Category: God

Jesus’ true identity revealed!

This is the last Sunday in what we call the season of Epiphany. Epiphany itself is the 6th of January, the day we remember the Magi visiting Jesus in a house in Bethlehem after looking for him in the royal palace in Jerusalem. A discovery that Jesus wasn’t that kind of king. We keep going with that theme of discovery, revelations, these little glimpses into who Jesus is and what that means for us until we get to Lent and Lent begins on Wednesday.

On this last day of Epiphany we remember a strange event with a name that before Harry Potter we might not have been that familiar with… transfiguration. That just means when the outward appearance of something changes. So in Happy Potter that means turning into a cat or a frog. That’s not quite what happens in this story about Jesus though.

Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a hill, and there on the mountainside Jesus is changed. Transfigured. But instead of being changed into something else, what happens here is that Jesus’ true nature is revealed. He is, I think, in this moment the same Jesus that the other Gospel writers will describe Mary meeting at the tomb on Easter Morning, and the same Jesus the disciples will meet in a locked room. He is, in this moment, the eternal Christ revealed.

One of the things that always amazes me about this whole happening is that these three disciples are invited to be a part of it. We have often seen Jesus wander off into the wilderness alone to pray, to rest and to spend time with God. But this is different.

Over the last weeks we have been invited to catch these glimpses, these little epiphanies, helping us to piece together just who Jesus is. That’s how the disciples had to do it too. Jesus didn’t sit them down and lay it all out for them. He invited them to follow him and see for themselves. And they did.

They saw healings and miracles. Jesus fed 5,000 people and then later another 4,000. He has walked on water and calmed a storm. He has healed people in public and in private, he has exorcised demons and he has told these strange stories called parables.

They heard Jesus teach and transform the way they thought about God, and the world, and their place in it. They heard Jesus’ radical reimagining of how the world should be and he has openly challenge the religious authorities and the empire.

And they were the good guys. They had a ringside seat to all that had happened and was about to happen.

Peter thought he had worked it all out. By the time we get to chapter 9 Peter had made his declaration about who he thought Jesus was. You are the Messiah.

But it’s one thing to know something and something very different when you actually experience it.

We all know that. Having to endure your friend’s holiday snaps and hear all their stories about wherever they have just can get pretty boring if you’ve never been there. It’s nice for a while, and you’re happy (and maybe a little bit jealous) that they have had a great time, but the photos and the stories are never going to sum up what it’s like to stand on a glass shelf 153 stories up in the Sears Tower in Chicago
or to cross the Golden Gate Bridge
or look across the Grand Canyon
or come face to face with the space shuttle.

Mark’s story of Jesus is what’s called apocalyptic writing. We have come to use the word apocalypse to mean the end of the world, usually is some kind of disastrous fashion with an action hero trying to save the day, but apocalypse actually means something quite different. Apocalypse means an uncovering or discovery of great knowledge. Apocalypse is actually very close in meaning to epiphany, just bigger!

So, as Mark’s story unfolds there are these apocalyptic moments, events that reveal something much bigger. Something huge and important.

The first one is Jesus’ baptism when God speaks. “‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”. Bits of information don’t really come much bigger than that, but at Jesus’ baptism we are never quite sure who hears these words from God. Mark suggests that the experience is Jesus’ experience alone. In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. 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.  And a voice came from heaven…. An apocalyptic moment for Jesus… Confirmation of who he is. And now an apocalyptic moment for us through the retelling of the story.

But I want to suggest something about this story we call the transfiguration. I think it’s in the wrong place. And once you realise that, and why it’s in the wrong place the whole thing makes much more sense.

Have you ever watched a film or read a book that starts with the final scene and then explains how we got there? I think this might be what Mark is doing here. If you have a Bible handy, if you flip to the end of Mark’s Gospel you’ll find that there are two endings. A short ending and a longer one. The short ending stops before anyone meets the risen Jesus. And that’s just odd… Why would you do that? That’s obviously what everyone else thought and so there is a longer ending that is an account of the risen Christ meeting the disciples. But what if there is already an encounter with the risen Christ in the story? What if that encounter is somewhere else? Like in chapter 9… right in the middle.

