Sermon from March 11, 2001
What pictures come to mind when you think of God? Nothing in our 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." 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 to us the only authoritative and trustworthy accounts from the life of Jesus Christ available to humanity, and as we read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, we come to see the face of the invisible God.

Having come halfway through the Gospel of Mark, it is appropriate that we should pause and ask ourselves again what image of God is taking shape in our souls as a result of this exposure. My task is to present faithfully the vision of God that is emerging from the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. This vision of God is what we bear witness to in this congregation. It is what we stand for. It provides us with a vantagepoint from which we can look out on our world and ask if our world measures up. This is soul food. This is a vision of hope and a source of joy.

Over today and next Sunday, I will present this vision of God. For ease of presentation and listening I will present it with six statements. I will illustrate each on with material from the Gospel of Mark. Here is the first one. God elected Israel as the human community in which He would anticipate and guarantee the unimaginable good He has in store for all the nations of the earth.

To begin with, God worked out His ultimate purpose for mankind specifically within the life of the Jewish people. Look, for example, at Mark 1:2: It is written in Isaiah the prophet ... and the beginning of verse four finishes the thought: And so John came. Clearly, Christianity saw its origins within the life of Israel. The Old Testament prophets anticipated uncannily the life of Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, 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.

Supremely, God's choice of Israel as the instrument for achieving His ultimate purpose for mankind centers on Jesus Christ. Jesus 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. All His disciples were 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.

It was Jesus who precipitated Israel's greatest crisis. The conflict in the Gospels between Jesus and the authorities does not offer an occasion for anti-Semitism. That would be a gross misreading of the Gospels. There was conflict aplenty, but it was between Jew and Jew. Jesus touched Israel at its most sensitive spot – its identity. What does it mean to be a Jew? He introduced a new understanding of what it means to be Israel. Two sections of Mark embody Jesus' challenge to the dominant beliefs about Jewish identity.

First, beginning with the forgiveness of the paralytic in Mark 2, Mark crafted a sequence of five events in which conflict between Jesus and some of the religious authorities emerged and escalated dangerously over the issue of Jewish identity.

He forgave a paralytic his sins, and teachers of the law accused Him of blasphemy. After all, sins for God to forgive them had to be atoned for, and atonement took place in the temple with the appropriate sacrifices offered by the appropriate people in the prescribed way. Jesus made no use of the temple and its sacrifices.

Next, they took Him to task for failing to keep a kosher table. When Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, He was defying what faithful and loyal Jews saw as an indispensable badge of Israel's unique relationship with God among the Gentiles. He saw it as an indispensable way of restoring the down-and-out back to a covenant relationship.

Fasting also was part of an observant Jew's peity. More pointedly, John the Baptist and his disciples practiced fasting. Jesus and His disciples did not. Why not? Jesus responded that He had come to teach Israel a new way of being Israel, and that called for celebration, not mourning.

Finally came accusations about Jesus and the Sabbath. In a world where pagan Romans constantly chipped away at the distinctiveness of Israel, a Jew could show himself loyal to Israel's unique calling by strict Sabbath observance. Along comes Jesus, and not only does He ignore the rules, He calls Himself Lord even of the Sabbath. Then, in the Capernaum synagogue, Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath and pushed some of His enemies over the edge. The Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

Mark seven embodies Jesus' second challenge to dominant beliefs about Jewish identity. Many devout Jews, who wanted to show their devotion to God as clearly as possible, were not satisfied with the ordinary religous routine of the synagogue. They wanted to go beyond that, and they found the most disciplined devotion to God in the temple, among the priests. The Pharisees, the strictest of all the groups, sought to imitate temple behavior outside the temple as a way of showing how devoted to God they were.

In small ways other Jews jointed them. When verse three says that all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, that put an action within reach of all Jews, and when practiced in a Gentile setting, it made a statement about what it meant to be a Jew. The piety of the Pharisees had broad influence in Jewish society.

Jesus, following Isaiah, challenged this piety with these words in 7:6: "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." They express the temptation to make the religion suit me instead of subordinating my agenda to the will of God. He went on to give one telling example out of many of how that was happening in first century, Jewish piety, and all the scrupulous behavior in Israel was not preventing it.

Jesus' new way of being Israel put the real problem facing Israel in the human heart. Mark 7:20 says, He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes hime 'unclean.'" In one deft statement Jesus turns attention away from external considerations like religious rituals and public opinion and puts it where the great prophets of Israel had always put it – on a person's mysterious and voracious capacity to love.

Then, there is Mark 8:27-30. Jesus asks His disciples who people say He is. They told Him: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. Jesus was not impressed. He looked those twelve men in the eye and asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah."

This was a Jewish confession. Do you understand? We Christians will always be guests in a Jewish house. Almost all our ways of expressing our faith we learned from Jews. That is why it was so astonishing one day at Border's Book Store, when I was looking at books on Judaism. I found a book on messianic ideas and movements within the history of Judaism. It was more than 300 pages long. Less than two pages said anything about Jesus of Nazareth.

It is as if Jews have shut off an incredible part of their contribution to the happiness of the world. It is encouraging that some major Jewish scholars have begun to interact with Jesus and with evangelical and Roman Catholic theologians about Jesus. We Christians are more than glad to acknowledge our debt to Israel. God elected Israel as the human community in which He would anticipate and guarantee the unimaginable good He has in store for all the nations of the earth.

