Sermon from December 30, 2001
What comes to mind when you think of God? Nothing in life matters more than that. No one better than Jesus Christ can draw those pictures in our minds. He once said, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." As a result, we do not read the Gospels and I am not preaching on the Gospel of Mark in order to take some nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John present the only authoritative accounts and trustworthy interpretations of the life of Christ available to humanity, and as we hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, we come to see the face of the invisible God.

In two weeks we begin the culminating chapters in the greatest story ever told. It is appropriate that we should pause today and ask ourselves what image of God is taking shape in our souls as a result of this exposure. The image may not be as clear as we would like, because the surface of our souls on which it is reflected is less like a mirror, which reflects faithfully, and more like water, whose reflections can easily be troubled by any motion at all. We need God's help to be as calm as possible.

My task is to present as faithfully as I can the vision of God that Mark shapes in our souls by the story of Jesus He has told so far. I will organize what I have to say around eight statements that try to get words around the picture of God that Jesus gives us through His words and deeds. In each case I make the statement and then seek to connect it closely with what we have read together thus far in Mark's Gospel. Finally, I comment on why that statement has meaning for our lives.

God is acting within human life so as to bless all the nations of earth, and nothing can thwart Him in His purpose. Let the first witness to His irresistible purpose come forward. Its name is time. Do you remember the Old Testament quotation that begins the Gospel of Mark? "I will send my messenger ahead of you."

Malachi wrote those words half a millennium before Christ. Mark quotes them as though they had been spoken for the first time only yesterday. That is because the purpose of the Speaker was as firm in Mark's day as it was 500 years earlier. After all, who is the I who said, "I will send my messenger ahead of you?" It is the God of Israel. Time has met its match. He has purposes that endure through vast ages.

Abraham appeared about 1500 years before Christ, and then the living and true God, the Maker of heaven and earth, devoted those 1500 years to teaching Abraham and his descendants what kind of God He was. If God made His ultimate purpose for mankind depend on 1500 years of getting one little people out of all the peoples of the earth ready for their Messiah, do we seriously think anything we do will derail His purposes? Time, which cuts short all our efforts, has no power to thwart His ultimate purpose. The plans of the LORD stand firm forever.

Let the second witness to His irresistible purpose come forward. Its name is death. Mark six reports the fickle way in which King Herod puts to death the Messiah's forerunner, John the Baptist. Jesus' followers do not respond and Jesus does not incite them to respond with violence. Nevertheless, the ministry of Jesus goes on more vigorously than ever. Jesus predicts His own suffering and murder to come but tempers it with the promise of resurrection, which God made good on Easter Sunday. Death, which cuts short all our efforts, has no power to thwart His ultimate purpose. The plans of the LORD stand firm forever.

Here is our second statement. God elected Israel as the human community through which He would bless all the nations of earth. The Gospel of Mark takes place exclusively in a Jewish setting. The River Jordan, Nazareth, Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee, the synagogues, Jerusalem  – all are Jewish places. Andrew, Simon, James, John, Matthew, Nathaniel, Judas, Jesus – all are Jewish names.

But supremely, God's choice of Israel centers on Jesus Christ. He was a Jew – reared in a Jewish carpenter's household, of a Jewish mother, and with siblings who played and worked in the Jewish village of Nazareth. He had a profound grasp of Jewish scriptures and Jewish traditions. Jewish authorities found Him a threat to their national interests. His first disciples were all Jews. Jesus reflected awareness of His unique place within the chosen people when He preached, "The time is fulfilled." He saw His life as the climactic moment for which God had brought Israel into existence. He is not only thoroughly Jewish, He is the supreme Jew.

Also, Jesus stood squarely in the tradition of the great prophets of Israel. He knew their teachings, and He used them to powerful effect in His own ministry. Quoting their words implied that He saw clear parallels between the spiritual dangers that faced Israel of old and the spiritual dangers that faced Israel in His own day. His inflammatory actions and words were not the anti-Semitic rhetoric of a gentile outsider; they expressed a thoroughly Jewish quarrel about the meaning and destiny of Jewish life. Jesus had come to show Israel a new way of being Israel, and the prophets were His allies.