But why?

One of the strange things about following the lectionary, the readings for the week, is that when the church year changes we bounce about the story. We have spent the last few weeks working through chapter 1. All that stuff has happened in just one chapter so just imagine how much has gone on by the time we get to chapter 9.

Jesus has been healing and teaching and has started to talk about the end… It’s all getting pretty dark. He speaks about how he has to suffer and die and how his followers have to take up their own cross to follow him. It’s the only way. But the disciples aren’t listening.

Or rather, they don’t want to listen.
This isn’t what they signed up for.
Why can’t we just keep doing the healings and miracles and having everybody love us? Love you… we mean love you!

Is that how we feel? The journey to the cross is one nobody would choose to make.

It makes sense then for Mark to present us with the risen Christ here at the transfiguration in the middle of the story before taking us on that road to the cross.

We’ve spoken before about how the joy of Palm Sunday and Easter Day are hollow without the darkness of Holy Week. Mark, I think, agrees.

Mark is writing to a group of people who are most likely in Rome, right at the heart of the Empire, and who are and will continue to be hated and persecuted, tortured and killed for their faith, so for Mark it is hugely important to show his readers that this suffering is part of what Jesus calls us into. Jesus tells his followers to take up your cross… leave behind all that you know… sell all that you have and give the money to the poor.

Mark’s gospel is a hard and painful journey that leaves us much closer to the foot of the cross where Jesus dies, screaming in agony, wondering aloud why God has forsaken him. Peter himself will travel to Rome and will be crucified upside down there by the empire.

So, when you look at this strange transfiguration story as an encounter with the risen Christ, the universal christ, the Christ who was and is and is to come, it all starts to make much more sense.

Mark tells us this story to show Jesus’ place in things, in the Kairos of God’s time rather than the chronos of our time, by placing him there on the mountain with the other major figures of the faith story, Moses and Elijah.

Moses, the one, who despite all his misgivings and lack of confidence, led his people out of Egypt to the threshold of a new land and along the way met God on the mountain where God passes him by, just like he did with Adam and Eve in that story of the paradise of Eden. And Elijah, the prophet who spent his days holding the king and queen to account for all that he had done wrong, who after lying down under a bush and wishing to die because it was all just too hard, was cared for and restored to health by God and then met God on a mountain, not in the noise and fury of fire or wind or even an earthquake, but in the overwhelming silence, taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. These are the greatest of all the prophets, who the stories say will return when the Messiah arrives…

The disciples are terrified. Who wouldn’t be?

Peter blurts out something about making shelters because, perhaps, there in the wilderness Moses had built a tent, the tabernacle, where God would come and meet them. But he calls Jesus Rabbi. There, presented with the Christ, the Messiah revealed in all his cosmic glory, Peter tries to put Jesus back into his ordinary box… rabbi. Teacher. One of many rabbis. Just a man. I can cope with just a man, even if he’s a man who does all kinds of stuff I don’t understand… but this… I can’t cope with this.

And in the middle of this apocalyptic moment where the disciples are full of doubt and wonder in equal measure, God speaks. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’

This is who Jesus is, the son of God. The disciples heard it straight from God. The disciples can’t un-see of un-know it. This moment will travel with them way beyond the things that are recorded in Mark’s story.

But what of us? Are we left with the snapshots and second hand tales of an experience we might never have? Only three disciples went up that mountain. The other nine, just like us, didn’t share in that moment. But they, like us, still encounter this Jesus. This universal Christ who doesn’t only live on the pages of a book.

We meet him every day,
in the wonder of creation,
in the eyes of a friend or stranger,
in moments of compassion,
in a word of consolation.

Nobody ever said that following Jesus would be easy. Jesus himself said it would be difficult, costly even. But when the whole point is to completely transform the world then what would we expect?

Personal Jesus

Mark 1:29-39
As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.  Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once.  He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.  And the whole city was gathered around the door.  And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.  And Simon and his companions hunted for him.  When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’  He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’  And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

It’s still light. Still daytime. The sun has not yet set.

