Sermon from July 9, 2000
As the first millennium began with Jesus Christ, so have we begun the third millennium with Jesus Christ. Six months ago today, we began a leisurely, thoughtful reading of the Gospel of Mark. The downside of such a reading is to lose sight of the big picture. So, from time to time I back away and give us the big picture before we go further. Today is one of those times. Listen to what Mark has said thus far about Jesus.

A pattern of shocking facts marks the first 15 verses of this Gospel. It began with an Old Testament quotation. Mark took part of it from Isaiah and part from Malachi. The Isaiah quotation focused on the splendor of the King. Malachi focused on something unwelcome about the coming King of Israel. By putting this unexpected twist at the very beginning of his Gospel Mark was preparing us to grasp the meaning of the story he was about to tell. We can see an unwelcome side at Jesus' baptism.

Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. What was Jesus doing at a baptism of repentence for the forgiveness of sins? Did He need to repent? Did He need forgiveness? It seems like a blunder for all four gospels to put Jesus in a setting that exposed Him to great misunderstanding. But it cannot have been a blunder. The stories about Him that make up the Gospels were told thousands of times before they were written down. Including Jesus in a baptism for sinners had to be deliberate, but it gave an unwelcome, unexpected twist to an otherwise splendid event.

The opening words of verse 12 express, if possible, something just as deliberate and unwelcome about Jesus. At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. It is the word sent that expresses deliberation, and what the Spirit sent Him there for completes our uneasiness. He sent Him to be tempted by Satan.

Then, John the Baptist, the divinely-chosen forerunner of the Messiah, was arrested for unstated reasons. However, his imprisonment sent a signal to Jesus that it was time for Him to go public. He went public in Galilee with this inflammatory message: "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" Mark saw the life of Jesus as the culminating moment for which God had brought Israel into existence.

Whenever we hear about the kingdom of God, two words need to come at once to mind: authority and love. The kingdom of God means God's exercise of authority over ever-increasing circles of human life in love.

The word in Jesus' message that put the fat in the fire was the word near. If someone says that God's power to exercise authority over a nation's life is about to show itself in the public arena, the next thought in your mind will be, "Show me! Prove it!" Mark has told his story of Jesus in such a way as to demonstrate the presence of God's kingdom in the daily affairs of Israel.

He asked four fishermen, Andrew, Peter, James, and John, to abandon their source of livelihood and attach themselves to Him as His disciples, and they did it. He persuaded and illuminated the consciences of the congregation by His teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, and they were amazed. He broke the power of irrational evil over a human personality by virture of His command, and his reputation spread like wildfire. By a touch He dismissed fever from a woman's body, and He got the undivided attention of an entire fishing village. He then declared that what He had done in Capernaum must not be confined to Capernaum; it served a model of what He had a mission to make happen elsewhere. In a great act of love and authority He touched and healed an unclean leper, who represented the dregs of Jewish society.

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 escalated dangerously. 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.

Then, 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.

Fasting was part of an observant Jew's piety. 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 and joyful way of being Israel.

Finally came accusations about Jesus and the Sabbath. The Sabbath also marked Israel as having a unique relationship to the God who created all things. In a world where pagan Romans constantly chipped away at the distinctiveness of Israel, a Jew could show himself faithful and 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.

Matters had come to a head. Jesus for His part left the Capernaum synagogue, never to go there again. However, huge crowds from all over Israel and even from outside Israel flocked to Him. He appointed twelve men to help Him organize His response to the crowds. Isaiah's splendor of the King could be seen all over.

So could Malachi's unwelcome character of the King. Antagonism toward Jesus expressed itself in His own family, who said He had lost His mind. No doubt they said that to protect Him from the official, Jerusalem verdict, which was that Jesus acted by the power of the devil.

Jesus warned the Jerusalem delegation that by attributing His power to the devil, they were not only not thinking straight, but they were also in danger of committing the unpardonable sin. Far from being Satan's servant, He was Satan's superior. He responded to His family's statement by saying that the family of faith transcends the family of flesh and blood. Were the authorities right, or was Jesus right? When chapter four opens, Jesus will give His assessment of the spiritual meaning of this tense situation for friends and foes alike. Let's turn there together. 

Again Jesus began to teach by the lake. This time, Mark will allow us to hear Jesus' teaching. The crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water's edge. If you don't like crowds, the Gospel of Mark may make you claustrophobic. A people movement of huge proportions marked Jesus' public life.

