King's Cross by Timothy Keller

 

KING'S CROSS by Timothy Keller

I read this book in 2 days journaling as I read.  I have to say that each chapter in this book is like a sermon in itself and sometimes you need to read it a couple of times to get the gist of what Timothy Keller is saying.  I have decided in reviewing this book to quote whole chunks simply because it is the easiest way at times to understand what he is saying.

Introduction

This book is an extended meditation on the historical Christian premise that Jesus' life, death and resurrection form the central event of cosmic and human history as well as the central organizing principle of our own lives.  Said another way, the whole story of the world - and of how we fit into it - is most clearly understood through a careful direct look at the story of Jesus.  My purpose here is to try to show, through his words and actions, how beautifully his life makes sense of ours.

Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses cites extensive evidence that for decades after Jesus' death and resurrection the people who were healed by Jesus, like the paralytic who was lowered through the roof; the person who carried the cross of Jesus, Simon of Cyrene; the women who watched Jesus being placed in the tomb, like Mary Magdalene; and the disciples who had followed Jesus for 3 years, like Peter and John - all of these participants in the life of Jesus continually and publicly repeated these incidents in great detail.  For decades these eyewitnesses told the stories of what happened to them.

Who was Mark? The earliest and most important source of an answer comes from Papias, bishop of Hierapolis until 130 AD who said that Mark had been a secretary and translator for Peter, one of the first 12 of Jesus' disciples or followers and "wrote accurately all that Peter remembered."  This testimony is of particular significance, since there is evidence that Papias knew John, another of Jesus' first and closest disciples personally.  Mark mentions Peter proportionately more than any of the other Gospels.  If you go through the book of Mark, you'll see that nothing happens in which Peter is not present.  The entire Gospel of Mark, then, is almost certainly the eyewitness testimony of Peter.

Mark is written in the present tense, often using words like "immediately" to pack the account full of action.  You can't help but notice the abruptness and breathless speed of the narrative.  This Gospel conveys then something important about Jesus.  He is not merely a historical figure but a living reality, a person who addresses us today.  In his very first sentence Mark tells us that God has broken into history.  His style communicates a sense of crisis, that the status quo has been ruptured.  We can't think of history as a closed system of natural causes anymore.  We can't think of any human system or tradition or authority as inevitable or absolute anymore,  Jesus has come; anything can happen now.  Mark wants us to see that the coming of Jesus calls for decisive action.  Jesus is seen as a man of action, moving quickly and decisively from event to event.  There is relatively little of Jesus' teaching in the Gospel of Mark - mainly we see Jesus doing.  Therefore we can't remain neutral; we need to respond actively.

PART ONE - THE KING - THE IDENTITY OF JESUS Chapter 1 The Dance

Mark 1 verses 1 - 4  Mark roots Jesus as deeply as possible in the historic, ancient religion of Israel.  Christianity, he implies, is not a completely new thing.  Jesus is the fulfillment of all the biblical prophets' longings and visions, and he is the one who will come to rule and renew the entire universe.

Mark 1 verses 9 - 11

In the sacred writings of Judaism there is only one place where the Spirit of God is likened to a dove - Targums, the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that the Jews of Mark's time read.  In Genesis 1 verse 2 the Spirit hovered over the face of the waters.  The Hebrew verb here means "flutter"; the Spirit fluttered over the face of the waters.  To capture this vivid image the rabbis translated the passage for the Targums like this: "And the earth was without form and empty and darkness was on the face of the deep and the Spirit of God fluttered above the face of the waters like a dove and God spoke: "Let there be light".  There are 3 parties active in the creation of the world: God, God's Spirit and God's Word through which he creates.  The same 3 parties are present at Jesus' baptism: The father who is the voice; the Son who is the word; and the Spirit fluttering like a dove.  Mark is deliberately pointing us back to the creation, to the very beginning of history.  Just as the original creation of the world was a project of the triune God, Mark says, so the redemption of the world, the rescue and renewal of all things that is beginning now with the arrival of the King, is also a project of the triune God.

When Jesus came out of the waters of baptism the Father envelops him and covers him with words of love "You are my Son whom I love with you I am well pleased."  Meanwhile the Spirit covers him with power.  This is what has been happening in the interior life of the Trinity from all eternity.  Mark is giving us a glimpse into the very heart of reality, the meaning of life, the essence of the universe.  Instead of self centeredness, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are characterised in their very essence by mutually self-giving love.  No person in the Trinity insists that the others revolve around him; rather each of them voluntarily circles and orbits around the others.

Different views of God have different implications.  If there's no God - if we are here by blind change, strictly as a result of natural selection - then what you and I call love is just a chemical condition of the brain.  Evolutionary biologists say there's nothing in us that isn't there because it helped our ancestors pass on the genetic code more successfully.  If you feel love, it's only because that combination of chemicals enables you to survive and gets your body parts in the places they need to be in order to pass on the genetic code.  That's all love is - chemistry.  On the other hand, if God exists but is unipersonal, there was a time when God was not love.  Before God created the world, when there was only one divine person because love can exist only in a relationship.  If a unipersonal God had created the world and its inhabitants, such a God would not in his essence be love.  Power and greatness possibly, but no love.  But if from all eternity, without end and without beginning, ultimate reality is a community of persons knowing and loving one another, then ultimate reality is about love relationships.

Why would God create us?  There's only one answer.  He must have created us not to get joy, but to give,  He must have created us to invite us into the dance, to say: If you glorify me, if you center your entire life on me, if you find me beautiful for who I am in myself, then you will step into the dance, which is what you are made for.  You are made not just to believe in me or to be spiritual in some general way, not just to pray and get a bit of inspiration when things are tough.  You are made to center everything in your life on me, to think of everything in terms of your relationship to me.  To serve me unconditionally.  That's where you'll find your joy.  That's what the dance is about.

Mark 1 verses 12 - 13.  When Jesus came out of the waters of baptism he is lead into the desert.  Mark treats Satan as a reality, not a myth.  To us, Satan is a personification of evil left over from a pre-scientific, superstitious society.  He's just a symbol now, an ironic way to deflect personal responsibility for evil.  But if you believe in God, in a good personal supernatural being, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that there are evil personal supernatural beings.  Satan never stops testing us.

We look at Adam and Eve and say "What fools - why did they listen to Satan?"  Yet we know we still have Satan's lie in our own hearts, because we're afraid of trusting God - of trusting any body, in fact.  We're stationary, because Satan tells us we should be - that's the way he fights the battle.

But God didn't leave us defenseless.  God said to Jesus "Obey me about the tree - only this time the tree was a cross - "and you will die."  And Jesus did.  He has gone before you from the heart of a very real battle, to draw you into the ultimate reality of the dance.  What he has enjoyed from all eternity he has come to offer to you.  And sometimes, when you're in the deepest part of the battle, when you're tempted and hurt and weak, you'll hear in the depths of our being the same words Jesus heard "This is my beloved child - you are my beloved child, whom I love; with you I'm well pleased."

Chapter 2 The call

Mark 1 verses 14 and 15  Jesus went into Galilee "Repent and believe the good news!"  The essence of other religions is advice.  Christianity is essentially news.  Other religions say "This is what you have to do in order to connect to God forever, this is how you have to live in order to earn your way to God."  But the gospel says, "This is what has been done in history.  This is how Jesus lived and died to earn the way to God for you."  Christianity is completely different.  It's joyful news.

The gospel is that God connects to you not on the basis of what you've done (or haven't done) but on the basis of what Jesus has done, in history, for you.  The good news of the kingdom of God is that the material world God created is going to be renewed so that it lasts forever.

Mark 1 verses 16 - 20.  Jesus calling the first disciples.  Jesus immediately calls people to follow him.  This is unique in Jewish tradition.  Pupils chose rabbis; rabbis did not choose pupils.  Those who wished to learn sought out a rabbi to say "I want to study with you."  Mark is showing us that Jesus has a different type of authority than a regular rabbi.  You can't have a relationship with Jesus unless he calls you. 

Jesus is saying, "Knowing me, loving me, resembling me, serving me must become the supreme passion of your life.  Everything else comes second."

In many of our minds, such words cast the shadow of fanaticism.  People in our culture are afraid of fanaticism - and for good reason really.  In this world considerable violence is being carried out by highly religious people.  Even setting aside such extremism, almost everybody knows someone, personally or by reputation, who is very religious and who is also condemning, self-righteous or even abusive.  Most people today see religion as a spectrum of belief.  On one end are people who say they're religious but don't really believe or live the tenets of their religion.  On the other end you've got the fanatics, people who are too religious, who overbelieve and overlive their faith.  What's the solution to fanaticism?  Many would say, "Well, why can't we be in the middle?  Moderation in all things.  Not too zealous and not too uncommitted.  Being right in the middle would be just right."  So is that the way Christianity works?  Does Jesus say "Moderation in all things?"  Jesus says "If anyone comes to me."  He doesn't say to the crowd "Look, most of you can be moderate, but I do need a few good men and women who really want to go all the way with this discipleship."  He says "anyone".  There's no double standard.  "If anyone wants to have anything to do with me, you have to hate your father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister, and even your own life, or you cannot be my disciple."  That's what it means to follow Jesus.

Why does he talk about hating?  In a number of other places Jesus says that you're not even allowed to hate our enemies.  So what is he saying regarding one's father and mother?  Jesus is not calling us to hate actively; he's calling us to hate comparatively.  He says, "I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look like that by comparison."  If you say, "I'll obey you, Jesus, if my career thrives, if my health is good, if my family is together," then the thing that's on the other side of that if is your real master, your real goal.  But Jesus will not be a means to an end; he will not be used.  If he calls you to follow him, he must be the goal.

Understand the difference between religion and the gospel.  Remember what religion is: advice on how you must live to earn your way to God.  Your job is to follow that advice to the best of your ability.  If you follow it but don't get carried away, then you have moderation.  But if you feel like you're following it faithfully and completely, you'll believe you have a connection with God because of your right living and right belief, and you'll feel superior to people that have wrong living and wrong belief.  That's a slippery slope: If you feel superior to them, you stay away from them.  That makes it easier to exclude them, then to hate them and ultimately to oppress them.  And there are some Christians like that - not because they've gone too far and been too committed to Jesus but because they haven't gone far enough.  They aren't as fanatically humble and sensitive or as fanatically understanding and generous as Jesus was. Why not? They're still treating Christianity as advice instead of good news.

The gospel isn't advice: It's the good news that you don't need to earn your way to God; Jesus has already done it for you.  And it's a gift that you receive by sheer grace - through God's thoroughly unmerited favour.  If you seize that gift and keep holding on to it, then Jesus' call won't draw you into fanaticism or moderation.  You will be passionate to make Jesus your absolute goal and priority, to orbit around him yet when you meet somebody with a different set of priorities, a different faith, you won't assume that they're inferior to you.  You'll actually seek to serve them rather than oppress them.  Why?  Because the gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it's about being called to follow a King.  Not just someone with the power and authority to tell you what needs to be done - but someone with the power and authority to do what needs to be done and then to offer it to you as good news.

Where do we see that kind of authority?  Jesus' baptism has already been attended by supernatural signs that announce his divine authority.  Then we see, Simon, Andrew, James and John follow Jesus without delay - so his call itself has authority.  Mark continues to build on his theme.

Mark 1 verses 21 and 22.  Jesus in the synagogue teaching - "he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law."  Mark uses the term authority for the first time; the word literally means "out of the original stuff."  It comes from the same root as the word author.  Mark means that Jesus taught about life with original rather than derived authority.  He didn't just clarify something that they already knew, or simply interpret the Scriptures in the way the teachers of the law did.  His listeners sensed somehow that he was explaining the story of their lives as the author and it left them dumbfounded.

Mark 1 verses 29 - 31 Jesus goes to Simon Peter's house and heals his mother-in-law.  The healing shows that Jesus is concerned with and king over the physical word - not just the spiritual.  It is not simply a claim of authority (which we have in the calling of the disciples and the authoritative teaching) but is also a clear proof and exercise of Jesus' authority.  He shows he has real power over sickness - just a touch of his hand and the fever is cured.  And this happens over and over.  Three lines later Mark records that Jesus cured whole crowds of people.  A few days after that his touch cured a man with leprosy.  There are 30 healings recorded in the Gospels, all showing us that Jesus has authority over sickness.

Come, follow me, Jesus is saying "Follow me because I'm the King you've been looking for.  Follow me because I have authority over everything, yet I have humbled myself for you.  Because I died on the cross for you when you didn't have the right beliefs or the right behaviour.  Because I have brought you news, not advice.  Because I'm your true love, your true life - follow me.

Chapter 3 The Healing

Mark 1 verses 35 - 38  Jesus had begun to preach and teach publicly.  His words were commanding and his commands were irresistable.  News of him spread like wildfire and soon there were crowds surging forward to see him.  Jesus got up very early to pray in a solitary place.  The language indicates that his prayer was not brief and perfunctory but took hours - he was still praying by the time Simon came to get him.  When Simon told him that there were huge crowds gathered to see him, Jesus said that they should immediately leave.  Why did Jesus leave it all behind?  He was much more interested in the quality of the people's response to him than in the quantity of the crowd.

Mark 2 verses 1 - 8 healing of the man let down through the roof.  Jesus knows something the man doesn't know - that he has a much bigger problem than his physical condition.  Jesus was saying that the main problem in a person's life is never his suffering; it's his sin.  If someone says to you "The main problem in your life is not what happened to you, not what people have done to you; your main problem is the way you've responded to that."  Ironically that's empowering.  Why?  Because you can't do very much about what's happened to you or about what other people are doing - but you can do something about yourself.  

When the Bible talks about sin it is not just referring to the bad things we do.  It's not just lying or lust or whatever the case may be - it is ignoring God in the world he has made; it's rebelling against him by living without reference to him.  It's saying, "I will decide exactly how I live my life."  And Jesus says that is our main problem.

Jesus is confronting the paralytic with his main problem by driving him deep.  Jesus is saying "By coming to me and asking for only your body to be healed, you're not going deep enough.  You have underestimated the depths of your longings, the longings of your heart."  Everyone who is paralyzed naturally wants with every fiber of his being to walk.  But surely this man would have been resting all of his hopes in the possibility of walking again.  In his heart he's almost surely saying, "If only I could walk again, then I would be set for life. I'd never be unhappy, I would never complain.  If only I could walk, then everything would be right.  And Jesus is saying "My son, you're mistaken."  That may sound harsh but it's profoundly true.  Jesus says "When I heal your body, if that's all I do, you'll feel you'll never be unhappy again.  But wait 2 months, 4 months - the euphoria won't last.  The roots of the discontent of the human heart go deep.

The Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us is building our identity on something besides Jesus.  Whether it's to succeed in our chosen field or to have a certain relationship - we're saying "if I have that, if I get my deepest wish, then everything will be okay."  You're looking to that thing to save you from oblivion, from disillusionment, from mediocrity  You've made that wish into your saviour.  And if you never quite get it, you're angry, unhappy, empty.  But if you do get it, you ultimately feel more empty, more unhappy.  You've distorted your deepest wish by trying to make it into your saviour, and now that you finally have it, it's turned on you.

Jesus says, "You see, if you have me, I will actually fulfill you and if you fail me, I will always forgive you.  I'm the only saviour who can do that."  But it is hard to figure that out.  Many of us first start going to God, going to church, because we have problems, and we're asking God to give us a little boost over the hump so that we can get back to saving ourselves, back to pursuing our deepest wish.  The problem is that we're looking to something besides Jesus as saviour.  Almost always when we first go to Jesus saying, "This is my deepest wish," his response is that we need to go a lot deeper than that.  The fact that we thought getting our deepest wish would heal us, would save us - that was the problem.  We had to let Jesus be our Saviour.

When Jesus says to the paralytic, "Son your sins are forgiven" he is doing something unexpected.  So unexpected that it triggers his first clash with the religious leaders of his day - verses 5 - 8.  Jesus can read the motives of the hearts of those around him - the religious leaders.  They are shocked at his words and angry.  They believe Jesus is blaspheming - showing contempt or irreverence toward God - because he claims to do something only God can do.

How does Jesus respond to their thoughts?  Mark 2 verses 8 - 12  The penetrating question Jesus asks them "Which is easier, to say to the paralytic 'Your sins are forgiven' or to say 'Get up, take up your mat and walk?'   On the first reading Jesus seems to be saying "Anybody can say 'Your sins are forgiven' but not everybody can heal.  To show you therefore that I am the Lord with authority to forgive sins, I say to you 'pick up your mat and walk'.  The apparent implication is that it's a lot harder to heal somebody than to forgive somebody and he is signaling his power to do the latter by performing the former.  Jesus is also saying "my friends, it is going to be infinitely harder to effect the forgiveness of sins than you can imagine.  I'm not just a miracle worker, I'm the Saviour.  Any miracle worker can say 'take up your mat and walk' but only the Saviour of the world can say to a human being 'all your sins are forgiven."  The shadow of the cross falls across Jesus' path!  If he not only heals this man but forgives his sins as well, he's taking a decisive, irreversible step down the path to his death.  By taking that step he is putting a down payment on our forgiveness.

Jesus has the power to give you that career success, that relationship, that recognition you've been longing for.  He actually has the power and authority to give each of us what we've been asking for, on the spot, no questions asked.  But Jesus knows that's not nearly deep enough.  We don't need someone who can just grant our wishes.  We need someone who can go deeper than that.  In short, we need to be forgiven.  That's the only way for our discontent to be healed.  It will take more than a miracle worker or a divine genie - it will take a Saviour.  Jesus knows that to be our Saviour he is going to have to die.

And we will discover that in the process of dealing with what we thought were our deepest wishes, Jesus has revealed an even deeper, truer one beneath - and it is for Jesus himself.  He will not just have granted that true deepest wish, he will have fulfilled it.  Jesus is not going to play the rotten practical joke of giving you your deepest wish - until he has shown you that it was for him all along.

Chapter 4 The Rest

Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins, and the religious leaders called that blasphemy.  But Jesus goes on to make a claim so outrageous that the leaders don't have a word for it.  Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he's here to end religion and to replace it with himself.  

Mark 2 verses 23 - 28 The law of God directed that you had to rest from your work one day in 7  The religious leaders of the day had fenced in this law with a stack of specific regulations.  There were 39 types of activity that you could not do on the Sabbath, including reaping grain, which is what the Pharisees accused the disciples of doing.  Mark goes on to record a second incident that took place on the Sabbath day - Mark 3 verses 1 - 6

Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he's here to end religion and to replace it with himself.  In Mark 3 the story of the man with the shriveled hand being healed on the Sabbath day, Jesus became angry with the religious leaders.  Why?  Because the Sabbath is about restoring the deminished.  It's about replenishing the drained.  It's about repairing the broken.  To heal the man's shriveled hand is to do exactly what the sabbath is all about.  Yet because the leaders are so concerned that Sabbath regulations be observed, they don't want Jesus to heal this man - an incredible example of missing the forest for the trees.  Their hearts are as shriveled as the man's hand.  They're insecure and anxious about the regulations  They're tribal, judgmental, and self-obsessed instead of caring about the man.  Why?  Religion.

Most people in the world believe that if there is a God, you relate to God by being good.  Most religions are based on that principle, though there are a million different variations on it.  Some religions are what you might call nationalistic: You connect to God, they say, by coming into our people group and taking on the markers of society membership.  Other religions are spiritualistic: You reach God by working your way through certain transformations of consciousness.  Yet other religions are legalistic: There's a code of conduct, and if you follow it God will look upon you with favour.  But they all have the same logic: If I perform, if I obey, I'm accepted.  The gospel of Jesus is not only different from that but diametrically opposed to it: I'm fully accepted in Jesus Christ and therefore I obey.

In religion the purpose of obeying the law is to assure you that you're all right with God.  As a result, when you come to the law, what you're most concerned about is detail.  You want to know exactly what you've got to do, because you have to push all the right buttons.  You won't gravitate toward seeking out the intent of the law; rather, you'll tend to write into the law all sorts of details of observance so you can assure yourself that you're obeying it  But in the life of Christians the law of God - though still binding on them - functions in a completely different way.  It shows you the life of love you want to live before the God who has done so much for you.  God's law takes you out of yourself; it shows you how to serve God and others instead of being absorbed with yourself.  You study and obey the law of God in order to discover the kind of life you should live in order to please and resemble the one who created and redeemed you, delivering you from the consequences of sin.  And you don't violate it or whittle it down to manageable proportions by adding man-made details to it.

Most of us work and work trying to prove ourselves, to convince God, others, and ourselves that we're good people.  That work is never over unless we rest in the gospel.  At the end of his great act of creation the Lord said, "It is finished" and he could rest.  On the cross at the end of his great act of redemption Jesus said, "It is finished" and we can rest.  On the cross Jesus was saying of the work underneath your work - the thing that makes you truly weary, this need to prove yourself because who you are and what you do are never good enough - that it is finished.  He has lived the life you should have lived, he has died the death you should have died.  If you rely on Jesus' finished work, you know that God is satisfied with you.  You can be satisfied with life.

Jesus, however, understands that there is a God who is uncreated, beginningless, infinitely transcendent, who made this world, who keeps everything in the universe going, so that all the molecules, all the stars, all the solar systems are being held up by the power of this God,  And Jesus says, That's who I am.

At the end of this Sabbath encounter with the religious leaders Mark records a remarkable sentence that sums up one of the main themes of the NT "Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus."  The Herodians were the supporters of Herod, the nastiest of the corrupt kings who ruled Israel, representing the Roman occupying power and its political system.  In any country that the Romans conquered, they set up rulers.  And wherever the Romans went, they brought along the culture of Greece - Greek philosophy, the Greek approach to sex and the body, the Greek approach to truth.  Conquered societies like Israel felt assaulted by these immoral, cosmopolitan, pagan values.  In these countries there were cultural resistance movements and in Israel that was the Pharisees.  They put all their emphasis on living by the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures and putting up big hedges around themselves to prevent contamination by the pagans.  The Herodians were moving with the times, while the Pharisees upheld traditional virtues.  The Pharisees believed their society was being overwhelmed with pluralism and paganism and they were calling for a return to traditional moral values  These 2 groups had been longtime enemies of each other but now they agree: They have to get rid of Jesus.  These 2 groups were not used to cooperating, but now they do.  In fact the Pharisees, the religious people take the lead in doing so.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion.  It can't be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.

The "traditional values" approach to life is moral conformity - the approach taken by the Pharisees.  It is that you must lead a very, very good life.  The progressive approach, embodied in the Herodians, is self-discovery - you have to decide what is right or wrong for you.  And according to the Bible, both of these are ways of being your own saviour and lord.  Both are hostile to the message of Jesus.  And not only that, both lead to self-righteousness.  The moralist says, "The good people are in and the bad people are out - and of course we're the good ones.  The self-discovery person says, "Oh, no, the progressive, open-minded people are in and the judgmental bigots are out - and of course we're the openminded ones.  In Western cosmopolitan culture there's an enormous amount of self-righteousness about self-righteousness.  We progressive urbanites are so much better than people who think they're better than other people.  We disdain those religious, moralistic types who look down on others.  Do you see the irony, how the way of self-discovery leads to as much superiority and self-righteousness as religion does?  The gospel does not say, "the good are in and the bad are out" nor "the open-minded are in and the judgmental are out."  The gospel says the humble are in and the proud are out.  The gospel says the people who know they're not better, not more open-minded, not more moral than anyone else, are in, and the people who think they're on the right side of the divide are most in danger.

When Jesus says he is not coming for the "righteous" he does not mean that some people don't need him.  The clue to what Jesus does mean is his reference to himself as a physician.  You go to a doctor only when you have a health problem that you can't deal with yourself, when you feel you can't get better through self-management.  What do you want from a doctor?  Not just advice - but intervention.  You don't want a doctor to simply say "Yes, you sure are sick!"  You want some medicine or treatment.

Jesus calls people "righteous" who are in the same position spiritually as those who won't go to a doctor.  "Righteous" people believe they can "heal themselves", make themselves right with God by being good or moral.  They don't feel the need for a soul-physician, someone who intervenes and does what they can't do themselves.  Jesus is teaching that he has come to call sinners: those who know they are morally and spiritually unable to save themselves.

Chapter 5 The Power

Each part of the story Mark tells reveals a little more of who Jesus is - his power, his purpose, and his self-understanding.  Mark is revealing Jesus gradually like an expert storyteller.  But at the same time, he's also a faithful reporter.

Mark 4 records the calming of the wind and the waves.  Jesus is demonstrating, "I am not just someone who has power; I am power itself.  Anyone and anything in the whole universe that has any power has it on loan from me."

That is a mighty claim.  And if it's true, who is this and what does this mean for us?  There are 2 options.  You could argue that this world is just the result of a monumental "storm" - you're here by accident, through blind, violent forces of nature, through the big bang and when you die, you'll turn to dust.  And when the sun goes out, there won't be anyone around to remember anything that you've done, so in the end whether you're a cruel person or loving person makes no lasting difference at all.  However, if Jesus is who he says he is, there's another way to look at life.  If he's Lord of the storm, then no matter what shape the world is in - or your life is in - you will find Jesus provides all the healing, all the rest, all the power you could possibly want.

If you have a God great enough and powerful enough to be mad at because he doesn't stop your suffering, you also have a God who's great enough and powerful enough to have reasons that you can't understand.  You can't have it both ways.  If you're at the mercy of the storm, its power is unmanageable and it doesn't love you.  The only place you're safe is in the will of God.  But because he's God and you're not the will of God is necessarily, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.  Is he safe?  "Of course he's not safe.  Who said anything about being safe?  But he's good.  He's the King."

We have a resource that can enable us to stay calm inside no matter how the storms rage outside.  Here's a clue: Mark has deliberately laid out this account using language of the famous Old Testament accounts of Jonah.  Both Jesus and Jonah were in a boat, and both boats were overtaken by a storm - the descriptions of the storms are almost identical.  Both Jesus and Jonah were asleep.  In both stories the sailors woke up the sleeper and said, "We're going to die."  And in both cases, there was a miraculous divine intervention and the sea was calmed.  Further, in both stories the sailors then became even more terrified than they were before the storm was calmed.  Two almost identical stories - with just one difference.  In the midst of the storm, Jonah said to the sailors, in effect: "There's only one thing to do.  If I perish, you survive.  If I die, you will live."  And they threw him into the sea.  Which doesn't happen in Mark's story.  Or does it?  I think Mark is showing that the stories aren't actually different when you stand back a bit and look at them with the rest of the story of Jesus in view.  In Matthew' s Gospel Jesus says "One greater than Jonah is here" and he's referring to himself: I'm the true Jonah.  He meant this: Someday I'm going to calm all storms, still all waves.  I'm going to destroy destruction, break brokenness, kill death.  How can he do that?  He can do it only because when he was on the cross he was thrown - willingly, like Jonah - into the ultimate storm, under the ultimate waves, the wave of sin and death.  Jesus was thrown into the only storm that can actually sink us - the storm of eternal justice, of what we owe for our wrongdoing.  That storm wasn't calmed - not until it swept him away.

