“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

"Discipleship is a process" (1 Peter 5:1-11)

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Last year, as many of you know, I passed the fortieth anniversary of my ordination. The occasion provided an opportunity to leaf through old photographs and reignite many memories, particularly of the people among whom I have been privileged to serve over the decades. This morning in our Epistle and Gospel readings we are given two brief glimpses of the life of the apostle Peter, one towards the end of many years of discipleship, the other back at the very beginning. Peter did not have the convenience of photographs but as he composed the first of his two letters that we find in the New Testament with the help of his friend and coworker Silvanus, I can only imagine that a torrent of memories, going all the way back to the events of this morning’s Gospel reading, must have been flooding through his mind.

Peter first became aware of Jesus through the witness of his brother Andrew. Andrew was a follower of John the Baptist. He had been present when Jesus had come to the banks of the Jordan River and John had proclaimed, “Look, the Lamb of God!” Andrew had been so entranced by what he heard and saw that he followed Jesus to where he was staying and spent the rest of the day with him. His excitement was such that he wasted no time in going straight to his brother and telling him, “We have found the Messiah.” This in turn aroused Simon’s interest enough that he followed his brother back to where Jesus was. There Jesus met him with the words, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas”. Now kepha is Aramaic for “rock” or “stone”, which in Greek is petros—hence the name Peter. And it seems to me that the rest of the story of Andrew’s brother Simon, or Peter, in the New Testament is how he became a rock.

So now as we read the Epistle, Peter is writing from the perspective of a long life of discipleship. He describes himself as “a witness of the sufferings of Christ”. It is a unique designation. Nowhere else in the New Testament do we find a disciple described in this way. The apostles were to have been witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. But Peter describes himself as “a witness of the sufferings of Christ”. I wonder if Peter did not have in mind that fateful night as Jesus stood in the Garden of Gethsemane and pleaded with his heavenly Father, “If it be your will, take this cup from me.” Luke’s gospel tells us that his agony was such that he sweat drops of blood. Or later on as Peter warmed himself by the fire in the courtyard of the high priest’s residence as Jesus awaited trial. Three times he denied even knowing Jesus. Surely he must have seen the pain in Jesus’ eyes as Jesus looked at him—and I have no doubt that that pain pierced his own soul as he ran out only to break down and weep inconsolably.

At the same time Peter describes himself not only as a witness of Jesus’ suffering but also as one who shares in the glory to be revealed. Here too I wonder if there were not reminiscences in his mind—of the day when he and James and John had stood at the top of a mountain to see Jesus revealed in all his eternal glory before their very eyes. As Peter now prepares to close this brief letter, written to followers scattered over the great swath of land more than a thousand miles long and five hundred miles across that is now modern Turkey, what does he have to say to them? Three things stand out in my mind: be humble, be prayerful, and be watchful.

Be humble

Twice in the eleven verses that we have before us Peter speaks about the need to be humble: in verse 5, “Clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another,” and again in verse 6, “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God.” There had been a time in Peter’s life when he had been anything but humble. I think that, like many of us, genuine humility, the grace, as Paul describes it, of honoring others before ourselves, did not come easily to Peter. He was impetuous. He had spent his life working long hours, hauling in nets with heavy loads of fish flipping and flapping in every direction, occasionally battling storms at sea. Life had demanded that he be tough.

No doubt Peter’s pride had been punctured somewhat early in his acquaintance with Jesus. It was on that occasion when he and his companions had been out fishing all night with nothing to show for it. The sun was getting high into the sky and the fish would certainly have retreated to the cooler waters deeper down, when Jesus said to them, “Go back out into the middle of the lake and let down your nets for a catch.” The gospels don’t psychologize, but I can only imagine Peter thinking to himself, “What does that @#$%& carpenter think he knows about fishing anyway?” His words to Jesus were more polite: “Master, we have toiled all night and haven’t caught a thing…” Then something in him caused him to relent. “Well, if that’s what you want, we’ll let down the nets…” And we all know the rest of what happened. In no time nets were so full that they threatened to tear apart. All that Peter could do at that moment was to fall at Jesus’ feet, and here I like the way the New Living Translation puts his words: “Lord, please leave me—I’m too much of a sinner to be around you.”