He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: "Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times." Then Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

Anyone hearing this for the first time would understand every word Jesus said and have no idea what He meant. It does not make sense, does it? Why would the master Teacher teach so as to leave His listeners without a clue to His meaning? We do not like someone doing that with us. It seems frivolous, a waste of our time. The lack of understanding afflicted both Jesus' closest followers and His severest detractors, as verse 10 says. When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables, meaning, "Explain to us what you just said."

His friends and admirers got far more than they asked for. Jesus would explain what the words of His parable meant. Verses 14-20 give His explanation. Before He gave that explanation, He explained why He spoke in parables in the first place. Verses 11-12 give that explanation, and it is like wading in shallow water and without warning stepping into water a thousand feet deep.

He told them, "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!'"

Verse 12 is central to Jesus' explanation. It is a quotation from Isaiah 6:9-10. Keep a finger in Mark 4, and turn to Isaiah 6. This chapter is Isaiah's testimony to his calling to be a prophet. Verse 8 climaxes God's call. "Then I heard the voice of the LORD saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"

God immediately gave Isaiah the message he must preach to Israel. You can see where Jesus got His words from the last four lines of verse 10.

Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
     hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts,
     and turn and be healed.

Isaiah then asks God, "How long am I to preach this message?" Look at the answer in verse 11.

Until the cities lie ruined
     and without inhabitant,
until the houses are left deserted
     and the fields ruined and ravaged.

Isaiah's words, which Jesus quoted, warned of national judgment to come. Mark 4 will make sense if we understand Jesus' use of parables as a warning of judgment to come on a national scale. Jesus' language at the end of verse 12 points in this direction. He did not say, like Isaiah, turn and be healed. He said, turn and be forgiven. That seems harsh. Who was Jesus talking to when He said that?

The last statement of verse 11 gives the only answer in the immediate context. To those on the outside everything is said in parables. He did not name names. He did not point fingers. He simply warned that it was possible to be on the outside of what God was doing in Israel. The ideas of chapter 4 have already been expressed in what Jesus said to the Jerusalem authorities in Mark 3:29. "Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin." Like Mark 4:12, that may seem harsh, but it was not something God was doing to people; it was something people were doing to themselves by their deliberate rejection of Jesus.

Remember: Mark saw the life of Jesus as the culminating moment for which God had brough Israel into existence. Jesus Himself believed that He had come to teach Israel a new and joyful way of being Israel. Like Isaiah of old, He was a man with a message with national implications. To reject Him had national consequences of an especially unpleasant kind.

On the other hand, Jesus had this to say in verse 10 about those who accepted His message. "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you." What is the secret of the kingdom of God? Jesus. It was also possible to be on the inside of what God was doing in Israel by accepting His new way of being Israel.

Jesus already told us at the end of Mark 3 that being on the inside of what God is doing with humanity means doing the will of God. Doing the will of God means accepting Jesus and His new way of being human. That is what we here have done. We are on the inside. Are we being self-righteous to say that? It might be that we are, except for two things.

First, the people on the inside then and now can be just as blank about Jesus' meaning as those on the outside. Our ignorance of Jesus' ways will temper a person's high opinion of himself. Second, wait till you see in the rest of Mark what people on the inside have to go through. Being on the inside with Jesus Christ is a responsibility, not a reason to boast; it is not a status symbol; it is the start of a long, arduous and joyful journey that will turn us every way but loose. At the end we will be very different people than when we began. Then, if the people in Mark are any indication, we will not care that much about our status in other people's eyes.

Finally, what do you make of a man, who says that the fate of a nation depends on their attitude toward Him? Obviously, matters had reached a crisis point in Jesus' relation to the religious authorities of Judaism, but to go to the next step and say that had serious, national consequences seems to be just a bit over the top. Would we say that the fate of our nation depends on its attitude toward Jesus Christ?

What Jesus said to His puzzled listeners then now applies to us. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." In a world where we are free to do anything we can get away with it is hard to believe that large issues hang on our decisions. I believe huge issues hang on the decision of men and women to practice Jesus' new way of being human. We will not know the impact of our decisions until some great crisis shows us what kind of people we have become.

     Seest thou, the passing of the ages is like a parable
     And in its passing it may burst to flame.
     In the name, then, of its awesome majesty
     I shall, in voluntary torments, descend into my grave.

     I shall descend into my grave. And on the third day rise again.
     And, even as rafts float down a river,
     So shall the centuries drift, trailing like a caravan,
     Coming for judgment, out of the dark, to me. (Pasternak, 558-559)