Tag: Messiah

Second Sunday in Advent: The Messiah’s Job Description (Isaiah 9:2-7)

Isaiah 9:2-7

I wonder whether you know what your name means.

In my case, my parents gave me the name ‘David’ because it means ‘beloved.’ And I was certainly beloved of them, right through to their deaths.

I am sure you know that in the Bible someone is often given a name with a particular meaning to signify their life’s calling. Thus, God sometimes commands parents to give babies certain names. Most prominent of all in this is the detail in the nativity stories, where Joseph is told by the angel to name the infant Mary is carrying ‘Jesus’, which means ‘God saves.’

We see something similar in the famous verse 6 of Isaiah 9:

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given,
    and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
    Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Whoever Isaiah had in mind in his day, the early church saw this as only completely fulfilled in the coming of the Messiah, Jesus. Those four names or titles – Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace – are like a job description for the Messiah.

And so we’re going to explore those four titles from the perspective of the New Testament.

Firstly, Wonderful Counsellor:

In the Old Testament, a counsellor tended to be an adviser to the king at the royal court. And that interpretation would do very nicely for some people: if the Messiah, Jesus, were just an adviser to us, we might be pleased. He could advise us, but we would be under no obligation to follow everything he said. All that pesky stuff about caring for the poor, sharing our possessions, and so on: we could reject awkward stuff like that and simply follow the bits we like.

And some people live pretty much like that, including regular churchgoers.

But in the New Testament we get a different sense of the word ‘counsellor.’ You may be familiar with the way the Holy Spirit is called ‘The Counsellor’ in John’s Gospel: well, in fact, when Jesus introduces that topic he speaks of the Holy Spirit as ‘another Counsellor.’ The sense is that the Spirit will come as Counsellor to replace the Counsellor who is leaving, namely Jesus.

And what does ‘counsellor’ mean here? ‘One called alongside.’ That’s why alternative translations to ‘Counsellor’ are Comforter, Helper, or Advocate.

The Holy Spirit comes alongside us to replace Jesus, who previously came alongside us. And this gets to the heart of the wonder of the Incarnation. In coming to earth, taking on human flesh, and living an ordinary (if not poverty-stricken) life, Jesus came alongside us.

Some people talk as if God is remote. There is that dreadful song that Cliff Richard covered some years ago called ‘From A Distance’, which includes the refrain, ‘God is watching us from a distance.’ But God has done so much more. In Jesus, he has come alongside us, in all the mess and the confusion of everyday living.

Don’t you want someone like that when you are in need? When I had a broken engagement a few years before I met Debbie, two friends of mine turned up on my doorstep and said they were taking me out to lunch. I hadn’t realised that both of them had been through broken engagements before meeting their husbands.

When we pray, let’s remember that Jesus is the ‘Wonderful Counsellor’, who in the Incarnation has come alongside human beings in the grimiest, bleakest parts of life. He is Good News.

Secondly, Mighty God:

A couple of weeks ago after the morning service, Haslemere Methodist Church hosted a nativity production by a group of Ukrainian refugees. Adults and children together in native costumes told the nativity story in what they said was a traditional Ukrainian way. Almost all of it was in their native tongue, so they provided a translation sheet. Their one concession to English was to sing ‘Silent Night’ in both languages. All of this was to raise money for a small charity set up by some British Christians in Portsmouth called Ukraine Mission, which takes relief supplies out there to suffering people.

They explained beforehand how elements of the Christmas story had become all the more relevant to them since Putin’s invasion, not least the flight into Egypt to escape murderous Herod, which spoke to them about the many Ukrainian mothers who had fled their homeland with their children.

And most notable to me in their presentation of the nativity was the attention they gave to Herod’s plot to kill the infant boys in Bethlehem. However, they did vary from the script of the Gospels by including an elite hit squad of angels who turned up to kill Herod and his henchmen. I can’t imagine what hopes they were expressing …

We’d like a ‘Mighty God’ like that. One who sent his hit squads of angels like some heavenly SAS unit to knock out the tyrants and evildoers of this world. Of course, it’s altogether too easy for us to assume that we are the goodies and this God would have no bones to pick with us.  Which makes this vision of God dangerous.

