Last Sunday after Epiphany: On the Mountaintop

2 Kings 2:1-12
Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9

Rule of thumb: when you arrive at a mountain in the Scriptures you know that there will be revelation, you know that God has drawn us there to reveal something of the divine nature or something about the deepest truths of our existence; about our relationship with God, with each other, with creation. At Mt Horeb God reveals God’s own name to Moses (Exodus 3:15), and on Mt Sinai delivers the law and enters into a specific covenant with the children of Israel. (Exodus 20) Again at Horeb, God reveals God’s self to Elijah, not in the power of earthquakes, wind or fire but in the depth of sheer silence. (1 Kings 19:11-12) In the New Testament – as the Gospel of Matthew tells us, Jesus goes up a mountain to deliver the most memorable of his sermons. (Matthew 5) Not unlike Moses, he reveals a new way to live and a new way of understanding the human condition: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are those who mourn; blessed are the peacemakers.” At the end of the New Testament in the Book of Revelation – the name says it all – St John is taken in a vision onto a high mountain and there is shown to him “the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.” (Revelation 21:10)

However, the Transfiguration – when the glory of Jesus is revealed to a few of his chosen followers – seems to lack something of the definitive and defining nature of these others. Jesus is transfigured, changed in the presence of Peter, James and John. He appears flanked by Moses and Elijah – thereby referencing other mountop experiences – but the moment passes very quickly; and although a voice from heaven confirms Jesus’ identity as the “Beloved Son”, not only his disciples, but us as well I think, are left wondering – “What just happened.?” “What was that about?” The entire event seems to have about it a sense incompleteness; an event that we are never quite sure what do with. We aren’t alone. Peter, the writer of Mark tells us, doesn’t know what to do or say either, so instead offers to build dwellings or booths for Jesus, Elijah and Moses. The other two are simply terrified.

This sense of incompleteness is not by accident, because the event on this mountain derives its meaning and finds its completion from future events on another mountain altogether – Mt Calvary. Today as we turn away from the Epiphany, and the “season” of revelation, we begin to turn our faces towards Ash Wednesday, Lent and Holy Week. We begin to turn our feet towards the way of the cross – toward Jesus’ glorification on Mt Calvary. What the gospel story presents us with this morning, and what it will present us with in seven weeks on Good Friday is fundamentally the same; it is what St Paul calls in his second letter to the Corinthians “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” They each inform and are informed by the other. But what a glory! What a revelation! Is it really what his disciples expected or wanted? Is it really what we expect or want?

In each of the times when God has taken his followers unto a mountain, they never get exactly what they expect. Moses on Horeb receives the name of God, but one which is utterly cryptic: “I AM WHO I AM”, and a mission he did not want. With the giving of the law on Mt Sinai the people of Israel do not just enter into a legal contract, but into much more than that. They are called into a relationship, a covenant with a God they cannot see or call my name. Elijah, again on Mt Horeb, learns that God does not act in the powerful forces of nature – earthquakes, winds, fire, as the ancient world belived of their gods – but in the stillness of sheer silence. At the transfiguration on Mt Tabor, Jesus’ followers learn that God’s glory and revelation can neither be captured nor contained – the old booths or dwellings will no longer do. The cross however, will present the greatest dis-connect between expection and reality – the “knowledge of the glory of God” is revealed in the tortured, agonized face of Jesus Christ. What could be more surprisingly disturbing to his followers, both then and even now.

Jesus of course, tries to prepare them – the Gospel writers try to prepare us – for that striking and disturbing revelation on Mt Calvary. In each of the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – the transfiguration event is preceeded by Jesus telling his followers what lies in store for him and for them in Jerusalem. In the Gospel of Mark, specifically, he tells them how “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” (Mark 8:31); Peter takes him aside and rebukes him for even suggesting such a fate. The dis-connect between his expectation of the revelation of God’s glory and its reality is too great for him, so great that he even challenges Jesus. He reflects the feelings and thoughts of the early Christians community to whom the author directed the Gospel of Mark, so the writer invites us to see the glory of the Transfiguration as couched between the crucifixion’s prediction and its coming to pass. As Jesus is revealed on Mt Tabor by the voice from heaven – “This is my Son, the Beloved” (Mark 9:7), so he is revelaed on Mt Calvary by a voice from the earth, namely that of an unknown Roman centurion who on Jesus’s death declares: “Truly, this man was God’s son.” (Mark 15:40) The revelation from heaven, is confirmed by the experience of earth; and the glimpse of glory revealed in the dazzling white of the Transfiguration, is fully revealed in the midst of the darkened skies of the crucifixion. This is so unlike anything which the first century world could countenance or expect, so unlike anything that any system of power can really deal with, that we can understand why the crucifixion was considered a scandal, both to Jews and Gentiles; indeed, even to many believers. For this reason, the gospel writers highlighted its connections to previous revelations of God – those to Moses and Elijah, and proclaim God’s power and glory to be manifested in this so unlikely a place and event.