Here is the third statement. As part of His blessing, God is compassionate toward human beings in their many sufferings, and He has power to relieve their suffering. We often hear people say, "God is love." How do they know that? How do we know it is not just wishful thinking to say God is love? What hard evidence outside their own heads can the Gospel of Mark give to support such a statement?

Jesus' words and deeds are the garment in which the compassion of our invisible God comes within reach of human sense and sensibilities. In Mark 1:29-31 Jesus learned that Simon's mother-in-law had the disease of a moment – a fever. He took her by the hand (a tender gesture) and healed her (a powerful gesture). In Mark 1:41 a leper (with the disease of a lifetime) comes to Jesus. The verse tells us what we need to hear. Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" (a most powerful gesture).

It means more to us than we can say to know that the God who made us is not aloof from our sufferings. We don't want God caught in the same trap we are in, but we do want Him to care about us when the terrible distresses of this world overtake us and threaten to overwhelm us. If by watching Jesus we see what God is like, then we have good cause to say that God is tender, compassionate and powerful toward us.

Here is a fourth statement. God's present exercise of compassionate power to relieve human suffering is selective, because in blessing all the nations of earth matters of the human spirit are more urgent than the relief of suffering.

Jesus was selective about His healing. On the morning after a dramatic evening of healing, Jesus was nowhere to be found. Mark 1:36-37 tells us that Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: "Everyone is looking for you!"

Jesus replied, "Let us go somewhere else – to the nearby villages – so I can preach there also. That is why I have come." Those last six words speak eloquently of Jesus' intentions. "That is why I have come." The Man knew what He was about. He was not acting randomly; He was acting according to some clear vision of where He was to go next and what He was to do. Capernaum mattered. Other places mattered also.

In the meantime the sick in Capernaum would get well in the normal course of things or they would not. What He had done was truly compassionate and powerful, but it served a purpose larger than health. It is almost an insult to say that in our culture. What could be more important than health? It feels good to feel good. Medical progress is desirable. Health insurance for everyone makes good sense. We are glad the Centers for Disease Control is on the job. "If you have your health, you have everything."

That is a very appealing philosophy of life. Under its impact we are prone to ask, "If God has compassion on human suffering and has the power to relieve the suffering, why doesn't He just do it?" In his delightful fairy tale called The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis pointed out that unwearying strength and endless days are not enough. He said, "Length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery," (pg. 157).

Jesus points to a purpose in His healing greater than the healing itself. In Mark 2, the friends come, bringing their paralytic friend for Jesus to heal. Instead of healing him, He forgives him and then said this. "But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins..." He said to the paralytic, "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." Jesus meant for His power to heal to give material evidence of His authority to forgive sins. In His mind the power to heal served the larger purpose of vindicating the claim to forgive sins. Forgiveness matters more than health.

That brings us to a fifth statement. In realizing His purpose for the nations of earth, God renounces the use of violence and chooses renunciation and sacrifice as the means by which He will bring blessing on all the nations of earth. Very simply, Jesus never uses nor advocates anything remotely resembling violence. Jesus' royal entry into Jerusalem illustrates this.

In chapters 8-10 Jesus forecasts three times that religious leaders would reject Him and turn Him over to the gentiles for torture and execution. In light of this foreboding, why did He deliberately enter Jerusalem as a king and allow other people to welcome Him as a king? Was it a charade? Was it a mockery of the hopes of those who were loyal to Him? I do not think so.

In His own consciousness He saw Himself to be the Messiah, the King of the Jews, and He also saw Himself in a great mystery as doomed to die. The necessity of the doom did not do away with the royal reality. He could not deny any part of the truth about Himself. If He is the King, then He must go to Jerusalem and declare Himself there, come what may, but He does not use violence to accomplish that.

We know from Mark 14-15 that His claim to be King gave the legal grounds for His crucifixion. The inscription of the charge against Him that Pilate nailed to His cross read, King of the Jews. The religious leaders who taunted Him as He hung on the cross said, "Let the Messiah, the king of the Jews, come down now from the cross."

