and the wine with the words, “This is my blood, poured out for you and for many.” That same night, as Judas Iscariot entered the Garden of Gethsemane with the soldiers and a band of ruffians, who dragged Jesus away to the court of the high priest, they must have known in their hearts that things had gone beyond the point of no return. All that was left for them to do was to look on helplessly as Jesus was carried away to be crushed by the unstoppable wheel of fate.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people. (Isaiah 53:7-8)

What the disciples did not know, what they could never have conceived at the time, was that things were not out of control at all—that what was unfolding was not evil running unchecked, but the long-awaited plan of a loving Father. “It was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief…” wrote Isaiah centuries before (Isaiah 53:10). Or not many days later, as Peter himself would soon recognize and proclaim, “This man [was] handed over … according to the deliberate plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23).

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor? (Romans 11:33-34)

A fact of history

Let’s stop there for a moment. For I believe that there may be a second reason why time slows down at this point in Mark’s gospel. It stems from a curious incident the night before, as Jesus is being led away from the Garden of Gethsemane, and of the four gospels it is found only in Mark’s account. In chapter 14, verses 51 and 52, we are told about a young man who had been following along behind Jesus and the disciples wearing nothing but a linen cloth. The guards tried to apprehend him, but all they managed to do was to grab hold of the cloth and off he ran, naked, into the dark.

Practically ever since people have been asking, could this have been Mark? After all, it is not unlikely that the upper room where the last supper took place was in the home of Mark’s mother, Mary. Could he have sneaked out of the house and followed Jesus and the disciples across the Kidron Valley to the garden? Added to that, Mark would have been a very young man, likely not even have reached puberty, so he would not have been regarded as a threat by the authorities. Could it be then that what we have from this point on in the gospel is not a second-hand report of the events, but an actual eyewitness account? I grant that all of this is to some extent speculation, but it might explain why Mark goes into such detail at this point.

He carefully notes times—a detail we don’t find anywhere else in his gospel. At nine o’clock Jesus is crucified. At noon darkness shadows the whole land. At three o’clock Jesus cries out, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” and then breathes his last. Why all the detail? Because Mark wants to make sure that we know that what we are reading about are actual events. The nails that pierced Jesus’ hands were hard iron. The wood on which he hung was rough and splintered. The pain that tormented his naked body ran through every nerve.

As we read the account of the Passion, we need to remember that this is not just a story, a myth that has been devised or a legend that has been passed down. What we commemorate over this Holy Week are actual events, testified to by eyewitnesses, that took place in real time. “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received,” wrote the apostle Paul less than twenty years later, “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3). “What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands,” wrote St John, “we declare to you” (1 John 1:1). The crucifixion was a real event. The cross is real.

The fulcrum of eternity

There is another reason that occurs to me as to why Mark slows down at this point. Picture yourself on a train, speeding across the countryside. The train begins to decelerate. Then slowly, its brakes squealing and sparks flying from its wheels, it comes to a halt. You have reached your destination.

It is at the cross that the gospel also reaches its destination. It is at the cross that everything stops. All creation holds its breath and gasps as the Lamb of God breathes his last and bows his head. And a centurion, who knows nothing of the Bible, nothing of God’s centuries-long pursuit of his people, nothing about Jesus, looks up and exclaims, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” For the cross was Jesus’ destination also. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:23,32).

The cross is the fulcrum on which the destiny, not just of humankind, but of the entire universe, turns. “Through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). It is on the cross that sin is canceled, the powers of evil overthrown, the tragic chain of events that can be traced all the way back to the Garden of Eden is reversed, and death becomes the gate to eternal life.

But we have not let the cross do its work until what is the fulcrum of eternity becomes the fulcrum of our lives as well. We can accept it as a fact of history. We can wonder at it as the ultimate act of sacrifice by a loving Savior. But until we bow before it and receive the grace and forgiveness that Jesus has wrought for us there, it can only be a symbol, a distant event shrouded by the mists of the past.

“I have been crucified with Christ,” wrote the apostle Paul, “and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). The challenge of Holy Week, the challenge of the cross, is to allow what Jesus has done there to become a present reality for us, to accept in humble gratitude the terrifying but awesome truth that it was for me and for my sins that Jesus shed his blood and gave himself over to death. He died so that I might live…

What more is there to say, except to pray? And for that I would like to use the words of Isaac Watts. If you know them, perhaps you would like to say them with me.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
save in the death of Christ my God:
all the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to his blood.