The revelation of God’s glory has always surprsied and disturbed those to whom it has been revealed. For Christians, if we take our faith seriously, it presents a particular challenge – that the glory of God – the glory of divinity – is most perfectly revealed in a willingness to be emptied of divinity; to lay aside power, even a power which is God’s by right. It is not just about cross, but about the incarnation as a whole – God is revealed in the frailty and dependency of a baby, in one who is tired by journeys and who weeps at the tomb of a friend. This idea was clearly unpleasant and distateful to the earliest Christians; were it not so it would not have figured to prominently in the gospels in order to reinforce it. I think that it is unpleasant, even distasteful to us too. We know what to do with a god who is revealed in glory and light – we can cower in fear and awe, or we build that god a dwelling; but what do we do with a God who reveals the divine glory in the frailty of our own human nature, who in that nature is rejected, and whose only earthly crown is one of thorns?

Today with Jesus and his followers we descend from the glory of Mt Tabor, turn our faces towards Jersualem and on Wednesday we begin our journey to Mt Calvary and to an altogether different revelation of that same glory – a revelation which is to bring us all to say: “Truly this man is God’s son”. Amen

Epiphany 6: Prayer or Plan?

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147:1-12, 20c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39

Two healings this morning. One in the second book of Kings, one in the gospel of Mark. Two men suffering from leprosy, both afflicted by the same dreaded disease, and yet such different people — living in different times and places, and coming from very different social positions. The first, Naaman, is a successful army commander, a great man in favour with his master the king of Aram. The second is nameless. The writer of Mark tells us nothing about him, not his name or position. More likely than not, he was one of the many outcasts of Jewish society who lived by begging; a person dependent completely on the goodwill and alms of others. Two lepers who plead to God for healing, and yet two such different men who plead in such different ways. Naaman gets his master the King of Aram to send a messenger to the king of Israel, for he has heard that in Israel there is a man of God who could cure him of his leprosy. The nameless leper in the gospel does not have the power or social connections which provide him with intermediaries. He must approach Jesus directly, and, having nothing to recommend him except his humility and straightforwardness, says to Jesus, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Two lepers who ask for the same thing — to be made clean, but who expect that cleansing to come in such different ways. Naaman expects magic — the prophet Elisha coming out and waving his hands over him in an obvious display of power. The leper in Mark, trusting the person of Jesus and the encounter with him to be restorative, expects that Jesus knows best. ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’(Mark 1.40) The question for us becomes, ‘What kind of God do we believe in?’ Do we believe in a God of magic or a God of relationship; a God who panders to our old ways of thinking and doing, or a God who really does make all things new?

How often do we come to God with a plan instead a prayer? We come to God and while we may may say that we are asking for a way forward, the truth is we have invented our own way forward. What we really want is for God to approve our plan so that our resolution will be realised, and realised the way we want it to be. We must awaken ourselves to the reality that prayer is not is not magic spell or a program pitch. Like Naaman, we so often want God to behave according to our expectations and fulfill our limited desires. Naaman does not want a relationship with God, he wants the benefits which come from, what he perceives to be, God’s power. He does not come to God because he loves God, but because he has heard that this Yahweh, this God of Israel — working through the prophet Elisha — is powerful. He does not know God, but as an army commander he does know power — what it looks like and how it works. His expectations of power and certainly of divine power require signs, wonders and extraordinary happenings; and yet the demands of the Lord are simple: that he go wash in the Jordan. You can almost understand his amazement and even anger; in fact, he is only cured because his servants step in and convince him that he should do as Elisha has said.