Jesus has just been to the synagogue in Capernaum where he taught with authority and then performed his first public acts. He had authority they had never seen before and then to show what that authority looks like in practice he calls an unclean spirit out of a man who was also there with everyone else at worship.

Immediately after…
Mark is so frantic in his telling of the story, but it matters that it’s still the Sabbath.

Immediately after Jesus goes with his brand new disciples, Simon (who is so new he hasn’t even got his new name yet), his brother Andrew, and also James and John, all back to Simon’s house where they discover Simon’s mother-in-law is in bed ill with a fever.

It’s probably important to say a bit about how houses were arranged in Jesus’ time because I think we probably imagine that they are like ours with lots of separate rooms. From childhood now we value our private spaces where we can spend time alone in our room, but life just wasn’t like that in Jesus’ time. People lived in one or two rooms, much like we did until fairly recently in our history. Houses were open plan. That meant privacy as we understand it just didn’t exist. People lived communally. Extended families lived together. If people were rich they might build more homes next door as the family grew, but in the main people lived all together in one place.

That’s has lots of implications, not least the problem of infection control. We have grown very used to the language of self-isolation in order to stop the spread of disease but that wasn’t a practical option in those days. Contagious disease was a huge issue and the only way to do something about it was to banish sick people. They were sent away. And because there were very few effective treatments something like a fever could be, and still is, very, very dangerous.

At once they tell Jesus about her. Again the urgency. At once… But that begs a question… why?
Why do they tell Jesus?
He hasn’t healed anyone who has been sick like this. So what are they asking for?

Again we need to think about what these people believed… and to some extent still believe… about the cause of sickness.

The cause of sickness was sin. People got sick because they had done something wrong. The worse you had sinned the greater the sickness. And if Jesus could rid someone of something like an unclean spirit then he would be able to cure Simon’s mother-in-law because both in their limited understanding were about removing sin.

That’s an idea that Jesus will challenge. For him sin is the stuff we do that damages our relationship with God and therefore limits our lives.

I love the description of how Jesus helps Simon’s mother-in-law. “He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

It’s so simple. So stripped back. And yet like everything Mark writes it is so full of meaning.

Jesus takes her by the hand and lifts her up. And in so many ways that’s exactly what Mark’s gospel is all about. He lifts her up out of the thing that is limiting her life. He renews her. Jesus recreates her.

And people see it happen.

There’s always a sense that everything Jesus does is very public. Jesus is always on show, always in the public eye, always scrutinised by those watching. But this moment reminds us that in every encounter there is a personal Jesus there just for us.

It’s one of the great paradoxes of our faith. We recognise that our faith is found in community, in communion with God and with each other, but at the same time our faith is personal. Personal because our relationship with Jesus is ours… That’s personal… but I’d suggest that our faith is never private.

It doesn’t matter how many others are present, Jesus is there for each person.
And as Simon’s mother reaches out, through the touch of faith she is restored to life.

It quickly becomes obvious the wagging tongues have been busy. The Sabbath is over not when the clock strikes midnight but when the light fades and dusk comes. They have been waiting for the night to come and as the sun sets people start to arrive at the house all looking for Jesus. They want freed from all the pain they have become used to. The pain they have carried for too long.

And Jesus does the same for each of them as he did for Simon’s mother-in-law. He meets their needs. He lifts each one of them up.

The sick are healed and unclean spirits are driven out and silenced. Each person gets what they need from Jesus because to him each of us is somebody precious. Each of us is an individual with our own hope and dreams. Our own problems and issues. Our own joys and sorrows.

We should never presume to know what someone else feels. Even if we wanted to, you couldn’t walk in my shoes and I couldn’t walk in yours. Our experience is unique. It is ours and ours alone. But that never means that we are on our own.

Jesus attends to each of the people gathered there in turn. He treats each of them with compassion and dignity.

But it’s exhausting for Jesus. It takes a toll.

So, early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus gets up and goes to a deserted place to pray, to enjoy the silence away from the clamour and demands of the crowds. Again and again we see Jesus do this. Taking time out to recharge, to reconnect with God. It’s so important for him. I wonder if it is for us?