But our Mighty God is not like that, and it’s certainly not what we see of the Messiah in the Christmas story. Tom Wright says this:

When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the pure-hearted and so on.[1]

He doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek. That sounds very Christmassy to me. That sounds like the way Jesus came. Mighty God? Oh yes. He turned history upside-down.

In the chorus of a song called ‘Cry of a Tiny Babe’, the Canadian Christian singer Bruce Cockburn put it like this:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

Thirdly, Everlasting Father:

Well, this could be tricky: as Christians, we don’t want to confuse Jesus and the Father in our understanding of the Trinity.

But maybe what we need to remember here is this. There is plenty of biblical material to say that no-one has seen God. Even Moses, who wanted to see the face of God, was denied that.

But on the other hand, Isaiah says in chapter 6 of his prophecy that in the year King Uzziah died, he saw the Lord in the Jerusalem Temple. And we need to put this alongside Jesus’ assertion that if you have seen him, you have seen the Father.

Jesus himself is divine, and he is the revelation of God. If we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. And we get to see that in the Incarnation.

Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in a former generation, famously said,

God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all

The other night, Debbie and I were watching Sky News when the ad break came. One of the ads was for Asda supermarkets. Now I expect companies like that to be promoting all their Christmas wares at this time – although as one of my Midhurst members said, much of it is insensitive at a time when food banks are being used more than ever.

But what really got me was the slogan at the end: Asda – the Home of Christmas.’ How shallow. How depressing. The home of Christmas is a manger.

And if Jesus came to reveal the Everlasting Father to us, then Christmas is so much more. It is a time when God is revealed to the world.

That’s why I’ll always have a short evangelistic talk in a carol service. God is revealed to the world at Christmas. It’s our unique message at this time.

Fourthly and finally, Prince of Peace:

This is a huge title for the Messiah. Paul talks about us receiving peace with God through Christ in Romans, and in Ephesians he talks about Jews and Gentiles finding peace with each other and bringing all things together in unity under Christ. Is it any surprise that the angels appear to the shepherds in Luke’s Gospel and proclaim peace on earth to those on whom God’s favour rests?

So this is big! It’s the Hebrew peace of shalom, where all is restored in the world. Not just the absence of war, but reconciled relationships, justice, healing of people and planet, basically everything right with the world. In other words, Jesus has come to reverse all the curses of Eden when everything went wrong.

Indeed, if we go back to Genesis 3 and the story of the Fall, we see brokenness everywhere. Adam and Eve hide from God – but now there will be peace with God through the Messiah. Adam and Eve are alienated from each other – because the man will rule over the woman – but in Christ human beings are reconciled with one another. Eve will suffer pain in childbirth – but Jesus brings healing. Adam is alienated from the earth, because his daily toil will be subjected to frustration – but the creation, which Paul says in Romans is ‘groaning’, will also find peace.

Let’s not just pick and choose our favourite bits from this and ignore the rest. Let’s not call people to conversion while missing the social dimensions. And equally, let’s not just make ourselves into religious politicians and downplay the call to personal commitment to Christ. Because if Jesus is the Prince of Peace we need to embrace the whole package. Jesus the Prince of Peace ushers in the new creation, and he calls us to be his disciples in this project.

Howard Thurman was an American Christian theologian at Boston University and civil rights leader who acted as a spiritual advisor to people like Martin Luther King. His most famous piece of writing is called ‘The Work of Christmas’. This is the best-known passage from it:

When the song of the angels is stilled,When the star in the sky is gone,When the kings and princes are home,When the shepherds are back with their flock,The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.

Conclusion

Jesus the Messiah comes alongside us in even the darkest parts of life. He mightily transforms the world in his meekness. He reveals the Father to us, and he brings peace to every aspect of creation.

