I count it a particular joy to be with
you at Trinity this morning and through this “interim” time as you seek the
Holy Spirit’s leading towards a new rector. My experience of Trinity goes way
back to 1974, when my wife Karen and I were visiting relatives in Nova Scotia
and we came and attended the evening service in the former building on Cogswell
Street. Some time after that, as many of you are probably aware, I served as
rector of St Paul’s Church, just blocks away, for eighteen years, up until
2004. During that time it was my privilege to meet and work alongside a number
of folk at Trinity, particularly in support of the Inner City Youth Club. Then,
eleven years ago, I was asked to lead a congregation in Saint Paul, Minnesota;
and now, after forty-one years of ordained ministry, we have returned to Nova
Scotia to be amongst family and the many friends we made here during our
previous time.
There are already a number of familiar
faces here in the congregation and I hope to get to know all of you better (and
you me) as we seek to minister together in Jesus’ name in this still new
location with all its many exciting opportunities and possibilities. And as we
worship and work and pray together, my chief prayer and desire is that we
should also get to know Jesus better, in the words of St Richard, “to know him
more clearly, to love him more dearly, and to follow him more nearly, day by
day.”
There could hardly have been a better
Scripture passage to set us on that journey than the one that was read from St
Mark’s Gospel this morning. Jesus and his disciples had been together now for
nearly three years. Some of them had looked on when he was baptized in the
River Jordan. They had seen the Holy Spirit come down upon him like a dove;
they had heard the Father’s voice proclaiming, “You are my Son, whom I love;
with you I am well pleased.” Others had been on the lakeside when they had responded
to his irresistible call, “Come, follow me, and I’ll show you how to fish for
people.” They had watched amazed as he demonstrated his power over evil
spirits, cleansed lepers, enabled paralyzed people to walk, walked on water,
stilled a storm at sea, fed thousands of people with just a few loaves of bread
and fish, and even raised the dead to life.
Who do people say I am?
Now, as they walked along the road Jesus
stopped for a moment and turned to them and asked, “What are people saying
about me? Who do they say I am?” I don’t think Jesus was asking the question to
gauge his popularity level. It was not like what is happening all around us
right now as we prepare for federal elections. Each day it seems that the pollsters
and public opinion experts are coming out with new figures. (I understand that
since the election was called last month there have been at least twenty-five national
polls.) No, Jesus was not running for office. Nor was he attempting to measure
his ratings in the arena of public opinion.
No, I believe that Jesus was more concerned
to discover how much of what he had done and taught had really penetrated, to
see if there might be some who had managed to “get it”. And of course the
answers he received were many. “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah;
and still others, one of the prophets.”
Now John the Baptist had had a huge
influence that was still being felt. People had come from far and wide to hear
his fiery preaching. I love the way Eugene Peterson translates it in his
version in The Message:
Brood of snakes! What do you think you’re
doing slithering down here to the river? Do you think a little water on your
snakeskins is going to deflect God’s judgment? It’s your life that must change,
not your skin… What counts is your life. Is it green and blossoming? Because if
it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire. (Luke 3:7-9)
Then there were those who thought of Jesus
as Elijah. Elijah, as many of you will recall, had been one of the greatest and
most powerful Old Testament prophets. Added to that, in the years preceding
Jesus’ ministry there had grown up a belief that immediately before the end
times Elijah would appear again. So could it be that Jesus had come to bring in
God’s kingdom?
In many ways things haven’t changed very
much, have they? There are all kinds of opinions about Jesus floating around in
the world today. In recent times Jesus has been depicted among other things as
a clown, as the lover of Mary Magdalene and as the founder of a hallucinogenic mushroom
cult. Even within the church there are those who cast doubt on his being God,
on the truth of his resurrection, and on the saving power of his death on the
cross.
Yet wide of the mark as many of those ideas
may be, it is testimony to the fact that, nearly two thousand years after he
first asked that question of his disciples, “Who do people say I am?” Jesus
remains a source of fascination around the world. He has appeared on the cover
of Time magazine more than any other
figure. Even as I speak there are thousands of Muslims who are putting their
faith in Isa, as they call him in Arabic. Recently news has been coming from
Berlin of a church that has suddenly grown from 150 attendees to 600 through
Iranian Muslim refugees who have put their faith in Christ.[1]
Who do you say I am?
We live in exciting times, when as much as
at any previous point in history and perhaps more, there is a huge interest in
Jesus. Yet for each of us there is a more important issue—and it has to do with
the second question that Jesus put before his followers. Not, “Who do others
say I am?” but, “Who do you say I am?”