Chapter 6  The Waiting

What is patience?  Patience is love for the long haul; it is bearing up under difficult circumstances, without giving up or giving in to bitterness.  Patience means working when gratification is delayed.  It means taking what life offers - even if it means suffering - without lashing out.  And when you're in a situation that you're troubled over or when there's a delay or pressure on you or something's not happening that you want to happen, there's always a temptation to come to the end of your patience.  You may well have lost your patience before you're even aware of it.

Jesus displayed patience not just in the way he faced his execution and his enemies.  He also displayed remarkable patience with his disciples - think of his patience with them in the storm and with the people he met throughout his life.

God's sense of timing will confound ours, no matter what culture we're from.  His grace rarely operates according to our schedule.  When Jesus looks at Jairus and says "Trust me, be patient: in effect he is looking over Jairus' head at all of us and saying "Remember how when I calmed the storm I showed you that my grace and love are compatible with going through storms, though you may not think so?  Well, now I'm telling you that my grace and love are compatible with what seems to you to be unconscionable delays."  It's not "I will not be hurried even though I love you", it's "I will not be hurried because I love you.  I know what I'm doing.  And if you try to impose your understanding of schedule and timing on me, you will struggle to feel loved by me."  Jesus will not be hurried and as a result, we often feel exactly like Jairus - impatient because he's delaying irrationally, unconscionably, inordinately.

When you go to Jesus for help, you get from him far more than you had in mind.  But when you go to Jesus for help, you also end up giving to him far more than you expected to give.

There's all the difference in the world between being a superstitious person who gets a bodily healing and a life-transformed follower of Jesus for all eternity.  If you go to Jesus he may ask of you far more than you originally planned to give, but he can give to you infinitely more than you dared ask or think.

If God seems to be unconscionably delaying his grace and committing malpractice in our life, it's because there is some crucial information that we don't yet have, some essential variable that's unavailable to us.  If I could sit down with you and listen to the story of your life, it may well be that I would join you in saying "I can't understand why God isn't coming through.  I don't know why he is delaying."  Believe me, I know how you feel, so I want to be sensitive in the way I put this.  But when I look at the delays of God in my own life, I realize that a great deal of my consternation has been rooted in arrogance.  I complain to Jesus, "Okay you're the eternal Son of God you've lived for all eternity, you created the universe.  But why would you know any better than I do how my life should be going?"  Right now is God delaying something in your life?  Are you ready to give up?  Are you impatient with him?  There may be a crucial factor that you just don't have access to.  The answer is to trust Jesus.

In the story of Jesus raising Jairus' daughter to life in Mark 5, Jesus understands the little girl is dead - not just mostly dead; she's all dead but why does he tell everyone she is just sleeping?  When you were little, if your parent had you by the hand you felt everything was okay.  You were wrong of course.  There are bad parents, and even the best parents are imperfect.  Even the best parents can slip up, even the best parents make wrong choices.  But Jesus is the ultimate Parent who has you by the hand and will bring you through the darkest night.  The Lord of the universe, the One who danced the stars into place, takes you by the hand and says "Honey it's time to get up."  Why would we want to hurry somebody this powerful and this loving, who treats us this tenderly? Why would we be impatient with somebody like this?  Jesus holds us by the hand and brings us through the greatest darkness.  What enables him to do that?  In his letter to the church in Corinth, 2 Corinthians 13 verse 4 the apostle Paul says Christ was crucified in weakness so that we can live in God's power.  Christ became weak so that we can be strong.  There's nothing more frightening for a little child than to lose the hand of the parent in a crowd or in the dark, but that is nothing compared with Jesus' own loss.  He lost his Father's hand on the cross.  He went into the tomb so we can be raised out of it.  He lost hold of his Father's hand so we could know that once he has us by the hand, he will never, ever forsake us.

Are you trying to hurry Jesus?  Are you impatient with the waiting?  Let him take you by the hand, let him do what he wants to do.  He loves you completely.  He knows what he's doing.  Soon it will be time to wake up.

Chapter 7 The Stain

Mark 7 - the cleanliness laws.  According to the cleanliness laws, if you touched a dead animal or human being, if you had an infectious skin disease like boils or rashes or sores, if you came into contact with mildew (on your clothes, articles in your home, or your house itself), if you had any kind of bodily discharge, or if you ate meat from an animal designated as unclean, you were considered ritually impure, defiled, stained, unclean.  That meant you couldn't enter the temple and therefore you couldn't worship God with the community.  Such strenuous boundaries seem harsh to us, but if you think about it, they are not as odd as they sound.  Over the centuries, people have fasted from food during seasons of prayer.  Why?  It's an aid for developing spiritual hunger for God.  Also people of various faiths kneel for prayer.  Isn't that rather uncomfortable?  It's an aid for developing spiritual humility.  So the washings and efforts to stay clean and free from dirt and disease that were used by religious people in Jesus' day were a kind of visual aid that enabled them to recognise that they were spiritually and morally unclean and couldn't enter the presence of God unless there was some kind of spiritual purification.  Spiritually, morally, unless you're clean, you can't be in the presence of a perfect and holy God.

Jesus couldn't have agreed more with the religious leaders of his day about the fact that we are unclean before God, unfit for the presence of God.  But he disagreed with them about the source of the uncleanness and about how to address it.

According to Jesus, in our natural state, we're unfit for the presence of God.  We often say today "if there is a God, we don't believe he is a transcendently holy deity before whom we stand guilty and condemned. " And yet, we still wrestle with profound feelings of guilt and shame. Where do they come from?  

We live in a world now where we don't believe in judgment, we don't believe in sin, and yet we still feel that there's something wrong with us.  We still have a profound inescapable sense that if we were examined we'd be rejected.  We have a deep sense that we've got to hide our true self or at least control what people know about us.  Secretly we feel that we aren't acceptable, that we have to prove to ourselves and other people that we're worthy, lovable, valuable.

Why do we work so very hard, always saying, "If I can just get to this level, then I can relax?"  And we never do relax once we get there - we just work and work.  What is driving us? Why is it that some of us can never allow ourselves to disappoint anybody?  We have no boundaries, no matter what people ask of us, how much they exploit us, trample on us, because to disappoint somebody is a form of death.  Why does that possibility bother us so much? Where are all the self-doubts coming from?  Why are we so afraid of commitment?  There's no escaping the fact that we all have a sense we're unclean.

What's really wrong with the world?  Why can the world be such a miserable place?  Why is there so much strife between nations, races, tribes, classes?  Why do relationships tend to fray and fall apart?  Jesus is saying We are what's wrong.  it's what comes out from the inside.  It's the self-centeredness of the human heart.  It's sin.  

Sin never stays in its place.  It always leads to separation from God, which results in intense suffering, first in this life and then in the next.  The Bible calls that hell.  That's why Jesus uses the drastic image of amputation.  There can be no compromises.  We must do anything we can to avoid it.  If our foot causes us to sin, we should cut if off.  If it's our eye we should cut it out. 

But Jesus has just pointed out that our biggest problem, the thing that makes us most unclean, is not our foot or our eye; it's our heart.  If the problem were the foot or the eye, although the solution would be drastic, it would be possible to deal with it.  But we can't cut out our heart.  No matter what we do, or how hard we try, external solutions don't deal with the soul.  Outside in will never work, because most of what causes our problems work from the inside out.  We will never shake that sense that we are unclean.

Time after time the Bible shows us that the world is not divided into the good guys and the bad guys.  There may be "better guys" and "worse guys" but no clear division can be made between the good and the bad.  Given our sin and self-centeredness, we all have a part in what makes the world a miserable, broken place.

Yet we're all still trying to address that sense of uncleanness through external measures, trying to do something that Jesus says is basically impossible.  Religion doesn't get rid of the self-justification, the self-centeredness, the self-absorption, at all  It doesn't really strengthen and change the heart.  It's outside in.

We're all trying to cleanse ourselves, or to cover our uncleanness by compensatory good deeds.  But it will not work.  Outside-in cleansing cannot deal with the problem of the human heart.

Jesus has an incredibly high regard for the word of God.  He considers it binding, even on himself.  In Matthew's Gospel he says that not a jot or a tittle - that is, not a letter - will pass away from the Word of God until it is all fulfilled.  Now, the cleanliness laws are a part of the Word of God.  Jesus would never look at any part of it and say, "I'm abolishing this; we've gotten beyond this now."  So what he is saying here is that the cleanliness laws have been fulfilled - that their purpose, to get you to move toward spiritual purification, has been carried out.  The reason you don't have to follow them as you once did is that they've been fulfilled.  How could that be?  In spite of all our efforts to be pure, to be good, to be moral, to cleanse ourselves, God sees our hearts and our hearts are full of filth.  All of our morality, all of our good works, don't really get to the heart.  Through Jesus Christ, at infinite cost to himself, God has clothed us in costly clean garments.  It cost him his blood.  And it is the only thing that can deal with the problem of your heart.

Are you living with a specific failure in your past that you feel guilty about and that you have spent your life trying to make up for?  Or perhaps you are not particularly religious, not especially immoral, yet you're fighting that sense of our own inconsequentiality.  You might be doing it through religion or politics or beauty.  You might even be doing it through Christian ministry. Doing, doing, doing from the outside in.  It won't work.

Chapter 8 The Approach

How do you approach God?  How do you connect with him?  Most of us can think of 2 options.  There is the ancient understanding: God is a bloodthirsty tyrant who needs to be constantly appeased by good behaviour if not outright sacrifice.  And there's the modern understanding of God: He's a spiritual force we can access anytime we want, no questions asked.  In Mark 7 tells us that approaching God might mean something else entirely.  

Jesus went to the vicinty of Tyre and did not want anyone to know it.  Jesus had been spending all of his time ministering in Jewish provinces and that ministry was drawing overwhelming crowds and he was exhausted.  So Jesus left the Jewish provinces and went into a Gentile territory, Tyre, in order to get some rest.

A Syrophoenician woman hears of Jesus' arrival and makes her way boldly to Jesus.  She is a Phoenician, a Gentile, a pagan, a woman and her daughter has an unclean spirit. She knows that in every way, according to the standards of the day, she is unclean and therefore disqualified to approach any devout Jew, let alone a rabbi.  But she doesn't care.  She enters the house without an invitation, falls down and begins begging Jesus to exorcise a demon from her daughter.  The verb beg here is a present progressive - she keeps on begging.  Nothing and no one can stop her.  But she's pleading with Jesus - she won't take no for an answer.

Jesus concentrated his ministry on Israel for all sorts of reasons.  He was sent to show Israel that he was the fulfillment of all Scripture's promises, the fulfillment of all the prophets, priests, and kings, the fulfillment of the temple.  But after he was resurrected, he immediately said to the disciples, "Go to all the nations."  His words, then, are not the insult they appear to be.  What he's saying to the Syrophoenician woman is, "Please understand, there's an order here.  I'm going to the Israel first, then the Gentiles (the other nations) later.

She doesn't take offense; she doesn't stand on her rights  She says, "All right.  I may not have a place at the table - but there's more than enough on that table for everyone in the world, and I need mine now."  She is wrestling with Jesus in the most respectful way and she will not take no for an answer.  She is not saying "Lord, give me what I deserve on the basis of my goodness."  She's saying "Give me what I don't deserve on the basis of your goodness - and I need it now."

This woman saw the gospel - that you're more wicked than you ever believed but at the same time more loved and accepted than you ever dared to hope.  On the one hand, she is not too proud to accept what the gospel says about her unworthiness.  She accepts Jesus' challenge.  She doesn't get her back up and say, "How dare you use a racial epithet about me?  I don't have to stand for this!"  Can you hear yourself saying that?  But on the other hand, neither does this woman insult God by being too discouraged to take up his offer.  

There are 2 ways to fail to let Jesus be your Saviour.  One is by being too proud, having a superiority complex - not to accept his challenge.  But the other is through an inferiority complex - being so self-absorbed that you say, "I'm just so awful that God couldn't love me."  That is, not to accept his offer.

It is just as much a rejection of the love of God to refuse to seek him, to refuse to come after his mercy, to refuse to accept it, to refuse to be content with it, as to say "I'm too good for it."

The Syrophoenician woman approached Jesus boldly, under her own initiative.  She knew what she wanted and was determined to get it.  Sometimes however, our approach to Jesus takes an altogether different trajectory; sometimes our first encounter with him feels almost accidental.  But either way, Jesus knows us and gives us what we need.

Mark 7 verses 31 - 37  Jesus does a whole series of things with the deaf and mute man.  He takes him away from the crowd; he points to his ears; he then touches his own tongue, takes his own saliva and puts it on the man's tongue; he looks up, sighs and says, "Be opened!"  You might say, "Well Jesus is doing the rituals of a miracle worker."  Actually no.  Remember that in every miracle we have witnessed, from calming the storm to bringing Jairus' daughter back to life to the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter, there was no arm waving, no incantation, no mumbo-jumbo.  Jesus obviously does not need to perform a ritual in order to summon his power.  Which means Jesus is doing all this not because he needs it but because the man needs it.

Jesus deeply identifies with this man.  All the touching of his ears, touching his mouth - it's sign language.  Jesus is saying "Let's go over here; don't be afraid, I'm going to do something about that; now let's look to God."  He comes into the man's cognitive world and uses terms - nonverbal speech - that he can understand.  Why does he take him away from the crowd?  As he grew up this man had been a spectacle.  He's deaf and therefore he can't produce proper speech.  Just imagine the way people made fun of him all his life.  Jesus knows this and refused to make a spectacle of him now.  He is identifying with him emotionally.

But there's a deeper identification yet, because at one point Jesus utters a deep sigh.  A better translation might be "he moaned."  A moan is an expression of pain.  Why would Jesus be in pain?  Mabe it's because he has emotionally connected with the man and his alienation and isolation.  That's true but he's about to heal him.  Why isn't Jesus grinning at the man saying "Wait till you see what I'm going to do for you"?  Because an even deeper identification is going on: There is a cost for Jesus' healing this man.  Mark deliberately signals this with the word he uses for "deaf and could hardly talk."  A single Greek word, maglilalos is used there and no other place in the Bible except Isaiah 35 verse 5.  The prophet Isaiah says this about the Messiah: "Be strong, do not fear; your God will come ... with divine retribution ... to save you.  Then will the eyes of the blind be open and the ears of the deaf unstopped.  Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy.  (Isaiah 35 verses 4 - 6)  Mark is saying: Do you see the blind opening their eyes?  Do you see the deaf hearing, do you hear the mute tongue shouting for joy?  God has come, just as Isaiah 35 promised; God has come to save you.  Jesus Christ is God come to save us.  Jesus is the King.

There is something else Mark wants his readers to think about.  Isaiah says the messiah will come to save us "with divine retribution."  But Jesus isn't smiting people.  He's not taking out his sword.  He's not taking power; he's giving it away.  He's not taking over the world; he's serving it.  Where's the divine retribution?  And the answer is, he didn't come to bring divine retribution; he came to bear it.  On the cross Jesus would identify with us totally.  On the cross, the Child of God was thrown away, cast away from the table without a crumb, so that those of us who are not children of God could be adopted and brought in.  Put another way the Child had to become a dog so that we could become sons and daughters at the table.

And because Jesus identified like that with us, now we know why we can approach him. The Son became a dog so that we dogs could be brought to the table; he became mute so that our tongues can be loosed to call him King.  Don't be too isolated to think you are beyond healing.  Don't be too proud to accept what the gospel says about your unworthiness.  Don't be too despondent to accept what the gospel says about how loved you are.

Chapter 9 The Turn

Mark chapter 8 is a pivotal chapter.  It's the climax of the first act, in which the disciples finally begin to see the true identity of the one they have been following.  In it Jesus says 2 things: I'm a King but a King going to a cross and if you want to follow me, you've got to come to the cross too.

Mark 8 verses 27 - 30  Who do people say that I am?

Peter begins to get the answer to the big question, Who is Jesus?  He proposes to Jesus "You are the Christ".  Peter is using a word that literally means "anointed one".  Kings were traditionally anointed with oil as a kind of coronation, but the word Christos had come to mean the Anointed One, the Messiah, the King to end all kings, the King who's going to put everything right.  You are the Messiah, Peter says.  Jesus accepts the title - but then immediately turns around and begins to say things they find appalling and shocking.  "Yes I'm the King", he says "but I'm not anything like the king you were expecting."

Jesus' first important statement here is "The Son of Man must suffer."  When we hear Jesus referring to himself as the Son of Man, we assume he's saying he is human - but this title means much more than that.  In the prophecies of Daniel there's a reference to "one like a son of man" (Daniel 7 verses 13 - 14), a divine messianic figure who comes with the angels to put everything right.

But Jesus says the Son of Man "must suffer ..."  Never before this moment had anyone in Israel connected suffering with the Messiah.  The notion that the Messiah would suffer made no sense at all, because the Messiah was supposed to defeat evil and injustice and make everything right in the world.  How could he defeat evil by suffering and dying?  

By using the word must, Jesus is also indicating that he is planning to die - that he is doing it voluntarily.  He is not merely predicting it will happen.  This is what probably offends Peter the most.  It is one thing for Jesus to say "I will fight and will be defeated: and another to say, "This is why I came; I intend to die!" That is totally inexplicable to Peter.

That's why the minute Jesus says this, Peter begins to "rebuke him".  This is the verb used elsewhere for what Jesus does to demons.  This means Peter is condemning Jesus in the strongest possible language.  Why is Peter so undone, that he would turn on Jesus like this right after identifying him as the Messiah?  From his mother's knee Peter had always been told that when the Messiah came he would defeat evil and injustice by ascending the throne.  But here is Jesus saying "Ye I'm the Messiah, the King, but I came not to live but to die.  I'm not here to take power but to lose it, I'm here not to rule but to serve.  And that's how I'm going to defeat evil and put everything right."

Jesus didn't just say that the Son of Man would suffer; he said that the Son of Man must suffer.  This word is so crucial that it's employed twice: "the Son of Man must suffer many things and ... he must be killed."  The word must modifies and controls the whole sentence and that means that everything in this list is a necessity.  Jesus must suffer, must be rejected, must be killed, must be resurrected.  What Jesus said was not just "I've come to die" but "I have to die".  It's absolutely necessary that I die.  The world can't be renewed and nor can your life, unless I die."  Why would it be absolutely necessary for Jesus to die?

There are healthy people and unhealthy people; some are more able to love than others.  Nobody can give anyone else the kind or amount of love they're starved for.  In the end we're all alike, groping for true love and incapable of fully giving it.  What we need is someone to love us who doesn't need us at all.  Someone who loves us radically, unconditionally, vulnerably. Someone who loves us just for our sake.  If we received that kind of love, that would so assure us of our value, it would so fill us up, that maybe we could start to give love like that too.  Who can give love with no need?  Jesus.  The Father, Son and the Spirit have been knowing and loving one another perfectly for all eternity.  Within himself, God has forever had all the love, all the fulfillment and all the joy that he could possibly want.  He has all the love within himself that the whole human race lacks.  And the only way we're going to get any more is from him.

True love, love without neediness, is generative; it is the only kind that makes more of itself as it goes along.  Why did God create us and later redeem us at great cost even though he doesn't need us?  He did it because he loves us.  His love is perfect love, radically vulnerable love.  And when you begin to get it, when you begin to experience it, the fakery and manipulativeness of your own love starts to wash away and you've got the patience and security to reach out and start giving a truer love to other people. 

Yet we don't need Jesus' sacrifice only personally; we also need it legally.  What do I mean by that?  When someone really wrongs you, a debt is established that has to be paid by someone.  When someone robs you of an opportunity, robs you of happiness, of reputation, or takes away something else that you'll never get back, that creates a sense of debt.  Justice has been violated - this person owes you.  Once you sense that debt, again there are only two things you can do.

One thing you can do is to try to make that person pay: You can try to destroy their opportunities or ruin their reputation; you can hope they suffer, or you can actually see to it.  But there's a big problem with that.  As you're making them pay off the debt, as you're making them suffer because of what they did to you, you're becoming like them.  You're becoming harder, colder, you're becoming like the perpetrator.  Evil wins.  What else can you do? The alternative is to forgive.  But there's nothing easy about real forgiveness.  When you want to harbor vengeful thoughts, when you want so much to carry out vengeful actions but you refuse them in an effort to forgive, it hurts.  When you refrain, when you forgive, it's agony.  Why?  Instead of making the other person suffer, you're absorbing the cost yourself.  You aren't trying to get your reputation back by tearing their reputation down.  You are forgiving them and it is costing you. That's what forgiveness is.  True forgiveness always entails suffering.

So the debt of wrong doesn't vanish: Either they pay or you pay. But here's the irony.  Only if you pay that price of forgiveness, only if you absorb the debt, is there any chance of righting the wrong.  If you confront somebody with what they've done wrong, while you've got vengeance in your heart, they probably won't listen to you.  They'll sense that you are not seeking justice but revenge, and they'll reject anything you say.  You'll just perpetuate the cycle of retaliation, retaliation, retaliation.  Only if you have refrained from vengeance and paid the cost of forgiveness will you have any hope of getting them to listen to you, of seeing their own error.  And even if they do not listen to you at first, your forgiveness breaks the cycle of further reprisals.  If we know that forgiveness always entails suffering for the forgiver and that the only hope of rectifying and righting wrongs comes by paying the cost of suffering, then it should not surprise us when God says, "The only way I can forgive the sins of the human race is to suffer - either you will have to pay the penalty for sin or I will."  Sin always entails a penalty.  Guilt can't be dealt with unless someone pays.  The only way God can pardon us and not judge us is to go to the cross and absorb it into himself.  "I must suffer" Jesus said.

Jesus had to die, then.  But couldn't he have just thrown himself off a cliff?  Or waited for the inevitable demise of his human body.  No.  Jesus' death had to be a violent one.  The writer of Hebrews says that "without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin." (Hebrews 9 verse 22)  This is not a magical view of blood.  Rather, the term blood in the Bible means a life given or taken before its natural end.  A life given or taken is the most extreme gift or price that can be paid in this world.  Only by giving his life could Jesus have made the greatest possible payment for the debt of sin.  Jesus' death was not only a payment, however, it was also a demonstration.

The Jewish chief priests, teachers of the law and of course, the Roman rulers should have been standing up for justice but instead conspired to commit an act of injustice by condemning Jesus to death.  The cross reveals the systems of the world to be corrupt, serving power and oppression instead of justice and truth.  In condemning Jesus, the world was condemning itself.  Jesus' death demonstrates not only the bankruptcy of the world, but it also reveals the character of God and of his kingdom.  Jesus' death was not a failure.  By submitting to death as penalty, he broke its hold on him and on us.

When Jesus went to the cross and died for our sins, he won through losing; he achieved our forgiveness on the cross by turning the values of the world on their head.  He did not "fight fire with fire."  He didn't come and raise an army in order to put down the latest corrupt regime.  He didn't take power; he gave it up and yet he triumphed.  On the cross, then, the world's misuse and glorification of power was exposed for what it is and defeated.  The spell of the world's systems was broken.

The corrupt powers of this world have many tools to make people afraid, the worst one being death.  When you know that a civil power or some other power can kill you, you're scared and they can use your fear to control you.  But since Jesus died and rose again from the dead, if you can find a way to approach Jesus and cling to him, you know that death, the worst thing that can possibly happen to you, is now the best thing.  Death will put you in God's arms and make you all you hoped to be.  And when death loses its sting, when death no longer has power over you because of what Jesus did on  the cross, then you will be living a life of love and not a life of fear.

Jesus is saying, "Since I am a King on a cross, if you want to follow me you must go to a cross."  What does it mean to take up our cross?  What does it mean to lose our life for the gospel in order to save it?

The deliberately chosen Greek word for "life" is psyche from which we get our word psychology  It denotes your identify, your personality, your selfhood - what makes you distinct.  Jesus is not saying "I want you to lose your sense of being an individual self."  That's a teaching of Eastern philosophy and if he meant that, he would have said, "You must lose yourself to lose yourself."  Jesus is saying "Don't build your identity on gaining things in the world."  His exact words are, "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?"

Every culture points to certain things and says, "If you gain those, if you acquire or achieve those, then you'll have a self, you'll know you're valuable."  Traditional cultures would say you're nobody unless you gain the respectability and legacy of family and children.  In individualistic cultures it's different; the culture says you're nobody unless you gain a fulfilling career that brings money, reputation and status.  Regardless of such differences, though every culture says identity is performance based achievement based.

And Jesus says that will never work.  If you gain the whole world, he says, it won't be big enough or bright enough to cover up the stain of inconsequentiality.  No matter how many of these things you gain, it's never enough to make you sure of who you are.  If you're building your identity on "somebody loves me" or if you're building your identity on I've got a good career" and anything goes wrong with that relationship or that job, you fall apart.  You feel like you don't have a self.

It's not a matter of saying, "I've been a failure, I've been immoral, so now I'm going to go to church and become a moral, decent person.  Then I'll know I'm a good person because I am spiritual."  Jesus says, "I don't want you to simply shift from one performance-based identity to another; I want you to find a whole new way.  I want you to lose the old self, the old identity and base yourself and your identity on me and the gospel."  Notice he says "for me and for the gospel."  He is reminding us not to be abstract about this.  You can't just say "Oh, I see: I can't build my identity on my parents' approval because that comes and goes; I can't build my life on my career success; I can't build my life on romance.  Instead I will build my life on God." If that's as far as  you take it, God is almost an abstraction; and so building your life on him is just an act of the will.  And no one has ever been deeply hanged by an act of the will.  The only thing that can reforge and change a life at its root is love.

Jesus is saying "It's not enough just to know me as a teacher or as an abstract principle; you have to look at my life.  I went to the cross - and on the cross I lost my identity so you can have one."

