Sermon from November 18, 2001
It is okay to ask why BVBC insists on staying close to the Bible. It is appropriate to ask why I preach only the message of the Bible. The risk in asking those questions is that I might give an answer the fails to do justice to the centrality of scripture in our life together. But if someone is willing to risk the question, it is only right that I should risk an answer. Here it is.

Nothing matters more to me than to know if the God who created us has anything to do with us. Some people have felt that if there is a God who made us, He seems to have abandoned us. If He has not abandoned us, how do we recognize His presence in our midst?

The Church says that God has made His presence known in many ways in the long human story, but He decided to make His character and His purpose known to the world in a decisive way that would bless all the nations of the earth. 3500 years ago, He chose a Semitic clan, wandering around The Fertile Crescent, and began to hammer into their souls the kind of God He is.

It took a long time with many fits and starts, with glorious success and pathetic failure, but during a millennium and a half the little nation Israel embodied the purpose and revealed the character of the Creator of all mankind. The Jews turned out to be the only lily on a stagnant pond of human ignorance of the living God.

This small and resilient nation gave birth to a remarkable tradition of storytellers and poets. Whatever else they produced, they told stories and made songs of their experiences with God. For hundreds of years they told and refined these stories and sang these songs. Their scribes patched together and wrote down some of these stories. Some of their original poems have survived intact, and in spite of the passage of time and translation into another language, they can still please us and nourish our faith.

Fifteen centuries after the founding of this tiny nation, another of its Sons appeared and began to transmit the treasures of Israel to the nations of earth. Jesus of Nazareth appeared in the hamlets of Galilee and in the Jerusalem temple with the stunning claim that to hear Him speak and watch Him act was to have immediate access to the character and the purpose of the Creator of the universe.

Like many of the great prophets of Israel He was rejected by the leadership of His day. But His followers proclaimed His resurrection from death and proceeded to disseminate Israel's accrued knowledge of God to ever-increasing circles of the human race. Those followers continued the Jewish ability to tell stories, and their writings have been cherished and preserved by the Church.

In fact, the collected writings of Israel have been cherished and preserved by the Church, because they tell us what the God who made us has to do with us. Like no other religious book in the world, they tell us what kind of God He is. They reveal to us His character and His purpose. They give us indispensable clues to His presence in our world. That is why BVBC stays close to the Bible. That is why I preach only the message of the Bible.

That is why I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the Gospel of Mark. The life of Jesus is the high-water mark of God's revelation to His world of what He is like. Every detail matters. With that understanding we turn again to Mark 12:35-44. Nearly all of Mark 11-12 takes place in the Jerusalem temple, the center of Judaism, and in the minds of many Jews the center of the created world. Events there show that Jesus, like Jeremiah and Ezekiel before Him, had found Israel wanting.

Verses 35-37 pose a kind of riddle about Israel's long-expected Messiah. While Jesus was teaching in the temple courts, he asked, "How is it that the teachers of the law say that the Christ is the son of David? David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared: 'The Lord said to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet."' David himself calls him 'Lord.' How then can he be his son?" The large crowd listened to him with delight.

The centerpiece of Jesus' riddle is the quotation in verse 36.

The LORD says to my Lord:
"Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet."

That comes from Psalm 110:1. No other Psalm is quoted as often in the New Testament as this one. Jews saw it as a prediction of the coming Messiah. The early Church, all of them Jews, saw Jesus as the fulfillment of that prophecy. They learned to do that from Jesus and maybe from this episode in the temple. But in this episode Jesus made a riddle of it.

The LORD in the verse refers to the God of Israel, Yahweh. The second word Lord referred in Jewish thinking to the descendant of King David, who would restore the fortunes of Israel. Jesus raises a simple question. "A father does not refer to his own son as 'lord'; it is more natural for the son to call his father 'lord,' (Cranfield, Mark, 382). So, says David, "David himself calls him 'Lord.' How then can he be his son?"

Do you see what He is doing? "If I am the son of David, foretold by scripture, then I am greater than my father, David. I am more than his son; I am his lord." Just raising the riddle like that would force people to think again about the identity of Jesus, to be asking, "Who is this man? Who does He think He is? What does it mean?" It is a riddling way of asking the crowd what He had asked His disciples in Mark 8. Who do you say that I am?

The Bible is full of riddles like this, because human beings live by faith. The atheist lives by faith just as much as a devout Christian. It is what they believe that distinguishes them. Neither Jesus nor Mark does anything more with the riddle. Mark reports it and then leaves it there in people's minds to do its subversive, redemptive work.

It is at work again in us. The question comes home again to us afresh: What do you think about Jesus of Nazareth? Who do you think He is? Now that the question is posed, we must of necessity give some kind of answer. This necessity belongs to the power of the Gospel.

Mark moves his story along with another, overtly subversive act, viz., Jesus' criticism of Israel's authorized spiritual leaders. Verses 38-40 ask no quarter, and they give no quarter. As he taught, Jesus said, "Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely."

