Death of the Messiah: Mark’s Gospel: Conclusion

2013 03 10 Death of the Messiah, Part 5,

Mark’s Gospel: Conclusion

Continuing with Mark’s description of the Passion, we find ourselves at the foot of the Cross. The title, "King of the Jews" is mockingly nailed to the Cross; but Mark does not see it as an ironic symbol, but rather calls it "a charge against him."  Mark knows Jesus made no such claim.

For the first three hours no human being shows Jesus the slightest sympathy, not the soldiers, nor the crowd, nor the passers-by, nor the chief priests and scribes who came to watch the spectacle. All mocked him, telling him to save Himself and come down from the cross, if he be the Messiah. Even both of the bandits crucified with him taunted him. Mark knows of no repentant thief.  And, more importantly, not one of his disciples came to the cross to be with him in his last hours.

Mark, who often aligns things in threes, divides the time on the cross into three periods.  They crucify him at 9 in the morning, darkness overcomes the land at noon, and at 3 in the afternoon Jesus dies.  So, for three hours he is subject to human insult and derision. And then even nature seemed to abandon him, as the sun was overcome by darkness for the next three hours.  And in the darkness Jesus hung there alone, abandoned by all who ever claimed to love him.  And through it all there was the exquisite, unbearable pain of crucifixion.

Finally, mercifully, it is over, as, at 3 o'clock, Jesus cries out with a loud voice the only words Mark reports:  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  These words are not new to Jesus.  They are the anguished opening words to Psalm 22. We should not try to soften these words, as hard as it might be for us to believe that Jesus could possibly feel abandoned by his own Father.  The words are there; God wants us to hear them.  Shortly thereafter Jesus lets out a loud cry, not of words, just of agony, and dies.  Jesus dies, alone, abandoned by his friends, seemingly abandoned by God.  Mark is quite clear that Jesus thought God had forsaken him.

This made the later Gospel writers very nervous, even as it might make some of us nervous now.  To the other Gospel writers for Jesus to feel forsaken and alone was a sign of human weakness, and they feared that humanity in Jesus. They would rather that the Son of God appear to be strong and in control, and, certainly, in complete contact with the Father at all times. And so they changed the final scene considerably from what Mark reports.

Their fear is understandable. Writing later than Mark they were being bombarded by accusations that Jesus was only a man, and not the Son of God; that he had simply died and his body stolen by his followers, not resurrected by God to heavenly glory. In other words, they were being accused of perpetrating a hoax.

But our job now is not to change or ignore the words in the Bible because they make us uncomfortable. The Church did not try to soften Mark’s portrayal of Jesus on the Cross. It did not argue that a Jesus who showed human frailty was not the Son of God. Rather, the Church argued what it had always argued: that the Christ was both God and man, divine and human. The Church has always contended that God could only understand us if he were to become one of us and live among us, feel what we feel and thereby know what we go through.

Our job is to hear Mark’s words and to ponder them; not to try to rewrite the Bible or to try to justify them, saying that Jesus didn’t say them, or didn't mean them; or coming up with some other such nonsense to correct Mark.  Our job is to try to understand the depths of despair that Jesus felt; this very brave, very faithful, very human Jesus we see here hanging on that tree.

And what we clearly see, is that God never for one moment actually abandoned Jesus. We know this because God's reply to Jesus' death is immediate, abrupt: the moment Jesus dies the curtain of the temple is split in two, from top to bottom, a violent rending, symbolic of Jesus' claim that he would tear down that Temple "made with hands."

This huge, dense “curtain” was actually a mammoth drapery, over a foot thick and 40 feet high, and was to keep everyone except the High Priest from going into the inner sanctum said to be where God dwelt. Here Mark, not with words, but with the mental picture of the Temple Curtain ripped asunder, has created a significant theological picture. Rending that Curtain in two symbolizes that no more will access to God be restricted to a chosen few allowed to enter the "Holy of Holies."

From that time forward people will come to a new temple, one "not made with hands," but rather one build upon the sacrifice of Jesus. God is saying that Jesus is the new Temple, built to receive those who show faith in the One who died to save us from ourselves, and from the sin within us.

Scholars do not often see Mark are much of a theologian. And he was certainly not one to write long theological explanations or include speeches by Jesus to explain why Jesus did what he did, or said what he said. John, writing a half century later, would be the one to do that. But, unlike John, Mark seldom speaks in theological terms. Rather he lets the theology be found in the mental pictures his writing evokes.

Thus in his story of the crucifixion he moves quickly to another great theological truth that he lets someone else speak. Startlingly, an outsider comes immediately into the picture of the Crucifixion, not a disciple, not a Jew, not in any way an "insider," but of all people, a Gentile, a Roman centurion. This centurion stands at the foot of the cross and says what no man, disciple or priest, had ever before figured out in the entire telling of Mark's Gospel:  "Truly, this man was the Son of God."

In a single moment God has vindicated Jesus; replacing the Temple as the center of worship and offering in its place Gods' own Son, who is confessed as the Son of God by a Gentile who had no agenda and no prior motive to think that, let alone say it.

And, as irony piles on irony, we are told that while the disciples, who were all men, all fled in cowardly retreat, standing in the distance are three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James and Joses, and Salome; three who had followed him in Galilee and had provided for him when he was going about his ministry. In that time and place it was not acceptable for women to play a prominent role, and so they toiled in the background on his behalf. But, unlike the core group of male disciples, these three female disciples, and some other women, while not coming to the Cross to share his agony with Jesus, at least looked on, waited and watched.  They did not provide comfort to Jesus, perhaps would not have been allowed to, but they did not flee as did the men.

And there was one other, Joseph of Arimathea, who showed courage, which only Mark sees that way.  Indeed, it must have been courage and perhaps remorse, because Mark has told us that ALL of the Sanhedrin, of which Joseph was a member, had found Jesus deserving of death. But Mark tells us now that Joseph went "boldly" to Pilate to ask for Jesus' body.  Only in Mark does Pilate question whether Jesus is really dead; and, assured by the centurion that he is dead, he granted the body to Joseph for burial.

Joseph took the body down, wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a rock hewn tomb.  Then he rolled a stone in front of the tomb’s entrance.  Preparing us for the resurrection, Mark tells us that the two Marys followed and saw where the body was laid. On Sunday morning they will return to the tomb and find it empty.  For Mark, the story of Jesus' death can not end with his burial, but with his resurrection. To Mark his death and resurrection were one event, each part of which was of no use to us without the other.

Mark, more than any of the other Gospel writers, emphasizes the importance of the Passion.  The Roman centurion's words dramatize the singularly Marcan idea that people cannot truly know who Jesus is until the death of the Messiah and the related resurrection. As reported by Mark, people may think they know him; and they can guess at who he is, but, until the death of Jesus, no one really knows who he is.

Mark clearly implies that one can become a true disciple, a faithful and brave disciple, only through understanding the suffering symbolized by a Cross which strips away all human support systems and makes one totally dependent upon God.  To Mark, to keep the faith requires this recognition of our total dependence on God. For Mark, salvation comes not from "coming down from the cross" as Jesus was taunted to do; but from acceptance of the cross and all that it entails.

Mark's community was one suffering from great persecution.  As Dr. Brown says, "the… 'Good News' for them was that this trial and suffering was not a defeat but a salvific example of taking up the cross and following Jesus." In other words, when we suffer for Christ we are doing no more than, and probably much less than, what he has already done for us. And thus, we can do no less than to accept whatever Crosses we are asked to bear for our faith.

We do not live in suffering and persecuted communities.  So perhaps an additional question for us is whether we can, accustomed as we are to great material pleasure, and not being used to suffering for the sake of Christ, find in Mark's description of the Passion a passion of our own for taking up our cross and carrying it in his name.  While we may not know such suffering ourselves, there are millions yet today who do suffer from the burdens of their own unjust crosses imposed upon them who would deny them to worship as Christians.  Doing something about that can be a way we can begin to know what it means to others who, though innocent, to this day bear crosses not of their own making.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer said that Jesus calls us to "come die with me."

That is a very Marcan idea. We are far removed from such drastic action in our lives.  But there are many who do die without help or hope..  "Take up you cross and follow me" is still the word to us from the Christ. And it is Mark’s very human Jesus who shows us the way.

God bless.

The Passion according to St. Mark, Part One

2013 03 03 Sermon: Death of the Messiah, Part 4: 

The Passion according to St. Mark, first of two on Mark

Today we are going begin to look at Mark's account of the Death of the Messiah in some detail. We won’t be able to finish it today. As we saw last week, Mark, the earliest Gospel written, portrays a scene of stark human abandonment of Jesus. And Mark portrays a very human, very vulnerable Jesus. In the end, Mark shows that we all, even Jesus, have no choice but to depend on God. Mark, like no other Gospel writer, gives us deep insights into the hearts and minds of men and woman.

