“Bathed in Glory” (Mark 9:2-9)

From the slopes of Mount Hermon you can look across and see all of Galilee, fifty miles away. Rising to an altitude of 9,100 feet above sea level, and crowned with snow the year round, locals speak of it as “the gray-haired mountain” or “the mountain of snow”. Throughout the year its temperatures hover in an alpine range. From its snowy peak the land slopes downwards in a rapid descent. Melt waters rush down its rugged slopes and the broken surface of its intervening valleys. They feed into springs at its southwestern foot that form the source of the River Jordan. Along the way they give nourishment to fertile plant life—lush vineyards, and pine, oak and poplar trees.[1]

This is the setting of this morning’s Gospel reading. Once again Jesus has taken his disciples with him to one of those lonely places where he was in the habit of devoting extended periods of time to teach them and to be with his heavenly Father. This time, however, it was to be no ordinary teaching.

So extraordinary were the events that took place on that mountainside, so utterly outside the realm of normal human experience, that many people since—Christians among them—have had difficulty accepting that it really happened. Some have theorized that what we have here is really a resurrection appearance of Jesus that has somehow been transposed into an earlier place in the gospel accounts. Others have suggested that what this passage relates is not an actual event, but a vision that was given to the three disciples. Still others have gone so far as to argue that there was never any such occurrence at all, that this was a story invented by the early church in attempt to visualize the glory and deity of Christ.

It seems to me (and to much better scholars than myself) that in the end none of these theories can really hold water. Morna Hooker, for example, who is the former Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, has written,

Although the story causes problems for the modern reader, it is unlikely that Mark was aware of them. In his God-filled universe, a heavenly confirmation of Jesus’ identity would have seemed no more out of place than the acknowledgement of his identity by the unclean spirits. The true nature of Jesus is a hidden mystery which breaks out from time to time, and for Mark these revelations do not require explanations.[2]

As we think about the transfiguration this morning, then, I believe that we have every reason to accept it as a literal event, and here are a couple of reasons why. For one thing, Mark is careful to place the transfiguration at a specific point in time, six days following Peter’s famous declaration of Jesus as the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi. Added to that, the inclusion of Peter’s almost comical response to what he witnessed gives further evidence of the genuineness of what we are being told. Altogether, it seems likely that, as they stood in Jesus’ presence that day, the three disciples were at one of those points where the barrier between heaven and earth becomes thin and eternal realities are glimpsed, even if only for an instant, for what they are.

The glory on the mountain

So let us take a few moments to look once again at what took place on the mountainside that day. Jesus has gone off with three of his disciples, Peter and the two brothers James and John—the ones often referred to as Jesus’ inner circle. There, high above the Galilean hills, they found themselves entirely alone. Notice how Mark emphasizes the point: he “led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves”. It is Luke who informs us that Jesus was praying. All the while, I can imagine the three disciples either taking in the magnificent view or perhaps foraging for food (a few berries, maybe) after the arduous climb.

When they looked at Jesus again, what they saw must have taken their breath away. Jesus had utterly changed. The verb in Greek is metamorphoo. You can recognize it in our word “metamorphosis”—when a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly or a tadpole into a frog. The transformation that the disciples saw in Jesus, on the other hand, was on an incomparably different level. It penetrated even his clothes to the point where they positively dazzled. (Here I love the quaintness of the King James Version: “such as no fuller on earth can white them”.) With Jesus were two other figures, whom the disciples were able to recognize as Moses and Elijah—perhaps representative of the Law and the Prophets.

Mark tells us that that the two were in conversation with Jesus—and I guess Peter was eager to get in on the discussion as well. “Rabbi,” he blurted out, “it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter’s words seem almost ludicrous, but I believe they expressed the genuine desire to prolong this unique experience. I think of the words of the old nineteenth-century hymn,

Father of Jesus, love’s reward!

what rapture it will be

prostrate before thy throne to lie,

and gaze and gaze on thee!

But that was not to happen. Hardly had the words gone out of Peter’s mouth than they were all overshadowed by a cloud. Here we can only think of the cloud of God’s shekinah glory, the cloud that hung over Mount Sinai as Moses received the Ten Commandments, the cloud that accompanied the people of Israel through the wilderness, the cloud that filled the Temple at its dedication under Solomon. And then from the cloud, more terrifying still, a voice: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

It seems to me that there is a lesson in those words, a lesson that at times I find difficult to learn. It is that while I know God delights for us to come into his presence and to offer our prayers, how much more important it is that we learn to listen. I am convinced that some of the most valuable time that we can spend in prayer are those moments of silence, when we allow God’s word to sink deep into our minds and hearts, when, instead of speaking to God we give time for God to speak to us. I sometimes wonder if this isn’t part of the reason why it took forty days after Jesus’ ascension for the Holy Spirit to fall upon the disciples. They needed to run out of things to say and simply be silent before the Lord!

Whatever the case, no sooner had the words been spoken than all was silent and the disciples were alone with Jesus once more.