Once you see the Son of God loving you like that, once you are moved by that viscerally and existentially, you begin to get a strength, an assurance, a sense of your own value and distinctiveness that is not based on what you're doing or whether somebody loves you, whether you've lost weight or how much money you've got.  You're free - the old approach to identity is gone.

When Peter hears that Jesus is going to Jerusalem, which will entail suffering - almost certainly not just for Jesus but also for him - he's furious.  Why?  Because he had an agenda, and his agenda led from strength to strength and it didn't include suffering.  When he sees that Jesus is not working from his agenda, he rebukes him.  If your agenda is the end, then Jesus is just the means; you're using him.  But if Jesus is the King, you cannot make him a means to your end.  You can't come to a king negotiating.  You lay your sword at a king's feet and say, "Command me."  If you try to negotiate instead, if you say, "I'll obey you if ...", you aren't recognizing him as a king.  But don't forget this: Jesus is not just a king; he's a king on a cross.  If he were only a king on a throne, you'd submit to him just because you have to.  But he's a king who went to the cross for you.  Therefore you can submit to him out of love and trust.  This means coming to him not negotiating but saying, "Lord, whatever you ask I will do, whatever you send I will accept."  When someone gave himself utterly for you, how can you not give yourself utterly to him?  Taking up your cross means for you to die to self-determination, die to control of your own life, die to using him for your agenda.  

When Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, some who are standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power," what does he mean?  Some people have interpreted this to mean that the current generation wouldn't pass away before he returned to earth.  But that's not what he's saying.  The early church cherished this passage well beyond the death of Jesus' generation.  They knew that Jesus meant something else.  They understood him to mean that although the kingdom of God began in weakness - on the cross - it would not end that way.  They would see the power of his resurrection, and see the church multiply and grow in love, and service and influence in the world.

For us, the kingdom of God begins with weakness, relinquishments, giving up our rights to our own life; it begins with admitting that we need a Saviour.  We need someone to actually fulfill all the requirements and pay for our sin.  That's weakness.  Jesus started in weakness - first, by becoming human and second, by going to a cross.  And if we want him in our life, we have to start in weakness too. The kingdom begins there, but it won't end there.  Someday, when Jesus returns and ushers in a renewed creation, love will totally triumph over hate and life will totally triumph over death.

PART TWO - THE CROSS - THE PURPOSE OF JESUS

Chapter 10 The Mountain

Jesus will now speak constantly of his death and suffering in ways that the disciples find extremely hard to swallow.  The second half of Mark's Gospel (chapters 9 to 16) will show us why the cross was necessary and what it accomplished.  What seemed like it might become a story of triumph is going to look more and more like a tragedy.

Now that Jesus has begun revealing more details about his mission, he also becomes more explicit about what it means to follow him.  In the first half of Mark, he called people to follow him, but now he is painting a more vivid picture of what that following entails.

The transfiguration - Mark 9 verses 2 - 8.

Centuries prior to this event, according to the book of Exodus in the OT, God came down on Mount Sinai in a cloud. The voice of God spoke out of the cloud, and everyone was afraid.  Moses went to the top of the mountain and begged to see God's glory: "Show me your glory - your infinite greatness and unimaginable beauty."  And God responded "When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by, but my face cannot be seen.  No one may see me and live." (Exodus 33 verses 18 - 23)  Moses was not able to see God's glory directly. But even getting near was enough to make Moses' face shine with the reflected glory of God.

Now, centuries later we're on top of another mountain and there's glory again.  This dazzling brightness makes Jesus' clothes "whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them."  There's a mountain, a voice out of a cloud - and even Moses makes an appearance.  Is this Mount Sinai all over again?  No because there's a head-snapping twist.  Moses had reflected the glory of God as the moon reflects the light of the sun.  But Jesus produces the unsurpassable glory of God; it emanates from him.  Jesus does not point to the glory of God as Elijah, Moses and every other prophet has done; Jesus is the glory of God in human form.  "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being" (Hebrews 1 verse 3).

Peter, James and John are in the presence of God and yet they do not die.

On Mount Sinai, God came down as a cloud.   It was called 'the shekinah glory'.  He spoke out of the cloud - it was his raw presence, which the Israelites knew was fatal.  When God told Moses, "No one can see my face and live" he was saying that there's an infinite gap between deity and humanity.  "You can't take my reality" said God, "you can't endure the presence of my holiness, my glory.  It would destroy you." 

This is why Peter is scared.  So scared he doesn't know what he's saying, according to Mark.  He stammers out, "Rabbi ... let us put up three shelters, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah."  

Peter talks about making shelters.  The word translated shelters here is actually the Greek word for tabernacle.  After God's glory came down on Mount Sinai, the Hebrew people built a tabernacle (Exodus).  Why?  Most religions have recognised that there's a wide gap of some kind between deity and humanity.  Therefore many religions have temples (or tabernacles) with priests and sacrifices and rituals to transform your consciousness or take away your sin - to mediate the gap and protect human beings from the divine presence. What Peter is actually saying here is "We need a tabernacle, we need to set up rituals, to protect us from the presence of God."  Immediately after Peter says this, a cloud appears and envelops Jesus, Moses and Elijah.  And from within the shekinah glory cloud, God says "This is my Son, whom I love.  Listen to him"  They are in the very presence of God.  Yet Peter, James and John do not die?  How could that be?  "Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus."  That's Mark's way of saying: Moses is gone, Elijah is gone and Jesus is the bridge over the gap between God and humanity.  Jesus is able to give what Elijah couldn't give, what Moses couldn't give, what no one else could ever deliver.  Through Jesus we can cross the gap into the very heart of reality, into the steps of the dance.  Jesus is the temple and tabernacle to end all temples and tabernacles, because he is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the ultimate priest to point the way for all priests. 

When the cloud comes down, not only do the disciples not die, they are surrounded and embraced by the brilliance of God.  They hear God the Father speaking of his love for the Son, just as he did when Jesus was baptized at the beginning of Mark.  Then suddenly the cloud goes away and they are left standing there blinking in the comparatively dim light of the mountaintop, in a state of electrified wonder.  James, Peter and John have experienced worship.  Worship is a preview of the thing that all of  our hearts are longing for, whether we know it or not.  We seek it in art, in romance, in the arms of our lovers, in our family.

Worship is not just believing.  Before they went up the mountain, Peter, James and John already believed in God.  And Peter had already said, "You are the Christ".  But now they have sensed it.  The presence of God has enveloped them.  They have had a foretaste of what we are all longing for: the very face and embrace of God.

The full meaning of this episode would only be apparent after the resurrection because the transfiguration is a glimpse, a preview of the resurrection (and of the second coming, Jesus's return to restore the world at the end of time, prophesied in the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible).  By speaking of his resurrection here, Jesus is again pointing to his death.

Peter asks "Why do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?"  The Old testament book of Malachi prophesied that Elijah would return before the great Day of the Lord, when God will appear and make everything right.  So the disciples are saying, "Hey we just saw Elijah up there, The day of the Lord must be near! Why all this talk about death?  Elijah is here."  Jesus lays them flat: "I tell you, Elijah has come and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him."  Jesus is saying, "The Elijah that the prophet was pointing to was John the Baptist and he has suffered and died.  Elijah has come and gone."  And he repeats that "it is written that the Son of Man must suffer much."  Just as Elijah's coming was a herald of the Lord's coming, so Elijah's execution (John the Baptist had been beheaded by Herod) is a herald of the Lord's execution).

When Jesus was baptized in the opening chapter of Mark, the Spirit descended on him like a dove, and it fortified him to begin teaching and healing publicly.  Now the father envelops him with his presence - the light and the shekinah glory and the voice - to fortify him for the far greater test that awaits him as he moved resolutely toward his execution on the cross.  and it's not only Jesus who is strengthened by the experience: God is also preparing the disciples for the test they will face when their leader is taken from them.

Have you ever had that kind of experience?  When the compassion and love of another person helped you deal with your suffering?  When someone's unconditional approval and encouragement transformed your fear into resolve?  When an encounter with beauty seemed to neutralize your anxiety and give you hope?  And if you got that kind of help more often, wouldn't you be different?  Wouldn't trouble make you wiser, deeper, and stronger instead of bitter and hard and joyless?  Wouldn't suffering make you more compassionate, rather than more cynical about human nature?  Wouldn't failure be more likely to be productive in your life?  Of course it would.

How are you going to get more of that kind of approval, that kind of encouragement, that kind of love, without burning out your friends and family with your neediness?

The answer for us, as it was for the disciples, is worship.  You must have access through worship to the very presence of God.  You have to see clearly in your mind what God has done and is doing through Jesus.  You have to experience foretastes of that embrace God is going to give you someday.  You need to actually sense what you know of God's love.

It's one thing to know that the glorious Creator God loves you, cares for you, holds you, but it's another thing to sense it, to experience it.  Whatever life brings you, you will need those foretastes to nourish and strengthen you.

The transfiguration is an experience of collective worship that they are going for what's ahead.

How then can we have access to the presence of God in that way?  How can we have these foretastes?  Jesus and the disciples are barely off the mountain before he gets the chance to show us how to make our way into God's presence.

Mark 9 verses 14 - 18 man with a son possessed by a spirit.

A big argument is going on among the teachers of the law and a crowd of other people and Jesus' disciples - those who hadn't gone up the mountain.  They're trying to exorcise a demon and it's not working.  Evil is present and everybody's confused.  Mark takes the existence of demonic activity as a self-evident aspect of reality, a fact of life.  Paul says in Ephesians 6 that we are all fighting demonic "principalities" all the time.  The boy in this story is possessed by a demon, making him deaf and mute and causing convulsions.  It is an overwhelming physical and spiritual condition that not only renders the boy helpless, but also stymies everyone around him - his father, the disciples and the teachers of the law.

Verses 19 - 29 The disciples have been trying to exorcise it without praying.  They tried this for the same reason that they couldn't understand why Jesus had to die - they didn't see how weak and proud they were  They under-estimated the power of evil in the world and in themselves.

The teachers of the law are there too, probably criticizing.  Only one figure in this entire scene is acknowledging his weakness, admitting that he does not have what it takes to handle the suffering and evil that he faces - the father of the boy.

This man asks Jesus, "Would you heal my son?" And Jesus says, "Everything is possible for him who believes."  That is "I can do it if you can believe."  The father responds, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" - that is, "I'm trying but I'm full of doubts."  Then Jesus heals the man's son.  This is very good news.  Through Jesus we don't need perfect righteousness, just repentant helplessness, to access the presence of God.

The boy's father says "I'm not faithful, I am riddled with doubts, and I cannot muster the strength necessary to meet my moral and spiritual challenges.  But help me."  That's saving faith - faith in Jesus instead of in oneself.  Perfect righteousness is impossible for us and if you wait for that, you will never come into the presence of God.  You must admit that you are unrighteous and that you need help.  When you can say that, you are approaching God to worship.

Think of what Jesus is about to lose.  He has lived for endless ages in glory with the Father.  On the mountain we see Jesus surrounded by God; on the cross he will be forsaken.  On the mountain we see the life he has always led - embraced and clothed with the love and light of God - but on the cross he will be naked in the dark.

Why did Jesus put himself through that?  He did it for us.  Paul tells us clearly that evil is unmasked and defeated on our behalf at the cross.  Colossians 2 verses 15 Jesus "disarmed the power and authorities ... triumphing over them by the cross."

And on the mountain, through the Spirit God was strengthening Jesus for his mission, for the infinite suffering he would endure to defeat all evil.  And God can empower us in the same way to face evil and overcome our own suffering.

You may know in your head that God loves you - but sometimes the Spirit makes it especially clear to you that that is the case.  Sometimes you go to the mountain.  Sometimes through the Spirit you can hear God make a statement of unconditional, permanent, intimate love.  Sometimes you don't just know about God's love but in your heart you actually hear God saying "You're my daughter, you're my son, I love you.  I would go to infinite depths not to lose you - and I have.

When you have pursued God in repentant helplessness, you will have worshipped.  And every time you sense his embrace, your soul will shine the slightest bit brighter with his reflected glory and you will be the slightest bit more ready to face what life has in store for you.

Chapter 11 The Trap

Islam started in Arabia at Mecca and the Middle East is still the center of Islam today

Buddhism started in the Far East and that's still the centre of Buddhism

Hinduism began in India and it is still predominantly an Indian religion

Christianity is exception - Christianity's centre is always moving, always on a pilgrimage.  The original centre of Christianity was Jerusalem, but then the Hellenistic Gentiles, who were considered the unwashed barbarians, embraced Christianity with such force that soon the centre of Christianity moved to the Hellenistic Mediterranean world - to Alexandria, North Africa and Rome and it stayed there for a number of centuries.  But then another set of unwashed barbarians, the northern Europeans - Franks and Anglo-Saxons and Celts - so took hold of Christian faith that soon the centre of Christianity migrated again to northern Europe.  There (and in North America through colonization and immigration) the centre has rested for a thousand years, but recently it is shifting again.

In the twentieth century, Christianity receded in Europe and in North America it just barely kept up with the population growth.  Meanwhile in Latin America, Asia and Africa, it has been growing at up to ten times the population growth rate.  In the past decade a major corner was turned: More than 50 percent of Christians in the world now live in the southern hemisphere.

Mark 10 the man who wanted to inherit eternal life.

In other Gospels we learn that this was a young man and also that he was a ruler; so he is often called the Rich Young Ruler.  Jesus tells this spiritual seeker something that he can't accept, and as the man walks away, notice the disciples' reaction - "they were amazed at his words."

Jesus says "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."  Notice the disciples reaction - "they were even more amazed".

There are many who believe that you can't accrue great wealth without taking advantage of people.  This is the premise behind many political and economic philosophies: that nobody can get rich without stepping on others.  Even having a lot of wealth is seen as an injustice.  The disciples response - "If he can't be saved then who can?"  The disciples came from a culture that did not see wealth as evil, but rather as the reward for moral behavour.  They accepted the view that if you live a good life, then God will reward you with prosperity.  This was the worldview, for example, of Job's friends in the OT book of Job.  They assumed that material prosperity meant you were living a good life and God was pleased, while poverty was a sign that you were not living a good life and God was not pleased.  But Jesus' response to this man shows he does not subscribe to these simplistic views - neither is great wealth necessarily exploitative, nor is it always a sign of virtue and God's favour.  By referring to several of the 10 Commandments, Jesus asks him some implicit questions.  "Do not defraud" in other words, have you misrepresented the facts in business dealing, "Have you stolen? Have you even exploited? Have you taken from people things that are by rights theirs?"

The young man says, "All these commandments I have kept since I was a boy."  That is "No, with all my wealth I have always acted in justice and kindness and fairness; I have never sinned in any of these ways."  Jesus accepts the assertion.   While of course you can accumulate wealth through vice, it is possible to earn wealth through virtue and hold it in virtue - that is, discipline, vision, delayed gratification, patience.  Here we see that Jesus has no ideological problem with wealth creation per se.  He does not say that having money is wrong or unjust in itself.  Nonetheless, he says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God. It is impossible for the rich to get into the kingdom of God - that's what Jesus is saying.

Jesus didn't mean that it's a sin to be rich.  it is not that all individual rich people are bad, nor are all individual poor people good.  Jesus did not make such blanket assertions.  No, on the other hand, was he saying, "Just be careful, don't fall into greed, be generous from time to time."  No.  Jesus was saying that there is something radically wrong with all of us - but money has particular power to blind us to it.  In fact, it has so much power to deceive us of our true spiritual state that we need a gracious, miraculous intervention from God to see it.  Its impossible without God, without a miracle.  Without grace.

Jesus' perceptive statement "One thing you lack" allows us to capture the gist of the young man's struggle.  The man was saying "You know what, I've done everything right: I've been successful economically, successful socially, successful morally, successful religiously.  I've heard you're a good rabbi and I'm wondering if there's something I've missed, something I'm overlooking.  I sense that something is lacking."

Anyone who counts on what they are doing to get eternal life will find that, in spite of everything they've accomplished, there's an emptiness, an insecurity, a doubt. Something is bound to be missing.  How can anyone ever know whether they are good enough?  Jesus tells him.  And his counsel lays the man flat.

Jesus begins his reply by telegraphing the punch.  The first thing he says to the man is "Why do you call me good?  No-one is good - except God alone."  That's a hint, a preview.  Jesus is not saying that he's not good.  He doesn't say, "Why are you calling me good?  I, Jesus am not."  He is saying "Why are you walking up to somebody you think is just a normal human rabbi and calling him good?  There's a flaw in your whole idea of goodness and badness."  That's the hint.

But then the blow comes.  Jesus has already accepted what the man said about having obeyed the commandments, having lived an ethical life.  What Jesus says to the man goes further.  Jesus proceeds to tell the young man the one thing he needs to do: "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come, follow me."

In other words; "If you want to follow me and to have eternal life, of course you shouldn't commit adultery; you shouldn't defraud people or murder them.  You shouldn't do bad things.  But if you just repent of doing bad things, all it will do is make you a religious person.  If you want eternal life, if you want intimacy with God, if you want to get over that nagging sense that there's still something missing, if you can't find way to get the stain out, then you have to change how you relate to your gifts and your successes.  You have to repent of how you've been using your good things."

And there are many ways that we use these "good things."  We may be using our "good things" to deal with the imperfections that no one else can see.  We may be incessantly trying to turn material wealth into a spiritual treasure to deal with that inner sense of poverty.  We may be trying to turn physical beauty into spiritual beauty to deal with that inner sense of deformity.  We also may be using our good things to feel superior to others, or to get them to do the things we want them to do.  Most of all we may point to our good things - our achievements and our attainments - and say to God, "Look at what I've accomplished!  You owe it to me to answer my prayers."  We may use our good things to get control of God and other people.

So Jesus is saying to the man in this passage, "You have put your faith and trust in your wealth and accomplishments.  But the effort is alienating you from God.  Right now God is your boss, but God is not your Saviour and here's how you can see it: I want you to imagine life without money.  I want you to imagine all of it gone.  No inheritance, no inventory, no servants, no mansions - all of that is good.  All you have is me.  Can you live like that?"

How does the man respond to Jesus' counseling?  "He went away sad."  The word sad translated here is better translated "grieved" - he grieved.  There's a place where the same Greek word is applied to Jesus.  Matthew records that in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus started to sweat blood as he grieved in deep distress.  Why?  He knew he was about to experience the ultimate dislocation, the ultimate disorientation.  He was about to lose the joy of his life, the core of his identity.  He was going to lose his Father, Jesus was losing his spiritual centre, his very self.

When Jesus called this young man to give up his money, the man started to grieve, because money was for him what the Father was for Jesus.  It was the centre of his identity.  To lose his money would have been to lose himself - to lose what little sense he had of having covered the stain.

If you want God to be your Saviour, you have to replace what you're already looking to as a saviour.  Everybody's got something.  What is it for you?

If you want to be a Christian, of course you'll repent of your sins.  But after you've repented of your sins you'll have to repent of how you have used the good things in your life to fill the place where God should be.  If you want intimacy with God, if you want to get over this sense that something is missing, it will have to become God that you love with all your heart and strength.

This young man's problem is not his financial worth; it's his moral worth.  It's his sense that he doesn't need the grace of God.  Christians, you see, are people who know that their Christianity is impossible, a miracle - there's nothing natural about it, it flies in the face of all one's merits.  Everybody has to recognise that we have been resting our hopes on some form of personal merit.  And it's our personal merit, our moral worth, that keeps us from understanding the cross.

Think of the story of the teacher of the law in Mark 12 who asked "of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

This inquiry is designed to trip Jesus up, but it seems also to be sincere - he really does want to know the answer.  The teachers of the law were professional scribes and scholars of the law.  They spent their lives studing, classifying and categorizing it.  Some had discerned as many as 613 rules in the OT law.  And they were always trying o distinguish the lighter ones from the heavier ones.  The fundamental question was "Of all the hundreds of rules and commands, which one is the most important?"

Jesus answers with 2 commands from the Hebrew Scriptures.  The first is from Deuteronomy 6 verses 4 - 5.  This passage includes the shema, which pious Jews recited morning and evening, as well as the command to love God with all our being.  The second he takes from Leviticus 19 verse 18, to love our neighbour as much as we love ourselves.  Thus Jesus boils down all of the law of God into one principle - love, directed to God and to others.  Here Jesus is going to the very heart of the core dilemma of ethics.  Jesus is not so much picking one or two rules over the others, nor is he choosing love over law, but rather he is showing that love is what fulfills the law.  The law is not being fulfilled unless it is obeyed as a way of giving and showing love to God or others.

The man's reaction? The teacher admits that these 2 commands are the most important.  His reference to the burnt offerings and sacrifices shows that he realizes that these cannot make up for sins.  Here we see him coming to recognize what an impossible standard the law gives us - that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a good man to satisfy the law.  The closer he gets to seeing this, the closer he is to figuring out the gospel.  If we concentrate on rules and regulations exclusively, we can begin to feel pretty righteous, but when we look at the heart attitude that the law really is requiring and getting at, we begin to realize how much we need grace and mercy.  

And what was Jesus' assessment.  "You are not far from the kingdom of God."  On the surface it was almost the same answer he gave the rich young man - "One thing you lack" - yet that reply was met with something closer to nausea.  Similar underlying questions, similar answers, completely different responses.  Only one of them could see the trap.

It's not a coincidence that for every one time Jesus wants about building our lives on sex and romance, he warns 10 times about money.  

Notice Jesus as he talked with the rich young ruler.  He "looked at him and loved him."  Why was Jesus' heart suddenly filled with love?  Jesus was a loving man of course, but this explicit statement of his tenderness toward a specific person is rare in Gospel narratives.  Did Jesus love him for his leadership potential?  Was it because of what the man said?  

Jesus looks at him and identifies with him.  Jesus, too is a rich young man, far richer than this man can imagine.  Jesus has lived in the incomprehensible glory, wealth, love and joy of the Trinity from all eternity.  He has already left that wealth behind him.  Paul says that though Jesus Christ was rich, for our sakes he became poor (2 Corinthians 8 verse 9).

And I'm going into a poverty deeper than anyone has ever known, Jesus says.  I am giving it all away.  Why?  For you.  Now, you give away everything to follow me.  If I gave away my 'big all' to get to you, can you give your 'little all' to follow me?  I won't ask you to do anything I haven't already one.  I'm the ultimate Rich Young Ruler who has given away the ultimate wealth to get you.  Now you need to give away yours to get me."

Jesus says, "My power is always moving away from people, who have power and mone.  My power is always moving toward people who are giving it away, as I did.  Where do you want to live?"

Chapter 12 The Ransom

Jesus does not leave any doubt about what he came to do.  He came to die.  He tells his disciples repeatedly that this is the case.  In fact, by chapter 10 he has already predicted his death twice: first in March 8 after Peter had said "You are the Christ" and again in chapter 9.  But just in case the disciples have missed it Jesus repeats it in chapter 10.  This time Jesus gives us more details about his death than he had previously.  For the first time we are told that his death will be in Jerusalem, and that both Jews and Gentiles will reject him.  Chapter 8 speaks only of the Jewish religious leaders and it speaks more generally about being delivered in to the hands of "men".  In chapter 8 he had said he would be "rejected" by the priests and scribes, but now he reveals that they will "condemn him to death".  This legal term indicates that he will be tried and executed within the criminal justice system.  His depiction of his final days also becomes more graphic and violent" the will "mock ... spit ... flog" him. Jesus knew his death was absolutely central to both his identity and his purpose on earth.  For the first time Jesus tells us not only that he will die but why he will do so - verse 45 "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Jesus' purpose was to die and be a sacrifice.  Jesus' choice of the word "come" is a strong giveaway that he existed before he was born: He came into the world.  By saying "did not come to be served" he assumes that he had every right to expect to be honoured and served when he came, though he did not exercise that privilege.

"To give his life as a ransom for many" sums up the reason why he has to die.  Jesus came to be a substitutionary sacrifice.  Think of the word "for" in the phrase "a ransom for many".  In Greek it's the word "anti" which means "instead of", "in place of", "substitute".  Ransom - in English we use the word in relation to kidnapping.  But here it translates a Greek word, "lutron" that meant to buy the freedom of a slave or a prisoner".  The ransomer would make a huge sacrificial payment that matched the value, or paid the debt of the slave or the prisoner in order to procure his or her freedom.  Jesus came to pay that kind of ransom.  Jesus is saying I will pay the ransom that you couldn't possibly pay, and it will procure your freedom".  The payment is Jesus' death on the cross.

Jesus didn't have to die despite God's love; he had to die because of God's love. And it had to be this way because all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice.

God created the world in an instant, and it was a beautiful process.  He re-created the world on the cross - and it was a horrible process.  That's how it works.  Love that really changes things and redeems things is always a substitutionary sacrifice.

Mark chapter 10 verses 35 - 36 - James and John's request for special places beside Jesus.

To James and John "in our glory" means "when you are seated on your throne" in which case the people on the right and the left are like the prime minister and the chief of staff.  John and James are saying "When you take power, we would like the top places in your cabinet."  Here's the irony of their request.  What was Jesus' moment of greatest glory? Where does Jesus most show forth the glory of God's justice?  And were does he reveal most profoundly the glory of God's love.  On the Cross.

When Jesus is at the actual moment of his greatest glory, there will be somebody on the right and the left, but they will be criminals being crucified.  Jesus says to John and James; You have no idea what you're asking.

He speaks to them of the cup and the baptism.  In the Hebrew Scriptures cup is almost always a metaphor for the just judgment of God against evil.  Similarly Jesus uses the word baptism in the older sense of an overwhelming experience, an immersion.  Jesus is saying "I am paying that ransom.  I am going to drink that cup.  I am going to bridge that gap.  I will take the just judgement on all human evil. I  will take the overwhelming experience of being condemned so that you can be free from all condemnation."  But they don't get it.

Verses 38 - 45  For the disciples, this is yet another lesson on substitutionary sacrifice.  When we read this we are supposed to be saying "what are we missing right now?"

When you see how John and James respond, and you realize how hard it is for anybody to take in the magnitude of what the cross really means, you will be in your way to attaining the gift of humility.  At some level, your normal assumptions, your pride and your egotistical way of thinking are blinding you to the truth.  