So we now see in Mark a very human and very vulnerable Jesus surrounded by disciples who are usually not very bright disciples. Mark's Jesus is very aware of what he must do, but he agonizes over it, and, at one point, begs God to let it pass him by.  But Mark's Jesus shows great courage in the face of personal fear and doubt and commits himself to God even knowing it will mean his death.  In the end he is abandoned by all who followed him, and Jesus even despairs that he has been abandoned by God. Of course, we know that was not so; but Mark gives absolutely no indication that Jesus knew that.

Jesus is aware from the beginning of Mark's Gospel that his preaching of the coming Kingdom of God is going to get him killed.  As early as the third chapter, Mark tells us that the Pharisees and Herodians were plotting to destroy him. And Jesus himself predicts His own violent death three times, long before the actual event.  Yet the disciples did not understand, failed to understand, refused to understand, and did not want to understand.

Then Jesus arrives in Jerusalem intent on purifying the Temple, and it all comes to a head as the priests and scribes plot to destroy him, exactly as the Pharisees and Herodians had been doing from the beginning. There are other hints.  A woman admirer anoints His body with oil, a sign of preparing him for His death.  Judas plots to betray him, and Jesus, aware of the plot, at the Last Supper indicates His willingness to pour out his blood as a sign of the New Covenant that God is offering to the people.

Thus, as he leaves the Upper Room and goes to pray on the Mount of Olives, Jesus understands the necessity of his suffering and death.  But the disciples do not understand and he knows that they do not, just as he knows that they will all abandon him, telling them that they all will be scattered.  They all deny any such possibility, but especially does Peter.  Yet Jesus tells Peter he will be particularly unfaithful and will deny Jesus three times.  On this gloomy note the Passion in Mark begins, and it will only get darker, until, on the following day, Jesus will die with no support at all from those who followed him.  He will die alone.

This unfolding tragic scenario is almost too much even for Jesus.  In Gethsemene Jesus confesses to the disciples, "My soul is very sorrowful, even unto death," and he asks them to stay near him while he goes to pray, admonishing them to stay awake. Then, he goes and prays, asking God that the cup of death might pass him by; yet saying that he will do the will of the Father regardless. There is no response from God, but Jesus accepts the will of God implied by the silence from heaven, and prepares to meet his enemies, knowing he will die. He is resigned to his fate, even as he is disturbed that the disciples can not even stay awake while he is in this agony.  They are physically present, but already have symbolically abandoned him while they sleep.

His total resignation to his fate is clear. Only in Mark does Jesus fail to respond to Judas' kiss, or to the striking of the slave of the High Priest on the ear by a bystander.  He does nothing to save himself, saying simply, "Let the Scriptures be fulfilled."

The disciples and all the followers flee. One, a young man, once intent on following him, flees so quickly and in such fear that he leaves his captors clinging to his clothes, running away naked, saving his skin, symbolic of the total abandonment of Jesus by all who intended to follow him. Jesus will face death, the ultimate evil, alone.  That is the clear message of Mark.

The pace now quickens and Mark takes us immediately to the trial by the Sanhedrin, the governing Jewish body in Jerusalem.  What goes on in the trial is juxtaposed sharply against what is happening in the courtyard outside the trial chamber. In the chamber the chief priests, elders and scribes hear testimony against Jesus, which Mark calls "false" testimony, which does not agree on a single factual detail.  We are not told the nature of the false testimony.  But the high priest is annoyed by both the ineptitude of the witnesses and the silence of Jesus.

Trying to force an answer from Jesus he asks, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One."  And, startlingly, Jesus answers for the first time in this Gospel, "I am."  Until now Jesus had made no such claim, even to his disciples, who are not present as he makes it now. He had always insisted that they figure out who he was for themselves, a task they badly bungled. We who have read Mark already know who he is from what God had said to him at his baptism.

But far more damning to Jesus is that he does not stop there but says that he will be seated at God's right hand and will come again on the clouds of heaven.  This is too much for the high priest, who declares that statement blasphemy, (which it was to their belief) whereupon all of the members of the Sanhedrin condemn him as deserving of death.  Some then spit on him and blindfold him, beating him and screaming at him to prophesy.  All of which is ironic for that is precisely what he has just done, and none of them believed it! Thus, the themes which have already emerged earlier in the Gospel here coalesce: destroying the Temple, acknowledging Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.  Yet, in Mark, still, nobody believes it.

In stark contrast to Jesus' faithful willingness to go the last mile for God is the scene outside the chamber of the Sanhedrin, in the court yard, where Peter has hesitantly followed Jesus at a distance.  In the chamber, Jesus confesses who he is; while outside his prime disciple denies him. As predicted by Jesus, Peter denies him not once, but three times, finally swearing an oath that he does not even know Jesus.  When the cock crows, Peter realizes his sin, and weeps.

The irony is complete: Jesus is beaten and ordered to prophesy which he has already done but none believed him, and, meanwhile, another of his prophesies is coming true in the court yard.

Rather than kill Jesus themselves by stoning, the Sanhedrin bind him and hand him over to Pilate, the Roman Governor.  Mark gives us no indication why. But the effect is dramatic and interesting, if usually unnoticed.  Up to now the condemnations against Jesus have been theological: "Are you the Messiah, the Son of God?"  "Do you intend to destroy the Temple?"  These are religious questions. But Pilate cares nothing about such questions.  His concerns are strictly political, reflecting the concern of Rome for stability in this conquered land: "Are you the King of the Jews?" is Pilate’s question.

Now, neither Jesus nor anyone else has ever made such a claim about Jesus.  Jesus refuses to take the bait, answering only "You say so;" which isn't an answer because Pilate has not said that he thought that to be true.  Pilate pushes him to say something, to answer the many charges the Jewish leaders have brought against him.  But Jesus says nothing. At this point there is no indication that the Sanhedrin has convinced Pilate to do anything with Jesus; but it is here that the crowd comes into play.

It was the custom to release one prisoner to the crowd at Passover and Pilate asked the crowd did they wish to have the "King of the Jews," Jesus, released, or Barabbas, a rebel, part of an insurrection against Roman rule.  The crowd demanded Barabbas. We are not told why.

Pilate, wishing perhaps to remove the decision from himself, asks them what to do with Jesus and they all shout "Crucify him!"  And Pilate, apparently surprised at the harshness of their verdict says, "Why?  What evil has he done?"  They gave no answer; shouting again, "Crucify him!"  Again, we are not told why. Nor does Mark tell us anything of Pilate's thoughts, but only that, to satisfy the crowd, he released Jesus to be flogged and then crucified.

Once again, in this scene as in the others, no one looks good except Jesus. Pilate appears weak, threatened by the crowd.  He makes no attempt to get to the bottom of the issue; certainly he makes no attempt to achieve any kind of justice: he simply wants the problem to go away.

First the disciple, Judas, betrays him, then the disciples all run away; Peter denies him; witnesses accuse him falsely; the high priest condemns him anyway, as does the Sanhedrin to a man; the crowd turns against him, Pilate sentences him to flogging and crucifixion; the soldiers beat him, mock him, spit on him (as had the Sanhedrin) and lead him to his death.

Thus, both trials end in betrayal and mockery.  And all: disciples, Jewish leaders, crowd, Roman Governor, and Roman soldiers share in the drama of shame and guilt, of desertion, betrayal, accusation, and condemnation of the Son of God, which inevitably leads to the death He has foretold.  Mark wants to drive that point home and does so with dramatic clarity.

The soldiers enlist Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross, implying that the beating had made it impossible for Jesus to carry it Himself.   On reaching Golgotha they offer him a bitter drink, which he refuses, and then they crucify him!!!

And here is where we must stop for today. Perhaps that is best, for we need to let that image of stark total betrayal and abandonment by every single person he ever knew or cared for settle into our hearts. It should give us pause to think that the Son of God should endure such treatment. But, we must ask ourselves: in those circumstances, do we dare think we would have behaved any better?

We continue with our look at Mark’s account of the Passion next week, beginning at the crucifixion.

God bless.

Is it Good to Have Different Portrayals of the Death of Jesus?

2013 02 24 Sermon: The Death of the Messiah, Part 3:

 Is it Good to Have Different Portrayals of the Death of Jesus?

Before we look in detail at a couple of the Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus, what I'm going to do today is give you a summary of what these different portrayals of Jesus’ death tells us.  We will look at Mark, Luke and John.  Matthew's portrayal of Jesus is closely based on Mark's, and a discussion of it would be covering essentially the same ground as Mark covered.