The glory of the cross

What are we to think about all of this? Tom Wright maintains that we cannot come to terms with what happened on this mountain until we think of what was to happen on another one. It is no coincidence that both before the transfiguration and after it, Jesus warned the disciples about his suffering and death. “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” (Mark 8:31) “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” (Mark 9:31) And so between the transfiguration and the crucifixion we find some eerie parallels. To quote Bishop Wright,

Here, on a mountain, is Jesus revealed in glory; there on a hill outside Jerusalem, is Jesus, revealed in shame. Here his clothes are shining white; there, they have been stripped off, while beneath him soldiers gamble for them. Here he is flanked by Moses and Elijah, two of Israel’s greatest heroes; there he is flanked by two brigands. Here, a bright cloud overshadows the scene; there, darkness comes upon the land. Here, Peter blurts out how wonderful it all is; there, he is hiding in shame after denying he even knows Jesus. Here, a voice from God himself declares that this is his beloved Son; there, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and a pagan soldier declares, in surprise, that this really was God’s son.[3]

Could it be that this is the reason why, on the way down the mountain, Jesus ordered the disciples not to share with anyone what they had just witnessed until after he had risen from the dead? We all want the glory. But was Jesus saying that there can be no glory without suffering—and specifically without his suffering? “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” wrote the apostle Paul,

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11)

“If we suffer with him, we will also be glorified with him.” (Romans 8:17b)

The glory that awaits us

Before we leave the transfiguration, there is another thing we ought to note. Apart from what we read in the gospels, the word “transfigure” occurs in only two other places in the whole of the New Testament. One them is 2 Corinthians 3:18 and it reads thus:

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transfigured into the same image from one degree of glory to another…

What does this teach us? I believe that when Peter and James and John looked on with awe at Jesus that day on the mountain, they were also looking at themselves—not as they were, but as they would one day be. As John himself was later to write, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

This is a truly astounding truth and it carries with it astounding implications. C.S. Lewis spoke about them in his famous sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory”.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship… There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit… And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses…

All of this brings us to the one other place in the Bible where we find the word “transfigured”. It is in Paul’s great exhortation in Romans 12 to “be transfigured (that is what the word is literally) by the renewing of your minds”. And so, if we take Lewis’ words seriously, the transfiguration stands as a challenge to you and to me to see ourselves and those around us in the same way that God sees us in Christ—in other words to love with that same self-giving love with which he loves us.

I’d like us to pray using the words of Charles Wesley.

Finish, then, thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be.
Let us see thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

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[1]     Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible

[2]     The Gospel According to Saint Mark, 214

[3]     See Matthew for Everyone, Part 2, 14, 15 (slightly altered)

“Our Merciful and Faithful High Priest” (Mark 1:29-39)

There is no book in the New Testament that presents a more exalted view of Christ than the Letter to the Hebrews. Its opening verses, read every year at Christmas, present a stirring portrait of Jesus in all his divine majesty.

He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. (Hebrews 1:3-4)

Yet alongside this picture of Jesus in his glory is the paradoxical recognition that threads its way through the whole of the Bible: that this same Son of God, who shares fully in all the inexpressible splendor of the Father, must also suffer. That message hits us full force this morning, in our reading from the second chapter of the same letter: “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.” The author goes on to tell us how the eternal Son of God “had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God.”

The Letter to the Hebrews introduces us to Jesus in terms of high theology. Complementing that is the earthy account of Jesus that Mark gives us in his gospel. It is in Mark’s and the other evangelists’ accounts that we discover that all the doctrines about Jesus that the church has distilled through the centuries are based on concrete realities. There the dogmas that we reaffirm week by week in the creeds take on actual flesh and blood. There we see, in practical terms, what it meant for the Son of God to have become a human being like ourselves.

Jesus’ Compassion

In this morning’s New Testament reading Hebrews describes Jesus as our merciful and faithful high priest. In the Gospel reading we see how that profound theological truth worked itself out in the context of ordinary, practical, everyday life. There Mark takes us into a simple Galilean home, the house of the two fisherman brothers, Andrew and Peter. We enter to find that Peter’s mother-in-law is in bed, suffering from a fever. Mark doesn’t tell us any more, whether it was a high fever or a low one, whether it had been going on for days or just begun. What we do know is that Peter and Andrew told Jesus about it, and he comes to her bedside. There he takes her hand, helps her up, and the next thing we know is that she is well again—well enough to have the energy to prepare and serve a meal to four hungry fishermen and their friend.

Even without Facebook or Twitter, it did not take long for news to spread around the community about the young teacher who had expelled an unclean spirit in the synagogue and healed an elderly woman of her fever. Before the sun had set, Andrew and Peter’s doorway was jammed with people suffering from every imaginable kind of complaint, all clamoring to see Jesus—and Mark tells us that there were many who went away cured. And while Mark doesn’t use the word, I believe that what we have here is a first glimpse of the compassion that moved within and constantly overflowed from the heart of Jesus.