At this point I can imagine an embarrassing
silence coming over the disciples. Can’t you see them looking back and forth at
one another with blank faces? Who is this amazing man who heals the sick,
stills storms and raises the dead? And equally importantly, who is he for me?
These are questions not only for those disciples of long past, but also for
each of us today. Who is Jesus?
In the end it was Peter who broke the
silence. (It was always Peter who spoke first among Jesus’ followers.) “You are
the Messiah,” he blurted out. I suspect that he didn’t even know where the
words came from. Yet suddenly there they were on his lips. It’s not that he
didn’t believe them. I believe that they arose from a conviction that all along
had been growing within his heart. And now, for the first time, almost by
surprise, like a baby chick hatching from its shell, out it came. “You are the
Messiah.”
Now messiah,
or mashiach, is a Hebrew word. It
means “anointed”. And when you capitalize the “m”, it takes on a special
meaning: the Anointed One. In Old Testament days pouring oil on a person’s head
was a way of setting them apart, designating them for a particular function in
the community. Among the people of ancient Israel there were three categories
of people who received this special anointing. First there were the priests. As
far back as the day when the Tabernacle was first consecrated for worship, God
commanded Moses to take anointing oil and to pour it on the heads of Aaron and
his sons, thus ordaining them as priests (Exodus 28:41; 29:7-9). And the
practice continued across the years right through the Old Testament.
The second kind of person to be anointed
was the king. When Saul, the first of Israel’s kings, was appointed, it was
Samuel who “took a flask of olive oil and poured it on Saul’s head and kissed
him, saying, ‘Has not the Lord anointed you ruler over his inheritance?’ ”
(1 Samuel 10:1). And the same occurred in later generations for David and
Solomon and those who followed them on the throne of Israel. And thirdly there
were the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos and the rest, anointed
to proclaim God’s word with faith and boldness.
Now put all three of these roles together—a
priest to intercede, a king to rule and a prophet to proclaim—and what you have
is not an anointed one, but the Anointed One, the Messiah. For
centuries now the people of Israel had yearned and prayed and wept for the
coming of this great figure. Now in Jesus he had come.
Who I say I am
Or had he? The problem was that over the centuries
all kinds of legendary and mythology had become attached to the figure of the
Messiah, specifically the notion that he would be a great military conqueror
who would restore Israel to the greatness it had once known in the golden age
of David and Solomon. All of this brings us to a third question, one that we
don’t hear explicitly asked in this passage, but the one that is perhaps the
most important of all: not, “Who do people say I am?” or, “Who do you say I
am?” but, who does Jesus say he is? And the answer was one that Peter found
unbelievable. Indeed it shook him to the core.
No sooner had those words come from Peter’s
lips, “You are the Messiah,” what did Jesus immediately begin to do? He began
to talk about suffering, about rejection, about being killed and rising again.
I can only imagine than for Peter and those who were with him, this was the
farthest thing from their notion of the Messiah. They were anticipating a great
confrontation of power, a final conflict where the Romans and their puppet
rulers in Jerusalem were finally put down.
However, Jesus had a greater foe in mind,
compared with which Caesar and his legions were less than an ant or a
butterfly. Jesus’ target was what the Bible identifies as “the rulers, the
authorities, the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil in
the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12) and not least the sin that reaches into
the very core of the human soul. The conflict in which Jesus was preparing to
engage was not temporal but cosmic.
It was the Father himself who had revealed
to Peter that the man standing before him was the Messiah. But what he could
not possibly have understood at that point or brought himself to accept was
that the Messiah’s path to victory would be through his own suffering and
death. And Peter was not alone in that. For the world around us the cross of
Jesus will always remain an impenetrable mystery, a stumbling block, an
offense.
Yet we believe that it was on the cross
Jesus revealed himself as the priest who offered not a bull or a calf or a
turtledove but his very self (in the words of our Prayer Book) as the one “full,
perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of
the whole world”. We believe that it was on the cross Jesus began his reign as
the king who has conquered not through “winning” but through the power of his
own self-giving love. We believe that on the cross Jesus was the prophet who in
his very self is the final and perfect expression of the height and length and breadth
and depth of God’s unsurpassable love for you and for me.
“Who do people say I am?” “Who do you say I
am?” “The Son of Man must suffer many things…”
[1] http://www.christianpost.com/news/muslim-refugees-are-being-baptized-and-converting-to-christianity-says-berlin-pastor-144554/
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