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We start with Mark. Mark portrays a very human, very vulnerable Jesus.  Mark also portrays a scene of stark human abandonment of Jesus at the time of his Passion. Yet, in the end God raises Jesus from the grave in an act of vindication of His Son.

Mark's gospel intends to shock. And it does. In Mark, long before the Passion the disciples were largely clueless as to whom Jesus really was, and, even when they came close to the truth they could not accept the idea of a dying Messiah.  And his indictment of the disciples only gets worse.

In the garden at Gethsemene they fall asleep, not once, but three times.  Judas betrays him, but Peter is hardly better, denying that he ever knew him.  All flee, one in such haste that he leaves his clothes behind, literally saving his own skin - the very opposite of leaving all things to follow Jesus.

The Roman and Jewish judges fare no better and are seen by Mark as great cynics. And Mark constantly pours on the pathos of the entire Passion. Jesus hangs from the cross for six hours; three of those hours are filled with mockery and three with utter darkness.  And Jesus deeply feels abandoned, even by his heavenly Father.  Mark's very human Jesus cries but one thing from the cross, quoting the 22nd Psalm, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"  Yet, whatever Jesus may have thought, in the end God has never abandoned him, vindicates his Son by his resurrection.

If the trial before the Sanhedrin was to assess his threat to tear down the Temple, God in an act of judgment and vindication, tears the veil of the Temple in two, and never again will the Temple be the place where God dwells. Jesus is the new Temple.

And an outsider, a hated Roman, is heard to say what no Jew, disciple or priest, could ever figure out: "Truly this was the Son of God."  In Mark, only AFTER his death on the Cross is it possible to see that Jesus was, indeed, the Son of God.

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We move now to Luke who portrays a very different Jesus, one who is extremely compassionate and caring.  And the disciples are shown in a far more sympathetic light.  They remain faithful to Him in his trials.  And, while they fall asleep once, not three times, while Jesus prays, it is only out of their sorrow that they do.

Even the enemies of Jesus look better in Luke. There are no false witnesses produced at the Jewish trial, and even Pilate acknowledges three times that Jesus is not guilty. The people are not rabble calling for his death, but rather are grieved over what has been done to him.  And, just as they show great concern for him, so too is he less anguished by what will happen to him than by what happens to them.

At the arrest he heals the slave's ear and on the road to Calvary he worries about the fate of the women in the coming trials.
 
Further, he forgives those who crucified him and even promises paradise to a thief who merely asks to be remembered. Thus, in Luke, the crucifixion becomes a time of divine forgiveness and care.  Jesus dies in tranquility, saying simply. "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

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Now John. In stark contrast to either Mark or Luke, John portrays a triumphal Jesus even in death, a Jesus who long before the Passion defiantly announced, "I lay down my life and I take it up again; no one takes it from me!"  This Jesus knows, in advance, exactly what is going to happen to him and when, and it will happen as and when he says it will.

When the Roman soldiers and the Jewish police come to arrest him they fall to the ground powerless.  In the garden he does not pray for the cup to pass him; for it was for this moment he was born.  He is so self assured that he offends the high priest.

And Jesus has no fear of Pilate, saying, bluntly, "You have no power over me."  Nor does anyone carry his cross; this is something he is perfectly able to do for himself.  Even his royalty is proclaimed in three languages on the cross and is, in fact, confirmed by Pilate.

Totally unlike in the other Gospels, Jesus does not die on the cross abandoned, but with his mother and the beloved disciple with him.  And speaking to them from the Cross he gives the beloved disciple and his mother to one another, creating, as it were, a family of loving disciples to carry forward the message.

This Jesus can not cry out "Why have you forsaken me?" because the Father has always been with him, literally "in" him, and will be so through death to resurrection and glorious ascension.  His last words bear no anxiety or pain, but the simple statement that he has done what he came to do: "It is finished."  And only then, when he declared that he has done what was needed, does he hand over his spirit to the Father.

Even in death he continues to dispense life as living water and blood flow from his pierced side. And his burial is not something hurried and unprepared as in the other Gospels, but he lies in state amidst 100 pounds of spices - as befits a king.

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Let me ask you: do you despair because these portraits are so starkly different? Four different people wrote the Gospel stories of his death: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. But, also remember that all four descriptions are given to us by one Holy Spirit, the one Spirit that inspired the writers of each Gospel.  And, understand that no one description, or all four combined, exhausts the meaning of Jesus!  In fact, a true picture of Jesus can only just begin to emerge from what has been written about him in the Gospels.

Why, then, is this Good News?  It is Good News because by having these differing descriptions people with different spiritual needs can find meaning in the cross.  And even the same person, at different points in his or her life, can find meaning in one or more of these descriptions.

As Jesus did in Mark's Gospel, have you never needed desperately to cry out "My God, My God Why Have You Forsaken Me?" Do you not need to know that when you feel that way that God actually has not abandoned you and that he can reverse tragedy in your life?

As in Luke's Gospel, have you never been hurt by others, and have finally found relief from your anger in forgiveness.  Is "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" not something that we need to hear, and do in our own lives?  Don't we, with Luke's Jesus, need from time to time to turn ourselves over fully to God, having been unable to fix things for ourselves?  Can we not find comfort in saying, "Into your hands, O God, I place myself."?

Yet, as in John's Gospel, are there not times in your life when you desperately need to know that the evil and sin and all the perfidy of this life cannot prevail against God and those who have faith in him?  With John don't we often need to worship an all knowing, fully in control, always in command, Jesus who will guide and protect us, and defend and defeat every foe and evil, be it the prevailing powers, or principalities or the purveyors of lies?

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These descriptions, while strikingly different, do not exhaust the portrayal of Jesus, they begin the task.  Each Christian must ultimately find a portrayal of Jesus the Christ that will fit his or her personal needs.  And that portrayal may change over time as we learn more about the One in whom we place out trust.  But that portrayal will be sufficient for our faith for whatever time of life we need it to be.

Listen to Dr. Raymond Brown who wrote the masterful study on which my own work is based.

"To choose one portrayal of the crucified Jesus in a manner that would exclude the other portrayals or to harmonize all the Gospel portrayals into one would deprive the cross of much of its meaning.  It is important that some be able to see the head bowed in dejection, while others observe the arms outstretched in forgiveness, and still others perceive in the title on the cross the proclamation of a reigning king."

That, my friends, is good news because no pen can capture all there is to know about God. And, just as surely mere words can never truly capture all there is to know about Jesus, his Son. And yet, through these different portrayals of Jesus, we are given more glimpses of the One who is the author of our salvation than any one portrayal can offer.

These glimpses can comfort us in times of trouble, but they also can strengthen our faith because we know far more about Jesus than we would ever know if we had only one harmonized portrayal of the One who is our Lord and Savior.

The Death of the Messiah, Part 2

2013 02 17 . The Death of the Messiah . Part 2: Four Different Views of The Death of The Messiah

The stories in the Bible are not written to meet any human standard.  They meet the standard that God wanted them to meet when he inspired the writers of the Gospels to write them. But many people are not comfortable with that, and have, unsuccessfully, tried to "harmonize" the Gospels, doing away with troublesome inconsistencies.  And no place has more attempt been made to harmonize the Gospel stories than in the stories about the death of Jesus.

We are not going to try to do that. Instead, we're going to look at a some of those inconsistencies today, and then use them to think about a point I will making a bit later in the series:  It is a good thing that we have four differing accounts of the Death of the Messiah.

 First, let's look at those stories in general.  The first thing you will notice is that all the Gospels do hold to a common, basic outline of the events leading to the crucifixion.  And that makes sense. After all, there was a basic order of events that took place, that had to take place, and each of the Gospel writers follows that basic order.

For example, Jesus' arrest had to precede his trial, and the trial had to precede the sentence, and the sentence had to precede His execution.  And all the Gospel share those common elements, and many more besides. While the details differ, anyone reading any of the Gospel account would easily see they were referring to the same event.

In this drama we call "The Death of the Messiah" there are not only the actions and reactions of Jesus, but also of supporting characters, like Peter and Judas and Pilate.  And the drama is heightened by the contrasts between certain characters: innocent Jesus and guilty Barabbas, faithful Jesus and betraying Peter, and in one of the Gospels, wise and troubled Pilate versus the vile and remorseless crowd.  Even the scoffing Jewish leaders have their antitheses in the Roman soldier who, in two accounts, declares Jesus to be the Son of God.

All of these elements, while often used quite differently in the separate Gospels, heighten our awareness of the struggle going on here between Jesus and the world that, as John puts it, “knew him not.”
 
The descriptions of the characters that surround him, and their motives and desires encourage us, the readers, to participate in the drama by constantly asking ourselves the question: "Where would I have stood had I been one of these players in this drama of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus?"