If Jesus had just denied that He was the King, He could have spared Himself the crucifixion. But if He denied that, what was left? The world would not be saved by one more giver of good advice. He tells the truth and seals His doom. In doing so, in a mystery, He also becomes the Savior of the world. Violence suffered, not violence given accomplishes the eternal purpose of God.

Our sixth statement says that Jesus Christ fulfills God's purpose for the nations of earth, and in giving His life He makes possible the liberation of humanity from its bondage to sin and death. It is important not to miss the obvious. Mark is a story about Jesus from beginning to end. Mark wrote the story, and the Church has cherished it for two millennia, because we believe the central character in the story embodies and fulfills God's purpose for the nations of earth.

Furthermore, Mark 10:45 captures the heartbeat of God's purpose. In Mark 10:45 Jesus gives what may be the key to the interpretation of the Gospel. "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." The fundamental idea in the word ransom is liberation. The rejection, suffering and death of Jesus would work for the liberation of humanity. Mark offers no comment on the meaning of these momentous words. In an act of great restraint he writes them and passes on, leaving us to take them into our heart and, like the Virgin Mary, to ponder Jesus' non-violent embrace of His terrible fate.

The seventh statement takes us back to the feeding of the 5000. Jesus Christ is the inexhaustible source of satisfaction for the seemingly insatiable appetite of human beings for meaning and purpose and the God who created us all.

This miracle differs from most of Jesus' miracles in that it does not do anything to a person. Also, it was not strictly necessary. According to Mark 6:36, people could have gotten food on their own. They may have been hungry, but they were neither desperate nor destitute. Something besides human need justified this miracle in Jesus' mind.

On the other hand, Jesus' command, "You give them something to eat," asked something of His disciples they could not do. They did not have the food or the eight months' wages to buy it. What they came up with (at Jesus' request) was laughable – five loaves of bread and two fish for 5,000 people.

Then, seating that many people in such an orderly fashion awakened expectations that far exceeded resources. Jesus, unperturbed, blessed the loaves before He broke and distributed them. Mark emphasizes the unexpected bounty. A) They all ate. B) They were all satisfied. C) The disciples took up twelve basketfuls of leftover broken bread and fish. Mark records no human response to this miracle. He cares little or nothing about what the disciples said or thought. He places a magnifying glass on the miracle and says in effect, "Look at what happened here. Ask yourself, 'What does it mean?'"

If this miracle is one that Jesus can do at will, then He can feed the world. But He Himself said, "Man does not live on bread alone." This miracle points to Jesus as the one who alone satisfies other hungers as well. And the scale of the miracle justifies us in seeing Jesus as the inexhaustible source of satisfaction for humanity's seemingly insatiable hunger for purpose and wholeness and God.

Finally, Every alternative to God's purpose of blessing all the nations of earth stands under the judgment of God. Judgment is a category of human experience that we find uncomfortable and unclear. We are going to talk about its nature during our Sunday night Academy class in January. For our purposes today, listen to the following words of Jesus that sound suspiciously like what we should call judgment.

Jesus explains why He told a parable no one understood this way in Mark 4:11-12: "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!'" To act so as to prevent someone from being forgiven is to judge. It implies that the one who is denied forgiveness has crossed some line of no return.

Again, when some religious leaders accused Jesus of doing miracles by the devil's power, He responded with these words: "I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin." This too implies that the one who is denied forgiveness has crossed some line of no return.

One more – the most dramatic – example of judgment comes from the lips of Jesus in Mark 13:2, when He says this about the Jerusalem temple: "Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down." Less than 40 years later the temple was gone. A nation – the chosen people of God – had crossed some line of no return.

In the words of C.S. Lewis the Gospel "does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is 'good' in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic," (Mere Christianity, 25). He is good in the sense of being ready to forgive; but what if a person or a nation claims to have nothing to forgive and insists that it will continue on down the path it is traveling?

That is why scripture says, It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31). That is why scripture says, Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.