"You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and their high officials exercise authority over them.  Not so with you."  Jesus is talking about how most people try to influence society, to get their way.  They lord it over others.  They seek power and control.  If I have the power, if I have the wealth, the connections, then I can get my way." 

When Jesus says "Not so with you", what do you think he means?  Is he saying we must withdraw and having nothing to do with society?  No.  Actually the principle that he's laing out rather explicitly here was already laid out earlier, in Jeremiah 29.  The Israelite nation had been destroyed by the Babylonian empire and many of the people had been taken by force to Babylon.  What was their attitude supposed to be toward Babylonian society, in which they were exiles?  They could have tried to just keep to themselves and have nothing to do with it.  Or they could have tried to infiltrate Babylon and use guerrilla tactics to take power.  But what did God ay to them?  Jeremiah 29 verse 7 "Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.  Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."  That is, I want you to seek the prosperity of Babylon.  I want you to make it a great city to live in.  I want you to serve your neighbours - even though their language is different and they don't believe what you believe.  And I don't want you to do this merely out of a sense of duty.  "Pray for it" is another way of saying "love it".  Love that city, pray for it, seek to make it a prosperous, peaceful city, the greatest place to live.  If Babylon prospers through your service to it, you prosper too.

"For you, God says, the route to gaining influence is not taking power.  Influence gained through power and control doesn't really change society; it doesn't change hearts.  I'm calling you to a totally different approach.  Be so sacrificially loving that the people around you, who don't believe what you believe, will soon be unable to imagine the place without you.  They will trust you because they see that you're not only out for yourself, but out for them, too.  When they voluntarily begin to look up to you because of the attractiveness of your service and love, you'll have real influence.  It will be an influence given to you by others, not taken by you from others."  Who is the model for that way of gaining influence?  It's Jesus himself, of course.  How did he respond to his enemies?  He didn't call down legions of angels to fight them.  He died for their sins and as he was dying he prayed for them.  And if at the very heart of your worldview is a man dying for his enemies, then the way you're going to win influence in society is through service rather than power and control.

If I lead an unselfish life primarily to make myself happy, then I'm not leading an unselfish life.  I'm not doing these acts of kindness for others I'm ultimately doing them for myself.  We are being encouraged, then, to live unselfish lives for selfish reasons, which doesn't make sense.

How can e escape this self-referential trap and truly become unselfish?  If secularism, psychology and relativism on the one hand and religion and moralism on the other don't actually give us what we need to be unselfish, what does?  The answer is, we need to look somewhere else besides ourselves.  We need to look at Jesus.  If he is indeed a substitutionary sacrifice, if he has paid for our sin, if he has proved to our insecure, skittish little hearts that we are worth everything to him, then we have everything we need in him.  It's all a gift to us by grace.  We don't do good things in order to connect to God or to feel better about ourselves.  What a meager upgrade to our self-image these good deeds would bring, compared with what we receive from understanding why Jesus died for us and how much he loves us.  Now you do not need to help people, but you want to help them, to resemble the One who did so much for you, to bring him delight.  Whether you think they are worthy of your service doesn't come into it. Only the gospel gives you a motivation for unselfish living that doesn't rob you of the benefits of unselfishness even as you enact it.

Chapter 13 The Temple

Mark 11 - when Jesus rode into Jerusalem, people laid down their cloaks on the road in front of him and hailed him as a king coming in the name of the house of David.  This type of parade was culturally appropriate in that era.  A king would ride into town publicly and be hailed by cheering crowds.  But Jesus deliberately departed from the script and did something very different.  He didn't ride in on a powerful war horse the way a king would; he was mounted on a polos, that is, a colt or a small donkey.  Here was Jesus Christ, the King of authoritative, miraculous power, riding into town on a steed fit for a child or a hobbit.  In this way Jesus let it be known that he was the One prophesied in Zechariah, the great Messiah to come - Zechariah 9 verse 9.

When Jesus arrived at Jerusalem, he went to the temple and things got a little bit more complicated.

Mark mentions that Jesus "entered the temple area".  Why?  When you stepped inside the temple door, the first area you got to was the court of the Gentiles - the ethne or "nations".  This was the only part where non-Jews were allowed.  It was the biggest section of the temple and you had to go through it to get to the rest.  All the business operations of the temple were set up there.  When Jesus walked in, he would immediately have seen great throngs of people buying and selling animals at dozens of stalls and exchanging foreign currencies at money changer's tables.  Thousands of people flooded into Jerusalem bringing and buying tens of thousands of animals to be sacrificed.  255,000 lambs were bought, sold and sacrificed in the temple courts.  And this was the place where the Gentiles were supposed to find God through quiet reflection and prayer.

Jesus' reaction to all this was to start throwing the furniture over.  He quoted from the prophet Isaiah in reply to the leaders asking him what he was doing.  "My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations" - that is, for the Gentiles.  We are told this amazed those who heard him.  Why?  For one thing, it was popularly believed that when the Messiah showed up he would purge the temple of foreigners.  Instead, here is Jesus clearing the temple for the Gentiles - acting as their advocate.  Jesus was challenging the sacrificial system altogether and saying that the Gentiles - the pagan, unwashed Gentiles - could now go directly to God in prayer.  This was amazing because the people knew the history of the tabernacle and the temple.

The story of the temple starts all the way back in the Garden of Eden.  That primal garden was a sanctuary; it was the place where the presence of God dwelled.  It was a paradise, because death, deformity, evil and imperfection cannot coexist with God's presence.  In the presence of God there is shalom, absolute flourishing, fulfillment, joy and bliss.  But when the first human beings decided to build their lives on other things besides God, to let other things besides God give them their ultimate meaning and significance, paradise was lost.  As Adam and Eve were banished from the sanctuary of God, they turned around and saw "a flaming sword flashing back and forth." (Genesis 3 verse 24).  No one could ever get past this flaming sword that barred the way back into the presence of God.

Turning from God has had dreadful consequences.  Building our lives on other things - on power, status, acclaim, family, race, nationality - has caused conflicts, wars, violence, poverty, disease and death.  We've trampled on another; we've trampled on this earth.  that means it's not enough just to say, "Sorry may I please get back into the presence of God?"  If you've been the victim of a heinous crime, if you have suffered violence and the perpetrator (or even the judge) says, "Sorry, can't we just let it go?" you would say, "No, that would be an injustice"  Your refusal would rightly have nothing to do with bitterness or vengeance.  If you have been badly wronged, you know that saying sorry is not enough.  Something else is required - some kind of costly payment must be made to put things right.

The flaming sword is the sword of eternal justice and it will not fail to exact payment.  Nobody can get back into the presence of God unless they go under the sword, unless they pay for the wrong that has been done.  But who could survive the sword?  No one.  And if no one can survive the sword, then how will we ever get back into the presence of God?

These questions remained in spite of the fact that God established a provisional solution for his chosen people, the Israelites first through the tabernacle and then the temple.  In the middle of the temple was the holy of holies.  It was a small space covered by a thick veil, to shield people from the shekina presence of God.  Remember, God's immediate presence was fatal to human beings.  Just once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the high priest could go inside briefly but only if he carried a blood sacrifice.  Why?  Because there was no way back into the presence of God without going under the sword.  Even then the blood sacrifice was only inadequately symbolic of the true atoning work that had to happen.  What's more, it didn't extend access to the rest of us - those not part of the Jewish people.  That tabernacle, the temple and the whole sacrificial system - the only solution to the problem of the sword and the only access, however limited, to the presence of God - were only for the Israelites.  So when Jesus quoted Isaiah to imply that the Gentiles could get access to the presence of God, the people were amazed.

Yet the prophets kept promising that someday the glory of God would cover the earth as the waters fill the sea - in other words, the whole world would become a holy of holies.  The whole earth would be filled with the glory and presence of God again.  And people from all nations, races, backgrounds and social classes would be welcome in that presence.

How would they get past the sword?

Isaiah 53 verse 8 "He will be cut off from the land of the living."  Revelation, when John looks at the throne, the place of ultimate power in the universe, why does he see a slaughtered lamb?  Because the death of Jesus Christ - the Lamb of God - is the greatest royal triumph in the history of the cosmos.  When Jesus went under the sword, it broke his body, but it also broke itself.  Jesus took the sword for you and me.  That's why at the moment Jesus died, the veil that covered the holy of holies was ripped from to bottom (Mark 15 verse 38).  It wasn't just ruined; it was made obsolete, so that now we all have access to the presence of God.  The flaming sword claimed its victim; the veil was parted; and the way back into the garden was permanently reopened.

What shocked the people more than the turning of the tables was that Jesus was overturning the sacrificial system of the temple and opening the way into the presence of God for everyone.

Jesus actually visited the temple twice.  He went there briefly upon his arrival in Jerusalem, then stayed that night with his disciples in Bethany, a couple of miles outside the city. The next day he came back into Jerusalem to visit the temple again (this is when Jesus overturned the tables) and on their way into the city Mark records the story of the fig tree (verses 12 - 14).

Middle Eastern fig trees bore two kinds of fruit.  As the leaves were starting to come in the spring, before the figs came, the branches bore little nodules, which were abundant and very good to eat.  Travelers liked to pick them off and eat them as they made their journey.  If you found a fig tee that had begun to sprout leaves but had none of the delicious nodules, you would know that something was wrong.  It might look ok from a distance because the leaves had emerged, but if it had no nodules it was diseased or maybe even dying inside.  Jesus seizes the opportunity to provide a private, memorable object lesson, a parable against hollow religiousity with the fig tree as a visual aid.

Jesus finds the fig tree not doing its appointed job.  The tree became a perfect metaphor for Israel and beyond that, for those claiming to be God's people but who do not bear fruit for him.  Jesus was returning to a place that was religiously very busy, just like most churches are: tasks, committees, noise, people coming and going lots of transactions.  But the busyness contained no spirituality.  Nobody was actually praying.  There are many things we do that can appear to be signs of real belief but can grow without real heart change.  Evidently we can be very busy in church activities without real heart change and without real compassionate involvement with others.

Later that day, Jesus would clear the temple of all that fruitless activity.  He would take the private object lesson of the fig tree and turn it into a necessary public spectacle.  Jesus is saying that he wants more than busyness; he wants the kind of character change that only come from realizing that you have been ransomed.  

There is a final irony to all of this.  Jesus, who unites such apparent extremes of character into such an integrated and balanced whole, demands an extreme response from every one of us.  He forces our hand at every turn in the story.  This man who throws open the gates of his kingdom to everyone, then warns the most devout insiders that their standing in the kingdom is in jeopardy without fruitfulness, is forever closing down our options.  This man who can be weakened by a touch in a crowd on his way to bring a little girl back from the dead is a man you dare not tear your eyes from.

He is both the rest and the storm, both the victim and the wielder of the flaming sword and you must accept him or reject him on the basis of both.  Either you'll have to kill him or you'll have to crown him.  Those teachers of the law who began plotting to kill Jesus at the end of this episode in the temple - they may have been dead wrong about him, but their reaction makes perfect sense.

Chapter 14 The Feast

For Jews the Passover is an annual meal that commemorates a defining moment in the history of Israel.  More than a millennium before the time of Jesus, the Israelites had been enslaved to Egypt's pharaoh, trapped in miserable bondage.  After sending many plagues to Egypt to loosen the pharaoh's opressive grip on Israel, one night God sent the final plague; he unsheathed the sword of divine justice.  And this justice would fall on everyone.  In every home in Egypt - of Jews and Egyptians alike - someone would die under the wrath of justice.  The only way for your family to escape was to put your faith in God's sacrificial provision, namely, you had to slay a lamb and put the blood on the doors as a sign of your faith in God.  In every home that night there would either be a dead child or a dead lamb.  When justice came down, either it fell on your family or you took shelter under the substitute, under the blood of the lamb.  If you did accept this shelter then death passed over you and you were saved.  You were saved only on the basis of faith in a substitutionary sacrifice.  

This is how God delivered the Israelites and led them into freedom, into the Promised Land.  Every year the Passover meal commemorated this deliverance (the exodus) which had been the most important moment in the life of Israel as a nation and as a people.

Mark 14 verses 12 - 16.  The Passover meal had to be prepared in a certain way and had a distinct form  It included 4 points at which the presider, holding a glass of wine, got up and explained the feast's meaning.  The 4 cups of wine represented 4 promises made by God in Exodus 6 verses 6 and 7.  These promises were for rescue from Egypt, for freedom from slavery, for redemption by God's divine power and for a renewed relationship with God.  The third cup came at a point when the meal was almost completely eaten.  The presider would use words from Deuteronomy 26 to bless the elements - the bread, the herbs, the lamb - by explaining how they were symbolic reminders of various aspects of the early Israelites' captivity and deliverance.  

Jesus was the presider at this Passover meal with the disciples and Mark recounts what happened when Jesus raised the third cup - verses 22 - 25

Jesus departs from the script!  He takes the bread and says "This is my body".  In other words "This is the bread of my affliction, the bread of my suffering, because I'm going to lead the ultimate exodus and bring you the ultimate deliverance from bondage."  It was an oath - taken very seriously and was literally marked with blood.  You were making a covenant - a solemn relationship of obligation - between you and another party.  Like signing a contract.  But this covenant was established and sealed by killing an animal, cutting it in half and walking between the pieces as you stated your oath.  This was a very vivid way of making the covenant binding.  Verses 23 - 25  Jesus' words mean that as a result of his substitutionary sacrifice there is now a new covenant between God and us.  The basis of this relationship is Jesus' own blood "my blood of the covenant."  When he announced that he will not eat or drink until he meets us in the kingdom of God Jesus is promising that he is unconditionally committed to us.

With these simple gestures of holding up the bread and the wine with the simple words "This is my body ... this is my blood" Jesus is saying that all the earlier deliverance, the earlier sacrifices, the lambs at Passover were pointing to himself.  Just as the first Passover was observed the night before God redeemed the Israelites from slavery through the blood of the lambs, this Passover meal was eaten the night before God redeemed the world from sin and death through the blood of Jesus.

Whe Jesus stood up to bless the food, he held up bread.  All Passover meals had bread.  He blessed the wine - all Passover meals had wine.  But not one of the Gospel mentions a main course.  There is no mention of lamb at this Passover meal. Passover was not a vegetarian meal.  There was no lamb on the table because the Lamb of God was at the table.  Jesus was the main course.  John 1 verse 29, Isaiah 53 verses 6, 7 and 12.

On the cross Jesus got what we deserved: The sin, guilt and brokenness of the world fell upon him.  He loved us so much he took divine justice on himself so that we could be passed over forever.  

All love, all real, life-changing love, is substitutionary sacrifice.  

The first Passover meal in Egypt was an actual meal.  It was not enough that a lamb was slain and its blood put on the doorposts.  The lamb also had to be eaten; it had to be taken in.  In the same way, the Lord's Supper is a way of "taking in" the death of Christ for yourself and appropriating it personally.

"While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples saying, "Take it, this is my body." verse 22

Jesus says, "Take it".  He lets us know that we have to take what he is doing for us.  We have to receive it actively.  You don't get the benefit of food unless you take it in and digest it.  To be nourished by a meal, you have to eat it.  Taking it is the same as saying "This is the real food I need - Christ's unconditional commitment to me."

The "mealness" of the Lord's Supper is a reminder that no one can appropriate the benefits of Jesus' death unless he calls them into a personal relationship with him.  Jesus is saying that we need a personal relationship with him if all the benefits of his perfect, substitutionary, sacrificial suffering are to come to us.

The Jews celebrated each Passover by eating the feast with their families.  The Passover is  a family meal.  Jesus was creating an altogether new family with his disciples.  

The Lord's Supper points toward our future with Jesus.  As he presides over the Passover with his disciples, he tells them the rest of the story of the world in 2 sentences This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many ... I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God."  He is saying that this Passover meal makes the ultimate feast possible and in so doing, draws an inexorable arc between the event of the ensuing 3 days and their consummation in the future.

If you trust in Jesus' substitutionary sacrifice, the greatest longings of your heart will be satisfied on the day you sit down for that eternal feast in the promised kingdom of God.

Chapter 15 The Cup

Mark 14 verses 32 - 36 Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane

Jesus opens his heart to his disciples, to God, to the readers of Mark's Gospel and lays bare his struggles, his agony, his fears about facing death.  He turns to God and pleads, "Is there a way this cup can be taken from me?  Is there any way I can be let off the hook?  Is there any way I can get out of this mission?"  Up to this point Jesus had been completely in control.  Nothing seems to have surprised him so far.  Jesus always knows what's going on.  But all of a sudden we read that "he began to be deeply distressed."  The Greek word translated "deeply distressed" actually means "astonished."  But here, suddenly, something he sees, something he realizes, something he experiences, stuns the eternal Son of God.

Jesus is also, according to the text "troubled."  The Greek verb here means "to be overcome with horror."  He says "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death."

Something happened in the garden - Jesus saw, felt, sensed something and it shocked the unshockable Son of God.  He was facing something beyond physical torment, even beyond physical death - something so much worse.  He was smothered by a mere whiff of what he would go through on the cross.  Didn't he know he was going to die?  Yes, of course he knew that; he had told the disciples so repeatedly.  But now he is beginning to taste what he will experience on the cross and it goes far beyond physical torture and death.  He says "take this cup from me."

In Hebrew scriptures the cup is a metaphor for the wrath of God on human evil.  It's an image of divine justice poured out on justice.  All his life, because of Jesus' eternal dance with his Father and the Spirit , whenever he turned to the Father, the Spirit flooded him with love.  What happened visibly and audibly at Jesus' baptism and at his transfiguration happened invisibly, inaudibly every time he prayed.  But in the garden of Gethsemane he turns to the Father and all he can see before him is wrath, the abyss, the chasm, the nothingness of the cup.  God is the source of all love, all life, all light, all coherence.  Therefore exclusion from God is exclusion from the source of all light, all love, all coherence.  Jesus began to experience the spiritual, cosmic, infinite disintegration that would happen when he became separated from his Father on the cross.  Jesus began to experience merely a foretaste of that and he staggered.  

"I don't like the idea of the wrath of God.  I want a God of love."  The problem is that if you want a loving God, you have to have an angry God.  Loving people can get angry, not in spite of their love but because of it.  If fact, the more closely and deeply you love people in your life, the angrier you can get.  When you see people who are harmed or abused, you get mad.  If you see people abusing themselves, you get mad at them, out of love.  Your senses of love and justice are activated together, not in opposition to each other.  If you see people destroying themselves or destroying other people and you don't get mad, it's because you don't care.  You're too absorbed in yourself, too cynical, too hard.  The more loving you are, the more ferociously angry you will be at whatever harms your beloved.  And the greater the harm, the more resolute your opposition will be. 

When we think of God's wrath, we usually think of God's justice and that is right.  Those who care about justice get angry when they see justice being trampled upon and we should expect a perfectly just God to do the same.  But we don't ponder how much his anger is also a function of his love and goodness.  The Bible tells us that God loves everything he has made.  That's one of the reasons he's angry at what's going on in his creation; he is angry at anything or anyone that is destroying the people and world he loves.  His capacity for love is so much greater than ours - and the cumulative extent of evil in the world is so vast  that the word wrath doesn't really do justice to how God rightly feels when he looks at the world.  So it makes no sense to say "I don't want a wrathful God, I want a loving God."  If God is loving and good, he must be angry at evil - angry enough to do something about it.

If you don't believe in a God of wrath, you have no idea of your value.  A god without wrath has no need to go to the cross and suffer incredible agony and die in order to save you.  Picture on the left a god who pays nothing in order to love you, and picture on the right the God of the Bible, who, because he's angry at evil, must go to the cross, absorb the debt, pay the ransom and suffer immense torment.  How do you know how much the  "free love" god loves you or how valuable you are to him?  Well, his love is just a concept.  You don't know at all.  This god pays no price in order to love you.  How valuable are you to the God of the Bible?  Valuable enough that he would go to these depths for you.   Your conception of God's love - and of our value in his sight - will only be as big as your understanding of his wrath.

When you look at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane he appears to be taking the first approach.  He's certainly not taking the way of detachment; he's pouring his heart out.  He's undone.  And he's honestly and desperately asking God to change the circumstances, praying "that if possible the hour might pass from him."  He cries out "Abba, Father ... everything is possible for ou.  Take this cup from me."  He's contending with the Father, asking him for a way out, asking for another way to rescue us without having to go personally under the flaming sword.

He's actually not taking his circumstances into his own hands.  In the end, he's obeying - relinquishing control over his circumstances an submitting his desires to the will of the Father.  He says to God, "Yet not what I will, but what you will."  He is wrestling but obeying in love.

He's begging the Father to carry out the mission some other way, but he doesn't ask him to abandon it altogether.  Why?  Because as horrible as the cup is, he knows that his immediate desire (to be spared) must bow before his ultimate one (to spare us).

Often what seem to be our deepest desires are really just our loudest desires.  But at one of the supreme moments of personal pain in the history of the world, Jesus doesn't do that.  He says, "Yet not what I will, but what you will."  He's not even saying to God, "I think you're wrong, but I'm going to let you win this one."  No; he's saying, "I trust you no matter what I'm feeling right now.  I know that your desires are ultimately my desires.  Do what we both know must be done."

And in so doing Jesus is absolutely obedient to the will of God.  Yet not what I will, but what you will.  Jesus is subordinating his loudest desires to his deepest desires by putting them in the Father's hands.  As if to say, "If the circumstances of life do not satisfy the present desires of my heart, I'm not going to suppress those desires, but I'm not going to surrender to them, either.  I know that they will only be satisfied, eventually in the Father.  I will trust and obey him, put myself in his hands and go forward."

Jesus doesn't deny his emotions, and he doesn't avoid the suffering.  He loves into the suffering.  In the midst of his suffering, he obeys for the love of the Father and for the love of us.

And when you see that, instead of perpetually denying your desires or changing your circumstances, you'll be able to trust the Father in your suffering.  You will be able to trust that because Jesus took the cup, your deepest desires and your actual circumstances are going to keep converging until they unite forever on the day of the eternal feast.

That love - whose obedience is wide and long and high and deep enough to dissolve a mountain of rightful wrath - is the love you've been looking for all your life.  No family love, no friend love, no mother love, no spousal love, no romantic love - nothing could possibly satisfy you like that.  All those other kinds of loves will let you down, this one never will.

Chapter 16 The Sword

All through the book of mark - and all through Matthew, Luke and John, too - Jesus is constantly talking about "the kingdom of heaven", "the kingdom of God" and also about "the kingdom of this world.  A kingdom is an administration - that is, a way of ordering things and getting things done.

The things the world puts at the bottom of its list are at the top of the kingdom of God's list.  And the things that are suspect in the kingdom of God are prized by the kingdom of this world.  What's at the top of the list of the kingdom of this world?  Power and money ("you who are rich"); success and recognition ("when all men speak well of you").  But what's at the top off God's list?  Weakness and poverty ("you who are poor"), suffering and rejection ("when men hate you").  The list is inverted in the kingdom of God.

These 2 kingdoms, these 2 administrations of reality, these 2 sets of priorities and values meet dramatically in the Garden of Gethsemane - Mark 14 verses 43 - 46.

The term kiss of death came into our English vocabulary from this incident.  The phrase means an intimacy with something that subsequently causes your destruction.

The problem is not that Judas is intimate with Jesus.  Intimacy with Jesus is always the kiss of life, never the kiss of death.  Judas' problem is that he's intimate with swords and clubs.  Why all the subterfuge?  Was he expecting that Jesus would be armed with swords and clubs too?  After all, Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, and any new kingdom had always used money, politics, military might or some combination of these to get into power.

How does the King react to this kiss and to his arrest?  Mark 14 verses 46 - 49

Judas seems to be expecting armed resistance, otherwise he and his squad wouldn't be coming in this fashion.  Jesus responds, "Am I leading a rebellion that that you'd have to come with firepower and deception to capture me?"  The word translated rebellion means a guerrilla movement that is using violent tactics (the sword) to overthrow the existing order of things and bring in a new order - a revolution.  Jesus is saying "If you come to me with swords, because you think I will retaliate with the sword, it shows you don't understand me at all.  The kingdom of God is different from the kingdom of this world."

What Judas and those with him do not understand is that Jesus is indeed leading a revolution but it is different kind of revolution and a much greater one that history has ever seen.  What happens in the kingdom of this world is that revolutions basically keep the same old thing on top of the list.  They're not real revolutions, money and power and politics always stay at the top.  Most revolutions have been merely a fine-tuning of the same old order. Every revolution brings a new set of people into power and then the next one puts a different set of people in power; he is bringing a totally different administration of reality - the kingdom of God.  Jesus is not a revolutionary you can stop with swords, because he's not about the sword all.  Judas doesn't get it.

But Judas is not the only one who doesn't get it.  We read that when Jesus is arrested "one of those standing near drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear."  In the Gospel of John we're told it was Peter.  Peter knows about the kingdom of God.  He has heard Jesus' teaching about it over a period of years.  Yet when push comes to shove, what's his instinct?  Pull out that sword.

We say we're on the side of justice, of peace, of fairness; but when a challenge arises, we feel for the sword hilt.  We merge the kingdom of this world - sword on top, then money, power, success, and recognition - into our philosophy whether it's Christianity or something else.  We settle for the kiss of death.  We're exactly like Peter.

To Peter and to all of us, Jesus is saying "My kingdom is not of this world.  It's completely different,  This is how I'm going to change things; I'm going to put others ahead of myself.  I'm going to love my enemies.  I'm going to serve and sacrifice for others.  I'm not going to repay evil with evil; I'm going to overcome evil with good.  I will give up my power, my life.  Weakness, poverty, suffering and rejection will now be at the top of the list.  My revolution comes without the sword; it is the first true revolution.

"Then everyone deserted him and fled."  Peter and the other disciples, who had spent years by his side, desert him at the first real test of their fortitude  One young man is so intent on saving his skin that when Judas' crowd grabs hold of his garment, he is willing to shed it and run away naked down the street.  In the Bible, nakedness is a sign of shame and disgrace and it's perfectly appropriate in this case: this man's an absolute coward so the shame of running home naked suits the occasion.  Everyone has failed Jesus.

By recounting this young man's naked flight from the garden Mark may be reminding us of another garden.  In the Garden of Eden too there were people who were given a test and they failed.  They were exposed as naked and fled in shame.  Centuries later, another garden and another test and everybody fails in one way or another. They're either waving swords around or fleeing in naked shame.