Let us remember: to watch what Jesus does and to hear what Jesus says gives us immediate access to the character and purpose of God. We now know that He reserves strong words for those who misues their spiritual authority.

Whether it is the Taliban of Afghanistan, the Borgia Popes of the Middle Ages, or the Puritan commonwealth of Massachusetts, "Those who serve the greater cause may not make the cause serve them," (T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral). This is not a pretty picture, and it is not very pretty in the lives of those who are afflicted by such misuse of power.

By the way, if we Gentile Christians are ever to have any meaningful conversation with Jews about Jesus, we must present Jesus as a Jew speaking to Jews about Jewish identity before we present Him as a Savior speaking to all mankind. He is both, but He was a Jew speaking to Jews first.

To say in the Jerusalem temple what these verses report Him as saying does to the reputation of Jewish spiritual leaders what He had done to the fig tree and the tables of the money changers in chapter eleven. We can see why Malachi, who foretold Jesus' day had said, "The Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty. But who can endure the day of his coming? (Mal. 3:1-2).

His next-to-final assault on the misplaced religious sensibilities of his day takes place around one of the more sensitive issues of human experience – money. Verses 41-44 tell the story of the widow's mite.

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasure than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything – all she had to live on."

I like what Bible commentators have said about this episode. C.E.B. Cranfield says, "The gifts of the rich, though large, were easy gifts: the widow's gift, though tiny, meant a real surrender of herself to God ... (Cranfield, Mark, 387). I like what John Calvin said. "The poor, who appear not to have the power of doing good, are encouraged by our Lord not to hesitate to express their affections out of their slender means ... On the other hand, those who possess great abundance ... are reminded that it is not enough if ... they greatly surpass the poor," (ibid.).

This episode impacts me in two ways. First of all, Mark seems clearly to intend a deliberate contrast with His preceding denunciation of religious leaders for their exploitation of widows. They devour widows' houses. This poor widow has put more into the treasure than all the others. This is Jesus again at His Jewish best, Jesus at His prophetic best. He is echoing a long-standing theme in Israel's relationship with God.

Isaiah took the powerful of his generation to task when he said, "What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?" declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty. Psalm 14:6 seems to catch both the perfidy of the teachers of the law in verse 40 and the compassion of Jesus in verses 43-44.

You evildoers frustrate the plans of the poor,
but the LORD is their refuge.

The second way Jesus' statement made here impacts me in a most personal way. His contrast of the widow and the rich in their giving reminds me that I can give more to God than I am giving now. That poor woman has become a doctor of sacred doctrine and holy living for the whole Church throughout time, teaching us to be less grasping and more generous in giving ourselves and our wealth to God.

Can you begin to see a bit more clearly why I said that the collected writings of Israel have been cherished and preserved by the Church, because they tell us what the God who made us has to do with us? Like no other religious book in the world, they tell us what kind of God He is. They reveal to us His character and His purpose. They give us indispensable clues of His presence in our world.

For example, we learn from Jesus that God is on the side of the poor. But so are we. At our best, I suspect that most of us would say that we will never live up to the generosity of the widow in the temple, although her example may actually prompt us to be more generous than we were. But we are glad to see the magnitude of her gift recognized by Jesus and held up as an example of great faith and courage, and we are glad to see Him speak out on behalf of widows who were being taken advantage of by unscrupulous, powerful men.

Verse 38-40 anticipate one of the favorite pastimes of  American culture – putting the powerful in their place and poking holes in inflated egos. What we might not have grasped without the scriptures is that the God of Israel and the Church specializes in putting the powerful in their place and poking holes in their inflated egos. For Jesus to say what He did about them in the temple not only addresses the specific prophetic need of His generation, it also connects with something deep within the human soul. Do you think it might also prepare us to view God as the Underdog in the drama of human life? We will pursue that theme as the Gospel of Mark moves toward its terrible climax.

Even Jesus' riddle helps us to grasp something of the character of God. After all, we have to account somehow for the centrality of Jesus Christ in human experience. If Jesus made the stunning claim that to hear Him speak and watch Him act was to have immediate access to the character and the purpose of the God of Israel, then we feel duty bound to get a better handle on who He was and is. If telling a riddle makes us think about that more deeply, then it serves the larger purpose of giving us fragil human beings a deeper sense of God's ways with us.

I said one time that the Bible gathers more dust than any other bestseller. Is that true of us here, or is there reason to hope for better things of us? Jesus once said to the best-read men of His day, "Have you never read in the Scriptures?" Would He say that to us, His latter-day disciples?

If you want to know what the God who created us has to do with us, rethink your neglect of the scripture. What you learned as a child is good, but it is not good to read this book with a childish understanding. Bring all your experiences and all your learning with you, and ask the God it reveals to speak powerfully to you as only He can do.