Perhaps we can see ourselves as being among those who welcomed him into Jerusalem as a hero.  But would we be able to see ourselves as Peter, denying him?  As Judas, betraying Him?  Or could we see ourselves, as being like the religious leaders who condemned him? Or as Pilate, either wishing to avoid the issue, as in John's account, or washing his hands of the whole thing so he might appear blameless, as in Matthew's? Could we see ourselves abandoning him, as all the disciples did in three accounts, or staying at the foot of his cross until the end, as did the beloved disciple and Mary in the John’s Gospel?

There were many factors that colored the writing of the Gospels, which, as we learned last week, were all written 30 to 80 years after the death of Jesus.  The memory of what happened at Jesus' death was deeply affected by the life situations of the local Christian communities in which the Gospel writers lived; and each was a little different.  Each community was strongly influenced on how persecuted it was, and by whom it was persecuted. And each Gospel reflects, for example, how the writers perceived the Romans and the Jews.

Take the Romans, for instance. How do you offset the negative attitude displayed toward Jesus when you read the words of Tacitus, the great Roman writer, who treats Jesus as a despicable criminal; not worthy of anyone’s attention? How would you overcome Tacitus' very negative portrayal?    What if, say, you were to portray Pilate as being a spokesman for Jesus, or at least, not against him?  Two of the Gospel writers did just that.
 
If you move through the Gospels according to when they were written you'll see that Pilate is increasingly portrayed as a fair judge who recognized Jesus as innocent of political ambition.  This viewpoint not only rehabilitates Pilate in the eyes of Christian readers, but also rehabilitates Jesus in the eyes of Romans: if a Roman Governor of Pilate's stature saw nothing wrong in Jesus, Tacitus must have been mistaken about Jesus being simply a common criminal.

Lets look at just one more example: "How would you characterize Jewish involvement in Jesus' death?  Who was involved, who was responsible, for the death of Jesus?  Was it all of the Jews?  Or just the Pharisees?  The Priests? All the Priests?  The Sanhedrin?  What about Joseph of Aramathea, wasn't he in the Sanhedrin?  Or, was it the Romans, and not the Jews at all?

Well, it depends on which Gospel you read.  If you wish to go easy on the Jewish involvement, or want to limit it to a handful of leaders, read Luke.  In Luke there is no calling for witnesses against Jesus and there is no Jewish death sentence against Him.  In fact, there is no formal night time trial, complete with the high priest Ciaphas in charge, as in Mark and Matthew.  There is only a simple questioning in the morning by the Sanhedrin.

John, who is hard on the Jews elsewhere in his Gospel, does not write that the Jews were heavily involved in actually deciding Jesus' fate.  John records no Sanhedrin session at all after Jesus' arrest, but only a police interrogation conducted by a different high priest, Annas.

Confused? Add further confusion: How much were the Romans involved, and when? John includes Roman soldiers and their Tribune as early as the arrest, the other writers do not. This is important because no Roman Tribune could have been dispatched without the knowledge of Pilate, which means that John believed that Pilate was involved far earlier and far more deeply than any of the other Gospels report, even though, in the end, Pilate could find no justification for killing Jesus.

On the other hand, look carefully at the stories about the accusations against Jesus. If you suspect that it was "all of the Jews" who accused Jesus then Matthew and John are the Gospels that lead you to that conclusion; while Mark and Luke limit Jewish accusations to the Jewish leadership, specifically the priests and the Sanhedrin.

And, while John goes easy on the Jewish leaders during the trial period, John also believes that the whole "world" rejected Jesus and so places blame for his death on everybody, and does not go easy on either the Romans or the Jews.  Both are guilty in John's eyes, but, in John’s eyes, so are we. And for my money, John’s conclusion is spot on. As the great Lenten hymn proclaims, “I crucified you.”

We could spend months looking at, and comparing, the Gospel accounts of such things as those above, and things like: How did Jesus view His own death? How did the disciples react at Gesthemene?  What did they do at the arrest?  Could the Jewish trial even have happened according to Jewish law?  What happened at the actual time of death?. i.e.:  Did the curtain in the Temple split?  Were graves opened?  And, after his death, were there guards at the tomb?  And on and on. We will do some of that in this series, but only as it helps us better understand Jesus.

Otherwise, if we took the time to sort through every detail, would we find out anything that would help us better understand Jesus?  Well, I have (Monte has) done that, done it for countless hours, and I can (he can) tell you that studying and arguing about every little detail does not help us learn much about Jesus.

What will help us know more about Jesus is to know that each individual portrayal of Jesus’ death gives us an insight into who he is such as none of the others give us. And the reason is simple enough. Each divinely inspired evangelist knows a different facet of our Lord and his life and death, and therefore each writer portrays a different picture.

I’m going to stop here for today.

During the coming weeks as you learn in more depth what some of those different views are, I want you to ponder the implications of having four differing portraits of the Death of the Messiah and decide for yourself how you feel about that. I will share with you how I feel about it, but you need to form your own conclusions. Each of us brings our own needs to God and each finds peace and secure faith in his or her individual way.

Can you, like the Church, live comfortably with four quite different portrayals of Jesus’ death? Or do you long for it to be much simpler?  How does it affect your faith to know that there is no single, absolutely scientifically provable history of his death?

When we are done looking at a few more of those conflicts in the reports of his death, we will take  a very close look at the portrayal by two of the Gospel writers to see WHY the different Gospel writers wrote what they did.

God bless.

"How Do You See the Death of the Messiah?" -- Part One of Series

2013 02 10 The Death of the Messiah: Mk 14: 1-4,

Introduction: "How Do You See the Death of the Messiah?"

This is the first of a series of Lenten Reflections on the Death of the Messiah, the death of Jesus, the Christ. Our understanding of Christ's Passion has been warped by well meaning persons who have sought to over simplify the accounts of His death. But we need to understand the Cross of Christ as God has taught it, not as we might like to hear it.  This sermon and the next will be an overview of all four Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus. The remaining sermons will be a more detailed look at the accounts of Mark and Luke.

Jesus’ death, when viewed in the light of his subsequent resurrection, is the most important event in the formation of Christian faith. Our salvation depends on it. And so we certainly need to understand what the Bible says about it, not what we might have heard that it says, or what we might wish that it says.

I chose the series title, “The Death of the Messiah,” in honor of the magnificent work of the same name be Dr. Raymond Brown.  His 1800 page long book is universally recognized as the most significant contribution to understanding the death of Jesus in the history of the church.  His work is the cornerstone of my own study of this subject.

We will be looking at the passion and crucifixion of Jesus through four very different sets of eyes: those of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.  And we must remember a critical fifth set of eyes: our own. This fifth set of eyes is the one which has filtered what we know from those four very different accounts into one account that we believe fits what happened to Jesus in the brief time of his Passion.

And our unconscious filtering may lead us to think that all four Gospel accounts of the death of the Messiah are essentially the same, and that our understanding of what happened to Jesus and how he approached his death is based on a coherent account. But that is not true.

The accounts of his death are not the same; and the Jesus depicted in each account is quite different from the others. The four gospels vary substantially as to what happened, and as to how Jesus is viewed by each writer of the individual stories.

For some that may be jarring and disquieting.  Through the centuries Christians have wanted to "harmonize" the four accounts, to make them into a single homogenous unit, with no loose ends.  None of those attempts, however, have been successful. That is because when we seek to harmonize the gospel accounts we fall victim to believing what we want to believe rather than what the Bible clearly tells us.

The early church struggled with this problem. But the church, from the beginning, believed that the scriptures, even while differing in detail, sometimes shockingly so, were the divinely inspired work of God. And, for over 1600 years, the church has said that, regardless of their lack of harmony, the four Gospel accounts of Jesus were intended to give us different pictures of Jesus; and that all were true when viewed by the eyes of faith.

The church has consistently held that no one account of his life, death and resurrection could capture all the facets of his life and death. Therefore, while many individuals have tried through the centuries, the church has never encouraged the attempts to harmonize the Gospels. The church has been content to allow the Gospels to stand as they are, seeing them as four different, divinely inspired, ways of viewing the same events.

The truth is that the Gospels, and the death of Jesus as reported in them, are different, both in substance and in theological outlook.  The Jesus described in Matthew and Mark is a far different Jesus than the one described in John, in almost every way imaginable. Now, you have two choices as I tell you this.  You can say that they all cannot be true and insist on force fitting them into your own pre-conceived ideas of what you think should or must have happened.

Or, you can look at the Gospels as they stand and see what God is trying to tell us about the death of Jesus through the divinely inspired work of these four stories. We will do that in this series. And what we shall find when we are finished is that Jesus was and is a far more complicated being than we thought; and that the writers of the Gospels had to struggle with that fact.  They also had to struggle with the fact that they wrote long after the event took place.