In the middle of this garden there's someone who is passing a test.  Why are all the other people fleeing and failing?  Their only reality is the world's sword.  they're afraid somebody is going to arrest them, kill them or start a revolution that will remove them from power.  But Jesus is standing firm and he's facing something even worse than the world's sword.  Remember that when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, they turned around and saw the flaming sword of justice, keeping them from ever going back.  Their sins separated them from God.  There's no way back into the presence of God unless someone goes under the sword of divine justice.  Jesus was in the garden facing the ultimate sword of divine justice and he stood firm for Adam and Eve, for me, for you.

On the cross Jesus is getting what we deserve so we can get what he deserves.  When you see that this great reversal is for you, when you see that he gave up all his cosmic wealth and came into our poverty so that you could be spiritually rich, it changes you.  The kingdom of this world teaches you to base your identity on status, money and power.  Without them your identity is gutted.  If you play by the rules of the kingdom of this world, you might do anything to keep your job.  Maybe even lie or cheat or stab others in the back.  But if you're starting to get rooted in the kingdom of God, you know losing your job is not going to be easy or pleasant, but you have learned that when weakness and suffering, poverty and rejection are near, the kingdom of God is near.  It's the time when you come to grips with your real treasure, your real identity.

Christians are free to take or leave money, power, recognition, and status.  How?  These things at the top of the kingdom of this world don't have to control them the same way anymore.  When you understand what Jesus has done for you, it frees you.  When you realise that you are made righteous by his grace and not by your achievement, and that you are loved in Jesus Christ, it changes the way you look at power, money and status; they don't control you anymore.

If you're trying to save yourself, trying to earn your own self esteem, trying to prove yourself, you'll either hate money and power too much or love them too much.  But if you know you're a sinner saved by sheer grace, you can take it or leave it.  You're free.  If money or power comes, there's a lot you can do with it.  But if it starts to go, you know that's one of the ways God's kingdom power is going to work in your life.  The sword is exiting from your life.  The compulsion is dissipating.  You work but your work does not define you.

If you're living for yourself, spending all your money on yourself, striving for power, focusing on your success and your reputation, you may be having a wonderful part, but according to the Bible, that kingdom is going to be inverted.  The days of that kingdom are numbered.

Chapter 17 The End

Mark 14 verses 53 - 59.  There's nothing more dramatic than to be on trial for your life, and no more dramatic moment in a trial than when the defendant is called to testify on the witness stand.  And perhaps there's never been a more dramatic and shocking testimony given on a witness stand than the one Jesus Christ gave during his trial.

Mark 14 verses 60 - 62.  The high priest puts Jesus on the witness stand, and asks if he is the Christ (the "Messiah"), the Son of the Blessed One.  At other times in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has avoided similar lines of inquiry about his identity (Mark 7 verses 5 and 6) or turned the question back on the questioner (Mark 11 verse 29).  This time Jesus answers this central question of the Gospel of Mark head on - positively and fully.  "I am" said Jesus.  "And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."

By saying "I am" Jesus claims to be the Messiah, the promised one.  Jesus goes on to amplify the meaning of the label Messiah by identifying himself as the Son of Man and also by saying he will sit at the right hand of God.

"Son of Man" see Daniel 7 verse 13

"at his right hand" see Psalm 110 verse 1

In both of these allusions the Messiah comes as a judge.  In Daniel 7, the Son of Man comes from the throne of God to earth in the clouds of heaven to judge the world.  And the clouds of the heaven are not the same as the clouds of earth, just water vapor.  These clouds are the shekinah glory, the very presence of God.  Therefore by replying as he does, Jesus is saying "I will come to earth in the very glory of God and judge the entire world."  It's an astounding statement.  It's a claim to deity.

By his choice of text, Jesus is deliberately forcing us to see the paradox.  There's been an enormous reversal.  He is the judge over the entire world, being judged by the world.  He should be in the judgment seat and we should be in the dock, in chains.  Everything is turned upside down.

The response is explosive - Mark 14 verses 62 - 65.  The high priest rips his own garments apart, a sign of the greatest possible outrage, horror and grief.  And then the whole trial deteriorates.  In fact, it's no longer a trial; it's a riot.  The jurors and judges begin to spit on him and beat him.  In the middle of the trial, they go absolutely berserk.  He is instantly convicted of blasphemy and condemned as worthy of death.

But the court of the Sanhedrin did not have the power to pass this death sentence.  It was empowered to judge many cases, but capital cases needed the confirmation of the Roman procurator.  As soon as they are able, the Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to Pilate, the governor appointed by Rome, so that he can put Jesus to death.  

Mark 15 verses 1 - 5.  Jesus is on trial again, this time before Pilate.  The religious leaders offer a battery of charges.  Jesus does not answer them, to the marvel of Pilate.  He vacillates and stalls in an attempt to get out of it.  But he has another card to play; He may be able to escape the responsibiity of a decision through the time-honoured custom of releasing a prisoner amid a time of general rejoicing.

Mark 15 verses 6 - 10.  Pilate is still trying to find a way out.  He knows that the religious leaders are only accusing Jesus out of envy; they don't have a case.  Barabbas is a violent man who has been convicted of murder.  Will Pilate knowingly free a guilty man and condemn an innocent one? 

Mark 15 verses 11 - 15.  Pilate is extremely reluctant to execute Jesus, but despite pronouncing that Jesus is not guilty of a capital offense, he hands him over to be crucified.

Crucifixion was designed to be the most humiliating and gruesome method of execution.  The Romans reserved it for their worse offenders.  It was a protracted, bloody, public spectacle of extreme pain that usually ended in a horrible death by shock or asphyxiation.  But it is noteworthy that Mark gives us very few of the gory details.  He aims his spotlight away from the physical horrors of Jesus' ordeal in order to focus it on the deeper meaning behind the events. - verses 20 - 24.

Although Mark makes no explicit reference to the fulfillment of prophecy, his choice of wording here shows that he is thinking of Psalm 22.  Imagine what Jesus' followers felt as they watched this scene around the cross, as they watched the man they had followed for years being crucified.  Here was a man who calmed storms, banished sickness and cheated death by the miraculous power of his word.

Verses 25 - 33 In their depictions of Jesus' death Mark and the other 3 Gospel writers show a consistent concern for what visual artists call "values" - that is, the interplay and contrast between darkness and light.  All 4 Gospel writers take pains to show us that all the critical events of Jesus' death happened in the dark.  The betrayal and the trial before the Sanhedrin all happened at night, of course, but now at the actual moment of Jesus' death, though it is daytime, an inexplicable darkness descends.  "At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour."  The sixth hour was noon; the ninth hour was 3 pm.  So from 12 to 3 in the afternoon as Jesus was dying there was total darkness.

This was a supernatural darkness.

In the Bible, darkness during the day is a recognised sign of God's displeasure and judgement.  Think of the penultimate plague at the time of the first Passover in Exodus 10 verses 21 - 23.  So when this darkness fell, we know that God was acting in judgment.  Who was he judging?  Mark 15 verses 33 - 34.  Jesus said "My God, my God."  On the cross Jesus was forsaken by God.  That's the language of intimacy.  In the Bible "my God" is covenantal address.  It was the way God said someone could address him if he or she had a personal relationship with him.  "You shall be my people and I shall be your God."

But this forsakenness, this loss, was between the Father and the Son, who had loved each other from all eternity.  This love was infinitely long, absolutely perfect and Jesus was losing it.  Jesus was being cut out of the dance.

Jesus, the Maker of the world, was being unmade.  Why?  Jesus was experiencing our judgment day.  It wasn't a rhetorical question.  And the answer is; For you, for me, for us.  Jesus was forsaken by God, so that we would never have to be.  The judgment that should have fallen on us fell instead on Jesus.

Physical darkness brings disorientation, but according to the Bible, so does spiritual darkness.  Spiritual darkness comes when we turn away from God as our true light and make something else the center of our life.

The Bible sometimes compares God to the sun.  The sun is a source of visual truth, because by it we see everything.  And the sun is a source of biological life, because without it nothing could live.  And God, the Bible says, is the source of all truth and all life.  If you orbit around God, then your life has truth and vitality.  You are in the light.  But if you turn away from God and orbit around something else - your career, a relationship, your family, as the source of your warmth and your hope, the result is spiritual darkness.  You are turning away from the truth, away from life, toward darkness.

When you are in spiritual darkness, although you may feel your life is headed in the right direction, you are actually profoundly disoriented.

If anything but God is more important to you, you have a problem with direction.  It's impossible to discern where you're going, let alone where you ought to be going.  Money, career, love - for a period of time you may feel you have something to live for.  But if you actually get the thing you have been seeking, you suddenly realise that it's not big enough for your soul.  It doesn't produce its own light.  If you centre on anything but God, you suffer a loss of identity.  Your identity will be fragile and insecure, because it's based on the things you center your life on.  It's based on human approval.  It's based on how well you perform.  You don't really know who you are.  In the darkness you can't see yourself.  In spiritual darkness you are isolated.  You are wrapped up in the things that you're living for, so you're always scared or angry or proud or driven or full of self-pity.  As a result, you become isolated from other people.

When God returns he will judge every action, every thought, every longing - everything our heart has ever produced.  And if there is anything imperfect, then we will not be able to remain in his presence.  And being out of the presence of God, who is all light and all truth, means utter darkness and eternal disintegration.  

This was our trajectory and Jesus' death was the only way to alter it.  This is why Jesus had to go to the cross.  He fell into the complete darkness for which we were headed.  He died the death we should have died so that we can be saved from this judgment and instead live in the light and presence of God.  Mark 15 verses 35 - 39

The curtain said loudly and clearly that it is impossible for anyone sinful - anyone in spiritual darkness - to come into God's presence.

At the moment Jesus died this massive curtain was ripped open.  The tear was from top to bottom, just to make clear who did it.  This was God's way of saying "This is the sacrifice that ends all sacrifices, the way is now open to approach me."  Now that Jesus has died, anybody who believes in him can see God, connect to God.  The barrier is gone for good.  Our trajectory has been permanently redirected toward God.  And that's only possible because Jesus has just paid the price for our sin.  Anybody who believes can go in now.

Mark immediately sows us the first person who went in - the centurion.  His confession, "Surely this man was the Son of God" is momentous.  Why?  Because the first line in the first chapter of Mark refers to "Jesus Christ, the Son of God."  Up to this point in Mark no human being had figured that out.  The disciples had called him the Christ, though in the prevailing culture the Christ was not considered to be divine.  All along, Jesus' teachings and acts of power - and even his testimony in front of the chief priests - had been pointing to the fact that he was divine.  All along, Jesus' teachings and acts of power and even his testimony in front of the chief priests - had been pointing to the fact that he was divine.  And people had been asking "Who is this?"  But the first person to get it was the centurion who presided over his death.

He was a Roman.  The only person a loyal Roman would ever call "Son of God" was Caesar - but this man gave the title to Jesus.  And he was a hard character.  Centurions were not aristocrats who got military commission; they were enlisted men who had risen through the ranks.  So this man had seen death and had inflicted it, to a degree that you and I can hardly imagine.  Here was a hardened brutal man.  Yet something had penetrated his spiritual darkness.  He became the first person to confess the deity of Jesus Christ.

Contrast with everyone else around the cross.  The disciples - who had been taught by Jesus repeatedly and at length that this day would come - were completely confused and stymied. The religious leaders had looked at the very deepest wisdom of God and rejected it.

What penetrated the centurion's darkness?  The centurion heard Jesus' cry and saw how Jesus died.

Christianity is the only religious faith that says that God himself actually suffered, actually cried out in suffering.  To Jesus' followers assembled around the cross, it certainly seemed senseless; that there was no good in it at all.  But in fact they came to realise that Jesus' suffering was of immense good to them, as can we.  Why?  Because they would eventually see that they had been looking right at the greatest act of God's love, power and justice in history.  God came into the world and suffered and died on the cross in order to save us.  It is the ultimate proof of his love for us.

And when you suffer, you may be completely in the dark about the reason for your own suffering.  It may seem as senseless to you as Jesus' suffering seemed to the disciples.  But the cross tells you what the reason isn't.  It can't be that God doesn't love you; it can't be that he has no plan for you.  It can't be that he has abandoned you.  Jesus was abandoned and paid for our sins, so that God the Father would never abandon you.  The cross proves that he loves you and understands what it means to suffer.  It also demonstrates that God can be working in your life even when it seems like there is no rhyme or reason to what is happening.

Jesus Christ not only died th death we should have died - he also lived the life we should have lived but can't.  He was perfect obedience in our place.  There is forgiveness and grace for you.

Chapter 18 The Beginning

What made the Christian faith different?  Christians would say it is because of what happened after the leader of this movement was killed.  So what did happen to cause explosive growth in Christianity after its founder's death?  In the course of 300 years Christianity had spread through the entire Roman empire.

Mark 15 verses 37 - 43  Jesus died in mid-afternoon and the Sabbath began at sunset.  The Jewish law permitted no work on the Sabbath, which meant they could not bury the body of Jesus that night or the next day.  So Joseph goes to Pilate, hoping to be able to bury the body in time.  Joseph though a Pharisee shows enormous courage and independence of thought by asking for Jesus' body.

Mark 15 verses 44 - 47  Mark is certifying that Jesus was really dead.  Joseph of Arimathea is named here as an identified witness who actually ad Jesus' body wrapped up and sealed it in a tomb  A Roman centurion (who would be an expert) bore witness of Jesus' death to Pilate (who would be the legal authority on the matter).  Finally 2 women are cited as eyewitnesses to the burial.  So multiple experts and witnesses prove he was really dead.  

Mark 16 verses 1 - 3  - 3 times within a span of just 8 lines, Mark records the names of some women who witnessed these events: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses and Salome.  The repeated names of the women here are source citations - footnotes.  These women must have been alive at the time that Mark was writing or he wouldn't have cited their names repeatedly.  By including their names, Mark was saying to anyone reading this document "If you want to check out the truth of my story, go talk to these 3 women.  They're still alive and they can corroborate everything I have said."  So what is it that these women witness?  They have brought spices and are on their way to the tomb to finish the burial rites on Jesus' dead body.

Mark 16 verses 3 - 7  "He has risen!  He is not here."  Imagine how these women felt, what they were thinking, as they heard these words.  They had come to the tomb expecting to find a dead body.  Instead they heard the words "He has risen!  He is not here."

Mark8, Mark 9 and Mark 10 Jesus has said to his disciples "I will rise again on the third day."  Repetition.  On the third day after Jesus' death there are no male disciples around.  Nobody is expecting a resurrection.  The angel in front of the empty tomb had to remind the women: "You will see him, just as he told you."  

The resurrection was as inconceivable for the first disciples, as impossible for them to believe, as it is for many of us today.  The Greeks did not believe in resurrection; in the Greek worldview, the afterlife was liberation of the soul from the body.  For them resurrection would never be part of life after death.  For the Jews, some of them believed in a future general resurrection when the entire world would be renewed but they had no concept of an individual rising from the dead.  The people of Jesus' day were not predisposed to believe in resurrection any more than we are.

If Mark and the Christians were making up these stories to get their movement off the ground, they would never have written women into the story as the first eyewitnesses to Jesus' empty tomb.  The only possible reason for the presence of women in these accounts is that they really were present and reported what they saw.  The stone has been rolled away, the tomb is empty and an angel declares that Jesus is risen.

The angel then instructs the women "Go tell his disciples and Peter.  He is going ahead of you into Galilee.  There you will see him."

Jesus' resurrection body had "flesh and bones".  He was not a ghost.  The disciples were able to recognise him and to touch him.  He spoke with them.  But could they all have been having a group hallucination?  No because the disciples were not the only ones who saw and touched Jesus.  Paul makes a long list of people who claimed to have seen the risen Christ personally and notes that "most of them are still living" (1 Corinthians 15 verse 6).  How could Paul write that "Peter said he saw the risen Jesus" if Peter was saying "No I didn't"?

Paul mentions 5 appearances of the risen Christ, including 500 people at one "sighting".  7 appearances are recounted in 4 Gospels.  And Acts 1 verses 3 - 4 tells us that for 40 days Jesus appeared constantly to numerous groups of people.  The size of the groups and the number of the sightings make it virtually impossible to conclude that all these people had hallucinations.  Either they must have actually seen Jesus or hundreds of people must have been part of an elaborate conspiracy that lasted for decades.  Paul suggests to his readers that they can go and talk to any of the 400 witnesses they like.  If this was a hoax, it would have had to last for years, and each of the dozens of conspirators would have had to take the secret to his grave.

Moreover there has to be some explanation for how the cowardly group of disciples was transformed into a group of leaders.  Many of them went on to live sacrificial lives and many of them were killed for teaching that Jesus had been resurrected.

Jesus Christ came to pay the penalty for our sins.  That was an infinite sentence, but he must have satisfied it fully, because on Easter Sunday he walked out free.  The resurrection was God's way of stamping PAID IN FULL right across history so that nobody could miss it.

When Jesus cried out from the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he was echoing Psalm 22 which foretold the circumstances of the cross and what it would accomplish.  This same psalm predicted that Jesus would be mocked and that they would cast lots for his clothing.

Jesus' death means no death for us.  His resurrection means our resurrection.

The truth of the resurrection is of supreme and eternal importance.  It is the hinge upon which the story of the world pivots.

The resurrection means we can look forward with hope to the day our suffering will be gone.  But it even means that we can look forward with hope to the day our suffering will be glorious.  When Jesus shows the disciples his hands and his feet he is showing them his scars.  The last time the disciples saw Jesus, they thought those scars were ruining their lives.  The disciples had thought they were on a presidential campaign.  They thought that their candidate was going to win an they were going to be in the cabinet and when they saw the nails going into the hands and th feet and the spear going into his side they believed those wounds had destroyed their lives.  And now Jesus is showing them that in his resurrected body his scars are still there.

Why is this important?  Because now that they understand the scars, the sight and memory of them will increase the glory and joy of the rest of their lives.  Seeing Jesus Christ with his scars reminds them of what he did for them - that the scars they thought had ruined their lives actually saved their lives.  Remembering those scars will help many of them endure their own crucifixions.

KING'S CROSS by Timothy Keller

I read this book in 2 days journaling as I read.  I have to say that each chapter in this book is like a sermon in itself and sometimes you need to read it a couple of times to get the gist of what Timothy Keller is saying.  I have decided in reviewing this book to quote whole chunks simply because it is the easiest way at times to understand what he is saying.

Introduction

This book is an extended meditation on the historical Christian premise that Jesus' life, death and resurrection form the central event of cosmic and human history as well as the central organizing principle of our own lives.  Said another way, the whole story of the world - and of how we fit into it - is most clearly understood through a careful direct look at the story of Jesus.  My purpose here is to try to show, through his words and actions, how beautifully his life makes sense of ours.

Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses cites extensive evidence that for decades after Jesus' death and resurrection the people who were healed by Jesus, like the paralytic who was lowered through the roof; the person who carried the cross of Jesus, Simon of Cyrene; the women who watched Jesus being placed in the tomb, like Mary Magdalene; and the disciples who had followed Jesus for 3 years, like Peter and John - all of these participants in the life of Jesus continually and publicly repeated these incidents in great detail.  For decades these eyewitnesses told the stories of what happened to them.

Who was Mark? The earliest and most important source of an answer comes from Papias, bishop of Hierapolis until 130 AD who said that Mark had been a secretary and translator for Peter, one of the first 12 of Jesus' disciples or followers and "wrote accurately all that Peter remembered."  This testimony is of particular significance, since there is evidence that Papias knew John, another of Jesus' first and closest disciples personally.  Mark mentions Peter proportionately more than any of the other Gospels.  If you go through the book of Mark, you'll see that nothing happens in which Peter is not present.  The entire Gospel of Mark, then, is almost certainly the eyewitness testimony of Peter.

Mark is written in the present tense, often using words like "immediately" to pack the account full of action.  You can't help but notice the abruptness and breathless speed of the narrative.  This Gospel conveys then something important about Jesus.  He is not merely a historical figure but a living reality, a person who addresses us today.  In his very first sentence Mark tells us that God has broken into history.  His style communicates a sense of crisis, that the status quo has been ruptured.  We can't think of history as a closed system of natural causes anymore.  We can't think of any human system or tradition or authority as inevitable or absolute anymore,  Jesus has come; anything can happen now.  Mark wants us to see that the coming of Jesus calls for decisive action.  Jesus is seen as a man of action, moving quickly and decisively from event to event.  There is relatively little of Jesus' teaching in the Gospel of Mark - mainly we see Jesus doing.  Therefore we can't remain neutral; we need to respond actively.

PART ONE - THE KING - THE IDENTITY OF JESUS Chapter 1 The Dance

Mark 1 verses 1 - 4  Mark roots Jesus as deeply as possible in the historic, ancient religion of Israel.  Christianity, he implies, is not a completely new thing.  Jesus is the fulfillment of all the biblical prophets' longings and visions, and he is the one who will come to rule and renew the entire universe.

Mark 1 verses 9 - 11

In the sacred writings of Judaism there is only one place where the Spirit of God is likened to a dove - Targums, the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that the Jews of Mark's time read.  In Genesis 1 verse 2 the Spirit hovered over the face of the waters.  The Hebrew verb here means "flutter"; the Spirit fluttered over the face of the waters.  To capture this vivid image the rabbis translated the passage for the Targums like this: "And the earth was without form and empty and darkness was on the face of the deep and the Spirit of God fluttered above the face of the waters like a dove and God spoke: "Let there be light".  There are 3 parties active in the creation of the world: God, God's Spirit and God's Word through which he creates.  The same 3 parties are present at Jesus' baptism: The father who is the voice; the Son who is the word; and the Spirit fluttering like a dove.  Mark is deliberately pointing us back to the creation, to the very beginning of history.  Just as the original creation of the world was a project of the triune God, Mark says, so the redemption of the world, the rescue and renewal of all things that is beginning now with the arrival of the King, is also a project of the triune God.

When Jesus came out of the waters of baptism the Father envelops him and covers him with words of love "You are my Son whom I love with you I am well pleased."  Meanwhile the Spirit covers him with power.  This is what has been happening in the interior life of the Trinity from all eternity.  Mark is giving us a glimpse into the very heart of reality, the meaning of life, the essence of the universe.  Instead of self centeredness, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are characterised in their very essence by mutually self-giving love.  No person in the Trinity insists that the others revolve around him; rather each of them voluntarily circles and orbits around the others.

Different views of God have different implications.  If there's no God - if we are here by blind change, strictly as a result of natural selection - then what you and I call love is just a chemical condition of the brain.  Evolutionary biologists say there's nothing in us that isn't there because it helped our ancestors pass on the genetic code more successfully.  If you feel love, it's only because that combination of chemicals enables you to survive and gets your body parts in the places they need to be in order to pass on the genetic code.  That's all love is - chemistry.  On the other hand, if God exists but is unipersonal, there was a time when God was not love.  Before God created the world, when there was only one divine person because love can exist only in a relationship.  If a unipersonal God had created the world and its inhabitants, such a God would not in his essence be love.  Power and greatness possibly, but no love.  But if from all eternity, without end and without beginning, ultimate reality is a community of persons knowing and loving one another, then ultimate reality is about love relationships.

Why would God create us?  There's only one answer.  He must have created us not to get joy, but to give,  He must have created us to invite us into the dance, to say: If you glorify me, if you center your entire life on me, if you find me beautiful for who I am in myself, then you will step into the dance, which is what you are made for.  You are made not just to believe in me or to be spiritual in some general way, not just to pray and get a bit of inspiration when things are tough.  You are made to center everything in your life on me, to think of everything in terms of your relationship to me.  To serve me unconditionally.  That's where you'll find your joy.  That's what the dance is about.

Mark 1 verses 12 - 13.  When Jesus came out of the waters of baptism he is lead into the desert.  Mark treats Satan as a reality, not a myth.  To us, Satan is a personification of evil left over from a pre-scientific, superstitious society.  He's just a symbol now, an ironic way to deflect personal responsibility for evil.  But if you believe in God, in a good personal supernatural being, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that there are evil personal supernatural beings.  Satan never stops testing us.

We look at Adam and Eve and say "What fools - why did they listen to Satan?"  Yet we know we still have Satan's lie in our own hearts, because we're afraid of trusting God - of trusting any body, in fact.  We're stationary, because Satan tells us we should be - that's the way he fights the battle.

But God didn't leave us defenseless.  God said to Jesus "Obey me about the tree - only this time the tree was a cross - "and you will die."  And Jesus did.  He has gone before you from the heart of a very real battle, to draw you into the ultimate reality of the dance.  What he has enjoyed from all eternity he has come to offer to you.  And sometimes, when you're in the deepest part of the battle, when you're tempted and hurt and weak, you'll hear in the depths of our being the same words Jesus heard "This is my beloved child - you are my beloved child, whom I love; with you I'm well pleased."

Chapter 2 The call

Mark 1 verses 14 and 15  Jesus went into Galilee "Repent and believe the good news!"  The essence of other religions is advice.  Christianity is essentially news.  Other religions say "This is what you have to do in order to connect to God forever, this is how you have to live in order to earn your way to God."  But the gospel says, "This is what has been done in history.  This is how Jesus lived and died to earn the way to God for you."  Christianity is completely different.  It's joyful news.

The gospel is that God connects to you not on the basis of what you've done (or haven't done) but on the basis of what Jesus has done, in history, for you.  The good news of the kingdom of God is that the material world God created is going to be renewed so that it lasts forever.

Mark 1 verses 16 - 20.  Jesus calling the first disciples.  Jesus immediately calls people to follow him.  This is unique in Jewish tradition.  Pupils chose rabbis; rabbis did not choose pupils.  Those who wished to learn sought out a rabbi to say "I want to study with you."  Mark is showing us that Jesus has a different type of authority than a regular rabbi.  You can't have a relationship with Jesus unless he calls you. 

Jesus is saying, "Knowing me, loving me, resembling me, serving me must become the supreme passion of your life.  Everything else comes second."