This is Jesus’ job description. This is his calling. This is the mission on which he came at the Incarnation.

This is what we celebrate.

[1] N T Wright, The Challenge of Jesus; cited at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9023698-when-god-wants-to-sort-out-the-world-as-the

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The Baptised Life (Luke 3:7-18) Advent 3, Year C

Luke 3:7-18

A favourite story I like to tell about the birth of our son concerns the first time we took him as a baby to one of the churches I was serving. One man looked at him, then looked at me, and said: “Don’t you ever bring a paternity suit against your wife over this lad, because the judge will take one look at him, then one look at you, and laugh the case out of court.”

Even now, seventeen years later, you can see the physical resemblance. You would do all the more if you’d known me at that age. We may have different colour hair, but his hair colour comes through from my father’s side of my family. He is a mathematician, as I was. He is blue-eyed, like me. He is left-handed, as I am – albeit that he is more like my father, who was a relatively ambidextrous left-hander, whereas I am much more left-handed. Like my father, he has an excellent sense of direction and is extremely good at navigating with maps.

But he won’t make his way in life based on whose son and grandson he is. That will depend more on how he uses his gifts, talents, and opportunities.

And John the Baptist is trying to get over something similar to his hearers in our passage today. He tells people who claim they are the offspring of Abraham that they are more like the offspring of snakes. You can have all the religious heritage you like, he says, but it counts for nothing if you’re not living a transformed life. Being raised in the Jewish faith won’t count for anything on its own. Being baptised won’t mean diddly-squat unless your life changes. (Verses 7-9)

It’s something that is painfully relevant to some of the pastoral conversations I have when I first meet people in Methodist churches. It’s not uncommon for people to tell me how they’ve been a Methodist for decades, maybe all their lives.

And I wonder, why is that the first thing they want to tell me about themselves? Because it won’t count for anything with Jesus – unless, of course, they are faithfully living according to the life-changing teaching and spiritual experience that John Wesley underwent and then taught to others.

So you were baptised a Methodist? Well, big deal. Actually, nobody is baptised a Methodist, they are baptised into the Christian faith.

But if you were brought to church as an infant and a minister poured water on your head in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then it doesn’t matter one bit that the Methodist Church says that any administration of water in the name of the Trinity is a valid baptism, because John the Baptist says that baptism only matters if you go on to lead a baptised life.

So enough of all this claiming of a religious heritage as if it’s a ticket to heaven. It’s nothing of the sort. Presenting your baptism certificate will not work in the way that showing your passport does at Immigration Control in a new country. All that God accepts as the passport to glory is a life of repentance and faith, a baptised life more than a baptised body.

If you want to come to a minister and start telling us that you’ve been a Methodist for fifty years, then make sure you’re actually living as a Methodist in the sense John Wesley taught. Make sure that you come to God not dependent on your own good works, but by faith in Jesus who died for you. Be thankful for his forgiveness and show it by your love for God and for other people. After all, Wesley was fond of quoting from Galatians: ‘The only thing that counts is faith working through love.’ Seek a constant renewing and reordering of your life, joining a small group of other Christians where you each hold one another accountable. Be generous and have a concern for the poor. Share your faith with others.

If you think that’s a bit strong, look at what John the Baptist required of the people who came to him for baptism. They were to share with the poor, not cheat, be truthful, and avoid greed. That wouldn’t be a bad starting place today, either! (Verses 10-14)

And if that’s the sort of person you are, then I’m highly likely to believe that you’re a traditional Methodist! That would show the kind of spiritual DNA that Wesley wanted to see replicated in people.

But if all you can do is wave a baptism certificate or produce your latest membership ticket with a flourish, well, John Wesley would have had harsh words for you and so too would John the Baptist. Both of them would have warned you about the judgement that Jesus will bring.