In fact, just two verses after this morning’s passage, Mark uses exactly that word. Defying all the strict regulations that required him to keep his distance, a leper comes right up to Jesus, falls at his feet and pleads with him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Then Mark tells us, “Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.” “Moved with compassion”—we find those words being used of Jesus at numerous points in the gospel records. A widow is following her only son’s casket through the town of Nain, and Jesus, moved with compassion, calls the procession to stop and raises him to life (Luke 7:11-14). Jesus gets out of a boat on the shore of Lake Galilee to see that a great crowd has followed him from the nearby towns, and Matthew tells us that he had compassion on them and cured their sick (Matthew 14:13,14). Just outside Jericho, two blind men find out about Jesus and start shouting to gain his attention. Moved with compassion, Jesus touches their eyes and immediately they regain their sight (Matthew 20:29-34). In John’s gospel we encounter the scene of Jesus standing with Mary and Martha outside the sealed tomb of their brother Lazarus. John tells us that Jesus “was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (John 11:33). And we find that same compassion as in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prepares to confront all the evil that afflicts and enslaves us. “In his anguish” Luke tells us, “he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:44).

Atlanta preacher and homiletician Thomas Long comments,

When the gaze of the eternal Son of God encompasses a criminal on death row, when the glorified Son sees a homeless woman crawling into a cardboard box to keep from freezing in the night, when the Lord of all sees a man robbed of dignity and purpose by schizophrenia, when the divine heir of all things sees a mother weeping over the death of her child or a man battling the last savage assault of cancer or the swollen body of a child slowly starving to death, he does not see a charity case, a pitiful victim, or a hopeless cause. He sees a brother, he sees a sister, and he is not ashamed to call us his “brothers and sisters”. The Son of God does not wag his head at misery and cluck, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Instead he says, “There because of the grace of God I am.”[1]

Jesus’ Priorities

Jesus: the man of compassion. There is another picture of Jesus that Mark gives us this morning, however: not the public Jesus preaching in the synagogue and healing the sick. This time we meet the private Jesus, who while the sun has not yet stretched its rays over the eastern horizon, gets up, withdraws to a secluded spot where nobody is likely to be, and there he prays. Some time later, after the feeding of the five thousand, Mark again shows Jesus removing himself from his disciples and going off to a mountainside to pray (Mark 6:46).

It is in Luke’s gospel, however, that we are given the most complete account of Jesus’ life of prayer. There we find Jesus in prayer at almost every major event in his ministry. Jesus prays at his baptism. He prays before appointing the twelve apostles. He prays before asking the disciples the pivotal question, “Who do people say I am?” He is in prayer when he is transfigured before the disciples. He prays for Peter, that his faith will not fail. And he prays in Gethsemane the night before he is crucified. Indeed Luke tells us that it was Jesus’ habit to withdraw to deserted places and pray (Luke 5:16).

Jesus not only spent a great deal of time in prayer himself; he also taught his followers to pray: to pray in faith, to pray with simplicity, to pray with persistence, to pray with humility. If we are to take both the teaching and the example of Jesus seriously, then we know that our own spiritual lives must be built, like his, on the foundation of prayer—and (Warning: guilt alert!) as I say what I am about to say, it is with the painful awareness of how short my own prayer life falls from what God desires of me. It is that prayer—true prayer—takes time and it takes effort. William Wilberforce, the man who virtually single-handedly stopped the West African slave trade in Britain, once remarked, “The shortening of private devotions starves the soul. It grows lean and faint.” Nineteenth-century Methodist preacher E.M. Bounds wrote,

Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as well in the market. We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly praying until it looks well to us, at least it keeps up a decent form and quiets conscience—the deadliest of opiates! We can slight our praying, and not realize the peril till the foundations are gone. Hurried devotions make weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable piety. To be little with God is to be little for God. To cut short the praying makes the whole religious character short, scrimp, niggardly, and slovenly.[2]

Jesus’ Mission

Aside from being president, Dwight Eisenhower is famous for making the very wise distinction between what is urgent and what is important. The idea is that what seems urgent is not necessarily important—and conversely the important things are not always urgent. Since then his principle has been turned into what is known as the Eisenhower Matrix. Picture a box containing four smaller boxes. In the upper left are tasks that are both urgent and important, things like finding a job, attending to your sick child, putting out the fire on the kitchen stove. In the lower right box are things that are neither urgent nor important. Here you might want to place distractions such as video games, Facebook or watching TV. Above it, in the upper right, are tasks that are urgent but may not be all that important. Think of things like the incessant ringing of the telephone or the emails that many of us are barraged with every day. Finally there are things that are important but don’t scream out at us as urgent—thoughtful planning, exercise, rest, family time, and not least, prayer. So often these are the things that receive the least attention in our lives. Yet Stephen Covey has observed in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that the people most likely to get things done, who actually accomplish something in life, are those who give more attention and spend more time in that fourth quadrant.

Jesus had his priorities right. He knew that he had to withdraw in order to engage. The time he spent in prayer did not remove him from the action; it prepared him for action. And so in the last little vignette that Mark gives us in the Gospel reading, what do we find Jesus doing? Moving forward vigorously to fulfill the mission that God had given him.