Jesus died about 30 AD. The earliest Gospel, Mark, was written 30 to 40 years later. Luke was likely written around 50 years after the death of Christ.  Matthew was written 50 to 70 years after the death of Jesus. And John’s account was written 60 to 80 years after the death of the Messiah.  In other words, if they were writing today, they would be writing about something that happened somewhere between 1930 and 1980!

No one felt a need to write the Gospels immediately after Jesus died. The impetus to write down the Gospels was that Jesus did not return as soon as expected; and the stories were starting to get confused, sometimes deliberately, as they were passed down verbally year after year. The original eye-witnesses were dying off, or already dead.  And many false gospels were springing up in the widely dispersed church.  Luke makes this clear in the preface to his Gospel where he tells us that he is writing it to “set the record straight.”

Each of the four Gospels was intended for the Christian community in which the writer lived.  He was not writing to the universal church.  And each writer's sources were slightly different. Mark, the earliest written, wrote primarily from the oral tradition, that is, from the verbal stories of Jesus told in his community by its leaders. Matthew, writing quite a bit later, relied heavily on Mark's gospel, often word for word. But he wrote a much longer Gospel, adding items from the oral tradition in his community.

Matthew also added early Christian "apologetics", in other words, “defenses of the faith” made by early church leaders against accusations that the Christian claims were false. He adds, for instance, scenes about the death of Judas, about Pilate washing his hands of the whole affair, about the dream of Pilate's wife, and he places guards at the tomb – just some of the changes he made to blunt attacks on the church.

Both Matthew and Luke seem to have shared ideas from a written source that we no remaining record of. We know this because both Matthew and Luke have identical word for word accounts in their Gospels that are unknown to Mark or John and that had to come from a written source shared by both writers.

John's Gospel is radically different than the others, so different that while the other three are called "synoptic," that is, they can be "viewed together," John's is called simply "the fourth Gospel."  There is no strong evidence that John relied on any of the other three Gospels in the composition of his Gospel.

John was very intentionally writing a theology of the Christ, and an anthropology of our reaction to Him, and so his emphasis is on discerning who Jesus is, what Jesus' relationship to the Father is, what Jesus said and taught us as that relates to God's intention for Jesus here on earth, and how we respond to it, or reject it.

And so John focuses on a ministry by Jesus that he reports was longer and more complicated than the ministry reported in the other gospels. In John, Jesus' ministry is three years long, not one or one and a half years as reported in the other Gospels; three Passover feasts are celebrated during his ministry, not one, and Jesus makes three trips between Galilee and Jerusalem, not one.  In fact, in John most of Jesus' ministry is concentrated in Judea and Jerusalem, not in Galilee as in the other Gospels.

In John’s Gospel the chronology of the trial and crucifixion is quite different as well, including saying that the Friday of the crucifixion was not the Passover, but the day of Preparation for Passover. John has no Passover meal in the upper room, but rather an ordinary supper after which he washes the feet of the disciples and proceeds to make several lengthy speeches to the disciples, speeches the other Gospels know nothing about.  And there are many other differences about the last days of Jesus in John's Gospel.

But, as different as these Gospel narratives are, we must be clear about one important truth: none of the Gospel writers was trying to write  history.  All were writing documents of faith: kerygma, proclamation, filtered through the eyes of faith.

They were all writing, consciously or not, theology, not history.  “History” as we know it today, based on careful gathering of the physical facts, was not on the agenda of these writers. It was, in fact, unknown to any writers of the time! The Gospel writers wrote to tell us the Good News of Jesus, not to nail down the precise facts of his life. Theirs was a labor of love.  They were not trying to write a text book for use in a college history course. They were writing statements of faith, of proclamation of the Good News of the coming of God’s Son.

So, where does this leave us?  Well, if you believe, as I do, that the Bible is not just another book; that it is something more than, say, the writings of Shakespeare, or Plato, or Martin Luther; if you believe, as I do, that the writers of the Bible were divinely inspired, anointed by the Holy Spirit to write what they wrote, then, with me, you must conclude that the differences in the four Gospel accounts of the death of the Messiah were intentional.

The differences will never be reconciled by us, or by anyone else.  But I believe that God gave us four Gospels, not one, on purpose.  And I believe he expects us to read all four of them and to learn from them, content to let them be for us what they are: divinely inspired books for educating us about the great mystery that is our God, and about his Son, Jesus, the Christ.

We will, later in this series, explore two of these Gospel accounts in some detail.  We will note some of the places where the Gospels clearly do not agree on the details. But the primary focus will be to allow us to see the Jesus that each writer saw, the Jesus that the Holy Spirit inspired them to write about, the Jesus that we need to know, but, in Philip Yancey's brilliant phrase, may well be "the Jesus we never knew".

God didn't give us four different Gospel accounts by accident; so next Sunday we will begin to explore the question of whether or not it might actually be good that we have four different portrayals of the death of the Messiah!

God bless you all as we explore this series as part of our Lenten discipline, with the clear intention of better understanding what the Gospels tell us about the “Death of the Messiah.”

Amen.

Final Sermon. Dr. Canfield’s Jonah Series. Insiders and Outsiders

2013 02 03 Final Sermon. Dr. Canfield’s Jonah Series. Insiders and Outsiders. The Baltic Parish

In the "introduction" to the Book of Jonah, I pointed out that, while we know very little about the background and setting of the book, and even less about Jonah himself - we do know, with certainty, that the Book of Jonah was written by an insider, to insiders, about an insider.  And that we, too, are "insiders.”

Jonah was the foremost prophet of his day; the spiritual leader of the nation, an insider who worked for the king.  He was at least as important as any modern Archbishop or denominational leader of our day. He had the credentials; he had the power; he had the prestige.  And, to top it off, he had an inside track to God.  As a prophet he was God's spokesman.

That's not hard to understand. We all know people in every congregation, or in positions of authority in our own denomination, who are "special" insiders.  Some of us might even, at a weak and honest moment, admit that we are pretty special to the church.  And we take a certain amount of prideful satisfaction in that. For example, the truth is that I sometimes do that, even when I know that pride is a great sin! It is the nature of the human beast to be prideful, and that is a hard sin to shake. We have to really work at being humble. It takes a lot more effort to really BE humble than it does to tell ourselves we are humble!

But, as we saw last week, Jonah, the insider, comes off very poorly in this story. It is the "outsiders," those for whom Jonah has, at his best, disdainful tolerance; and, at his worst, bitter hatred, who come off looking good in the story. They come off looking good to us; and, at the end of the story, they come off looking good to God.
There are two groups of outsiders highlighted in the story: first, the sailors and their captain and second, the Ninevites and their King.

I imagine that the sailors to be a rugged bunch of individuals; they come from many different places; they apparently have little in common; they worship different gods; but they do share a dangerous, low paying vocation. And they have some other things in common.  They know the sea, and they respect the danger of a storm at sea.  And when a storm comes they know what to do - they pray and then they take action.  And not one of them is an Israelite - they are NOT part of "the people of God," at least as Jonah thinks of  “the people of God.”

Like the Ninevites, they represent the people of the world: outsiders - certainly not only outside the church, but also outright pagans, worshiping other gods.  To Jonah, they are anathema! But - and this is intended to be a shock to our self-righteous, "insider" digestive systems - these are people who DO the things that we insiders are supposed to do - and don't often actually do; and they have characteristics that we tend to associate only with insiders – as if common decency were a monopoly owned by we insiders. Let’s look at some of those characteristics.

 –– The sailors are HUMANE: they risk their lives trying to row the boat to shore to save the ship - and Jonah!
–– They are PIOUS: when faced with danger they turn first to prayer, then to action.
–– They are PRACTICAL: when disaster strikes they work, shoulder to shoulder, together, to do what they can.
–– And, most importantly, they are open to SPIRITUAL GROWTH: When at the height of the storm they learn about the true God from Jonah, unlike Jonah, they pray to that God, our God, for help, and they offer to him sacrifices.  Jonah sleeps, and when aroused, tells them ABOUT God; but does not, himself, bother to pray to God on either his or their behalf.

Taken on its face, the story is deeply ironic: common sense would expect us, fellow insiders, to identify with Jonah, the insider.  But the writer knows that our sense of what is RIGHT makes us want to be LIKE THE OUTSIDERS, not like Jonah.
What is going on here is that the scene of Jonah and the sailors asks us - insiders who see ourselves as God's people - to re-evaluate our attitudes and prejudices toward "outsiders," those whom we would never normally see as "people of God."