And so John talks about how Jesus the Messiah will come to baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire – with fire being an image of judgement. He talks about how he will separate the wheat into the barn but burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. It’s a challenging and powerful description of Jesus. (Verses 15-17)

Of course, some people won’t have it. They will say, that can’t be Jesus, he was all about telling us to love one another. Well he was about teaching us to love, but he also had strong words for those who would not love. He had particularly harsh words for those who used their religion for their own power or to put others down. Jesus was absolutely clear in his teaching that if you claim to be a disciple of his, then it needs to be seen in the way you live.

So all the people who call him ‘Lord, Lord’ but don’t do his bidding will have a shock. All the people who can’t be bothered to be prepared for his coming like the five foolish virgins in the parable will find that their future is not what they complacently assumed.

I have to ask myself, how am I preparing for the coming of Jesus? Not in the sense of, have I bought all the presents I should for Christmas, but in the sense of, am I adjusting my life to make it more fit for the arrival of the One who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords?

Do you ask yourself the same sort of question? Because we all need to do so.

This is why historically Advent has not been a time for feasting on mince pies but rather a season of penitence, like Lent. Preparing for the coming of the Messiah is a challenging matter.

But Jesus does come with the Holy Spirit. We are not left with only our own feeble power to alter our lives. When Jesus challenges us, he also provides the strength we need to make those changes. And we find that ability and energy in the gift of the Holy Spirit.

I want to conclude by saying that all week the ending of the reading has puzzled me.

18 And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.

Good news? It doesn’t much sound like good news, does it, all this fire and brimstone preaching?

But it is good news. It is good news in the ancient sense, in the way the term ‘good news’ would have been used in the Roman Empire. When a Roman herald arrived in a place and said he was going to proclaim good news, it would be the announcement that there was a new Emperor, or that the armies of Rome had won a great battle against an enemy.

In that respect this is good news. It is the news that the kingdom of God is arriving in the person of the King himself, Jesus. It will later become the news that the king himself has won the greatest battle of all on the Cross against all the forces of evil. And it is the good news that in the reign of King Jesus he brings love, justice, reconciliation, harmony, healing, and much more.

Therefore when we are challenged to repent and to reorder our lives, the call is to bring our lives into step with the kingdom of God – that is, to be loving, to pursue justice, to work for reconciliation, to bring harmony, to exercise healing, and so on.

If we are to prepare for the coming of Christ, then this is the kind of life to which we are called.

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Sermon: Advent 2, An Undiluted Prophetic Hope

Isaiah 11:1-10

If I were ever to be on a TV show, I think Grumpy Old Men might suit me. Not that I would ever be famous enough to be invited, but I can be the sort of person who thinks that Ebenezer Scrooge was given an unfair press. It’s not simply that this is the time of year when Debbie gets out all the Singing Santa toys that she and the children love (and which can drive me mad), it’s this Second Sunday in Advent.

You see, the grump in me wonders why it got changed in the current Lectionary. You used to know where you were in the four Sundays of Advent. The first Sunday was about the Advent Hope – not just Christ’s original coming but the promise of his appearing again in glory. The second Sunday was about the promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament prophets. Sunday number three introduced you to the man with the extreme diet, John the Baptist. Then on the fourth Sunday it’s the Annunciation by Gabriel to Mary.

What went wrong? How come we now get a reading about John the Baptist this week as well as next week? Some of it has to do with the moving of Bible Sunday into October, although I’m not sure which came first. Perhaps a grumpy old man like me should appreciate two weeks’ worth of his fire and brimstone preaching, but actually I miss the emphasis on the prophets.

And no, it’s wrong to see the prophets as a job lot of grumpy old men. In the short term, they did warn people about the consequences of sin. But in the long term, they held out the hope of God’s future. In Isaiah’s case, that included the hope that God would send his Anointed One, that is, the Messiah.

So, then, what does this passage from Isaiah point us to in the hope of the Messiah’s coming? I want to take Isaiah’s original intentions and give them a distinctively Christ-centred flavour.