All of this takes place on the Sabbath and on the day after. The day of rest is followed by the first new day… the day where Jesus will rise from the tomb in the ultimate act of re-creation.

Sabbath is a hugely important idea. It’s not just a day off. It’s not even just a day where we worship God. Sabbath is holy. It’s the day of rest and recovery. Sabbath is a day of re-creation.

It used to be that everything stopped on the Sabbath. No work that wasn’t absolutely essential was done. That was taken to extremes and that’s an argument Jesus will have again and again. Keep the Sabbath holy is one of the commandments. It’s higher up the list than do not kill. I wonder how we managed to loose the sense of the importance of sabbath?

Other things crept in. I’m not at all for chaining up the swings and not letting anyone do anything at all on Sundays, but I do wonder if in our rush for convenience and ever increasing workloads we have been conned into seeing sabbath as a luxury rather than something that is completely fundamental to our wellbeing.

Walter Brueggemann suggest that we should think of Sabbath as an act of resistance. Doing nothing, producing nothing, buying nothing, is so counter-cultural we find it hard to even imagine what that looks like anymore. Practicing sabbath is standing against everything the world tells us is important and choosing instead to focus on what God tells us is important.

When you are training to run rest is included in any good training plan. It’s arguably the most important part. Without it you can’t improve. Without rest you can’t function properly. We all know the difference a good night’s sleep makes.

But the disciples come searching for him. Everyone is looking for you. They want more miracles. They just can’t get enough. Their need is so great. Their burdens are so heavy.

Restored by prayer and communion with God, Jesus is restored. He’s ready for what’s next.

Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns,’ says Jesus’, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’  And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I wonder if all that we do is rooted in our connection with God?
If we take the time to pray and to rest in God before we begin any task?

On this last Sunday of Epiphany perhaps this should be our realisation.
The authority Jesus has is God’s.
The strength Jesus has is through God.
The Good News Jesus proclaims is about God.
And all of it is so that we can restore our relationship with God.
So we can be renewed and lifted up into life in all its fullness.

perspective

Jonah 3:1-5,10 & Mark 1:14-20

Perspective is another one of those wonderful words that has two meaning. It can mean: the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other.

Matt Skinner of Fuller Seminary tells the story of his high school biology teacher who made them draw a pencil at the start of each class to help them be able to draw field notes of flowers and animals when they went out. Drawing the pencil helped them to get the perspective right.

One day one of the students handed in this…

Slide of circle with a dot.

The teacher was confused. What is this? I asked you to draw a pencil.

It is, Sir, said the student. It’s the end!

And he was right. It was just a different point of view. A new perspective.

We know immediately when we look at a drawing or painting if the perspective is off. Mostly. And when we don’t, like in an optical illusion, our minds are scrambled. But perspective also means a particular attitude towards, or way of regarding something. Perspective is a point of view. And we all have one of those.

I wonder what has shaped yours? What has influenced what you believe and how you think about the world? What has informed your point of view?

This week I’ve been teaching the latest two groups of people who (like Anne and Yvonne) are learning about leading worship in their own churches and that’s one of the questions we were thinking about. Why do you think and believe what you think and believe and where did that come from?

The question is based on the idea that each of us is in some way everything that has ever happened to us. We are a collection of experiences and all of it, to a greater or lesser degree, makes us who we are.

That can be anything, from what someone said to us in the playground when we were 6, to the words of a song, the pages from a book, your parents, the films you watched, the places you have visited, the people you are related to, the people you are friends with, the newspapers and magazines or websites you read, and the jobs we have done. All of it influences us. It colours how we see the world. All of it creates our point of view.

It affects how we understand the world. Things like relationships, what we think is fair, our attitudes to power, money, sex, family, justice, race, gender… all of it… even what we think about God, is seen from our own particular perspective that we have developed throughout our life.

So, for example, when we hear the story of Jonah what comes to mind?

Maybe two things.
‘Being a Jonah’ is to bring bad luck.
And Jonah was swallowed by a whale.

When you hear the story of Jesus calling the fishermen to follow him, some of you will hear in your head the song you learned in Sunday School or sang at school assemblies… I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.