Here is the second statement about the vision of God that emerges in Mark. Jesus Christ reveals to us that God is acting within human life so as to bless all the nations of earth with unimaginable goodness, and nothing can thwart Him in His purpose. This belief draws its life from the biblical idea of the kingdom of God.

Look at Mark 1:15. Everywhere He went, Jesus preached this message: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news." We must always remember that kingdom is a political word. It has to do with governance. It carries the idea and the exercise of power over people's lives. The kingdom of God has to do with God's governance of a people's life together. I have defined the kingdom of God with two words: authority and love. The kingdom of God refers to God's exercise of loving authority over ever increasing circles of human life. That raises a question: What would God's governance look like in human affairs?

That is where these indelible images of Jesus come to mind: His hand on the leper's flesh to heal him; stooping over the paralytic to forgive his sins; dining with the down-and-out in Galilee to show them that they had worth before God; by a word reintegrating the disintegrated personalities of the demon-possessed. They demonstrate the love and authority by which the world will be brought under the governance of God without opposition.

The miraculous feeding of the 5000 in chapter six and of the 4000 in chapter eight enrich this picture of God's intention to bless humanity with unimaginable goodness. These miracles point to Jesus as the inexhaustible source of satisfaction for humanity's seemingly insatiable appetite for meaning and purpose and God.

But those events took place a long time ago. Is the world any closer today to being brought under the governance of God? Has not the passage of time discredited the utopian dreams of Jesus and His followers? Mark has put into his story of Jesus as powerful indication that time cannot thwart God's ultimate purpose for all the nations of the earth.

Go back for a moment to Mark's Old Testament quotation in Mark 1:2: "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 was the I who said, "I will send my messenger ahead of you?" It was the God of Israel. Time had met its match. Here were purposes that endure through vast ages and across many cultures.

The plans of the LORD stand firm forever,
the purposes of his heart through all generations (Ps. 33:11).

We know that Abraham appeared about 1500 years before Christ. Then the living and true God, the Maker of heaven and earth, devoted the next 1500 years to teaching Abraham's descendeants what kind of God He was, culminating in the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. 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 is going to derail His purposes? Whatever horror genetic engineering may bring, whatever threats weapons of mass destruction may bring, and whatever hideous strength may be invested in the antichrist, the plans of the LORD stand firm forever.

He will overcome them all by making the actions of a thousand Pharaohs and Judases to manifest His glory in spite of their evil, and also by raising up ten thousand Josephs, Esthers, and Peters who will rise from lowly and unlikely obscurity to lead His people. In Christ we have been united to the irresistible intentions of almighty God. Nothing will thwart His intentions nor separate us from participation in the glad fulfillment of those intentions. The life of Israel and preeminently the life of Jesus Christ stand as pledge and symbol of the inevitable coming of the kingdom of God.

Jesus' teaching on the human heart brings me to a new insight into what Jesus reveals to us about the nature of God. Human sin builds the greatest barrier to God's intended blessing on humanity. Mark reveals this in a variety of ways.

Mark 1:4-5 says, And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Juedean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. Jesus preached the same in Mark 1:15: "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!"

What, exactly were those eager Jews doing when they repented? The action of the crowds who came to the Jordan to be baptized by John tells us in the middle of verse 5. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. Repentance means that I agree with God that something in my life has gone seriously wrong. I agree so strongly that I am willing publicly to acknowledge that. The crowds did that by confessing their sins at the River Jordan.

Mark 2:1-12 offers another relevant episode. Verse 5 says, When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven." The right to forgive belongs to the person offended. If you butt in line ahead of me or tell a lie about me, I can forgive you, because I am the offended party. But the paralytic had never done Jesus any harm. Yet Jesus spoke as though He were the offended party, and it does not sound like Jesus had in mind any one offense. "Your sins – all of them – are forgiven." He was claiming an authority that only God has. In this way Jesus clearly pointed to God as the party offended by our sins. That is why confession is made to God.

Repentance for sin prepared people for the coming of the kingdom of God. We repent of and turn away from behavior that will have no place in the kingdom of God. Mark 7:21-23 gets very specific about what behavior will be excluded. Failure to repent places a person in great jeopardy of being excludded from the blessings of God. That clearly points to sin as the barrier to God's intended blessing on humanity.

"For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.'" But, of course, there is nothing especially Jewish about that. If Jesus was teaching a new way of being Israel, He was also laying the foundations for a new human project – the very thing God had in mind when He brought Israel into existence in the first place.

How well do you know your own heart? "Unless we have some just idea of our hearts and sin, we can have no right ideal of a Moral Governor, A Savior or Sanctifier .... Thus self-knowledge is the root of all real religious knowledge," (Newman, Modern Age, Fall 2000, 347). Guilt and shame at our evil behavior teach us about ourselves and our status before God. The Christian faith offers an irreducible realism about the human condition. God's offer of forgiveness through Christ, which the Church proclaims, begins to make sense. To repent of sin and receive His offer put in a lasting foundation for all of life, and prepare the path on which the kingdom of God enters human life. Receive His offer!