More years ago than I care to remember, I was involved in an evangelistic outreach on our university campus. I recall a large number of us gathering for prayer a day or so beforehand with our speaker, the Rev. David MacInnes. One of the things that I clearly remember him saying and that has stuck with me ever since is that whenever we pray, we need to be prepared to be part of God’s answer to that prayer.

The next step after prayer is to move ahead in faith and obedience. Yet I confess that more often than not, no sooner have I gotten up from my prayers than they have vanished from my consciousness. Maybe this is one reason why our prayer lives are so feeble. We fail to put the rubber to the road. We neglect to take that final but all-important step, to take our life of prayer into our lives in the world. I suspect that if we dared to live more like that, we would also find our prayer becoming deeper, more vibrant, more related to the realities of life. We would find ourselves truly engaged in the mission of Jesus.

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[1]     Hebrews, Interpretation Commentary, 42

[2]     Power Through Prayer, page unknown

“He taught with authority” (Mark 1:21-28)

I am told that some years ago at a meeting of bishops from around the world an Irish bishop and a Mexican bishop got into conversation. “Tell me,” the Mexican bishop said to the Irish bishop. “Does the Irish language have any equivalent of our word mañana?” The Irish bishop looked down and stroked his chin for a moment. Then he looked up and said, “No, I can’t think of any Irish word that would confer quite the same sense of urgency.”

Translating from one language into another is often a complex and tricky business. Our Karen interpreters face it every week when they bravely take on the challenge of translating my sermons. Whether we are aware of it or not, many of the words we use have subtle shades of meaning for which there is no precise equivalent in another language. This was very much the case a couple of generations ago when missionaries first began to translate the Bible into Inuktitut, the language of the Eskimos living in the eastern Arctic regions of Canada. How do you translate, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” for a people who lived in igloos with no doors? Or, “I am the good shepherd,” in a land where there are no sheep and there is no tradition of herding, only hunting?

At a more critical level a huge debate rages today over translating the Bible into Arabic. Should the word “Allah”, for example, be used to translate “God”? A considerably more heated controversy has arisen over the question of how to render “Son of God” into Arabic with reference to Jesus, as there are many Muslims who assume that this must mean “procreated Son of God”.

A Sensation: The Authority of Jesus

Less controversially, there are two words in this morning’s Gospel reading that to my mind defy translation into English. In our pew Bibles they are the words “astounded” in verse 22 and “amazed” in verse 27. I have looked up this passage in several different translations and most of them are about the same. Eugene Peterson in The Message colorfully renders verse 27, “Everyone there was incredulous, buzzing with curiosity.” But my own impression is that what we are witnessing here is something far more profound than curiosity. The New Living Bible comes closer with, “Amazement gripped the audience.” Yet even that, I believe, falls short of the mark.

So let’s just take a moment to recreate the scene in our minds. It’s Saturday morning and the good folk of Capernaum (population 1500) have assembled in the synagogue. A new young rabbi has come to town from neighboring Nazareth. I don’t believe that it was because he was a great orator (although he may have been) or because he was especially scholarly (although that may have been true as well) but there was something about his teaching that resonated with their hearts in a way that no other rabbi had ever done before. It spawned in them a yearning to hear more, to plumb deeper. We see that reflected in Peter’s words in John’s gospel: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life;” or in the two disciples on the road to Emmaus: “Did not our hearts burn within us … as he opened the Scriptures to us?”

I can only imagine that their attention was so utterly focused on Jesus and on what he was saying to them that the sudden shrieks from the man with the unclean spirit must have caused their hearts to leap. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Yet without breaking step for a moment, and with a combination of total calm and intense concentration Jesus turned to him and said, “Be silenced (literally, ‘be muzzled’) and come out of him.” The man immediately went into convulsions and inarticulate screams, and then, as quickly as it had begun, all was silent. Then the room began to fill with amazed voices exclaiming, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

The words that contemporary Bible translations use to describe the congregation are “amazed”, “astonished”, “astounded”. But I don’t think that any of those words comes near to what was going on inside the hearts of the crowd on that day. I was tempted to think that “blown away” might bring us closer to what they were feeling. Yet even that seems woefully inadequate. “Overwhelmed” might be better. One of the verbs that Mark uses in this passage has at its root the idea of being struck, indeed being struck by lightning. The other is often coupled with trembling with fear. So do you see the direction in which we are heading? It is like Peter’s reaction after the miraculous catch of fish, falling at Jesus’ knees and protesting, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man;” or the people of Gerasa after the demons had caused their herd of swine to hurtle down the hillside and drown in the sea. Their utter bewilderment at what they had witnessed was such that they begged Jesus to leave the area.

Both in his teachings and in his actions Jesus demonstrated an authority not seen in anyone else. He simply did not fit into any category. And that, I believe, is something that ought to make anyone profoundly uncomfortable. “What kind of man is this?” the disciples asked themselves when Jesus calmed the storm. “Even the wind and sea obey him!”