In many of our minds, such words cast the shadow of fanaticism.  People in our culture are afraid of fanaticism - and for good reason really.  In this world considerable violence is being carried out by highly religious people.  Even setting aside such extremism, almost everybody knows someone, personally or by reputation, who is very religious and who is also condemning, self-righteous or even abusive.  Most people today see religion as a spectrum of belief.  On one end are people who say they're religious but don't really believe or live the tenets of their religion.  On the other end you've got the fanatics, people who are too religious, who overbelieve and overlive their faith.  What's the solution to fanaticism?  Many would say, "Well, why can't we be in the middle?  Moderation in all things.  Not too zealous and not too uncommitted.  Being right in the middle would be just right."  So is that the way Christianity works?  Does Jesus say "Moderation in all things?"  Jesus says "If anyone comes to me."  He doesn't say to the crowd "Look, most of you can be moderate, but I do need a few good men and women who really want to go all the way with this discipleship."  He says "anyone".  There's no double standard.  "If anyone wants to have anything to do with me, you have to hate your father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister, and even your own life, or you cannot be my disciple."  That's what it means to follow Jesus.

Why does he talk about hating?  In a number of other places Jesus says that you're not even allowed to hate our enemies.  So what is he saying regarding one's father and mother?  Jesus is not calling us to hate actively; he's calling us to hate comparatively.  He says, "I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look like that by comparison."  If you say, "I'll obey you, Jesus, if my career thrives, if my health is good, if my family is together," then the thing that's on the other side of that if is your real master, your real goal.  But Jesus will not be a means to an end; he will not be used.  If he calls you to follow him, he must be the goal.

Understand the difference between religion and the gospel.  Remember what religion is: advice on how you must live to earn your way to God.  Your job is to follow that advice to the best of your ability.  If you follow it but don't get carried away, then you have moderation.  But if you feel like you're following it faithfully and completely, you'll believe you have a connection with God because of your right living and right belief, and you'll feel superior to people that have wrong living and wrong belief.  That's a slippery slope: If you feel superior to them, you stay away from them.  That makes it easier to exclude them, then to hate them and ultimately to oppress them.  And there are some Christians like that - not because they've gone too far and been too committed to Jesus but because they haven't gone far enough.  They aren't as fanatically humble and sensitive or as fanatically understanding and generous as Jesus was. Why not? They're still treating Christianity as advice instead of good news.

The gospel isn't advice: It's the good news that you don't need to earn your way to God; Jesus has already done it for you.  And it's a gift that you receive by sheer grace - through God's thoroughly unmerited favour.  If you seize that gift and keep holding on to it, then Jesus' call won't draw you into fanaticism or moderation.  You will be passionate to make Jesus your absolute goal and priority, to orbit around him yet when you meet somebody with a different set of priorities, a different faith, you won't assume that they're inferior to you.  You'll actually seek to serve them rather than oppress them.  Why?  Because the gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it's about being called to follow a King.  Not just someone with the power and authority to tell you what needs to be done - but someone with the power and authority to do what needs to be done and then to offer it to you as good news.

Where do we see that kind of authority?  Jesus' baptism has already been attended by supernatural signs that announce his divine authority.  Then we see, Simon, Andrew, James and John follow Jesus without delay - so his call itself has authority.  Mark continues to build on his theme.

Mark 1 verses 21 and 22.  Jesus in the synagogue teaching - "he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law."  Mark uses the term authority for the first time; the word literally means "out of the original stuff."  It comes from the same root as the word author.  Mark means that Jesus taught about life with original rather than derived authority.  He didn't just clarify something that they already knew, or simply interpret the Scriptures in the way the teachers of the law did.  His listeners sensed somehow that he was explaining the story of their lives as the author and it left them dumbfounded.

Mark 1 verses 29 - 31 Jesus goes to Simon Peter's house and heals his mother-in-law.  The healing shows that Jesus is concerned with and king over the physical word - not just the spiritual.  It is not simply a claim of authority (which we have in the calling of the disciples and the authoritative teaching) but is also a clear proof and exercise of Jesus' authority.  He shows he has real power over sickness - just a touch of his hand and the fever is cured.  And this happens over and over.  Three lines later Mark records that Jesus cured whole crowds of people.  A few days after that his touch cured a man with leprosy.  There are 30 healings recorded in the Gospels, all showing us that Jesus has authority over sickness.

Come, follow me, Jesus is saying "Follow me because I'm the King you've been looking for.  Follow me because I have authority over everything, yet I have humbled myself for you.  Because I died on the cross for you when you didn't have the right beliefs or the right behaviour.  Because I have brought you news, not advice.  Because I'm your true love, your true life - follow me.

Chapter 3 The Healing

Mark 1 verses 35 - 38  Jesus had begun to preach and teach publicly.  His words were commanding and his commands were irresistable.  News of him spread like wildfire and soon there were crowds surging forward to see him.  Jesus got up very early to pray in a solitary place.  The language indicates that his prayer was not brief and perfunctory but took hours - he was still praying by the time Simon came to get him.  When Simon told him that there were huge crowds gathered to see him, Jesus said that they should immediately leave.  Why did Jesus leave it all behind?  He was much more interested in the quality of the people's response to him than in the quantity of the crowd.

Mark 2 verses 1 - 8 healing of the man let down through the roof.  Jesus knows something the man doesn't know - that he has a much bigger problem than his physical condition.  Jesus was saying that the main problem in a person's life is never his suffering; it's his sin.  If someone says to you "The main problem in your life is not what happened to you, not what people have done to you; your main problem is the way you've responded to that."  Ironically that's empowering.  Why?  Because you can't do very much about what's happened to you or about what other people are doing - but you can do something about yourself.  

When the Bible talks about sin it is not just referring to the bad things we do.  It's not just lying or lust or whatever the case may be - it is ignoring God in the world he has made; it's rebelling against him by living without reference to him.  It's saying, "I will decide exactly how I live my life."  And Jesus says that is our main problem.

Jesus is confronting the paralytic with his main problem by driving him deep.  Jesus is saying "By coming to me and asking for only your body to be healed, you're not going deep enough.  You have underestimated the depths of your longings, the longings of your heart."  Everyone who is paralyzed naturally wants with every fiber of his being to walk.  But surely this man would have been resting all of his hopes in the possibility of walking again.  In his heart he's almost surely saying, "If only I could walk again, then I would be set for life. I'd never be unhappy, I would never complain.  If only I could walk, then everything would be right.  And Jesus is saying "My son, you're mistaken."  That may sound harsh but it's profoundly true.  Jesus says "When I heal your body, if that's all I do, you'll feel you'll never be unhappy again.  But wait 2 months, 4 months - the euphoria won't last.  The roots of the discontent of the human heart go deep.

The Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us is building our identity on something besides Jesus.  Whether it's to succeed in our chosen field or to have a certain relationship - we're saying "if I have that, if I get my deepest wish, then everything will be okay."  You're looking to that thing to save you from oblivion, from disillusionment, from mediocrity  You've made that wish into your saviour.  And if you never quite get it, you're angry, unhappy, empty.  But if you do get it, you ultimately feel more empty, more unhappy.  You've distorted your deepest wish by trying to make it into your saviour, and now that you finally have it, it's turned on you.

Jesus says, "You see, if you have me, I will actually fulfill you and if you fail me, I will always forgive you.  I'm the only saviour who can do that."  But it is hard to figure that out.  Many of us first start going to God, going to church, because we have problems, and we're asking God to give us a little boost over the hump so that we can get back to saving ourselves, back to pursuing our deepest wish.  The problem is that we're looking to something besides Jesus as saviour.  Almost always when we first go to Jesus saying, "This is my deepest wish," his response is that we need to go a lot deeper than that.  The fact that we thought getting our deepest wish would heal us, would save us - that was the problem.  We had to let Jesus be our Saviour.

When Jesus says to the paralytic, "Son your sins are forgiven" he is doing something unexpected.  So unexpected that it triggers his first clash with the religious leaders of his day - verses 5 - 8.  Jesus can read the motives of the hearts of those around him - the religious leaders.  They are shocked at his words and angry.  They believe Jesus is blaspheming - showing contempt or irreverence toward God - because he claims to do something only God can do.

How does Jesus respond to their thoughts?  Mark 2 verses 8 - 12  The penetrating question Jesus asks them "Which is easier, to say to the paralytic 'Your sins are forgiven' or to say 'Get up, take up your mat and walk?'   On the first reading Jesus seems to be saying "Anybody can say 'Your sins are forgiven' but not everybody can heal.  To show you therefore that I am the Lord with authority to forgive sins, I say to you 'pick up your mat and walk'.  The apparent implication is that it's a lot harder to heal somebody than to forgive somebody and he is signaling his power to do the latter by performing the former.  Jesus is also saying "my friends, it is going to be infinitely harder to effect the forgiveness of sins than you can imagine.  I'm not just a miracle worker, I'm the Saviour.  Any miracle worker can say 'take up your mat and walk' but only the Saviour of the world can say to a human being 'all your sins are forgiven."  The shadow of the cross falls across Jesus' path!  If he not only heals this man but forgives his sins as well, he's taking a decisive, irreversible step down the path to his death.  By taking that step he is putting a down payment on our forgiveness.

Jesus has the power to give you that career success, that relationship, that recognition you've been longing for.  He actually has the power and authority to give each of us what we've been asking for, on the spot, no questions asked.  But Jesus knows that's not nearly deep enough.  We don't need someone who can just grant our wishes.  We need someone who can go deeper than that.  In short, we need to be forgiven.  That's the only way for our discontent to be healed.  It will take more than a miracle worker or a divine genie - it will take a Saviour.  Jesus knows that to be our Saviour he is going to have to die.

And we will discover that in the process of dealing with what we thought were our deepest wishes, Jesus has revealed an even deeper, truer one beneath - and it is for Jesus himself.  He will not just have granted that true deepest wish, he will have fulfilled it.  Jesus is not going to play the rotten practical joke of giving you your deepest wish - until he has shown you that it was for him all along.

Chapter 4 The Rest

Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins, and the religious leaders called that blasphemy.  But Jesus goes on to make a claim so outrageous that the leaders don't have a word for it.  Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he's here to end religion and to replace it with himself.  

Mark 2 verses 23 - 28 The law of God directed that you had to rest from your work one day in 7  The religious leaders of the day had fenced in this law with a stack of specific regulations.  There were 39 types of activity that you could not do on the Sabbath, including reaping grain, which is what the Pharisees accused the disciples of doing.  Mark goes on to record a second incident that took place on the Sabbath day - Mark 3 verses 1 - 6

Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he's here to end religion and to replace it with himself.  In Mark 3 the story of the man with the shriveled hand being healed on the Sabbath day, Jesus became angry with the religious leaders.  Why?  Because the Sabbath is about restoring the deminished.  It's about replenishing the drained.  It's about repairing the broken.  To heal the man's shriveled hand is to do exactly what the sabbath is all about.  Yet because the leaders are so concerned that Sabbath regulations be observed, they don't want Jesus to heal this man - an incredible example of missing the forest for the trees.  Their hearts are as shriveled as the man's hand.  They're insecure and anxious about the regulations  They're tribal, judgmental, and self-obsessed instead of caring about the man.  Why?  Religion.

Most people in the world believe that if there is a God, you relate to God by being good.  Most religions are based on that principle, though there are a million different variations on it.  Some religions are what you might call nationalistic: You connect to God, they say, by coming into our people group and taking on the markers of society membership.  Other religions are spiritualistic: You reach God by working your way through certain transformations of consciousness.  Yet other religions are legalistic: There's a code of conduct, and if you follow it God will look upon you with favour.  But they all have the same logic: If I perform, if I obey, I'm accepted.  The gospel of Jesus is not only different from that but diametrically opposed to it: I'm fully accepted in Jesus Christ and therefore I obey.

In religion the purpose of obeying the law is to assure you that you're all right with God.  As a result, when you come to the law, what you're most concerned about is detail.  You want to know exactly what you've got to do, because you have to push all the right buttons.  You won't gravitate toward seeking out the intent of the law; rather, you'll tend to write into the law all sorts of details of observance so you can assure yourself that you're obeying it  But in the life of Christians the law of God - though still binding on them - functions in a completely different way.  It shows you the life of love you want to live before the God who has done so much for you.  God's law takes you out of yourself; it shows you how to serve God and others instead of being absorbed with yourself.  You study and obey the law of God in order to discover the kind of life you should live in order to please and resemble the one who created and redeemed you, delivering you from the consequences of sin.  And you don't violate it or whittle it down to manageable proportions by adding man-made details to it.

Most of us work and work trying to prove ourselves, to convince God, others, and ourselves that we're good people.  That work is never over unless we rest in the gospel.  At the end of his great act of creation the Lord said, "It is finished" and he could rest.  On the cross at the end of his great act of redemption Jesus said, "It is finished" and we can rest.  On the cross Jesus was saying of the work underneath your work - the thing that makes you truly weary, this need to prove yourself because who you are and what you do are never good enough - that it is finished.  He has lived the life you should have lived, he has died the death you should have died.  If you rely on Jesus' finished work, you know that God is satisfied with you.  You can be satisfied with life.

Jesus, however, understands that there is a God who is uncreated, beginningless, infinitely transcendent, who made this world, who keeps everything in the universe going, so that all the molecules, all the stars, all the solar systems are being held up by the power of this God,  And Jesus says, That's who I am.

At the end of this Sabbath encounter with the religious leaders Mark records a remarkable sentence that sums up one of the main themes of the NT "Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus."  The Herodians were the supporters of Herod, the nastiest of the corrupt kings who ruled Israel, representing the Roman occupying power and its political system.  In any country that the Romans conquered, they set up rulers.  And wherever the Romans went, they brought along the culture of Greece - Greek philosophy, the Greek approach to sex and the body, the Greek approach to truth.  Conquered societies like Israel felt assaulted by these immoral, cosmopolitan, pagan values.  In these countries there were cultural resistance movements and in Israel that was the Pharisees.  They put all their emphasis on living by the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures and putting up big hedges around themselves to prevent contamination by the pagans.  The Herodians were moving with the times, while the Pharisees upheld traditional virtues.  The Pharisees believed their society was being overwhelmed with pluralism and paganism and they were calling for a return to traditional moral values  These 2 groups had been longtime enemies of each other but now they agree: They have to get rid of Jesus.  These 2 groups were not used to cooperating, but now they do.  In fact the Pharisees, the religious people take the lead in doing so.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion.  It can't be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.

The "traditional values" approach to life is moral conformity - the approach taken by the Pharisees.  It is that you must lead a very, very good life.  The progressive approach, embodied in the Herodians, is self-discovery - you have to decide what is right or wrong for you.  And according to the Bible, both of these are ways of being your own saviour and lord.  Both are hostile to the message of Jesus.  And not only that, both lead to self-righteousness.  The moralist says, "The good people are in and the bad people are out - and of course we're the good ones.  The self-discovery person says, "Oh, no, the progressive, open-minded people are in and the judgmental bigots are out - and of course we're the openminded ones.  In Western cosmopolitan culture there's an enormous amount of self-righteousness about self-righteousness.  We progressive urbanites are so much better than people who think they're better than other people.  We disdain those religious, moralistic types who look down on others.  Do you see the irony, how the way of self-discovery leads to as much superiority and self-righteousness as religion does?  The gospel does not say, "the good are in and the bad are out" nor "the open-minded are in and the judgmental are out."  The gospel says the humble are in and the proud are out.  The gospel says the people who know they're not better, not more open-minded, not more moral than anyone else, are in, and the people who think they're on the right side of the divide are most in danger.

When Jesus says he is not coming for the "righteous" he does not mean that some people don't need him.  The clue to what Jesus does mean is his reference to himself as a physician.  You go to a doctor only when you have a health problem that you can't deal with yourself, when you feel you can't get better through self-management.  What do you want from a doctor?  Not just advice - but intervention.  You don't want a doctor to simply say "Yes, you sure are sick!"  You want some medicine or treatment.

Jesus calls people "righteous" who are in the same position spiritually as those who won't go to a doctor.  "Righteous" people believe they can "heal themselves", make themselves right with God by being good or moral.  They don't feel the need for a soul-physician, someone who intervenes and does what they can't do themselves.  Jesus is teaching that he has come to call sinners: those who know they are morally and spiritually unable to save themselves.

Chapter 5 The Power

Each part of the story Mark tells reveals a little more of who Jesus is - his power, his purpose, and his self-understanding.  Mark is revealing Jesus gradually like an expert storyteller.  But at the same time, he's also a faithful reporter.

Mark 4 records the calming of the wind and the waves.  Jesus is demonstrating, "I am not just someone who has power; I am power itself.  Anyone and anything in the whole universe that has any power has it on loan from me."

That is a mighty claim.  And if it's true, who is this and what does this mean for us?  There are 2 options.  You could argue that this world is just the result of a monumental "storm" - you're here by accident, through blind, violent forces of nature, through the big bang and when you die, you'll turn to dust.  And when the sun goes out, there won't be anyone around to remember anything that you've done, so in the end whether you're a cruel person or loving person makes no lasting difference at all.  However, if Jesus is who he says he is, there's another way to look at life.  If he's Lord of the storm, then no matter what shape the world is in - or your life is in - you will find Jesus provides all the healing, all the rest, all the power you could possibly want.

If you have a God great enough and powerful enough to be mad at because he doesn't stop your suffering, you also have a God who's great enough and powerful enough to have reasons that you can't understand.  You can't have it both ways.  If you're at the mercy of the storm, its power is unmanageable and it doesn't love you.  The only place you're safe is in the will of God.  But because he's God and you're not the will of God is necessarily, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.  Is he safe?  "Of course he's not safe.  Who said anything about being safe?  But he's good.  He's the King."

We have a resource that can enable us to stay calm inside no matter how the storms rage outside.  Here's a clue: Mark has deliberately laid out this account using language of the famous Old Testament accounts of Jonah.  Both Jesus and Jonah were in a boat, and both boats were overtaken by a storm - the descriptions of the storms are almost identical.  Both Jesus and Jonah were asleep.  In both stories the sailors woke up the sleeper and said, "We're going to die."  And in both cases, there was a miraculous divine intervention and the sea was calmed.  Further, in both stories the sailors then became even more terrified than they were before the storm was calmed.  Two almost identical stories - with just one difference.  In the midst of the storm, Jonah said to the sailors, in effect: "There's only one thing to do.  If I perish, you survive.  If I die, you will live."  And they threw him into the sea.  Which doesn't happen in Mark's story.  Or does it?  I think Mark is showing that the stories aren't actually different when you stand back a bit and look at them with the rest of the story of Jesus in view.  In Matthew' s Gospel Jesus says "One greater than Jonah is here" and he's referring to himself: I'm the true Jonah.  He meant this: Someday I'm going to calm all storms, still all waves.  I'm going to destroy destruction, break brokenness, kill death.  How can he do that?  He can do it only because when he was on the cross he was thrown - willingly, like Jonah - into the ultimate storm, under the ultimate waves, the wave of sin and death.  Jesus was thrown into the only storm that can actually sink us - the storm of eternal justice, of what we owe for our wrongdoing.  That storm wasn't calmed - not until it swept him away.

Chapter 6  The Waiting

What is patience?  Patience is love for the long haul; it is bearing up under difficult circumstances, without giving up or giving in to bitterness.  Patience means working when gratification is delayed.  It means taking what life offers - even if it means suffering - without lashing out.  And when you're in a situation that you're troubled over or when there's a delay or pressure on you or something's not happening that you want to happen, there's always a temptation to come to the end of your patience.  You may well have lost your patience before you're even aware of it.

Jesus displayed patience not just in the way he faced his execution and his enemies.  He also displayed remarkable patience with his disciples - think of his patience with them in the storm and with the people he met throughout his life.

God's sense of timing will confound ours, no matter what culture we're from.  His grace rarely operates according to our schedule.  When Jesus looks at Jairus and says "Trust me, be patient: in effect he is looking over Jairus' head at all of us and saying "Remember how when I calmed the storm I showed you that my grace and love are compatible with going through storms, though you may not think so?  Well, now I'm telling you that my grace and love are compatible with what seems to you to be unconscionable delays."  It's not "I will not be hurried even though I love you", it's "I will not be hurried because I love you.  I know what I'm doing.  And if you try to impose your understanding of schedule and timing on me, you will struggle to feel loved by me."  Jesus will not be hurried and as a result, we often feel exactly like Jairus - impatient because he's delaying irrationally, unconscionably, inordinately.

When you go to Jesus for help, you get from him far more than you had in mind.  But when you go to Jesus for help, you also end up giving to him far more than you expected to give.

There's all the difference in the world between being a superstitious person who gets a bodily healing and a life-transformed follower of Jesus for all eternity.  If you go to Jesus he may ask of you far more than you originally planned to give, but he can give to you infinitely more than you dared ask or think.

If God seems to be unconscionably delaying his grace and committing malpractice in our life, it's because there is some crucial information that we don't yet have, some essential variable that's unavailable to us.  If I could sit down with you and listen to the story of your life, it may well be that I would join you in saying "I can't understand why God isn't coming through.  I don't know why he is delaying."  Believe me, I know how you feel, so I want to be sensitive in the way I put this.  But when I look at the delays of God in my own life, I realize that a great deal of my consternation has been rooted in arrogance.  I complain to Jesus, "Okay you're the eternal Son of God you've lived for all eternity, you created the universe.  But why would you know any better than I do how my life should be going?"  Right now is God delaying something in your life?  Are you ready to give up?  Are you impatient with him?  There may be a crucial factor that you just don't have access to.  The answer is to trust Jesus.

In the story of Jesus raising Jairus' daughter to life in Mark 5, Jesus understands the little girl is dead - not just mostly dead; she's all dead but why does he tell everyone she is just sleeping?  When you were little, if your parent had you by the hand you felt everything was okay.  You were wrong of course.  There are bad parents, and even the best parents are imperfect.  Even the best parents can slip up, even the best parents make wrong choices.  But Jesus is the ultimate Parent who has you by the hand and will bring you through the darkest night.  The Lord of the universe, the One who danced the stars into place, takes you by the hand and says "Honey it's time to get up."  Why would we want to hurry somebody this powerful and this loving, who treats us this tenderly? Why would we be impatient with somebody like this?  Jesus holds us by the hand and brings us through the greatest darkness.  What enables him to do that?  In his letter to the church in Corinth, 2 Corinthians 13 verse 4 the apostle Paul says Christ was crucified in weakness so that we can live in God's power.  Christ became weak so that we can be strong.  There's nothing more frightening for a little child than to lose the hand of the parent in a crowd or in the dark, but that is nothing compared with Jesus' own loss.  He lost his Father's hand on the cross.  He went into the tomb so we can be raised out of it.  He lost hold of his Father's hand so we could know that once he has us by the hand, he will never, ever forsake us.

Are you trying to hurry Jesus?  Are you impatient with the waiting?  Let him take you by the hand, let him do what he wants to do.  He loves you completely.  He knows what he's doing.  Soon it will be time to wake up.

Chapter 7 The Stain

Mark 7 - the cleanliness laws.  According to the cleanliness laws, if you touched a dead animal or human being, if you had an infectious skin disease like boils or rashes or sores, if you came into contact with mildew (on your clothes, articles in your home, or your house itself), if you had any kind of bodily discharge, or if you ate meat from an animal designated as unclean, you were considered ritually impure, defiled, stained, unclean.  That meant you couldn't enter the temple and therefore you couldn't worship God with the community.  Such strenuous boundaries seem harsh to us, but if you think about it, they are not as odd as they sound.  Over the centuries, people have fasted from food during seasons of prayer.  Why?  It's an aid for developing spiritual hunger for God.  Also people of various faiths kneel for prayer.  Isn't that rather uncomfortable?  It's an aid for developing spiritual humility.  So the washings and efforts to stay clean and free from dirt and disease that were used by religious people in Jesus' day were a kind of visual aid that enabled them to recognise that they were spiritually and morally unclean and couldn't enter the presence of God unless there was some kind of spiritual purification.  Spiritually, morally, unless you're clean, you can't be in the presence of a perfect and holy God.

Jesus couldn't have agreed more with the religious leaders of his day about the fact that we are unclean before God, unfit for the presence of God.  But he disagreed with them about the source of the uncleanness and about how to address it.

According to Jesus, in our natural state, we're unfit for the presence of God.  We often say today "if there is a God, we don't believe he is a transcendently holy deity before whom we stand guilty and condemned. " And yet, we still wrestle with profound feelings of guilt and shame. Where do they come from?  

We live in a world now where we don't believe in judgment, we don't believe in sin, and yet we still feel that there's something wrong with us.  We still have a profound inescapable sense that if we were examined we'd be rejected.  We have a deep sense that we've got to hide our true self or at least control what people know about us.  Secretly we feel that we aren't acceptable, that we have to prove to ourselves and other people that we're worthy, lovable, valuable.

Why do we work so very hard, always saying, "If I can just get to this level, then I can relax?"  And we never do relax once we get there - we just work and work.  What is driving us? Why is it that some of us can never allow ourselves to disappoint anybody?  We have no boundaries, no matter what people ask of us, how much they exploit us, trample on us, because to disappoint somebody is a form of death.  Why does that possibility bother us so much? Where are all the self-doubts coming from?  Why are we so afraid of commitment?  There's no escaping the fact that we all have a sense we're unclean.

What's really wrong with the world?  Why can the world be such a miserable place?  Why is there so much strife between nations, races, tribes, classes?  Why do relationships tend to fray and fall apart?  Jesus is saying We are what's wrong.  it's what comes out from the inside.  It's the self-centeredness of the human heart.  It's sin.  

Sin never stays in its place.  It always leads to separation from God, which results in intense suffering, first in this life and then in the next.  The Bible calls that hell.  That's why Jesus uses the drastic image of amputation.  There can be no compromises.  We must do anything we can to avoid it.  If our foot causes us to sin, we should cut if off.  If it's our eye we should cut it out. 

But Jesus has just pointed out that our biggest problem, the thing that makes us most unclean, is not our foot or our eye; it's our heart.  If the problem were the foot or the eye, although the solution would be drastic, it would be possible to deal with it.  But we can't cut out our heart.  No matter what we do, or how hard we try, external solutions don't deal with the soul.  Outside in will never work, because most of what causes our problems work from the inside out.  We will never shake that sense that we are unclean.

Time after time the Bible shows us that the world is not divided into the good guys and the bad guys.  There may be "better guys" and "worse guys" but no clear division can be made between the good and the bad.  Given our sin and self-centeredness, we all have a part in what makes the world a miserable, broken place.

Yet we're all still trying to address that sense of uncleanness through external measures, trying to do something that Jesus says is basically impossible.  Religion doesn't get rid of the self-justification, the self-centeredness, the self-absorption, at all  It doesn't really strengthen and change the heart.  It's outside in.