Firstly, let me take you to the manse Debbie and I had in the circuit before last. Known among local Methodists as ‘the Frost manse’, because David Frost famously lived there as a boy when his father was the local Methodist minister just after World War Two. The house had begun life, though, as the admiral’s house for the nearby Chatham Dockyard. Thus, although it was terraced, it was a large house. The downstairs study which Paradine Frost, David Frost’s father, had used when he was there, had by our time been converted into a huge kitchen. There was ample space not only to cook but also to seat several people around a dining table for meals.

There was a large window from the kitchen looking out onto the garden. Unfortunately, it didn’t let in much light, and we had to turn on the lights earlier and more frequently than might have been expected.

Why was this so? Because a large tree stood not far outside the window. Far enough away for the roots not to affect the house, but near enough to darken the kitchen. Eventually, we asked the circuit if they could send in a tree surgeon, which they did, and we gained more natural light when he had reduced it to a stump.

Isaiah begins by talking about a stump:

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. (Verse 1)

‘The stump of Jesse’ is a tragic statement. You will remember that Jesse was the father of David, and all Israel’s hopes had been in him. Yet this seems to suggest that David’s line has failed, even to the point where his father is named instead of him. The great tree has been cut down to a stump. ‘The stump of Jesse’ implies human failure and sin. Time after time, Israel and Judah had been let down by her kings.

Yet, says Isaiah, ‘from the stump of Jesse’ shall come ‘a shoot’ ‘and a branch shall grow out of his roots’. From a long line of human failure, God will grow his purposes. From generations of sinners, God will bring his Messiah. From iffy patriarchs whose morals crumbled under pressure, to Rahab the prostitute, to King David the adulterer and murderer, the ancestral line of the Messiah is filled with broken sinners. Within the purposes of God you get Moses who murdered a man and ran away, then protested when God called him that he couldn’t be a public speaker. You have Gideon, who was fearful and full of doubt. There is Jeremiah, who may well have suffered from depression, yet only Isaiah exceeds him among the prophets.

And so that is the first theme I want to take from Isaiah – the hope of the Messiah is one of God working through sinners. God’s purposes are accomplished through a people that one video clip I saw the other day called ‘The March of the Unqualified’.

This Advent, then, be encouraged by the prophetic hope that whatever your failures, whatever your weaknesses, whatever your disappointments, God is capable of working his purposes out through you. If you think that your sins have disqualified you from God and that you have shrivelled from a tree to a stump, then know that God is able to develop a shoot from your stump and a branch from your roots. The God of grace and mercy has come to shine his light into the world even through a cut-down stump.

Secondly, if there’s one thing I get very little of as a parent of young children, but which I would like to have more of, it’s rest. While – as I told Knaphill last week – I begrudgingly rely on an alarm clock in the morning, there are times when it’s not needed. We have two small human alarm clocks, and one in particular. Rest is something Debbie and I envy in others.

But the trouble with words is one of multiple meaning. Think of how you look up a dictionary definition for a word, only to face a range of options. And ‘rest’ is one such word. In the way I have just used it, the connection is with sleep. But ‘rest’ can also mean ‘stay’. I’d like to combine the two meanings of rest into one, of course: stay asleep!

But it’s this second meaning of ‘rest’, that of staying, which Isaiah uses here:

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. (Verse 2)

It’s not simply that the Messiah will have the Spirit of the Lord, it’s that the Spirit of the Lord will rest – that is, stay – on him. Generally in the Old Testament when the Spirit of God comes upon someone it is a ‘tumultuous and spasmodic’[1] experience. The Spirit usually comes dramatically, but only temporarily.

Therefore it’s a big thing for Isaiah to speak about the Spirit resting on the Messiah. Here is the one on whom the Spirit will come and remain. The Messiah will have God’s Spirit permanently. And when John the Baptist says that Jesus is the one on whom he saw the Holy Spirit come and remain, he is making a big claim – a claim that here indeed is the Messiah.