A Confrontation: The Reality of Evil

At this point we need to stop for just a moment to wind back and ask ourselves, what was it exactly that was taking place in the synagogue that morning? It is not just Jesus who doesn’t fit readily into our twenty-first century categories. What about the unclean spirit? What are we to say, what are we to think, about that? Our three-and-a-half-century heritage of rationalism and reductionistic thought has succeeded in pretty well eradicating any sense of the supernatural from our worldview. We prefer to explain what an earlier generation saw as spirit possession in terms of disease or psychosis or something else that fits more neatly into an understanding of life composed entirely of the physical.

Charles Cranfield, one of the leading New Testament scholars of the twentieth century, commented on this passage,

Here we are up against something that presents many difficulties to the modern mind, which is apt to dismiss the whole subject as outgrown superstition. It is important to approach it with as open a mind as possible. To suggest that there may be more truth here in the New Testament picture than has sometimes been allowed is not to wish to turn the clock back on scientific progress or to open the floodgates of obscurantism. The question whether the confident spread of the demons’ non-existence has not been their greatest triumph gets tragic urgency from such twentieth-century features as Nazism, McCarthyism, and Apartheid. And lest we should be prejudiced by the memory of such horrors as the burning of witches, it must be said that they were due, not to taking the New Testament too seriously, but to failing to take it seriously enough.[1]

So how do we take what the Bible says seriously? C.S. Lewis perhaps put it best in his brief preface to The Screwtape Letters, when he wrote,

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors…[2]

The New Testament clearly recognizes the reality of personal evil. In a few weeks’ time as we enter the season of Lent we will be reading about Jesus’ threefold confrontation with the devil. He taught us to pray, “Deliver us from the evil one.” (That is the literal translation of the Lord’s Prayer.) The apostle Paul teaches that we are engaged in a struggle “against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). And numerous times in the New Testament we see both Jesus himself and later the apostles engaging in direct conflict with the occult forces of evil in the world.

Yet we need also to be aware that, while the Bible speaks about the reality of the devil and his legions, it is speaking about a conquered enemy. What we see in this morning’s passage is a power confrontation. The unclean spirit shrieked out, “I know who you are…” It somehow reasoned that by knowing who Jesus was, it could exert some kind of power over him. Yet its words were clearly the product of desperation because in fact the opposite was true. What we witness in the New Testament and in our own struggles with evil are the final skirmishes of a battle that has been won. In Revelation we read,

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our brothers and sisters has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb…” (Revelation 12:10,11)

Notice how the victory has been won: by the blood of the Lamb. The ultimate confrontation with evil took place at Calvary, as the spotless Son of God bore the full brunt of evil’s power and rendered it powerless. The devil and his legions are a defeated foe. Yet like a wounded bear they rage and flail, and we do ourselves a disfavor when we ignore their ability to damage and to destroy. Like those brave saints in Revelation, however, our victory is assured through the blood of the Lamb.

An Invitation: A Relationship with Jesus

One final note on this morning’s passage: The unclean spirit thought that it could somehow fend off Jesus’ power because it knew who he was. Elsewhere James tells us that even the demons believe (2:19). And so implicit in what we have read this morning and indeed throughout the Bible is that knowing about Jesus, even believing about Jesus, is not enough, not what God is looking for. And that is where our other reading this morning, from 1 Corinthians, comes in. There Paul tells us, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”

Early in my Christian life I remember my rector once saying (and I think very wisely), “Isn’t it great that we’re not going to be judged on the basis of the correctness of our doctrine!” Now I am not suggesting that we all go out and embrace heresy. Nor am I saying that doctrine is not important, or that we should not have a thirst to know more and more about Jesus. The problem with the unclean spirit in this morning’s Gospel, however, was that, while it knew about Jesus, it had no desire actually to know him, to yield to him, to enter into a relationship with him.

By contrast, Jesus’ prayer for his followers—and by extension for us—was that they might truly know him (John 17:3). Paul’s single desire was “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection” (Philippians 3:10). And so I guess my prayer is that we should go away from this morning’s Gospel passage, not simply amazed or bowled over or blown away by Jesus’ power, but that that should lead us to bow to him personally, to let his presence permeate our lives—and in the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim for ourselves, “Jesus is Lord.”

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[1]     The Gospel According to St Mark, 75

[2]     page 9

Sermon – “Good News, Bad News” (Romans 1:16-25)

We’ve all heard the “good news, bad news jokes”. A tomato and a carrot were out for a walk one evening. They were crossing the street when a car tore by and seriously injured the carrot. The carrot was carried off in an ambulance while the tomato rushed to the hospital after him. Outside the emergency room he met with the doctor. “How is my friend doing?” he asked breathlessly. “Is he going to live?” The doctor looked at him sternly and replied, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that your friend is still alive. The bad news is that he’s going to end up being a vegetable for the rest of his life.”

If you listened carefully to this morning’s reading from the New Testament, you will have noticed that it contains both good news and bad news. Paul starts with the good news, which is the gospel—and he gives us two good reasons why this is so. First of all, it is the power of God. The word in Greek is dunamis, from which we derive our English words “dynamic” and “dynamite”. And so we believe that, unlike other stories, the gospel has a power of its own, to bring those who hear it into a relationship with God.