We're all trying to cleanse ourselves, or to cover our uncleanness by compensatory good deeds.  But it will not work.  Outside-in cleansing cannot deal with the problem of the human heart.

Jesus has an incredibly high regard for the word of God.  He considers it binding, even on himself.  In Matthew's Gospel he says that not a jot or a tittle - that is, not a letter - will pass away from the Word of God until it is all fulfilled.  Now, the cleanliness laws are a part of the Word of God.  Jesus would never look at any part of it and say, "I'm abolishing this; we've gotten beyond this now."  So what he is saying here is that the cleanliness laws have been fulfilled - that their purpose, to get you to move toward spiritual purification, has been carried out.  The reason you don't have to follow them as you once did is that they've been fulfilled.  How could that be?  In spite of all our efforts to be pure, to be good, to be moral, to cleanse ourselves, God sees our hearts and our hearts are full of filth.  All of our morality, all of our good works, don't really get to the heart.  Through Jesus Christ, at infinite cost to himself, God has clothed us in costly clean garments.  It cost him his blood.  And it is the only thing that can deal with the problem of your heart.

Are you living with a specific failure in your past that you feel guilty about and that you have spent your life trying to make up for?  Or perhaps you are not particularly religious, not especially immoral, yet you're fighting that sense of our own inconsequentiality.  You might be doing it through religion or politics or beauty.  You might even be doing it through Christian ministry. Doing, doing, doing from the outside in.  It won't work.

Chapter 8 The Approach

How do you approach God?  How do you connect with him?  Most of us can think of 2 options.  There is the ancient understanding: God is a bloodthirsty tyrant who needs to be constantly appeased by good behaviour if not outright sacrifice.  And there's the modern understanding of God: He's a spiritual force we can access anytime we want, no questions asked.  In Mark 7 tells us that approaching God might mean something else entirely.  

Jesus went to the vicinty of Tyre and did not want anyone to know it.  Jesus had been spending all of his time ministering in Jewish provinces and that ministry was drawing overwhelming crowds and he was exhausted.  So Jesus left the Jewish provinces and went into a Gentile territory, Tyre, in order to get some rest.

A Syrophoenician woman hears of Jesus' arrival and makes her way boldly to Jesus.  She is a Phoenician, a Gentile, a pagan, a woman and her daughter has an unclean spirit. She knows that in every way, according to the standards of the day, she is unclean and therefore disqualified to approach any devout Jew, let alone a rabbi.  But she doesn't care.  She enters the house without an invitation, falls down and begins begging Jesus to exorcise a demon from her daughter.  The verb beg here is a present progressive - she keeps on begging.  Nothing and no one can stop her.  But she's pleading with Jesus - she won't take no for an answer.

Jesus concentrated his ministry on Israel for all sorts of reasons.  He was sent to show Israel that he was the fulfillment of all Scripture's promises, the fulfillment of all the prophets, priests, and kings, the fulfillment of the temple.  But after he was resurrected, he immediately said to the disciples, "Go to all the nations."  His words, then, are not the insult they appear to be.  What he's saying to the Syrophoenician woman is, "Please understand, there's an order here.  I'm going to the Israel first, then the Gentiles (the other nations) later.

She doesn't take offense; she doesn't stand on her rights  She says, "All right.  I may not have a place at the table - but there's more than enough on that table for everyone in the world, and I need mine now."  She is wrestling with Jesus in the most respectful way and she will not take no for an answer.  She is not saying "Lord, give me what I deserve on the basis of my goodness."  She's saying "Give me what I don't deserve on the basis of your goodness - and I need it now."

This woman saw the gospel - that you're more wicked than you ever believed but at the same time more loved and accepted than you ever dared to hope.  On the one hand, she is not too proud to accept what the gospel says about her unworthiness.  She accepts Jesus' challenge.  She doesn't get her back up and say, "How dare you use a racial epithet about me?  I don't have to stand for this!"  Can you hear yourself saying that?  But on the other hand, neither does this woman insult God by being too discouraged to take up his offer.  

There are 2 ways to fail to let Jesus be your Saviour.  One is by being too proud, having a superiority complex - not to accept his challenge.  But the other is through an inferiority complex - being so self-absorbed that you say, "I'm just so awful that God couldn't love me."  That is, not to accept his offer.

It is just as much a rejection of the love of God to refuse to seek him, to refuse to come after his mercy, to refuse to accept it, to refuse to be content with it, as to say "I'm too good for it."

The Syrophoenician woman approached Jesus boldly, under her own initiative.  She knew what she wanted and was determined to get it.  Sometimes however, our approach to Jesus takes an altogether different trajectory; sometimes our first encounter with him feels almost accidental.  But either way, Jesus knows us and gives us what we need.

Mark 7 verses 31 - 37  Jesus does a whole series of things with the deaf and mute man.  He takes him away from the crowd; he points to his ears; he then touches his own tongue, takes his own saliva and puts it on the man's tongue; he looks up, sighs and says, "Be opened!"  You might say, "Well Jesus is doing the rituals of a miracle worker."  Actually no.  Remember that in every miracle we have witnessed, from calming the storm to bringing Jairus' daughter back to life to the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter, there was no arm waving, no incantation, no mumbo-jumbo.  Jesus obviously does not need to perform a ritual in order to summon his power.  Which means Jesus is doing all this not because he needs it but because the man needs it.

Jesus deeply identifies with this man.  All the touching of his ears, touching his mouth - it's sign language.  Jesus is saying "Let's go over here; don't be afraid, I'm going to do something about that; now let's look to God."  He comes into the man's cognitive world and uses terms - nonverbal speech - that he can understand.  Why does he take him away from the crowd?  As he grew up this man had been a spectacle.  He's deaf and therefore he can't produce proper speech.  Just imagine the way people made fun of him all his life.  Jesus knows this and refused to make a spectacle of him now.  He is identifying with him emotionally.

But there's a deeper identification yet, because at one point Jesus utters a deep sigh.  A better translation might be "he moaned."  A moan is an expression of pain.  Why would Jesus be in pain?  Mabe it's because he has emotionally connected with the man and his alienation and isolation.  That's true but he's about to heal him.  Why isn't Jesus grinning at the man saying "Wait till you see what I'm going to do for you"?  Because an even deeper identification is going on: There is a cost for Jesus' healing this man.  Mark deliberately signals this with the word he uses for "deaf and could hardly talk."  A single Greek word, maglilalos is used there and no other place in the Bible except Isaiah 35 verse 5.  The prophet Isaiah says this about the Messiah: "Be strong, do not fear; your God will come ... with divine retribution ... to save you.  Then will the eyes of the blind be open and the ears of the deaf unstopped.  Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy.  (Isaiah 35 verses 4 - 6)  Mark is saying: Do you see the blind opening their eyes?  Do you see the deaf hearing, do you hear the mute tongue shouting for joy?  God has come, just as Isaiah 35 promised; God has come to save you.  Jesus Christ is God come to save us.  Jesus is the King.

There is something else Mark wants his readers to think about.  Isaiah says the messiah will come to save us "with divine retribution."  But Jesus isn't smiting people.  He's not taking out his sword.  He's not taking power; he's giving it away.  He's not taking over the world; he's serving it.  Where's the divine retribution?  And the answer is, he didn't come to bring divine retribution; he came to bear it.  On the cross Jesus would identify with us totally.  On the cross, the Child of God was thrown away, cast away from the table without a crumb, so that those of us who are not children of God could be adopted and brought in.  Put another way the Child had to become a dog so that we could become sons and daughters at the table.

And because Jesus identified like that with us, now we know why we can approach him. The Son became a dog so that we dogs could be brought to the table; he became mute so that our tongues can be loosed to call him King.  Don't be too isolated to think you are beyond healing.  Don't be too proud to accept what the gospel says about your unworthiness.  Don't be too despondent to accept what the gospel says about how loved you are.

Chapter 9 The Turn

Mark chapter 8 is a pivotal chapter.  It's the climax of the first act, in which the disciples finally begin to see the true identity of the one they have been following.  In it Jesus says 2 things: I'm a King but a King going to a cross and if you want to follow me, you've got to come to the cross too.

Mark 8 verses 27 - 30  Who do people say that I am?

Peter begins to get the answer to the big question, Who is Jesus?  He proposes to Jesus "You are the Christ".  Peter is using a word that literally means "anointed one".  Kings were traditionally anointed with oil as a kind of coronation, but the word Christos had come to mean the Anointed One, the Messiah, the King to end all kings, the King who's going to put everything right.  You are the Messiah, Peter says.  Jesus accepts the title - but then immediately turns around and begins to say things they find appalling and shocking.  "Yes I'm the King", he says "but I'm not anything like the king you were expecting."

Jesus' first important statement here is "The Son of Man must suffer."  When we hear Jesus referring to himself as the Son of Man, we assume he's saying he is human - but this title means much more than that.  In the prophecies of Daniel there's a reference to "one like a son of man" (Daniel 7 verses 13 - 14), a divine messianic figure who comes with the angels to put everything right.

But Jesus says the Son of Man "must suffer ..."  Never before this moment had anyone in Israel connected suffering with the Messiah.  The notion that the Messiah would suffer made no sense at all, because the Messiah was supposed to defeat evil and injustice and make everything right in the world.  How could he defeat evil by suffering and dying?  

By using the word must, Jesus is also indicating that he is planning to die - that he is doing it voluntarily.  He is not merely predicting it will happen.  This is what probably offends Peter the most.  It is one thing for Jesus to say "I will fight and will be defeated: and another to say, "This is why I came; I intend to die!" That is totally inexplicable to Peter.

That's why the minute Jesus says this, Peter begins to "rebuke him".  This is the verb used elsewhere for what Jesus does to demons.  This means Peter is condemning Jesus in the strongest possible language.  Why is Peter so undone, that he would turn on Jesus like this right after identifying him as the Messiah?  From his mother's knee Peter had always been told that when the Messiah came he would defeat evil and injustice by ascending the throne.  But here is Jesus saying "Ye I'm the Messiah, the King, but I came not to live but to die.  I'm not here to take power but to lose it, I'm here not to rule but to serve.  And that's how I'm going to defeat evil and put everything right."

Jesus didn't just say that the Son of Man would suffer; he said that the Son of Man must suffer.  This word is so crucial that it's employed twice: "the Son of Man must suffer many things and ... he must be killed."  The word must modifies and controls the whole sentence and that means that everything in this list is a necessity.  Jesus must suffer, must be rejected, must be killed, must be resurrected.  What Jesus said was not just "I've come to die" but "I have to die".  It's absolutely necessary that I die.  The world can't be renewed and nor can your life, unless I die."  Why would it be absolutely necessary for Jesus to die?

There are healthy people and unhealthy people; some are more able to love than others.  Nobody can give anyone else the kind or amount of love they're starved for.  In the end we're all alike, groping for true love and incapable of fully giving it.  What we need is someone to love us who doesn't need us at all.  Someone who loves us radically, unconditionally, vulnerably. Someone who loves us just for our sake.  If we received that kind of love, that would so assure us of our value, it would so fill us up, that maybe we could start to give love like that too.  Who can give love with no need?  Jesus.  The Father, Son and the Spirit have been knowing and loving one another perfectly for all eternity.  Within himself, God has forever had all the love, all the fulfillment and all the joy that he could possibly want.  He has all the love within himself that the whole human race lacks.  And the only way we're going to get any more is from him.

True love, love without neediness, is generative; it is the only kind that makes more of itself as it goes along.  Why did God create us and later redeem us at great cost even though he doesn't need us?  He did it because he loves us.  His love is perfect love, radically vulnerable love.  And when you begin to get it, when you begin to experience it, the fakery and manipulativeness of your own love starts to wash away and you've got the patience and security to reach out and start giving a truer love to other people. 

Yet we don't need Jesus' sacrifice only personally; we also need it legally.  What do I mean by that?  When someone really wrongs you, a debt is established that has to be paid by someone.  When someone robs you of an opportunity, robs you of happiness, of reputation, or takes away something else that you'll never get back, that creates a sense of debt.  Justice has been violated - this person owes you.  Once you sense that debt, again there are only two things you can do.

One thing you can do is to try to make that person pay: You can try to destroy their opportunities or ruin their reputation; you can hope they suffer, or you can actually see to it.  But there's a big problem with that.  As you're making them pay off the debt, as you're making them suffer because of what they did to you, you're becoming like them.  You're becoming harder, colder, you're becoming like the perpetrator.  Evil wins.  What else can you do? The alternative is to forgive.  But there's nothing easy about real forgiveness.  When you want to harbor vengeful thoughts, when you want so much to carry out vengeful actions but you refuse them in an effort to forgive, it hurts.  When you refrain, when you forgive, it's agony.  Why?  Instead of making the other person suffer, you're absorbing the cost yourself.  You aren't trying to get your reputation back by tearing their reputation down.  You are forgiving them and it is costing you. That's what forgiveness is.  True forgiveness always entails suffering.

So the debt of wrong doesn't vanish: Either they pay or you pay. But here's the irony.  Only if you pay that price of forgiveness, only if you absorb the debt, is there any chance of righting the wrong.  If you confront somebody with what they've done wrong, while you've got vengeance in your heart, they probably won't listen to you.  They'll sense that you are not seeking justice but revenge, and they'll reject anything you say.  You'll just perpetuate the cycle of retaliation, retaliation, retaliation.  Only if you have refrained from vengeance and paid the cost of forgiveness will you have any hope of getting them to listen to you, of seeing their own error.  And even if they do not listen to you at first, your forgiveness breaks the cycle of further reprisals.  If we know that forgiveness always entails suffering for the forgiver and that the only hope of rectifying and righting wrongs comes by paying the cost of suffering, then it should not surprise us when God says, "The only way I can forgive the sins of the human race is to suffer - either you will have to pay the penalty for sin or I will."  Sin always entails a penalty.  Guilt can't be dealt with unless someone pays.  The only way God can pardon us and not judge us is to go to the cross and absorb it into himself.  "I must suffer" Jesus said.

Jesus had to die, then.  But couldn't he have just thrown himself off a cliff?  Or waited for the inevitable demise of his human body.  No.  Jesus' death had to be a violent one.  The writer of Hebrews says that "without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin." (Hebrews 9 verse 22)  This is not a magical view of blood.  Rather, the term blood in the Bible means a life given or taken before its natural end.  A life given or taken is the most extreme gift or price that can be paid in this world.  Only by giving his life could Jesus have made the greatest possible payment for the debt of sin.  Jesus' death was not only a payment, however, it was also a demonstration.

The Jewish chief priests, teachers of the law and of course, the Roman rulers should have been standing up for justice but instead conspired to commit an act of injustice by condemning Jesus to death.  The cross reveals the systems of the world to be corrupt, serving power and oppression instead of justice and truth.  In condemning Jesus, the world was condemning itself.  Jesus' death demonstrates not only the bankruptcy of the world, but it also reveals the character of God and of his kingdom.  Jesus' death was not a failure.  By submitting to death as penalty, he broke its hold on him and on us.

When Jesus went to the cross and died for our sins, he won through losing; he achieved our forgiveness on the cross by turning the values of the world on their head.  He did not "fight fire with fire."  He didn't come and raise an army in order to put down the latest corrupt regime.  He didn't take power; he gave it up and yet he triumphed.  On the cross, then, the world's misuse and glorification of power was exposed for what it is and defeated.  The spell of the world's systems was broken.

The corrupt powers of this world have many tools to make people afraid, the worst one being death.  When you know that a civil power or some other power can kill you, you're scared and they can use your fear to control you.  But since Jesus died and rose again from the dead, if you can find a way to approach Jesus and cling to him, you know that death, the worst thing that can possibly happen to you, is now the best thing.  Death will put you in God's arms and make you all you hoped to be.  And when death loses its sting, when death no longer has power over you because of what Jesus did on  the cross, then you will be living a life of love and not a life of fear.

Jesus is saying, "Since I am a King on a cross, if you want to follow me you must go to a cross."  What does it mean to take up our cross?  What does it mean to lose our life for the gospel in order to save it?

The deliberately chosen Greek word for "life" is psyche from which we get our word psychology  It denotes your identify, your personality, your selfhood - what makes you distinct.  Jesus is not saying "I want you to lose your sense of being an individual self."  That's a teaching of Eastern philosophy and if he meant that, he would have said, "You must lose yourself to lose yourself."  Jesus is saying "Don't build your identity on gaining things in the world."  His exact words are, "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?"

Every culture points to certain things and says, "If you gain those, if you acquire or achieve those, then you'll have a self, you'll know you're valuable."  Traditional cultures would say you're nobody unless you gain the respectability and legacy of family and children.  In individualistic cultures it's different; the culture says you're nobody unless you gain a fulfilling career that brings money, reputation and status.  Regardless of such differences, though every culture says identity is performance based achievement based.

And Jesus says that will never work.  If you gain the whole world, he says, it won't be big enough or bright enough to cover up the stain of inconsequentiality.  No matter how many of these things you gain, it's never enough to make you sure of who you are.  If you're building your identity on "somebody loves me" or if you're building your identity on I've got a good career" and anything goes wrong with that relationship or that job, you fall apart.  You feel like you don't have a self.

It's not a matter of saying, "I've been a failure, I've been immoral, so now I'm going to go to church and become a moral, decent person.  Then I'll know I'm a good person because I am spiritual."  Jesus says, "I don't want you to simply shift from one performance-based identity to another; I want you to find a whole new way.  I want you to lose the old self, the old identity and base yourself and your identity on me and the gospel."  Notice he says "for me and for the gospel."  He is reminding us not to be abstract about this.  You can't just say "Oh, I see: I can't build my identity on my parents' approval because that comes and goes; I can't build my life on my career success; I can't build my life on romance.  Instead I will build my life on God." If that's as far as  you take it, God is almost an abstraction; and so building your life on him is just an act of the will.  And no one has ever been deeply hanged by an act of the will.  The only thing that can reforge and change a life at its root is love.

Jesus is saying "It's not enough just to know me as a teacher or as an abstract principle; you have to look at my life.  I went to the cross - and on the cross I lost my identity so you can have one."

Once you see the Son of God loving you like that, once you are moved by that viscerally and existentially, you begin to get a strength, an assurance, a sense of your own value and distinctiveness that is not based on what you're doing or whether somebody loves you, whether you've lost weight or how much money you've got.  You're free - the old approach to identity is gone.

When Peter hears that Jesus is going to Jerusalem, which will entail suffering - almost certainly not just for Jesus but also for him - he's furious.  Why?  Because he had an agenda, and his agenda led from strength to strength and it didn't include suffering.  When he sees that Jesus is not working from his agenda, he rebukes him.  If your agenda is the end, then Jesus is just the means; you're using him.  But if Jesus is the King, you cannot make him a means to your end.  You can't come to a king negotiating.  You lay your sword at a king's feet and say, "Command me."  If you try to negotiate instead, if you say, "I'll obey you if ...", you aren't recognizing him as a king.  But don't forget this: Jesus is not just a king; he's a king on a cross.  If he were only a king on a throne, you'd submit to him just because you have to.  But he's a king who went to the cross for you.  Therefore you can submit to him out of love and trust.  This means coming to him not negotiating but saying, "Lord, whatever you ask I will do, whatever you send I will accept."  When someone gave himself utterly for you, how can you not give yourself utterly to him?  Taking up your cross means for you to die to self-determination, die to control of your own life, die to using him for your agenda.  

When Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, some who are standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power," what does he mean?  Some people have interpreted this to mean that the current generation wouldn't pass away before he returned to earth.  But that's not what he's saying.  The early church cherished this passage well beyond the death of Jesus' generation.  They knew that Jesus meant something else.  They understood him to mean that although the kingdom of God began in weakness - on the cross - it would not end that way.  They would see the power of his resurrection, and see the church multiply and grow in love, and service and influence in the world.

For us, the kingdom of God begins with weakness, relinquishments, giving up our rights to our own life; it begins with admitting that we need a Saviour.  We need someone to actually fulfill all the requirements and pay for our sin.  That's weakness.  Jesus started in weakness - first, by becoming human and second, by going to a cross.  And if we want him in our life, we have to start in weakness too. The kingdom begins there, but it won't end there.  Someday, when Jesus returns and ushers in a renewed creation, love will totally triumph over hate and life will totally triumph over death.

PART TWO - THE CROSS - THE PURPOSE OF JESUS

Chapter 10 The Mountain

Jesus will now speak constantly of his death and suffering in ways that the disciples find extremely hard to swallow.  The second half of Mark's Gospel (chapters 9 to 16) will show us why the cross was necessary and what it accomplished.  What seemed like it might become a story of triumph is going to look more and more like a tragedy.

Now that Jesus has begun revealing more details about his mission, he also becomes more explicit about what it means to follow him.  In the first half of Mark, he called people to follow him, but now he is painting a more vivid picture of what that following entails.

The transfiguration - Mark 9 verses 2 - 8.

Centuries prior to this event, according to the book of Exodus in the OT, God came down on Mount Sinai in a cloud. The voice of God spoke out of the cloud, and everyone was afraid.  Moses went to the top of the mountain and begged to see God's glory: "Show me your glory - your infinite greatness and unimaginable beauty."  And God responded "When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by, but my face cannot be seen.  No one may see me and live." (Exodus 33 verses 18 - 23)  Moses was not able to see God's glory directly. But even getting near was enough to make Moses' face shine with the reflected glory of God.

Now, centuries later we're on top of another mountain and there's glory again.  This dazzling brightness makes Jesus' clothes "whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them."  There's a mountain, a voice out of a cloud - and even Moses makes an appearance.  Is this Mount Sinai all over again?  No because there's a head-snapping twist.  Moses had reflected the glory of God as the moon reflects the light of the sun.  But Jesus produces the unsurpassable glory of God; it emanates from him.  Jesus does not point to the glory of God as Elijah, Moses and every other prophet has done; Jesus is the glory of God in human form.  "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being" (Hebrews 1 verse 3).

Peter, James and John are in the presence of God and yet they do not die.

On Mount Sinai, God came down as a cloud.   It was called 'the shekinah glory'.  He spoke out of the cloud - it was his raw presence, which the Israelites knew was fatal.  When God told Moses, "No one can see my face and live" he was saying that there's an infinite gap between deity and humanity.  "You can't take my reality" said God, "you can't endure the presence of my holiness, my glory.  It would destroy you." 

This is why Peter is scared.  So scared he doesn't know what he's saying, according to Mark.  He stammers out, "Rabbi ... let us put up three shelters, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah."  

Peter talks about making shelters.  The word translated shelters here is actually the Greek word for tabernacle.  After God's glory came down on Mount Sinai, the Hebrew people built a tabernacle (Exodus).  Why?  Most religions have recognised that there's a wide gap of some kind between deity and humanity.  Therefore many religions have temples (or tabernacles) with priests and sacrifices and rituals to transform your consciousness or take away your sin - to mediate the gap and protect human beings from the divine presence. What Peter is actually saying here is "We need a tabernacle, we need to set up rituals, to protect us from the presence of God."  Immediately after Peter says this, a cloud appears and envelops Jesus, Moses and Elijah.  And from within the shekinah glory cloud, God says "This is my Son, whom I love.  Listen to him"  They are in the very presence of God.  Yet Peter, James and John do not die?  How could that be?  "Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus."  That's Mark's way of saying: Moses is gone, Elijah is gone and Jesus is the bridge over the gap between God and humanity.  Jesus is able to give what Elijah couldn't give, what Moses couldn't give, what no one else could ever deliver.  Through Jesus we can cross the gap into the very heart of reality, into the steps of the dance.  Jesus is the temple and tabernacle to end all temples and tabernacles, because he is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the ultimate priest to point the way for all priests. 

When the cloud comes down, not only do the disciples not die, they are surrounded and embraced by the brilliance of God.  They hear God the Father speaking of his love for the Son, just as he did when Jesus was baptized at the beginning of Mark.  Then suddenly the cloud goes away and they are left standing there blinking in the comparatively dim light of the mountaintop, in a state of electrified wonder.  James, Peter and John have experienced worship.  Worship is a preview of the thing that all of  our hearts are longing for, whether we know it or not.  We seek it in art, in romance, in the arms of our lovers, in our family.

Worship is not just believing.  Before they went up the mountain, Peter, James and John already believed in God.  And Peter had already said, "You are the Christ".  But now they have sensed it.  The presence of God has enveloped them.  They have had a foretaste of what we are all longing for: the very face and embrace of God.

The full meaning of this episode would only be apparent after the resurrection because the transfiguration is a glimpse, a preview of the resurrection (and of the second coming, Jesus's return to restore the world at the end of time, prophesied in the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible).  By speaking of his resurrection here, Jesus is again pointing to his death.

Peter asks "Why do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?"  The Old testament book of Malachi prophesied that Elijah would return before the great Day of the Lord, when God will appear and make everything right.  So the disciples are saying, "Hey we just saw Elijah up there, The day of the Lord must be near! Why all this talk about death?  Elijah is here."  Jesus lays them flat: "I tell you, Elijah has come and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him."  Jesus is saying, "The Elijah that the prophet was pointing to was John the Baptist and he has suffered and died.  Elijah has come and gone."  And he repeats that "it is written that the Son of Man must suffer much."  Just as Elijah's coming was a herald of the Lord's coming, so Elijah's execution (John the Baptist had been beheaded by Herod) is a herald of the Lord's execution).

When Jesus was baptized in the opening chapter of Mark, the Spirit descended on him like a dove, and it fortified him to begin teaching and healing publicly.  Now the father envelops him with his presence - the light and the shekinah glory and the voice - to fortify him for the far greater test that awaits him as he moved resolutely toward his execution on the cross.  and it's not only Jesus who is strengthened by the experience: God is also preparing the disciples for the test they will face when their leader is taken from them.

Have you ever had that kind of experience?  When the compassion and love of another person helped you deal with your suffering?  When someone's unconditional approval and encouragement transformed your fear into resolve?  When an encounter with beauty seemed to neutralize your anxiety and give you hope?  And if you got that kind of help more often, wouldn't you be different?  Wouldn't trouble make you wiser, deeper, and stronger instead of bitter and hard and joyless?  Wouldn't suffering make you more compassionate, rather than more cynical about human nature?  Wouldn't failure be more likely to be productive in your life?  Of course it would.

How are you going to get more of that kind of approval, that kind of encouragement, that kind of love, without burning out your friends and family with your neediness?