In spite of this incident early in his life with Jesus when it came to the point where everything seemed to be unraveling, it was Peter who stood up and boldly declared, “Even though all become deserters, I will not” (Mark 14:29). A few moments later, as the soldiers closed in to arrest Jesus, it was Peter again who boldly strode forward, drew a sword and sliced off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Yet in the end all this bravado proved to be nothing as Jesus was led away, put on trial and finally crucified.

Now, years later, Peter finds himself telling his fellow believers, “Clothe yourselves with humility.” The word refers to the tying on of a servant’s apron. So perhaps Peter had in mind that evening in the upper room when Jesus had gotten up from supper, stripped off his outer garment and fastened around himself the towel of a slave. After washing their feet he had said to them, “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14).

I believe that the person to whom humility comes naturally is rare. Rather, humility is something that most of us have to learn, as Peter did, both through the school of hard knocks and through the example of others. The Bible tells us that even Jesus learned obedience through the things he suffered (Hebrews 5:8). And Jesus comes to you and me as he did to Peter with the invitation, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29).

Be prayerful

Thus Peter says to us, “Be humble.” And secondly he says, “Be prayerful.” “Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares for you.” Again it was a lesson that Peter had begun to learn during his time with Jesus. He had been there when Jesus had taught,

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For … your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:25-33)

Jesus’ words about trusting God had been put to the test one night when one of those sudden, violent storms, which I understand are wont to arise on the Sea of Galilee, threatened to capsize their little fishing boat and drown them all. I suspect that Peter was one of those who in a panic found Jesus asleep in the stern of the boat and shook him awake. “Teacher, don’t you care that we’re all going to die?” And with just two words from Jesus the storm was over more quickly than it had begun.

“Teacher, don’t you care?” “Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares for you.” It’s the same word in the Bible. Worries and anxieties will come. There will be crises and disappointments. Yet what a privilege is ours that we have a God who is not only big enough to handle them, but who also cares—to whom we may bring all our concerns, who knows our needs before we ask, whose desire is only for our good!

Be watchful

Thirdly, Peter calls us to be watchful. “Discipline yourselves. Keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.” In spite of God’s fatherly care, Peter is under no illusions that Christian discipleship is a cakewalk. Once again he could look back on his experience in the Garden of Gethsemane. There, as Jesus had poured out his soul in prayer, he and James and John had all succumbed to their fatigue. “Simon,” Jesus had said to him after the first time, “are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mark 14:37,38).

At numerous points the Bible warns us that when we sign up to follow Jesus we are, whether we like it or not, engaging in a spiritual battle. As we read in Ephesians, “Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (6:12). Satan desires nothing more than to bring us down, to fall into the traps he sets around us, to make us believe the lies that call into doubt God’s good purposes for us. So it is that the life of discipleship is one of vigilance: of having our ears attuned to the voice of God, our minds infused with the word of God, our hearts inflamed by the Spirit of God, our eyes focused on the Son of God.

“Simon, Simon,” Jesus had warned Peter, “Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31,32). May we take Peter’s words, learned through the crucible of long Christian experience, to heart today. As we walk the path of discipleship, may we be humble, prayerful and watchful—and (in Peter’s words) may the God of all grace himself restore, support, strengthen and establish you.