I may have told you before of the story of Ernest Gordon, a Scottish military officer who was captured by the Japanese in World War 2 and taken to a prisoner of war camp in Burma, to work on the infamous “railway of death”. He and a group of his fellow prisoners began to read the New Testament together and it was not long before they were realizing that this Jesus of whom they were reading was not just a figure of history but one who was present in their very midst. Soon their lives were being transformed. Where there had been despair there was hope. The near-animal behavior that they had been reduced to by their captors was replaced by courageous acts of self-giving. They would never be the same again. That story has been duplicated again and again wherever men and women come into contact with the gospel.

The Gospel [wrote Karl Barth] is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths. The Gospel is not the door but the hinge… By the Gospel the whole concrete world is dissolved and established. 

The gospel is good news because of its power. But that power derives from its content. “For in it,” Paul tells us, “the righteousness of God is revealed…” Now you could just as easily translate those words, “In it the justice of God is revealed.” Whichever way you do it, it will become clear to us as we venture through Romans that God’s righteousness and God’s justice are not the same as human righteousness and human justice. According to human justice, the punishment must fit the crime. One of the earliest things a child learns to say is, “But that’s not fair!” What we will find is that God’s justice simply does not fit neatly into any of our human categories. It will always baffle us, always confound us—and that is why Paul says it is revealed “from faith to faith”, or as the New Living Translation puts it, “from start to finish by faith”.

The Act: They suppressed the truth

However, this amazing good news, which Paul proclaims and which is the subject of this letter, is set against the backdrop of bad news. Just as the gospel reveals the righteousness of God, so by contrast it inevitably reveals the wrath of God as well. Now speaking about God’s anger makes many people profoundly uneasy. It conjures up images of hellfire-and-brimstone preachers of past generations who appeared to think it was more effective to frighten their parishioners into Christian faith than to woo them. Yet when you take a moment to think about it, are there not things in this world that God ought to be angry about—the carnage of war, the horror of slavery and human trafficking, the evils of racism; or on a closer to home level, domestic abuse, bullying that drives children to suicide, a drunk driver who plows into a family of five? What kind of God would he be if he were not angry about things such as these?

Paul will have more to say about specific evils in the final verses of the chapter. However, for the moment he calls upon us to look at the root cause of so much of what is out of kilter both in his world and (I want to say) in our world today. It all revolves around two verbs. The first is in verse 18. Paul speaks of those “who by their wickedness suppress the truth”. The term quite literally means “hold down”. So you have a picture of a group of brigands taking someone captive and holding them to the floor. It happened to the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Jeremiah was warning that the city of Jerusalem was going to fall to the armies of Chaldea and that they ought to surrender. The city officials didn’t like what he was saying because they were afraid it would undermine the morale of their troops. (Never mind that Jeremiah was right and that surrendering from the start would spare a great many lives and even the city itself.) So they took him captive and shut him up in a muddy cistern.

So it is that not only individuals but whole societies can become profoundly uncomfortable with the truth, to the point where they will go to almost any length to suppress it—and this is where Paul’s second verb comes in, in verses 23 and 25: “exchange”. Once the truth has been rejected, there needs to be an alternative “truth” to take its place. In verse 23 Paul writes, “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” He was expanding on a verse from the Psalms, where the psalmist looked back to the construction of the golden calf on Mount Sinai and wailed, “They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (106:20).

Lest we think the church is immune from this, the lessons of history teach us otherwise. At the time of the Reformation the church had exchanged the free grace of God for a system of rituals and indulgences. In Nazi Germany the church exchanged God’s love for people of all nations for the myth of the German Volk. Today I fear that we have exchanged God’s holiness and the call to repentance for a “gospel” of inclusivity.

Late in the seventh century BC the prophet Jeremiah lamented,

Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:11-13)

The Consequence: Their hearts were darkened

You cannot drink for long from a cracked cistern. There will be consequences, and the first consequence that Paul identifies is that “their senseless minds were darkened”. In actual fact the word that Paul uses in verse 21 is not “mind” but “heart”. And at its root the word translated “senseless” means something like lacking comprehension, insight or understanding. What we are seeing here is a dreadful process: that our actions and our thoughts, what we do with our bodies, what we entertain in our minds, will invariably penetrate deeper into what makes up the very core of our being.

The lesson is brought home in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The ring that lies at the center of the story wields great powers in the hands of its possessor. Yet it becomes clear that the ring exerts a power not only on the external world but also in the heart of the one wearing it—and that that power is not for the good. The case in point is the evil Gollum, a slimy character who dwells in darkness at the bottom of a cave, surviving on a diet of raw fish and the occasional straying goblin. Gollum had begun his life as a hobbit, but the power of the ring had gradually corrupted his heart to the point where he was wholly given over to the purposes of evil.

We think of our heart affecting our minds and actions. The book of Proverbs teaches us, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, 
for from it flow the springs of life.” Yet it recognizes that the flow goes in both directions. How do we keep our hearts?

Put away from you crooked speech,
and put devious talk far from you. 

Let your eyes look directly forward, 

and your gaze be straight before you. 