Naaman has not understood the God of Israel or how that God works in the world. Although powerful, the God of Israel does not work out of power, but out of compassion; and compassion needs genuine encounter to be born and genuine relationship to grow. When that nameless leper in Mark’s gospel comes to Jesus, we are not told that Jesus is moved to heal him by power or authority, but that he is moved with pity, compassion or (as one translator rendered the Greek) “he is filled with tenderness”. Likewise the leper because he has no one to carry his messages or run his errands, must approach Jesus himself. He must look Jesus in the face and acknowledge Jesus not as someone he can manipulate with magic words or as some being whom he must coerce to exercise power on his behalf, but as a person with whom he must actually engage and whose autonomy as a fellow human being he must honour. That is why he says, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ This simple prayer, which does not colonise Jesus with expectations and prejudices as to how he will act, recognises and honours Jesus as a person and thereby initiates relationship; and Jesus also behaves in a way which affirms relationship, by looking on the broken man with compassion, by touching him with tenderness, by entering into this man’s situation and suffering his pain with him. (That is what ‘compassion’ means: co passio: ‘suffering with’). It is within this dialogue of vulnerability that real healing can occur, and not just the healing of the body. The cleansing of the leper integrates him back into the community: ‘go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded.’(Mark 1.44) The encounter with Jesus has not brought only physical healing but real integration for this one who had been cast out from the community. While we may find in this story a miracle, we find no magic or magical thinking. God’s longing to make ‘all things new’ is made manifest and effected in vulnerability, encounter and relationship.

We have here then two models of prayer, two models of encounter with God. The first seems to me is about colonising God with our expectations, the other has to do with taking the risk of entering into genuine relationship with God. Had Naaman not been healed through Elisha, he would have simply gone on looking for some other wonder-worker who could cast the right spell; someone whose god was more powerful. He just was not looking for relationship with God, he just didn’t think in those terms. The leper took the risk of coming to Jesus; because he had no power or status behind which to hide he brought all of himself in vulnerability.

The Church teaches us, as the Book of Common Prayer says, ‘to make prayers and supplications,’ but prayers are not magic words by which we can manipulate God to do what we want in the way we want it done. It is much more subtle and yes, powerful than that. At its core prayer is about entering into relationship with God. And real relationship with God, as with anyone, is not about manipulating the other to get him or her to do what we want, nor is it about colonising the other with our ideas of who we want them to be. It is about allowing the other to be the other, as they are, in our lives. Neither is real relationship about hiding behind the trappings of power and authority by which the world defines us and by which we often define ourselves. In real relationship no intermediaries will do. We ourselves must bring our selves to the encounter. When we do that with God, when we commit ourselves to relationship with God then real miracles can begin to happen. When we take God seriously enough to let God be who God is and wants to be in our lives it is then that transformation can happen, it is then when we can talk about being redeemed. Naaman was cured, but was he transformed?

When it comes to God, do we want magic or do we want relationship? Magic cannot ultimately save, because even if we get what we want we will probably remain trapped in our own self-centred and limiting point-of-view. That is not salvation. Only real relationship and relatedness can redeem, because real relationship, whether with God or with anyone, calls us out of ourselves. It is only when we come to the other in openness with all we have, like the leper in Mark, that we can really be touched and truly be made clean.

Epiphany 5: A Day in the Life

Isaiah 42.21-31
Psalm 147.1-12, 20c
1 Corinthians 9.16-23
Mark 1.19-39

We’ve all seen on television one of those day-in-the-life, fly-on-the-wall documentaries? You know the type where we follow some famous personage throughout their day; where we get a behind-the-scenes look at their fabulousness; where get a glimpse at how they balance their public persona with their private self; where we perhaps get a hint as to the secret of their success in maintaining a genuine sense of self in the face of the expectations and projections from their fans and admirers. What we hope to capture in these programmes is a microcosm of the person’s life. By looking at an ordinary day in their life we hope to discover not so much what their life is like, but rather what their life is about. This morning’s passage from the Gospel of Mark, taken together with last week’s gospel, reads rather like one of those day-in-the-life documentaries. In last week’s gospel Jesus went with his friends to the synagogue on a Saturday morning. There he taught and cast out an unclean spirit. Today’s gospel continues the story. After the synagogue, he went to Simon’s house and healed Simon’s mother-in-law and had something to eat. By sundown Simon’s front yard is crowded with people looking for Jesus. Jesus meets with them and apparently spent the night at Simon’s house. In the morning, before it is light, he goes out to pray, until his disciples find him; he then decides to leave Capernaum and go to the neighbouring towns to proclaim the message. There you have it, a day in the life. If we can read these verses from the gospel of Mark as a day-the-life programme, what do we learn about Jesus? What do we learn about how he manages the complexities of who he is in himself and the demands made of him, the expectations placed on him? And if we are his followers, as we confess we are, what can we learn from the way he does it? What then is the secret of Jesus’ success as we see it in the Gospel of Mark?

