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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