All you see is that bit of the story. The part someone else has told you about, probably a long time ago… and it has stuck. We think that we know it and so we don’t need to bother looking at it again because there’s nothing new there… is there?

I like when people tell me they don’t believe in God because then I get to ask them why not. What is it about God you don’t believe in. Mostly people say stuff I don’t believe either. And mostly the last time they gave any real thought to who or what God might be was a long time ago. It’s odd, because I’m pretty sure we don’t decide whether we believe in gravity when we’re 12… or quantum mechanics, or love, or… well pretty much anything really.

It’s a bit like thinking that a circle with a dot in the middle is what a pencil looks like. It is, but it’s far from the whole story.

If we do that then I think we have a problem. We won’t ever learn anything new. We won’t ever reconsider. We won’t ever change our minds.

Brian Cox, the physicist, was asked in an interview if he believed in God. His answer was brilliant. He said something along the lines of I haven’t seen any evidence to disprove the existence of God, so as a scientist I can’t say no, no matter how sceptical I might be. I have to be open to the possibility that new evidence will come to light.

We live in a world where that kind of openness is rare.

And that’s a huge problem for us today because reconsidering, learning something new, changing our minds is exactly what we are being invited to do.

Jonah is a brilliant story.

Johan is minding his own business when God tells him to go to Nineveh to tell them they are doomed if they don’t change their ways. Jonah didn’t want to do what God asked him because Nineveh was the worst place anyone could ever go. It was a terrible place full of violence. They have invaded their neighbours and committed awful crimes against them. Why would anyone want to go there?

And more to the point, why would I want to go there and tell them they are all doomed! That’s not going to end well for me. The only person who will be doomed is me!

So Jonah runs away in the opposite direction.

He gets on a ship and sails away. But there is a big storm and the sailors think it’s because of Jonah… so they throw him overboard. And then a big fish swallows him. And he’s inside the belly of the big fish for three days.

The fish spits him out and God tells Jonah again to go to Nineveh. And so he goes. Nineveh is massive. It would take 3 days to walk across the city. So Jonah walks for a day and in the morning he starts to tell the people that they have 40 days to shape up or God is going to destroy their city and all of them… and much to Jonah’s annoyance they believe him and they change their ways. Jonah goes and sits under a tree and sulks because God hasn’t obliterated Nineveh. Why? Because he doesn’t want them to change. He wants them to be punished!

It’s a morality tale. A lesson for all of us about the possibility of change even for people we either don’t think can change or who we don’t want to change because we wouldn’t know what to do with them if they did… We would have to change too.

There’s a great scene in the movie The Commitments when a two of the newly formed band meet at the dole office when they are collecting their unemployment benefit. Saxophonist Dean tells Jimmy “It feels better being an unemployed musician that an unemployed pipe fitter!” Perspective…

I wonder about the perspectives of those four fishermen Jesus meets.

They’re mending their nets getting ready for going back out on the Sea of Galilee to fish at night. It’s all they have ever known. They are fishermen. It’s not just a job. It’s their identity. They work with their family. James and John are with their dad, Zebedee when Jesus walks along and invites them to see the world differently. Come with me and I’ll make you fishers of people.

Come with me and I’ll help you to use what you are, what you know for a different purpose. Come with me and I’ll give you a completely new perspective.

The word that means change your perspective is repent. It means to re-think. To change your understanding. To get a new perspective. Come with me and I’ll open your eyes to how all this really works. I’ll show you why empire is a lie. How power and violence and wealth are illusions. How fame is false and how religion has been corrupted. And once you see it you can’t ever un-see it.

But to help them understand Jesus doesn’t use a load of big fancy church words. He talks in their terms. I’ll make you fishers for people. But that’s not the only option.

I wonder how that would sound for you? When Peter speaks on the day of Pentecost people hear his words in their own language. We’re surprise and confused by that but it starts here when Jesus talks fishing on the shores of the lake. What would Jesus say to you? hey you… yes you… come and follow me. Bring all that you are with you because we’re going to need it. Some of it will help you speak to people who have had the same troubles or the same joys. Come and see. The world looks different from Jesus’ point of view.