It seems the first aspect of that secret is his friends. Apart from the times when Jesus goes off to pray in private, he is always has his friends close to him. He worships with them and he stays at their house. Not only in Mark, but throughout the gospels, Jesus’ close friends are his constant companions. We all need friends who know us well to keep our feet firmly on the ground with regards to who we are and what we are about. We need friends with whom we can be ourselves completely, in whose company we can rest so that we are nourished to continue the work in which we are involved, whatever that work may be. For too long we have had an image of a completely self-sufficient Jesus, who calls his disciples simply so that he can teach them and so that they will spread the message of the kingdom. However, a self-sufficient Jesus is not a human Jesus; and perhaps we can understand Jesus not so much calling disciples, but as making friends. Together, they created a community of mutual interdependence, a community (as the gospels tell in various places) more important than that of blood relations, and which would eventually effect into being the kingdom Jesus preached. It is one of the secrets of Jesus’ success, that he had good friends; that he had people in his life with whom he could be himself; that he had people in his life with whom he could escape the demands and projections of the crowd.

At the same time, Jesus had respect for people and for their needs. Those who came to him came with genuine concerns and with real problems; and Jesus takes their condition seriously, and because he takes it seriously he is able to really address it. Last week we heard of the man who was liberated from an unclean spirit. If you remember Jesus does this by speaking directly to the condition. In no uncertain terms he orders the demon to leave the man. “Be silent and come out of him”, Jesus says. His popularity and authority does not make him deaf to the needs of others, in fact it is his openness to others and his willingness to to engage with them that gives him that authority. When the people crowded around Simon’s door it seems unlikely that Jesus did less for them than he did for the man possessed of that demon. He listened to them, engaged them individually and was able to release them from whatever it was oppressed them. To Jesus the crowds were never just a crowd, but a group of individuals – each with particular personalities, needs and voices. That is perhaps the reason that he is able to feel one person’s touch in a particular way in the midst of a great throng of people, if you remember the story of the woman with haemorrhage who touches the hem of Jesus’ robe. In his rising popularity Jesus never forgot the preciousness of each person and uniqueness of their story, and he made time to listen to those who came his way.

Finally, Jesus never forgets what he is about. Riding the crest of fame and popular acclaim, he could have bought the tales of his own fabulousness. He could have lost his direction and become simply one of the many miracle-workers known to have wandered throughout the ancient near-east. Jesus could have been driven off the course of his ideals and seduced by the power of it all. How many times have we heard of or known people who begin careers in politics, law or even the Church with noble ideals, but quickly lose them or distort them as they become more and more a part of a system which promises fame, power and wealth if they just play along and don’t rock the boat too much. The temptation is great and Jesus knows that. So, he finds a quiet place to pray before it is light, before others are up. He goes to listen to the will of his Father. He goes off on his own to get a perspective on the previous day and to discern what he should do next. And when his disciples come looking for him, expecting Jesus to continue the healing and miracle-working – because after all, Jesus’ public is calling him: “Everyone is searching for you”, they tell him – when his friends comte to him expecting more of the same, Jesus simply says to them, “Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came to do.” (Mark 1.38) Jesus’ mission is to proclaim the message which he began to proclaim shortly after his baptism: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1.15) The miracles are important, but only in so far as they are signs of the coming kingdom. When people begin to see them as ends in and of themselves, then Jesus knows that he must move on. He knows the proclamation of the kingdom to be his real mission and he does not allow either the acclaim of the crowds or the lure of popularity to distort his own self-understanding or what he came to do.

The Jesus we encounter in Mark’s “Day-in-the-Life” production is a human and humane Jesus; one who has the need for the companionship and support of good friends, and who deals with people as individuals. We encounter a Jesus who faces the same challenges and temptations which we face, not least of which the temptation to sell out on our ideals for the sake of popularity or an easy ride. In placing this in the very first chapter of his gospel the author of Mark sets the tone for the rest of the work. The author shows us what kind of person Jesus is: a person of commitment – commitment to his friends, to those in need, to his mission of the kingdom; a person of integrity who measures his external actions by his own internal ideals. Jesus is a person who is clear about what he came to do, his mission is his guiding principle. These three – friendship, the honouring of each person, and clear-headed integrity – seem the cornerstones of Jesus’ life as portrayed by Gospel of Mark. They are, one might say, the secret of his success. This day-in-the-life with which the author of Mark presents us is a perfect way to reflect on these qualities, not only so we can come to a deeper knowledge of Jesus, but also so we might imitate and follow him more closely, so that we might allow his own life and priorities to challenge and shape our own. Amen.