“Arise, Shine” (Isaiah 60:1-9)

I don’t consider myself a film buff, but I do enjoy a good movie once in a while. One movie I didn’t bother to go and see in 2014, however, was Left Behind. Apparently my choice was a wise one. In addition to the theology that it represented, which has no warrant in Scripture, I understand that the film did not have a single redeeming feature. Here is what I read in some of the moviegoers’ reviews:

I simply don’t know where to start. This is—without doubt—the worst pile of steaming garbage I’ve sat through…

This movie was simply AWFUL. Really, really bad. And to those who are going to argue that the reason why this movie is rated so low is because people are becoming “anti-Christian”, NO. The acting was terrible, the script was horrendous, seriously. A group of high school kids in drama club could do better. It was deathly boring, I thought I was in there for more than three hours.

Shockingly horrible movie. I can’t imagine anybody being able to sit through it except for morbid curiosity… Save yourself an hour and 40 minutes of pain and cringing (or however long you can tolerate this train wreck of a production). Buy this movie and save it as a punishment for your grounded kids…

If anything, this movie can bring atheists and Christians together holding hands to stand firm against piles of schlock like this.

Ladies and gentlemen, this … may be the worst movie, not just this year… I mean the worst movie of all time.

I didn’t come here this morning to dis a movie. But its title, Left Behind, does provide me with something of a hook on which to hang my sermon. I believe that Isaiah’s words from which we read a few moments ago were addressed to a people who had been left behind.

A scene of destruction

After years of surviving as a puppet kingdom, in the summer of 587 BC the walls of Jerusalem finally fell to King Nebuchadnezzar and the invading armies of the Babylonians. But that fall occurred only after Jerusalem had been under siege for eighteen months. During that time unimaginable atrocities occurred among a people driven beyond the point of desperation. Here is Jeremiah’s description of what conditions were like:

The chastisement of my people has been greater
than the punishment of Sodom,
which was overthrown in a moment,
though no hand was laid on it…
Happier were those pierced by the sword
than those pierced by hunger,
whose life drains away, deprived of the produce of the field.
The hands of compassionate women
have boiled their own children;
they became their food
in the destruction of my people.
The Lord gave full vent to his wrath;
he poured out his hot anger,
and kindled a fire in Zion
that consumed its foundations. (Lamentations 4:6,9-11)

It seemed impossible that things could become worse. But they did. When the walls were breached, the people of Jerusalem, already reduced to animal behavior, were met with the full brutality of the armies of Babylon. Here again is how Jeremiah describes it:

Women are raped in Zion,
virgins in the towns of Judah.
Princes are hung up by their hands;
no respect is shown to the elders.
Young men are compelled to grind,
and boys stagger under loads of wood. (Lamentations 5:11-13)

In the end, most of those who survived the onslaught were led away in captivity to Babylon. Jerusalem had been reduced to a heap of charred stones, its empty streets inhabited by jackals. Only a tiny remnant of the people remained to tend the farmlands. Poor beyond imagining, desolate and forsaken, it was to these people that Isaiah’s words were addressed:

Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. 

A vision of hope

The words seem impossibly optimistic. But before we write Isaiah off, let us take a moment to examine them more closely. What we see in this passage is a complete reversal of circumstances for the people of Jerusalem. Isaiah is writing to a people whose backs have been bowed low by the yoke of humiliation and subservience. When people have been beaten down in that kind of way, when they have been robbed of all hope and any sense of self-worth, their eyes tend to bend downward. Indeed they dare not look upwards for fear that some further catastrophe may befall them. But Isaiah calls upon them to do exactly that—and what do they see?

Instead of darkness, their eyes are met with light. To be sure, there is darkness. But it is not the darkness of the toppled walls of Jerusalem or the sooty ruins of its Temple. No, now the darkness hovers over all the earth, with Jerusalem being the one exception. And instead of people fleeing to get away or being led off into captivity, we find that whole nations, their rulers included, are being drawn into its light.