What does this resting of the Spirit upon Jesus mean for us? It ushers in the New Testament era of faith, where the people of the Messiah may receive the same gift. The coming of Jesus the Messiah is the coming of a new age, the age of the Holy Spirit, where Jesus, who received the Spirit permanently, gives the Spirit to his followers in the same way. There may still be dramatic experiences of the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit does not generally depart from a person any more. The Spirit may become distant when we grieve him by our sin, but the intention of Jesus in the messianic age is to give the Holy Spirit as a permanent endowment. In this way, Advent and Christmas look forward to Pentecost!

So be encouraged. Just as the Christ child is called ‘Immanuel’, God with us, so he comes with the promise of God being with us – ‘even to the close of the age’ – because he who receives the Spirit permanently gives the Spirit in the same way. Do not think that God has deserted you. As one Christian scholar puts it, even doubt ‘is a time of “disguised closeness” to God’. Or as the liturgy puts it, in a dialogue between minister and congregation: ‘The Lord is here.’ ‘His Spirit is with us.’

So far, then, we have good news twice over: firstly, that God works even through sinners and failures to bring his messianic purposes to fruition. Secondly, that the Messiah receives the Spirit permanently and gives the Spirit in a similar way to his disciples, so we may know that God is always present with us, even when we can neither see nor feel him. I want to draw out a third strand of this messianic hope before I close.

Just as we’ve thought about the word ‘rest’ as having more than one meaning, this third thought also depends on a double entendre. Not in the sense of a rude joke, but because biblical words are often so rich they convey multiple meanings.

There is one such word in our passage, and Isaiah uses it more than once: righteousness: ‘with righteousness he shall judge the poor’ (verse 4); ‘Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist’ (verse 5). Isaiah uses the word ‘righteousness’ of the Messiah here in terms of who he is, and what he does. Isaiah uses ‘righteousness’ for the Messiah’s dealings with people, and for the society he creates.

It’s a many-layered word, and at the heart of God’s righteousness in Christ is God’s covenant faithfulness. In covenant faithfulness through Jesus, God will make people righteous with him. Ultimately, we know he will do that through the Cross. But this righteousness is not just a ‘get out of jail free’ card for the Day of Judgment. God’s righteousness is also about the transformation he wants to bring to people, to societies, to the world and even to all creation. God’s righteousness is about personal and social salvation, personal and social transformation.

If this is what Jesus the Messiah came to do, it crosses the boundaries we sometimes erect in the church. On the one side we have those who say personal conversion to Christ is the be-all and end-all of faith. They say that society will not change until people are changed by God. On the other there are those who are almost cynical about personal conversion and say the big thing is social justice. Yet the righteousness of the Messiah doesn’t allow us to split personal conversion and social justice and play them off against each other, supporting our particular favourite. Jesus has come to call people to personal faith in him, and to share in his project of transforming the world.

And if that’s the case, woe betide us if we reduce Advent or Christmas to gooey sentimental thoughts about a baby. The baby who came did so through God’s purposes of using weak, sinful people. The baby who came would receive the Spirit in full measure and permanently, and came to give the Spirit permanently to those weak sinners that God delights in using. And the baby who came gave the Spirit to weak sinners to bring them to faith in him and to empower them to work for God’s kingdom.

The prophets don’t let us settle for a half-hearted, diluted hope. Let’s make sure we drink their hope neat.

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Sermon: The Identity Of Jesus And His Disciples

Mark 8:27-38

Just the other day I came across a spoof news report from two years ago which claimed that the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith wanted people to use their loyalty cards more, and for stores which didn’t have them to introduce them. This was to combat terrorism, in the light of the Glasgow bombers having bought their supplies from B & Q, which didn’t at the time have a loyalty card. According to the article, she wanted loyalty cards to replace the unpopular idea of identity cards, and for the data collected by loyalty cards to be used in intelligence gathering operations. In the article, these words are put into Jacqui Smith’s mouth:

“The plan is not just for the ID cards, but to outsource the whole of MI5 to Tesco,” said the Home Secretary. “Frankly they seem to know more about what people in this country are doing than we do.”