And in the light of what we now know about Jesus, perhaps doing that might force us to remember something written by St. John: 'For God so loved THE WORLD that he gave his only Son'; not "for God so loved US" that he gave his Son.  And that "world" includes those sailors, and all those other outsiders who dwell in the squalor of Rio, Damascus, Teheran, Beirut, Calcutta, and, of course, Ninevah.

Ah, Ninevah, that whore of a city.  Jonah hated it.  But, spit up on the beach Jonah is given another chance - Go to Ninevah and preach a simple declarative statement "Yet 40 days and Ninevah will be overthrown!" And, reluctantly, while deeply angry at God, Jonah did.  And the miracle occurs - the whore listens, the murderous King hears, and they respond with fasting and mourning.  The King himself sits in sack cloth and ashes; he calls a fast – extending even to the animals who are to wear sack cloth and ashes as well as the people.

Nor does the King assume that God will repent of his righteous wrath.  He knows well his own sin and the sin of his city. But he cares for his people, and so all he can say is the wonderfully ironic line: “Who knows? Perhaps God will have mercy on us."  This vile and sinful outsider knows he has no reason to expect deliverance, and so he throws himself and his city on the mercy of God.  He knows only too well their sin; but, like the captain of the ship, his overriding concern is for his people.  "Who knows?"  God may even deliver the Ninevites, a people deserving of punishment for generations of sin.

And the city is "overthrown" all right.  But not as Jonah expected. God does not consume it in his wrath.  It is over thrown by the repentance of its people - those lowly "outsiders.” And we must ask: Who cares that this miracle has taken place?  Well, it certainly isn't Jonah.  He is enraged. He walks out when he finds that God will not destroy the city that, by every standard of justice and decency and, yes, VENGEANCE, should be destroyed.  But God pities Ninevah, hears their cry of repentance and saves the city.  What do we - insiders all - think of that?

Jonah hated it!  He hated that the God to whom he sang in the belly of the fish "Deliverance belongs to the Lord!" would deliver THEM! He hated it because, all along, deep in his heart, he KNEW that God was capable of just such selfless, forgiving love toward all those of his creation. God could show a love to others that Jonah’s hate could never let Jonah feel.

This story asks us, God's people, those of us within the church, to re-evaluate how we feel about and act toward all those "outsiders" we hold morally inferior to ourselves.  As James Limburg says, "It speaks a word of criticism against a people who prefer huddling and cuddling in the safety of their own groups. (It calls them to be) about the tasks to which Jesus called them: 'Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.'  It warns the people of God against the danger of forgetting that they are ambassadors, participating in reconciling the world to God.”

 So, who cares?  God cares.  And we should care for the Ninevites of this world. There is no better lesson upon which we can build our upcoming Lenten prayers and actions.  Lent is much more than “giving up” something; a true and lasting Lenten discipline means "giving" something of ourselves to others.  

The book of Jonah tells us that those “others” include all the "outsiders" of this world that our God also calls his children. May we, in our lives and by our actions, open ourselves to be Christ’s ambassadors to a world full of outsiders; full of "Ninevites."  If we do, then “Who knows?  Perhaps our God might spare US a thought, and be pleased by the compassion of his people.

To our surprising, loving, forgiving  and compassionate God be all the glory!  Amen.

Jonah Tries To Run from God’s Will

 2013 01 27

Sermon: the Baltic Parish: Jonah Tries To Run from God’s Will

God's instruction to Jonah is very clear.  "Arise, Go to Nineveh and prophesy against it because it is wicked!"  That seems pretty clear.  And Jonah was a professional, royal, prophet, so you would expect Jonah to understand clear instructions from God and to do them, in proper, "Thus says the Lord" fashion.  After all, that is what a prophet is for, to be the mouthpiece of God. Prophets are always to speak for the Lord, often they are to speak the very hard truths that we don't want to hear – and they are never to speak for themselves.  That's how it works.

But that's not how it worked with Jonah.  Jonah arose alright. And then he made a 180 degree turn from the direction on Nineveh and went down to Joppa, intent on fleeing the presence of God altogether by going to Tarshish.  Tarshish was as far as one could get from Nineveh at that time, way out on edge of the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of what we now call Spain.  Tarshish was literally thought to be at the "end of the earth."

And here we get the FIRST point of the story: it won't work!  It is not possible to escape from God when God is intent on calling us to a mission. And so, in a masterful use of metaphor, the writer tells us that Jonah then begins a series of "descents" from God.  He goes "down" to Joppa; he goes "down into the ship;" (most translations says "went on board" but the Hebrew word is "down.") he then goes down into the hold of the ship; he lies down; and he drops down into sleep.  He is forced to get up, but not of his free will, is thrown overboard, and then he goes down into the sea.

Before Jonah gets anywhere near Tarshish he is already going down, down from God, down, he says, to the very roots of the mountains, down to where the deep surrounds him, where weeds wrap around his head and the gate of the Pit closes upon him….Down to a place where, without help, he is as good as dead.

 Jonah thought he knew what he wanted: to do whatever it takes to flee from God; to go to Tarshish; and, if necessary, to die. But we learn here the SECOND point we need to know: that it is impossible to escape the presence of the Lord.  The Psalmist knew what Jonah did not: you can never escape the presence of God.  From Psalm 139 :

7  Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
8  If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9  If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10  even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
11  If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,"
12  even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

And a THIRD truth is revealed to us here: it is impossible to escape the tasks that God assigns to us.  After all that happens to Jonah, after the fish spits Jonah safely onto the beach, God does not say, "Well, I hope that you have learned yours lesson.  Take a few days off.  Get some rest.  Then report to me next Monday and I'll find something for you to do that isn't so disagreeable to you." Not a chance. In the very next line, before Jonah has time to take a shower, comb his hair, shave, brush his teeth and put on some clean clothes, we are told, "The Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, 'Get up; go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim the message that I tell you!'"  Jonah is back at square one.

But more important than these teachings is the FOURTH teaching that is inherent in this story of deliverance: that it is impossible to escape the LOVE of God.  Psalm 139 also clearly says this as do many other places in the Bible, such as Paul's great hymn of God's love in Romans 8: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord."

Jesus himself tells a story, perhaps the most beloved story that he tells, of the prodigal son, who could not bear being at home with his father, and so he demanded and got his inheritance, left, squandered it, and then sunk "down" into the pit with the pigs that he fed to stay alive, literally eating the scraps thrown to the pigs he tended.  And so at the end of his rope he returned to his father. He came home, content to be a slave, not a son, if that be his father's will.  Yet, upon arriving home he learns that, in all his attempts at running away, he had not escaped the love of his father, who was beside himself with joy that his son had come home.

Jonah, like the wayward son in that story, has to learn the hard way.  And it is not by accident that, only after Jonah had exhausted all his own options, only when he reconsidered the death that he had shortly before thought he wanted, only when he was one tick away from drowning did God send the fish to save him. It was sent not simply to save his life, but to save Jonah from himself!

Moving into Chapter Two we see Jonah within the belly of the fish reconsidering all he had done, a changed man, far different than the one we were coming to know in the first chapter. In fact, most scholars, including me, think that this prayer, a poem in the style of a psalm, was added to the story by a later writer who sought to rehabilitate Jonah by making him thankful for his deliverance from certain death. We will learn later on that Jonah’s rehabilitation did not take.

But, regardless of who wrote it, we are expected to learn something from this prayer, this psalm.  Which brings us to the FIFTH thing we can learn: and that is that when we are down, when we have exhausted all of our own resources, the only thing left to do is to pray to God for deliverance.

For someone of faith, and often also for those who have previously had no faith at all, when we, like Jonah, go down, and then the bottom falls out; when we reach the end of our rope; when we cannot possibly create a new future for ourselves; when the god we have made of ourselves fails us, all that is left to us is to pray to God for deliverance.

When he was going down into the depths of the sea Jonah's initial thought was that he had been thrown into the sea by God, and then had been abandoned by God.  But when we read the story carefully we know that neither of those things that Jonah thought were true.  Jonah did it to himself!  Can we learn something here? I think we can.

And so we come to the FINAL lesson for today. Isn't it often true that when, by our own decisions and actions, we are cast into the depths of despair, of desperation, real or imagined, we want to blame our misfortune on someone, and often that someone is God?

Well, so did Jonah.  But when he finally realizes that he is getting his death wish, that he will forever dwell in the Pit, when he fears that he will be barred from the face of God forever, then and only then does he wake up.  "When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, God!"  And God remembered Jonah.  And so Jonah completes his psalm of praise with the one thing that he now knows for certain: "Deliverance belongs to the Lord!"

Unfortunately, too often we think that deliverance is something we can handle ourselves.  But our faith teaches us that when things get really rough, when we are finally done shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic, and God points us toward a way out of our despair, we finally figure out that our salvation comes as a pure gift, a free grace from God.  Salvation does, indeed,  belong to the Lord. Jonah learns that much, but only for a short while.