Apparently those opening words are not enough to draw Isaiah’s listeners out of their gloom. And so he calls upon them once again: “Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you.” Leading this vast procession are the people of Jerusalem itself. No longer a ragtag collection of defeated captives, their shoulders hunched over in despair, their bodies wasted through starvation, now they are robust, their eyes gleaming with joy, their stride confident and sure. As they look on, their mouths gaping in amazement, the dullness disappears from their eyes and is replaced with vigor once again. The cobwebs of gloom that had enshrouded their hearts are swept away as a new warmth begins to glow from them. The word Isaiah uses here is found in only one other place in the Old Testament, in Psalm 34:5, where David bids us “look to [the Lord], and be radiant”. The idea is that of witnessing the first rays of the sun as they peer over the horizon at early dawn, bringing with them all the promise of a new day.

But look: It is not only the people of Jerusalem who are coming, but people from all nations far and wide, from Midian and Ephah across the Gulf of Aqaba, from Sheba at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, from Kedar and Nebaioth to the east, and all the way from Tarshish in southern Spain. It was not only people who would stream into the holy city, but they would bring all their wealth with them, to offer in homage and praise to the Lord.

Those with a keen ear will have noticed that among the tribute that pours in are gold and frankincense, two of the three gifts brought to the infant Jesus by those strange visitors who had seen his star in the east. And that may just be enough of a hint to help us realize that what Isaiah was speaking about was not a political promise or a military victory, but something infinitely greater: the breaking of God’s final rule into creation. As we read in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”

A word for today

Well, what does all of this have to say to us today?

I suspect that there are some of us who look back on the old year, or even the whole of their past lives, in much the same way that the people of Isaiah’s time looked on their beloved city of Jerusalem, and all we see is a heap of ruins. Our lives are littered with unfulfilled dreams, lost opportunities, damaged relationships. Yet even in the midst of the wreckage, God graciously invites us to look up.

As we look up, what do we see? First of all and most importantly, that God has not forgotten us, indeed that we are the objects of his love. In spite of our failures, in spite of our outright sin, he loves us with a burning, undying love—a love from which nothing in creation, no tragedy, no failure, can separate us, a love that brought his only Son to the cross. It was there, mysteriously and miraculously, that the Son of God absorbed all the pain and darkness, all the sin and evil of the world into himself. Such is the love that God has for you and for me.

The second thing to realize is that it is in our moments of pain that God’s light very often most clearly shines. As the apostle Paul was about to close his second letter to the Christian congregation in Corinth, he shared with them some of his own personal pain. Through it the Lord had told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” “So,” wrote Paul, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9,10). I am not suggesting that we seek out suffering. Yet I do believe that God is able to use our pain and even our wrongdoing, indeed to redeem it, in such a way that his glory is revealed.

A case in point is another movie that came out this past year, but this time it is one that I fully intend to go and see. It is showing in theaters now and it is entitled Unbroken. It tells the story of Louis Zamperini, who competed in the 5000 meter run in the 1936 Olympics and may easily have become the first man to break the four-minute mile had World War 2 not intervened. In 1943 his bomber plane was shot down over the Pacific. In spite of the blistering heat of the sun and very little water or rations as well as being strafed by a Japanese bomber, he and another crew member were able to survive a grueling forty-seven days afloat in their leaky life raft.

That alone would have made an epic tale of suffering. However they were “rescued” (if that is the correct word) by a Japanese naval ship and transferred to a series of prisoner-of-war camps, where for two years they were subjected to some of the most cruel and brutal treatment imaginable. Receiving a hero’s welcome on his return home, Zamperini found himself haunted by nightmares of his war experience and his desire for revenge and began drinking heavily. As his life whirled into a downward spiral, it was through his wife’s encouragement that he attended a Billy Graham crusade and there committed his life to Christ. Immediately he found that his dependence on alcohol ceased, his nightmares vanished, and eventually he was even able to forgive his captors for the unspeakable cruelty to which they had subjected him. In all it is a remarkable story of God’s power to bring light out of darkness, glory out of suffering.

As we emerge into this new year of 2015, amid all the ups and downs may we find in it the opportunity to discover more deeply the love that God has for us in Christ and his power to redeem and restore. And may we take Isaiah’s words to heart and find them fulfilled in our own lives.

Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.