Identity. It’s a big theme today. Identity cards and identity theft are but two major areas of concern and controversy about the identity of individuals in our society.

And identity is a central theme of our Gospel reading. It’s about the identity of Jesus, and the consequent identity of his disciples. I see this revelation of identity coming in three phases.

Firstly, we have a confession.

If you like reading stories, I wonder what kinds you prefer. Thrillers, romance, epics? If you enjoy whodunits or mysteries, you will be somewhat disappointed by Mark’s Gospel. In the very first verse, he tells us it is the Gospel of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus is both the Christ (or Messiah) and the Son of God. At the Cross, the Roman centurion confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, and here, Peter says ‘You are the Messiah’ (verse 29), when Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is, as opposed to the opinions of people they know.

This, then, is one of the high water marks of Mark’s Gospel. Here, after all the build-up, with Jesus’ popularity among ordinary people and the opposition starting to rise from those who feel threatened by him, is a decisive confession by Peter. ‘You are the Messiah.’ Lesser options, like the ones proposed by others, will not do. Jesus is more than ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets’ (verse 28).

And it’s similar today. Lesser confessions will not do. Around the time I first became seriously interested in faith for myself, musicals like Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar had been popular. Both contain elements that are worthy of appreciation by Christians, and it’s interesting to see how people without a clear Christian faith perceive Jesus, but both fall short. Godspell is ambivalent about the Resurrection. Jesus is dead at the end, and you simply have the ambiguous song ‘Long live God.’ And Jesus Christ is more than a superstar. Indeed, his whole approach to life would critique attitudes to stardom and popularity.

Do we run the danger of making a lesser confession in the Church sometimes? Possibly. Might liberal Christians be so enamoured by the social justice implications of Jesus’ teachings that they forget the importance of salvation from our own sins? Might catholic Christians be so entranced by the power of the sacraments in remembering Jesus that they overlook the personal responsibility we have in embracing faith? Might evangelical Christians be so caught up with the personal blessings of salvation that they pass over the social implications of his message and ministry?

These are all over-simplifications, I know, but I hope I make this simple point. Encounter with Jesus leads to a full-blooded confession of him as Messiah. It involves the blessings of forgiveness, new life and salvation for us. It starts with God’s initiative towards us, and we need to respond. And it isn’t merely for our own benefit, but for sake of God’s love for the world. All these things are implied in confessing Jesus as Messiah.

So let’s make sure our confession of Jesus is not a truncated one, not restricted by the vision of the world or by our church tradition. Let’s accept that confessing Jesus as Messiah leads us to a big, inspiring vision of who he is, what he does, who he blesses and what he calls us to do.

Secondly, there is confusion. Early in my ministry, I asked a congregation how they might have imagined their new minister before I arrived. Perhaps I was married with children, with brown eyes and right-handed. At the time, I was single (without children!). My eyes are blue (please don’t say ‘red’ after the service!) and I’ve always been part of that elite minority of people who are left-handed.

Similarly, when I moved from that appointment, I obtained a profile from one circuit I was interested in, only to find buried in it a description of their ideal minister as being married with children. At the time, I was still single (and still without children!). I found it sobering to talk the other morning with our Chair of District about our move from this circuit when she said I would be a more attractive option to some circuits because I was married with kids.

People can imagine all they like what someone is like, only for reality to deal a shock to them. that’s certainly what happened to Peter when Jesus explained that as Messiah he would have to suffer and die (verse 31). You’ll remember that Peter was shocked and began to rebuke Jesus (verse 32), only to earn the response

‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ (Verse 33)

Peter’s fantasies about the Messiah have to be exploded. No warmongering conqueror of the Roman occupying forces, but the suffering conqueror of occupying sin. We think of other Gospel stories, like James and John getting mad when a village doesn’t respond to the message of Jesus. They ask him whether calling down fire from heaven would be a good response, and Jesus declines their suggestion. No wonder they were nicknamed the Sons of Thunder.