And so we end this exploration of the first half of the Book of Jonah.  Next, in the third and final sermon in this series, we will learn lessons every bit as important and practical as those we have learned today.  Like today’s lessons, the lessons for next week will be clearly applicable to our daily lives, and the big question is whether we will willingly open our hearts to the lessons we learn in this series, and make them a part of our lives.

God bless you all.  Amen.

2013 01 20 Sermon: Jonah, Part One: An Epiphany Rejected

2013 01 20 Sermon on Jonah, Part One: An Epiphany Rejected

(A NRSV translation of the Book is attached at the bottom of this sermon.)

This is the first Sunday of a brief three part series about a very brief book.  The book of the Prophet Jonah is but four short chapters long. It is a whopping good story; and it is a good story to study during Epiphany because God clear Epiphany was revealed to Jonah; and Jonah equally clearly rejected it. Which almost never happens, since prophets are supposed to, by definition, get with God’s program. Whatever else Jonah had he certainly had some nerve! And the upshot of that is that, in spite of God’s great efforts with him, Jonah would not have known an Epiphany had it crawled up his leg and bit him!

First, I want to share with you some thoughts about misunderstanding the Book of Jonah. Jonah is well worth some study because most of us do not have a clue as to what God is trying to teach us in this book, and what he is trying to teach us is both applicable and important to us.  The book is simple and straight forward which makes it a bit astonishing that so few practicing Christians or Jews actually understand it.  Hopefully, this brief series will put an end to that for you.

Unfortunately, if you are anything like me and the hundreds of students and parishioners I have taught about Jonah through the years, your ideas about Jonah have been warped by an almost exclusive focus on the first half of the book, and particularly by the idea that Jonah was swallowed by a "whale." And that particular understanding has been further distorted by Walt Disney's "Pinochio" and that very scary scene where the puppet-boy is chased and swallowed by a very menacing whale. So you may not know that the Bible says nothing about a whale that chased and swallowed Jonah, but the story actually tells of a "giant fish" that was sent by God to rescue Jonah!

And you may well have been subjected to one of those boring arguments about whether or not Jonah actually could have been swallowed by a whale, or whether or not that part of the story was a metaphor, or hyperbole, or fantasy: all of which are possible.  But there is no critical agreement on those options, so the spectrum runs from literally true to pure fantasy and picking one leads you no closer to understanding Jonah than you were when the argument started.

It usually helps to understand a story by having an idea about who wrote it, when, for whom, where, and others basic things that give us the sitz im liben, the "setting in life," of the story. For better or worse we don't know much about Jonah, but what we don't know helps because we have been mislead by well meaning scholars who did a lot of guessing about Jonah and forgot to tell us they were guessing.  We will straighten that out now.

We do know, from 2 Kings 14:25, that there actually was a prophet named "Jonah, the son of Amittai," who was active during the reign of King Jeroboam II.  And we know that Jeroboam II ruled early in the 8th Century, BC, from 786 to 746.  The Jonah in our story has exactly the same name as the prophet during Jeroboam's reign so we know the writer of the Book of Jonah wants us to believe the exploits of the Jonah in the story is the same man who served King Jeroboam II.  The problem is that we know next to nothing about the 40 year reign of Jeroboam II.  2 Kings tells us, "Jeroboam II restored the border of Israel from Lebo-Hamath as far as the sea of Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant, Jonah, son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-Heper."

From that we can infer that Jonah was in favor with the King to the point of being allowed to speak for the Lord during his reign.  So Jonah was a royal prophet, not some wandering prophet who was out of favor with the reigning monarch.  We know essentially nothing about when it was written.  It is written in the third person so, regardless what the author would like us to believe he is not Jonah, but someone writing about Jonah. and scholars have said it was written in the 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th and 3rd centuries, BC, so you can take you pick and not be "wrong."  What you can know is that at least one Biblical scholar got his PhD writing his dissertation defending each of those rough dates.

Perhaps more importantly, we don't know who did write the book, or why.  Nor do we know if it was written all at once by one author or a group of authors, or whether it was patched together from bits and pieces, perhaps over several centuries.  A good example of that question involves the prayer that Jonah prays to God while he is in the fish.  It is prayed in the form of a psalm, a poetic writing, wholly unlike the prose narrative of the rest of the book. In the prayer Jonah is both thankful and pious, completely different than the man described in the rest of the book. And once Jonah is spit out of the mouth of the fish Jonah becomes once again the familiar old grouchy, negative, defiant Jonah we have come to know, if not love.  This has led some to say that this prayer was inserted at a later date to make Jonah look a bit more orthodox, and a whole lot more likable.

We can say something pretty definitive about is who it was written for. We know that the author was an Israelite writing for other Israelites.  In other words, and this is important, the Book of Jonah was written by an insider for other insiders.  And as it has been handed down through the ages it is also written for today's insiders – us.  Of course others can learn much from it as well, but it is addressed to insiders and how those insiders feel when God chooses to treat even hated outsiders with compassion and mercy! Let me reiterate that: it addresses the question of how Insiders react when God decides to show compassion and mercy to Outsiders!

One of the ways we can be sure that this writer was an Israelite, and insider, is that the God referred to here is Yahweh, the God of Israel.  And when you know when God is called yahweh in a Biblical text you also know that the center of the story is NEVER about the human actors in the story; rather it is about God.  So, if you were to count the references to God in this short book you would find that God is mentioned 39 time in its 44 verses.  God is the center of this story from beginning to end.  God starts the story by calling Jonah, and ends it by telling Jonah what he already should have known: that God is a God of compassion and mercy, so get used to it!

We do know quite a bit about Nineveh.  It was located on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq.  It was truly a great city, large and prosperous long before most of the other cities of the middle east were important.  Under King Sennacherib it became the capital of Assyria at the end of the 8th century BC and remained so until the fall of that nation in 612 BC.

Israel hated the far superior military might of Assyria which ultimately conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, leaving only Judah, and carrying most of the leaders of the northern kingdom off in chains to Ninevah.  This goes a long way towards understanding how the prophet could hate Ninevah. Ninevah was infamous in the eyes of the Israelites for its evil, debauchery, whoredom, thievery, treachery and cruelty.

The deep and bitter hatred of the Assyrians by the Israelites after the fall of the Northern Kingdom is why many scholars date the writing of the book as later than 722 BC, at least a third of a century after Jonah prophesied. There is no proof of this, but it is widely accepted as making sense.  Of course it is also likely that the Israelites had hated the Assyrians long before they invaded Israel.  Generally speaking, throughout Israel's history Israelites hated all nations that were bigger and stronger than little Israel and that sought to subjugate that tiny nation, either through war or by the insistence on the payment of tribute to avoid war. Regardless, what is very clear is that Jonah hated Ninevah and was none too happy with his God who had the audacity to ask Jonah to preach to them and warn them that God was about to punish them.  And, as we will see, Jonah would rather go to the end of the earth than to obey that instruction of God.

Next time we will look closely at the first two chapters of the book, the first half of the book actually, and begin to answer that great theological question that I insist we all ask: "So what?"  "So what?  What can Jonah and Ninevah possibly have to do with me over 2700 years later?"  The answer is, "A whole lot more than you may realize."  God bless.

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The Book of Jonah, NRSV translation

Chapter One

1:1  Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, 2  "Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me." 3  But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.

4  But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. 5  Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep. 6  The captain came and said to him, "What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish." 7  The sailors said to one another, "Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us." So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

8  Then they said to him, "Tell us why this calamity has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?" 9  "I am a Hebrew," he replied. "I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." 10  Then the men were even more afraid, and said to him, "What is this that you have done!" For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them so. 11  Then they said to him, "What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?" For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. 12  He said to them, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you."

13  Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. 14  Then they cried out to the LORD, "Please, O LORD, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man's life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O LORD, have done as it pleased you." 15  So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. 16  Then the men feared the LORD even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows.

17  But the LORD provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Chapter Two

2:1  Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, 2  saying, "I called to the LORD out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. 3  You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. 4  Then I said, 'I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?' 5  The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head 6  at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God.

7  As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. 8  Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. 9  But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!"

10  Then the LORD spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.

Chapter Three

3:1  The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2  "Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." 3  So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days' walk across.

4  Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" 5  And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. 6  When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7  Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: "By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8  Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. 9  Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish."

10  When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

Chapter Four

4:1  But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2  He prayed to the LORD and said, "O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3  And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live."

4  And the LORD said, "Is it right for you to be angry?" 5  Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. 6  The LORD God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. 7  But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. 8  When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, "It is better for me to die than to live." 9  But God said to Jonah, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?" And he said, "Yes, angry enough to die."