Keep straight the path of your feet… 

Do not swerve to the right or to the left; 

turn your foot away from evil. (Proverbs 4:23-27)

As Jesus’ disciples we are challenged to maintain a difficult balance. Our place is in the world, but how important it is not to allow the world’s values to take hold of our minds and penetrate our hearts. For then we cease to be the salt and light that Jesus calls us to be. And if the salt has lost its saltiness, what is it good for?

The Outcome: God gave them up

And so we have the truth being suppressed and exchanged for a lie. We have hearts darkened. But the bad news does not end there. There is still one more dreadful and frightening detail that Paul has to add. “Therefore,” he says in verse 24, “God gave them up…”

What haunting words! What a dreadful sentence! Can you imagine anything more devastating? To be given up by God. For God to leave us alone, entirely to our own devices. To call out and all we hear is an echo. To have nothing and no one in any ultimate sense to whom to turn. This is the final outcome of suppressing the truth and exchanging it for a lie. This is what happens when we allow our hearts to be darkened. It is a terrible fate.

“God gave them up…” Yet already, in the prospect of that devastating silence, there is a faint whisper of hope. The darkness has descended upon us; yet as we look to the eastern horizon we see the first glimmer of the first ray of dawn—and it is found in those very words of desolation: “God gave them up…”

The hope is in the fact that this is not the last time in his letter to the Romans that Paul will use those words. Underneath the fearful scene that Paul paints for us in chapter 1 is the abiding conviction of chapter 8—that the God of his gospel, the God whom he proclaims and in whom we put our faith today, is the God “who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). In the words of Stuart Townend’s hymn,

How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure,
That he should give his only Son
To make a wretch his treasure.

How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns his face away,
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory.

When Jesus cried aloud, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he was taking God’s absence, the final outcome of our exchanging the truth for a lie, upon himself. “So remember,” Paul writes elsewhere, “that at one time you were without God in the world. But now you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:11-13).

Out of the bad news our wondrous God brings good news. May we find our minds made new and our hearts set free by its transforming power.

Sermon – “He Ascended Into Heaven” (Acts 1:3-11)

We call them mountaintop experiences—and in the Bible we meet with many of them quite literally:

•     Noah and his family standing atop Mount Ararat as the rain-soaked earth began to come to life once again, the rainbow stretched across the blue sky, and God established his covenant, “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:20 – 9:17)

•     Abraham clutching his beloved son Isaac to his breast at the peak of Mount Moriah, as the scent of the freshly sacrificed lamb fills the air. He calls the place Jehovah Jireh, “The Lord will see to it”. (Genesis 22:9-14)

•     Moses at the summit of Mount Sinai as God himself passes by before him and proclaims himself as “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…” (Exodus 33:18 – 34:8)

•     And it may have been in the exact spot once again where Abraham had met with God that Isaiah had his astounding vision of the Lord, the train of his garment filling the Temple and the seraphim crying aloud to one another, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” (Isaiah 6:1-5)

We find that same pattern repeating itself in the New Testament. Jesus takes three of his disciples to the top of a mountain where he is transfigured before them. I love the way the old King James Bible renders it: “And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them.”

So it is today that we come to another mountain, the Mount of Olives—a Sabbath day’s journey, as Luke describes it, or about three-quarters of a mile, outside of Jerusalem. For forty days Jesus had been appearing to his followers. In last week’s sermon I referred to Jesus’ meeting with seven of them on the shore of Lake Galilee. This week the scene is back in Jerusalem, where Jesus had instructed all the disciples to gather. In spite of having seen and met with Jesus on numerous occasions, their minds were still racing with questions. “Lord is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus leaves them in their quandary: “It is not for you to know the times or seasons…” But he does give them one sure promise: “You will receive power…”

Then Luke tells us that in plain sight of all of them Jesus was taken up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. It is a strange scene, and so far out of our experience that it is impossible for us to explain or fully understand. On the one hand I am inclined to avoid a literalistic interpretation of the passage, where Jesus shoots up like a missile being launched into the stratosphere. On the other hand, I don’t think we are entitled to understand Luke’s account simply as a kind of metaphor or worse still, an invention or a myth. I believe that Luke is relating an actual historical event. The problem is that it is beyond description. It lies outside all our normal human categories.

One thing is certain, however, and that is that the cloud that took Jesus from the disciples was nothing less than the Shekinah glory of God. It was the cloud that enveloped Mount Sinai when Moses received the Law and that led the people of Israel in their forty-year trek across the wilderness into the Promised Land. It was the cloud that had filled the Tabernacle when the Ark of the Covenant was returned—so thickly, in fact, that the priests were unable to stand to minister. “The Lord is king!” sang the psalmist. “Clouds and thick darkness are all around him” (Psalm 97:2).