All this is obvious to us with hindsight. We know that Jesus came as a suffering Messiah, not a military general or a freedom fighter. We know the way of the Messiah is the journey to the Cross. So you might think it would be easy for us to live without the confusion of Peter and the first disciples.

I am not so sure. We may know in our heads that the path of Jesus would take him to Calvary, but there are times when we want to call on a warlike Messiah, just like his first followers. Think about how we pray sometimes about evil. We may want God to sort it with a quick fix. We may ask God to zap evildoers, whether they are tyrants inflicting injustice on their people or folk we know who have treated us unfairly or even cruelly.

I wonder whether those are the kinds of prayers to which God answers, ‘No.’ I wonder whether heaven even says, ‘Get behind me, Satan’ to us when we pray like that. I wonder whether the way we need guiding out of our confusion about Jesus is to focus our thoughts and devotions much more solidly on the Cross. Having seen some churches ripped apart by bitterness and lack of forgiveness, I do suspect we have our fair share of Peters and Sons of Thunder in today’s church. But here, especially, and as always, the Cross is what unscrambles our confusion about Jesus.

Thirdly and finally, this passage presents us with a challenge. Many of us may find the world of the prosperity gospel preachers baffling and bizarre. If you’ve caught sight of any on satellite TV, you’ll know what I mean.

But it’s easy to understand their appeal. ‘God wants you rich’ is an attractive message in a materialistic society. ‘Jesus suffered so that you don’t have to’ plays well in a culture that spends all its time trying to avoid suffering. And while we might see through the ‘God wants you rich’ approach, I think a lot of us don’t so much think about suffering as attempt to avoid it.

But think about it we must, because the challenge of Jesus here is that just as he was to go to the Cross, so too his followers would have to face suffering because they are his disciples. ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,’ he says (verse 34).

It’s not that Jesus thinks we should go looking for suffering, but he calls us all to such an abandonment to his ways that it will bring us in the firing line of evil, just as happened to him. If that happens, then self-preservation is not an option. If I want to save my life, I will lose it, but if I surrender it for Jesus and the Gospel I will save it (verse 35).

Now that thought is one we need to apply not only to ourselves as individuals, but also to churches. How often I hear churches in these days of aging and declining congregations talk about how they are going to survive and keep open. ‘How are we going to keep our church going?’ people ask. I suggest that it is a question based on self-preservation rather than a concern for the Gospel. It’s about how we are going to save our lives, rather than a passion for other people to know the love of God in Christ. Maybe churches that talk like that are the very ones that will lose their lives.

Few people like the idea of embracing suffering head on – I certainly don’t! However, we need to remember that Jesus offers us hope with these challenging words: if we are willing to lose our lives for his sake, we will save our lives. That might be in this life, it might be in the life of the world to come. But Jesus keeps his promises. I recently read this story:

Bernard Gilpin (1517-1583) was a preacher who was taken into custody for preaching the gospel during the time when Queen Mary Tudor was persecuting Protestants. He was being taken to London to certain death, but to the amusement of the guards accompanying him he kept saying, ‘Everything is for the best.’ On the way he fell off his horse and was hurt, so they could not travel for a few days. He told the amused guards, ‘I have no doubt that even this painful accident will prove to be a blessing.’ Finally he was able to resume his journey. As they were nearing London, later than expected, they heard the church bells ringing. They asked someone why this was so. They were told, ‘Queen Mary is dead, and there will be no more burning of Protestants.’ Gilpin looked at the guards and said, ‘Ah, you see, it is all for the best.’[1]

So let us embrace the challenge, knowing Jesus will give us life everlasting, whatever we lay down now.

[1] Ajith Fernando, The Call to Joy and Pain, p36, citing Tom Carter (editor), Spurgeon at his Best, pp323ff.

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Advent 7

Seventh Advent 2008 video from Damaris Trust: Richard Collins on how the Messiah met our deepest needs, rather than the popular expectations of the day.

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more about “Advent 7“, posted with vodpod
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