10  Then the LORD said, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"

2013 01 13 Sermon Mark 1: 4-11, The Baptism of Jesus

Mark's was the first description of the baptism of Jesus written. It is the simplest, and it offers no explanation of the BIG question that Biblical Theologians like to debate endlessly: “If, as the Bible says, and the Church confirms, Jesus was without sin, why was he baptized by John?”  Mark doesn't answer that question, content to let God be God and accept the divine mystery. Mark was never burdened when he didn't understand everything about God. He didn’t expect to, and neither should we.

However, writing several years later, Matthew worries about it, and includes a sentence explaining that John was not happy being put in a position to have to baptize Jesus, to which Jesus replies, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness."  According to Matthew, that answer is good enough for John, and so he baptizes Jesus.

In any case, Jesus decided to be baptized by John, even though John was baptizing "for the forgiveness of sins" and not “to fulfill all righteousness,” whatever that means. And the Bible tells us that Jesus was without sin.  So Matthew doesn’t solve the question of why, but only adds another one: “What does “to fulfill all righteousness” mean? And there are dozens of ideas about that, and I am not going there in this sermon.

Rather, let’s stick to the question of why Jesus would want to be baptized by John. Now, it is possible, but just barely possible, that at that point in time, BEFORE he began his ministry he may not have known that he was sinless! God had not spoken directly to him as far as we know, and he was likely pretty hard on himself in terms of trying to be as good a person as he could be. So, that is a possible reason. But it raises a lot of questions about when Jesus was aware of who he was, his relationship to God before his baptism, and what his mission in life was to be. In other words, that answer, even more than Matthew’s answer, raises far more questions than it solves.


But, I believe, after many, many hours studying this issue, that Jesus may well have had another agenda than to wash away his sins. And that is that he was determined to set a proper example for all those who, like us, would come to be his disciples and would do our best to emulate him in our own lives. And I will discuss why I think that is the correct answer in a bit. But, the bottom line is that no one knows for certain why he let John baptize him, and probably never will. It is a mystery.

In any case, three of the four Gospel writers tell us that Jesus was, in fact, baptized by John, the Baptizer, and one Gospel writer, St. John the Evangelist, avoids the issue.  So, I think it is safe to say at the very least that John did, in fact, baptize Jesus; that the heavens were, in fact, torn open, that the Spirit did, in fact, descend on Jesus, and that He did, in fact, hear a voice saying that He was God's Son, in whom God was well pleased.

BUT, there is no indication that anyone else heard God’s voice; though, conceivably, they might have. If they did there is no indication that they ran around telling others about it who were not there. And since it would have been a startlingly miraculous event, I doubt that anyone but Jesus heard it, or we would have read more about what a fantastic revelation this was. So, the tearing of the heavens apart, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and the voice speaking to Jesus immediately after the baptism are all things that three of the Gospels say only Jesus saw and heard.  To everyone else who was there that day maybe nothing all that special appeared to be going on. Incidentally, this partially explains why Jesus’ disciples seem so dense for such a long time and unable to comprehend who Jesus is until well into his ministry.

Clearly, we now all have all this testimony as to what actually happened; because the Spirit obviously told Mark, Matthew and Luke to share this revelation with us in the Bible.  But, at the time it happened, it was a very private statement of the manifestation of God in the person of Jesus.  It was very much a private epiphany.  Now, it is not.  We all know what happened, even if we are a bit shaky on the details, and a lot shaky as to "why was Jesus baptized at all?"

So, let's look at Mark's text again.  It's the one that strips the scene to the bare essentials.
9  In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  10  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  11  And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

That may look like a pretty innocent paragraph, but, believe me, folks, there is a lot of stuff going on there, in these so called "bare essentials" that give us information about this Epiphany: the manifestation of God in Jesus, the Christ.

Note, first, that the heavens are "torn apart."  In the Greek the word for "torn apart" is not a gentle word, and does not convey a gentle image such as we always see in the paintings of the sweet dove descending on Jesus. The word itself is violent: tearing, ripping, shredding -- powerful: the very heavens ripped open!  God sends the Spirit upon Jesus in power and glory!  Which, if you recall, was Isaiah's prayer, uttered 700 years before as he stood frustrated by the sin of the people, begging God: "Oh! That you would tear open the heavens and come down!"  Come down in power and glory and with justice and judgment.  In Christ, that prayer is finally fulfilled.

Interestingly, the very word for "torn apart" used here is used only one other time in the New Testament: at the time of Jesus' death.  Then, Matthew tells us, at His death, "the curtain of the temple was torn apart, from top to bottom."

That massive curtain, which is said to have been a foot thick and 40 feet tall, was ripped to shreds.  That curtain was the very thing that Jews believed separated them from God, from the inner sanctum, the "Holy of Holies," a place where only a handful of priests were allowed to enter.  Now all of that is gone; and God is to be confined there no more; but is to be found only in Jesus: the One who will be raised in three days.

And yet, in the midst of the massive display of power at the ripping open of the heavens at Jesus' baptism, we see a paradox as the Spirit gently, with total love, alights on Jesus, even as the voice heralds the great epiphany, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

And today, we here are privileged read about and to witness to this great event; this great epiphany as the Father notifies Jesus that He, He alone, is his Son, the beloved Son, with whom the Father is well pleased.

Is it any wonder that I get frustrated sometimes with scholars who get so consumed worrying about what they can and cannot understand? Clearly God tells Jesus that he is well pleased, delighted, with him.   And this is the same Jesus who was just baptized for the repentance of sins which He did not commit.

And so now we come back to my idea that the reason for his baptism could well be to set an example for us. Why should that surprise us?  Is not this the same Son, the same man, who will, within three years, will go to the Cross to die for sins which He did not commit, sins that WE committed against the Father and the Spirit, and yes, against Him?  Can we not see the symmetry in that?  Can we not see that at his baptism, even before His mission began, He was identifying with us, probably knowing that He was, Himself, without sin, but willing to show us, by His example, the steps we need to take in obedience to God's will?

He offered Himself to a baptism He had no need to do.  I believe that He did this because He wanted to be obedient to God.  Perhaps He knew why God wanted this; perhaps not.  But what He did know is that God wanted it.  And so He did it.  Just as, as he waited in Gestheme, He wished that the cup of death might pass Him by; but knowing it was God's will that he die for us, He said, "But not my will, but thine be done."

This was no ordinary man. Yet at the cross He allowed Himself to be crucified as an ordinary man, an ordinary sinner, even though He was without sin.  In both cases He did what He did because He knew it was the will of the Father. And it was Jesus’ will to set an example for us.

Why, to this day, do so many not experience the epiphany of seeing who this man really is: The beloved Son of God?  Even with the testimony of the Bible, I run across people who think of themselves as Christians who say, "I admire Jesus.  I really admire him; he was a great man.” Which is, of course, true.  He was a great man.  The question, however, is not whether he was a great man.  The question, which requires a personal epiphany on every Christian’s part to answer correctly, is "Who IS Jesus?"

By reading the Bible accounts of His baptism we are given strong, undeniable clues as to his identity; clues which many who should know better constantly ignore.  They would rather argue over whether or not He should have been baptized by John, or whether He was baptized at all; and argue over who did or did not hear or see what; and over countless trivial things that we can't explain and never will be able to explain. But “Who is Jesus?” is the only question about his baptism that really matters.

We've got to be more like Mark.  There are some things we can't explain; that we never will be able to explain; and that we probably were never meant to know.  If our God is so small that we can figure out everything about him that we want to know; then that God is not the God who is the Father of Jesus. This Season of Epiphany we have to get beyond all the trivial detail and answer for ourselves the real question of the Epiphany: "Who is Jesus?"

Many of you know that C. S. Lewis was probably the greatest Christian apologist of the last century.  He was a crusty, sarcastic and delightfully blunt man; a brilliant man; a man who came to Christ reluctantly, as an adult.  And he was a man who fell head over heels in love with his Savior.  He puts the issue of the Epiphany about as clearly as I can imagine it can be put.

Listen to this statement from his classic book, "Mere Christianity."

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher; but I don't accept His claim to be God."  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  he has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”

Lewis, previously an avowed atheist, decided that Jesus was his Lord and God. He did this fairly late in life, when he was already famous, and at a time when coming to faith in Jesus Christ could do his career no good, and possibly do it harm.

We each one of us need to remember that when we lift all the facts we can from all the books and all the scholars, and sift carefully through them, when we listen to all the voices who claim to know what is and isn’t true in the Bible, all of that pales in the face of the great question Jesus asks each one of us, “But you, who do you say I am?”

It is a great Epiphany, and a great blessing, if we can answer, “You, Lord, are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

God bless you all.