We see that same cloud in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration. Matthew describes it as “a bright cloud”. And just as Jesus had been accompanied by two people on that occasion—Moses and Elijah—so now, as they gazed upwards into the heavens, the disciples found themselves in the company of two men. Have you ever had one of those experiences where your thoughts are in an entirely different place and suddenly something brings you back into the “real world”? I suspect that that is what happened to the disciples when the men spoke to them. “Galileans, what are you doing standing there, looking into the sky?” But you can hardly blame them. Just as Peter had wanted to put up lean-tos for Moses and Elijah, so now the disciples needed time to ponder this unique and remarkable moment in their lives. Nineteenth-century hymn writer Frederick Faber put it well:

My God, how wonderful thou art,

thy majesty, how bright;

how beautiful thy mercy seat

in depths of burning light!

Father of Jesus, love’s reward!

what rapture it will be

prostrate before thy throne to lie,

and gaze and gaze on thee!

Praise

So what do we mean when we say Sunday by Sunday, “He ascended into heaven”? As with the disciples, the first thing that Jesus’ ascension should do is to draw us to look upwards—to recognize that Jesus shares fully in the glory of the Father. As we read in Philippians (2:9-11),

Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

So it is that Christian worship is always Christ-centered, Christ-directed worship—for Jesus is the focus of worship not just on earth but in heaven. With John in the Revelation we hear the roar of the heavenly host as they sing together, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12) Our worship here at Messiah is a foreshadowing of that day when we too shall gather around the throne of the risen, ascended, glorified Christ. We recognize that fact in the Eucharistic Prayer as we confess that we are joining with those “countless throngs of angels [who] stand before you to serve you night and day; and, beholding the glory of your presence, offer you unceasing praise”.

Too easily the focus of worship can move from Jesus to me. I have seen it in congregations and I have seen it in myself. Instead of keeping my focus on Jesus, the criterion shifts to what I want, to my preferences, to my comfort zone. Worship moves from being Christocentric to being egocentric. That does not mean that we should suspend all our critical faculties when we gather for worship. There are bad prayers, bad songs, and even (dare I say it?) bad sermons—and I’m sure I have preached my share. Yet that does not mean that because it challenges us or annoys us or even profoundly upsets us that a sermon or a prayer in itself is bad. Worship that draws us into the presence of the risen, exalted, glorified Christ will always be challenging.

Prayer

Our Gospel reading this morning is taken from what is often called Jesus’ “high priestly prayer” in John 17. There is a reason that we read from that prayer every year on this particular Sunday. It is to remind us that, just as Jesus prayed for his church on the eve of the crucifixion, so he continues to intercede on our behalf even now. As we read in the letter to the Hebrews (7:25), “He is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.” When Stephen, the church’s first martyr, was facing death, the Bible tells us that he gazed into heaven. And what did he see there? Jesus not seated, but standing at the right hand of God. Jesus was interceding for him at that very moment.

When you really begin to think about it, it boggles the mind. Many times when I have visited people in times of illness or severe distress, they have shared with me how they have felt physically buoyed up by the prayers of their Christian sisters and brothers. There have been times when I have felt that myself as well. Did you know that each Sunday there is someone in prayer for our worship throughout the service? It happens invisibly and unnoticed. Yet I believe that that prayer is a significant factor in making the presence and power of the Holy Spirit a reality for us when we meet.

But pause for a moment to realize that Jesus himself is praying for us right now. And if John 17 is anything to go by (which it is!) he is asking, “Father, may they know you…” “May you truly be God in their lives…” “Keep them in your care…” “May they be one as you and I are one…”

As I examine my own life I am aware that all too often I have ignored Jesus’ own heart’s desire for me in the presence of the Father. As I look at the church, I see how many times down through history right to our present day we have made that prayer into a mockery. I know that if I were Jesus, I would have thrown up my hands in despair and given up praying a long time ago. Yet Jesus continues to plead for us, to intercede before the Father on our behalf—and he promises that as we learn to pray in the same way he will grant our requests.

Power

A third thing about Jesus’ ascension was that it was necessary in order to make way for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus had said to his disciples after the last supper, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Now, before he ascends to the Father, he tells them again, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

During his time on earth Jesus’ ministry extended over little more than a 150-mile stretch. Within a very few years the gospel would be making inroads into Egypt in the south and over the whole northern coast of the Mediterranean as far as Rome and beyond. But none of it would have happened without the Holy Spirit.

My suspicion is that the disciples might easily have been quite comfortable spending the rest of their lives simply sharing their reminiscences about Jesus. It was the Holy Spirit who would turn all that they had experienced over the previous three years into a passion, an unquenchable flame that would spread across the world.

Statistics reveal that, according to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, 50.7% of the population identify as introverts. Several years ago we took an informal poll of the Vestry and discovered that 80% of us were introverts. That makes sharing the gospel a challenge. It means that we are probably more comfortable being a “holy huddle”—that the notion of evangelism (at least as it is portrayed much of the time) strikes terror into our souls. But perhaps there is a good side to that as well—if it makes us depend more on the Holy Spirit.

Jesus did not command his disciples to be witnesses. He made a statement of fact: “You will be my witnesses.” We are Jesus’ witnesses, whether we like it or not. And I believe that as we live in conscious dependence upon his Spirit he will turn our eyes to those around us—and the Spirit will open our hearts to the heart of Jesus to make his love known.