The answer for us, as it was for the disciples, is worship.  You must have access through worship to the very presence of God.  You have to see clearly in your mind what God has done and is doing through Jesus.  You have to experience foretastes of that embrace God is going to give you someday.  You need to actually sense what you know of God's love.

It's one thing to know that the glorious Creator God loves you, cares for you, holds you, but it's another thing to sense it, to experience it.  Whatever life brings you, you will need those foretastes to nourish and strengthen you.

The transfiguration is an experience of collective worship that they are going for what's ahead.

How then can we have access to the presence of God in that way?  How can we have these foretastes?  Jesus and the disciples are barely off the mountain before he gets the chance to show us how to make our way into God's presence.

Mark 9 verses 14 - 18 man with a son possessed by a spirit.

A big argument is going on among the teachers of the law and a crowd of other people and Jesus' disciples - those who hadn't gone up the mountain.  They're trying to exorcise a demon and it's not working.  Evil is present and everybody's confused.  Mark takes the existence of demonic activity as a self-evident aspect of reality, a fact of life.  Paul says in Ephesians 6 that we are all fighting demonic "principalities" all the time.  The boy in this story is possessed by a demon, making him deaf and mute and causing convulsions.  It is an overwhelming physical and spiritual condition that not only renders the boy helpless, but also stymies everyone around him - his father, the disciples and the teachers of the law.

Verses 19 - 29 The disciples have been trying to exorcise it without praying.  They tried this for the same reason that they couldn't understand why Jesus had to die - they didn't see how weak and proud they were  They under-estimated the power of evil in the world and in themselves.

The teachers of the law are there too, probably criticizing.  Only one figure in this entire scene is acknowledging his weakness, admitting that he does not have what it takes to handle the suffering and evil that he faces - the father of the boy.

This man asks Jesus, "Would you heal my son?" And Jesus says, "Everything is possible for him who believes."  That is "I can do it if you can believe."  The father responds, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" - that is, "I'm trying but I'm full of doubts."  Then Jesus heals the man's son.  This is very good news.  Through Jesus we don't need perfect righteousness, just repentant helplessness, to access the presence of God.

The boy's father says "I'm not faithful, I am riddled with doubts, and I cannot muster the strength necessary to meet my moral and spiritual challenges.  But help me."  That's saving faith - faith in Jesus instead of in oneself.  Perfect righteousness is impossible for us and if you wait for that, you will never come into the presence of God.  You must admit that you are unrighteous and that you need help.  When you can say that, you are approaching God to worship.

Think of what Jesus is about to lose.  He has lived for endless ages in glory with the Father.  On the mountain we see Jesus surrounded by God; on the cross he will be forsaken.  On the mountain we see the life he has always led - embraced and clothed with the love and light of God - but on the cross he will be naked in the dark.

Why did Jesus put himself through that?  He did it for us.  Paul tells us clearly that evil is unmasked and defeated on our behalf at the cross.  Colossians 2 verses 15 Jesus "disarmed the power and authorities ... triumphing over them by the cross."

And on the mountain, through the Spirit God was strengthening Jesus for his mission, for the infinite suffering he would endure to defeat all evil.  And God can empower us in the same way to face evil and overcome our own suffering.

You may know in your head that God loves you - but sometimes the Spirit makes it especially clear to you that that is the case.  Sometimes you go to the mountain.  Sometimes through the Spirit you can hear God make a statement of unconditional, permanent, intimate love.  Sometimes you don't just know about God's love but in your heart you actually hear God saying "You're my daughter, you're my son, I love you.  I would go to infinite depths not to lose you - and I have.

When you have pursued God in repentant helplessness, you will have worshipped.  And every time you sense his embrace, your soul will shine the slightest bit brighter with his reflected glory and you will be the slightest bit more ready to face what life has in store for you.

Chapter 11 The Trap

Islam started in Arabia at Mecca and the Middle East is still the center of Islam today

Buddhism started in the Far East and that's still the centre of Buddhism

Hinduism began in India and it is still predominantly an Indian religion

Christianity is exception - Christianity's centre is always moving, always on a pilgrimage.  The original centre of Christianity was Jerusalem, but then the Hellenistic Gentiles, who were considered the unwashed barbarians, embraced Christianity with such force that soon the centre of Christianity moved to the Hellenistic Mediterranean world - to Alexandria, North Africa and Rome and it stayed there for a number of centuries.  But then another set of unwashed barbarians, the northern Europeans - Franks and Anglo-Saxons and Celts - so took hold of Christian faith that soon the centre of Christianity migrated again to northern Europe.  There (and in North America through colonization and immigration) the centre has rested for a thousand years, but recently it is shifting again.

In the twentieth century, Christianity receded in Europe and in North America it just barely kept up with the population growth.  Meanwhile in Latin America, Asia and Africa, it has been growing at up to ten times the population growth rate.  In the past decade a major corner was turned: More than 50 percent of Christians in the world now live in the southern hemisphere.

Mark 10 the man who wanted to inherit eternal life.

In other Gospels we learn that this was a young man and also that he was a ruler; so he is often called the Rich Young Ruler.  Jesus tells this spiritual seeker something that he can't accept, and as the man walks away, notice the disciples' reaction - "they were amazed at his words."

Jesus says "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."  Notice the disciples reaction - "they were even more amazed".

There are many who believe that you can't accrue great wealth without taking advantage of people.  This is the premise behind many political and economic philosophies: that nobody can get rich without stepping on others.  Even having a lot of wealth is seen as an injustice.  The disciples response - "If he can't be saved then who can?"  The disciples came from a culture that did not see wealth as evil, but rather as the reward for moral behavour.  They accepted the view that if you live a good life, then God will reward you with prosperity.  This was the worldview, for example, of Job's friends in the OT book of Job.  They assumed that material prosperity meant you were living a good life and God was pleased, while poverty was a sign that you were not living a good life and God was not pleased.  But Jesus' response to this man shows he does not subscribe to these simplistic views - neither is great wealth necessarily exploitative, nor is it always a sign of virtue and God's favour.  By referring to several of the 10 Commandments, Jesus asks him some implicit questions.  "Do not defraud" in other words, have you misrepresented the facts in business dealing, "Have you stolen? Have you even exploited? Have you taken from people things that are by rights theirs?"

The young man says, "All these commandments I have kept since I was a boy."  That is "No, with all my wealth I have always acted in justice and kindness and fairness; I have never sinned in any of these ways."  Jesus accepts the assertion.   While of course you can accumulate wealth through vice, it is possible to earn wealth through virtue and hold it in virtue - that is, discipline, vision, delayed gratification, patience.  Here we see that Jesus has no ideological problem with wealth creation per se.  He does not say that having money is wrong or unjust in itself.  Nonetheless, he says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God. It is impossible for the rich to get into the kingdom of God - that's what Jesus is saying.

Jesus didn't mean that it's a sin to be rich.  it is not that all individual rich people are bad, nor are all individual poor people good.  Jesus did not make such blanket assertions.  No, on the other hand, was he saying, "Just be careful, don't fall into greed, be generous from time to time."  No.  Jesus was saying that there is something radically wrong with all of us - but money has particular power to blind us to it.  In fact, it has so much power to deceive us of our true spiritual state that we need a gracious, miraculous intervention from God to see it.  Its impossible without God, without a miracle.  Without grace.

Jesus' perceptive statement "One thing you lack" allows us to capture the gist of the young man's struggle.  The man was saying "You know what, I've done everything right: I've been successful economically, successful socially, successful morally, successful religiously.  I've heard you're a good rabbi and I'm wondering if there's something I've missed, something I'm overlooking.  I sense that something is lacking."

Anyone who counts on what they are doing to get eternal life will find that, in spite of everything they've accomplished, there's an emptiness, an insecurity, a doubt. Something is bound to be missing.  How can anyone ever know whether they are good enough?  Jesus tells him.  And his counsel lays the man flat.

Jesus begins his reply by telegraphing the punch.  The first thing he says to the man is "Why do you call me good?  No-one is good - except God alone."  That's a hint, a preview.  Jesus is not saying that he's not good.  He doesn't say, "Why are you calling me good?  I, Jesus am not."  He is saying "Why are you walking up to somebody you think is just a normal human rabbi and calling him good?  There's a flaw in your whole idea of goodness and badness."  That's the hint.

But then the blow comes.  Jesus has already accepted what the man said about having obeyed the commandments, having lived an ethical life.  What Jesus says to the man goes further.  Jesus proceeds to tell the young man the one thing he needs to do: "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come, follow me."

In other words; "If you want to follow me and to have eternal life, of course you shouldn't commit adultery; you shouldn't defraud people or murder them.  You shouldn't do bad things.  But if you just repent of doing bad things, all it will do is make you a religious person.  If you want eternal life, if you want intimacy with God, if you want to get over that nagging sense that there's still something missing, if you can't find way to get the stain out, then you have to change how you relate to your gifts and your successes.  You have to repent of how you've been using your good things."

And there are many ways that we use these "good things."  We may be using our "good things" to deal with the imperfections that no one else can see.  We may be incessantly trying to turn material wealth into a spiritual treasure to deal with that inner sense of poverty.  We may be trying to turn physical beauty into spiritual beauty to deal with that inner sense of deformity.  We also may be using our good things to feel superior to others, or to get them to do the things we want them to do.  Most of all we may point to our good things - our achievements and our attainments - and say to God, "Look at what I've accomplished!  You owe it to me to answer my prayers."  We may use our good things to get control of God and other people.

So Jesus is saying to the man in this passage, "You have put your faith and trust in your wealth and accomplishments.  But the effort is alienating you from God.  Right now God is your boss, but God is not your Saviour and here's how you can see it: I want you to imagine life without money.  I want you to imagine all of it gone.  No inheritance, no inventory, no servants, no mansions - all of that is good.  All you have is me.  Can you live like that?"

How does the man respond to Jesus' counseling?  "He went away sad."  The word sad translated here is better translated "grieved" - he grieved.  There's a place where the same Greek word is applied to Jesus.  Matthew records that in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus started to sweat blood as he grieved in deep distress.  Why?  He knew he was about to experience the ultimate dislocation, the ultimate disorientation.  He was about to lose the joy of his life, the core of his identity.  He was going to lose his Father, Jesus was losing his spiritual centre, his very self.

When Jesus called this young man to give up his money, the man started to grieve, because money was for him what the Father was for Jesus.  It was the centre of his identity.  To lose his money would have been to lose himself - to lose what little sense he had of having covered the stain.

If you want God to be your Saviour, you have to replace what you're already looking to as a saviour.  Everybody's got something.  What is it for you?

If you want to be a Christian, of course you'll repent of your sins.  But after you've repented of your sins you'll have to repent of how you have used the good things in your life to fill the place where God should be.  If you want intimacy with God, if you want to get over this sense that something is missing, it will have to become God that you love with all your heart and strength.

This young man's problem is not his financial worth; it's his moral worth.  It's his sense that he doesn't need the grace of God.  Christians, you see, are people who know that their Christianity is impossible, a miracle - there's nothing natural about it, it flies in the face of all one's merits.  Everybody has to recognise that we have been resting our hopes on some form of personal merit.  And it's our personal merit, our moral worth, that keeps us from understanding the cross.

Think of the story of the teacher of the law in Mark 12 who asked "of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

This inquiry is designed to trip Jesus up, but it seems also to be sincere - he really does want to know the answer.  The teachers of the law were professional scribes and scholars of the law.  They spent their lives studing, classifying and categorizing it.  Some had discerned as many as 613 rules in the OT law.  And they were always trying o distinguish the lighter ones from the heavier ones.  The fundamental question was "Of all the hundreds of rules and commands, which one is the most important?"

Jesus answers with 2 commands from the Hebrew Scriptures.  The first is from Deuteronomy 6 verses 4 - 5.  This passage includes the shema, which pious Jews recited morning and evening, as well as the command to love God with all our being.  The second he takes from Leviticus 19 verse 18, to love our neighbour as much as we love ourselves.  Thus Jesus boils down all of the law of God into one principle - love, directed to God and to others.  Here Jesus is going to the very heart of the core dilemma of ethics.  Jesus is not so much picking one or two rules over the others, nor is he choosing love over law, but rather he is showing that love is what fulfills the law.  The law is not being fulfilled unless it is obeyed as a way of giving and showing love to God or others.

The man's reaction? The teacher admits that these 2 commands are the most important.  His reference to the burnt offerings and sacrifices shows that he realizes that these cannot make up for sins.  Here we see him coming to recognize what an impossible standard the law gives us - that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a good man to satisfy the law.  The closer he gets to seeing this, the closer he is to figuring out the gospel.  If we concentrate on rules and regulations exclusively, we can begin to feel pretty righteous, but when we look at the heart attitude that the law really is requiring and getting at, we begin to realize how much we need grace and mercy.  

And what was Jesus' assessment.  "You are not far from the kingdom of God."  On the surface it was almost the same answer he gave the rich young man - "One thing you lack" - yet that reply was met with something closer to nausea.  Similar underlying questions, similar answers, completely different responses.  Only one of them could see the trap.

It's not a coincidence that for every one time Jesus wants about building our lives on sex and romance, he warns 10 times about money.  

Notice Jesus as he talked with the rich young ruler.  He "looked at him and loved him."  Why was Jesus' heart suddenly filled with love?  Jesus was a loving man of course, but this explicit statement of his tenderness toward a specific person is rare in Gospel narratives.  Did Jesus love him for his leadership potential?  Was it because of what the man said?  

Jesus looks at him and identifies with him.  Jesus, too is a rich young man, far richer than this man can imagine.  Jesus has lived in the incomprehensible glory, wealth, love and joy of the Trinity from all eternity.  He has already left that wealth behind him.  Paul says that though Jesus Christ was rich, for our sakes he became poor (2 Corinthians 8 verse 9).

And I'm going into a poverty deeper than anyone has ever known, Jesus says.  I am giving it all away.  Why?  For you.  Now, you give away everything to follow me.  If I gave away my 'big all' to get to you, can you give your 'little all' to follow me?  I won't ask you to do anything I haven't already one.  I'm the ultimate Rich Young Ruler who has given away the ultimate wealth to get you.  Now you need to give away yours to get me."

Jesus says, "My power is always moving away from people, who have power and mone.  My power is always moving toward people who are giving it away, as I did.  Where do you want to live?"

Chapter 12 The Ransom

Jesus does not leave any doubt about what he came to do.  He came to die.  He tells his disciples repeatedly that this is the case.  In fact, by chapter 10 he has already predicted his death twice: first in March 8 after Peter had said "You are the Christ" and again in chapter 9.  But just in case the disciples have missed it Jesus repeats it in chapter 10.  This time Jesus gives us more details about his death than he had previously.  For the first time we are told that his death will be in Jerusalem, and that both Jews and Gentiles will reject him.  Chapter 8 speaks only of the Jewish religious leaders and it speaks more generally about being delivered in to the hands of "men".  In chapter 8 he had said he would be "rejected" by the priests and scribes, but now he reveals that they will "condemn him to death".  This legal term indicates that he will be tried and executed within the criminal justice system.  His depiction of his final days also becomes more graphic and violent" the will "mock ... spit ... flog" him. Jesus knew his death was absolutely central to both his identity and his purpose on earth.  For the first time Jesus tells us not only that he will die but why he will do so - verse 45 "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Jesus' purpose was to die and be a sacrifice.  Jesus' choice of the word "come" is a strong giveaway that he existed before he was born: He came into the world.  By saying "did not come to be served" he assumes that he had every right to expect to be honoured and served when he came, though he did not exercise that privilege.

"To give his life as a ransom for many" sums up the reason why he has to die.  Jesus came to be a substitutionary sacrifice.  Think of the word "for" in the phrase "a ransom for many".  In Greek it's the word "anti" which means "instead of", "in place of", "substitute".  Ransom - in English we use the word in relation to kidnapping.  But here it translates a Greek word, "lutron" that meant to buy the freedom of a slave or a prisoner".  The ransomer would make a huge sacrificial payment that matched the value, or paid the debt of the slave or the prisoner in order to procure his or her freedom.  Jesus came to pay that kind of ransom.  Jesus is saying I will pay the ransom that you couldn't possibly pay, and it will procure your freedom".  The payment is Jesus' death on the cross.

Jesus didn't have to die despite God's love; he had to die because of God's love. And it had to be this way because all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice.

God created the world in an instant, and it was a beautiful process.  He re-created the world on the cross - and it was a horrible process.  That's how it works.  Love that really changes things and redeems things is always a substitutionary sacrifice.

Mark chapter 10 verses 35 - 36 - James and John's request for special places beside Jesus.

To James and John "in our glory" means "when you are seated on your throne" in which case the people on the right and the left are like the prime minister and the chief of staff.  John and James are saying "When you take power, we would like the top places in your cabinet."  Here's the irony of their request.  What was Jesus' moment of greatest glory? Where does Jesus most show forth the glory of God's justice?  And were does he reveal most profoundly the glory of God's love.  On the Cross.

When Jesus is at the actual moment of his greatest glory, there will be somebody on the right and the left, but they will be criminals being crucified.  Jesus says to John and James; You have no idea what you're asking.

He speaks to them of the cup and the baptism.  In the Hebrew Scriptures cup is almost always a metaphor for the just judgment of God against evil.  Similarly Jesus uses the word baptism in the older sense of an overwhelming experience, an immersion.  Jesus is saying "I am paying that ransom.  I am going to drink that cup.  I am going to bridge that gap.  I will take the just judgement on all human evil. I  will take the overwhelming experience of being condemned so that you can be free from all condemnation."  But they don't get it.

Verses 38 - 45  For the disciples, this is yet another lesson on substitutionary sacrifice.  When we read this we are supposed to be saying "what are we missing right now?"

When you see how John and James respond, and you realize how hard it is for anybody to take in the magnitude of what the cross really means, you will be in your way to attaining the gift of humility.  At some level, your normal assumptions, your pride and your egotistical way of thinking are blinding you to the truth.  

"You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and their high officials exercise authority over them.  Not so with you."  Jesus is talking about how most people try to influence society, to get their way.  They lord it over others.  They seek power and control.  If I have the power, if I have the wealth, the connections, then I can get my way." 

When Jesus says "Not so with you", what do you think he means?  Is he saying we must withdraw and having nothing to do with society?  No.  Actually the principle that he's laing out rather explicitly here was already laid out earlier, in Jeremiah 29.  The Israelite nation had been destroyed by the Babylonian empire and many of the people had been taken by force to Babylon.  What was their attitude supposed to be toward Babylonian society, in which they were exiles?  They could have tried to just keep to themselves and have nothing to do with it.  Or they could have tried to infiltrate Babylon and use guerrilla tactics to take power.  But what did God ay to them?  Jeremiah 29 verse 7 "Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.  Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."  That is, I want you to seek the prosperity of Babylon.  I want you to make it a great city to live in.  I want you to serve your neighbours - even though their language is different and they don't believe what you believe.  And I don't want you to do this merely out of a sense of duty.  "Pray for it" is another way of saying "love it".  Love that city, pray for it, seek to make it a prosperous, peaceful city, the greatest place to live.  If Babylon prospers through your service to it, you prosper too.

"For you, God says, the route to gaining influence is not taking power.  Influence gained through power and control doesn't really change society; it doesn't change hearts.  I'm calling you to a totally different approach.  Be so sacrificially loving that the people around you, who don't believe what you believe, will soon be unable to imagine the place without you.  They will trust you because they see that you're not only out for yourself, but out for them, too.  When they voluntarily begin to look up to you because of the attractiveness of your service and love, you'll have real influence.  It will be an influence given to you by others, not taken by you from others."  Who is the model for that way of gaining influence?  It's Jesus himself, of course.  How did he respond to his enemies?  He didn't call down legions of angels to fight them.  He died for their sins and as he was dying he prayed for them.  And if at the very heart of your worldview is a man dying for his enemies, then the way you're going to win influence in society is through service rather than power and control.

If I lead an unselfish life primarily to make myself happy, then I'm not leading an unselfish life.  I'm not doing these acts of kindness for others I'm ultimately doing them for myself.  We are being encouraged, then, to live unselfish lives for selfish reasons, which doesn't make sense.

How can e escape this self-referential trap and truly become unselfish?  If secularism, psychology and relativism on the one hand and religion and moralism on the other don't actually give us what we need to be unselfish, what does?  The answer is, we need to look somewhere else besides ourselves.  We need to look at Jesus.  If he is indeed a substitutionary sacrifice, if he has paid for our sin, if he has proved to our insecure, skittish little hearts that we are worth everything to him, then we have everything we need in him.  It's all a gift to us by grace.  We don't do good things in order to connect to God or to feel better about ourselves.  What a meager upgrade to our self-image these good deeds would bring, compared with what we receive from understanding why Jesus died for us and how much he loves us.  Now you do not need to help people, but you want to help them, to resemble the One who did so much for you, to bring him delight.  Whether you think they are worthy of your service doesn't come into it. Only the gospel gives you a motivation for unselfish living that doesn't rob you of the benefits of unselfishness even as you enact it.

Chapter 13 The Temple

Mark 11 - when Jesus rode into Jerusalem, people laid down their cloaks on the road in front of him and hailed him as a king coming in the name of the house of David.  This type of parade was culturally appropriate in that era.  A king would ride into town publicly and be hailed by cheering crowds.  But Jesus deliberately departed from the script and did something very different.  He didn't ride in on a powerful war horse the way a king would; he was mounted on a polos, that is, a colt or a small donkey.  Here was Jesus Christ, the King of authoritative, miraculous power, riding into town on a steed fit for a child or a hobbit.  In this way Jesus let it be known that he was the One prophesied in Zechariah, the great Messiah to come - Zechariah 9 verse 9.

When Jesus arrived at Jerusalem, he went to the temple and things got a little bit more complicated.

Mark mentions that Jesus "entered the temple area".  Why?  When you stepped inside the temple door, the first area you got to was the court of the Gentiles - the ethne or "nations".  This was the only part where non-Jews were allowed.  It was the biggest section of the temple and you had to go through it to get to the rest.  All the business operations of the temple were set up there.  When Jesus walked in, he would immediately have seen great throngs of people buying and selling animals at dozens of stalls and exchanging foreign currencies at money changer's tables.  Thousands of people flooded into Jerusalem bringing and buying tens of thousands of animals to be sacrificed.  255,000 lambs were bought, sold and sacrificed in the temple courts.  And this was the place where the Gentiles were supposed to find God through quiet reflection and prayer.

Jesus' reaction to all this was to start throwing the furniture over.  He quoted from the prophet Isaiah in reply to the leaders asking him what he was doing.  "My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations" - that is, for the Gentiles.  We are told this amazed those who heard him.  Why?  For one thing, it was popularly believed that when the Messiah showed up he would purge the temple of foreigners.  Instead, here is Jesus clearing the temple for the Gentiles - acting as their advocate.  Jesus was challenging the sacrificial system altogether and saying that the Gentiles - the pagan, unwashed Gentiles - could now go directly to God in prayer.  This was amazing because the people knew the history of the tabernacle and the temple.

The story of the temple starts all the way back in the Garden of Eden.  That primal garden was a sanctuary; it was the place where the presence of God dwelled.  It was a paradise, because death, deformity, evil and imperfection cannot coexist with God's presence.  In the presence of God there is shalom, absolute flourishing, fulfillment, joy and bliss.  But when the first human beings decided to build their lives on other things besides God, to let other things besides God give them their ultimate meaning and significance, paradise was lost.  As Adam and Eve were banished from the sanctuary of God, they turned around and saw "a flaming sword flashing back and forth." (Genesis 3 verse 24).  No one could ever get past this flaming sword that barred the way back into the presence of God.

Turning from God has had dreadful consequences.  Building our lives on other things - on power, status, acclaim, family, race, nationality - has caused conflicts, wars, violence, poverty, disease and death.  We've trampled on another; we've trampled on this earth.  that means it's not enough just to say, "Sorry may I please get back into the presence of God?"  If you've been the victim of a heinous crime, if you have suffered violence and the perpetrator (or even the judge) says, "Sorry, can't we just let it go?" you would say, "No, that would be an injustice"  Your refusal would rightly have nothing to do with bitterness or vengeance.  If you have been badly wronged, you know that saying sorry is not enough.  Something else is required - some kind of costly payment must be made to put things right.

The flaming sword is the sword of eternal justice and it will not fail to exact payment.  Nobody can get back into the presence of God unless they go under the sword, unless they pay for the wrong that has been done.  But who could survive the sword?  No one.  And if no one can survive the sword, then how will we ever get back into the presence of God?

These questions remained in spite of the fact that God established a provisional solution for his chosen people, the Israelites first through the tabernacle and then the temple.  In the middle of the temple was the holy of holies.  It was a small space covered by a thick veil, to shield people from the shekina presence of God.  Remember, God's immediate presence was fatal to human beings.  Just once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the high priest could go inside briefly but only if he carried a blood sacrifice.  Why?  Because there was no way back into the presence of God without going under the sword.  Even then the blood sacrifice was only inadequately symbolic of the true atoning work that had to happen.  What's more, it didn't extend access to the rest of us - those not part of the Jewish people.  That tabernacle, the temple and the whole sacrificial system - the only solution to the problem of the sword and the only access, however limited, to the presence of God - were only for the Israelites.  So when Jesus quoted Isaiah to imply that the Gentiles could get access to the presence of God, the people were amazed.

Yet the prophets kept promising that someday the glory of God would cover the earth as the waters fill the sea - in other words, the whole world would become a holy of holies.  The whole earth would be filled with the glory and presence of God again.  And people from all nations, races, backgrounds and social classes would be welcome in that presence.

How would they get past the sword?

Isaiah 53 verse 8 "He will be cut off from the land of the living."  Revelation, when John looks at the throne, the place of ultimate power in the universe, why does he see a slaughtered lamb?  Because the death of Jesus Christ - the Lamb of God - is the greatest royal triumph in the history of the cosmos.  When Jesus went under the sword, it broke his body, but it also broke itself.  Jesus took the sword for you and me.  That's why at the moment Jesus died, the veil that covered the holy of holies was ripped from to bottom (Mark 15 verse 38).  It wasn't just ruined; it was made obsolete, so that now we all have access to the presence of God.  The flaming sword claimed its victim; the veil was parted; and the way back into the garden was permanently reopened.

What shocked the people more than the turning of the tables was that Jesus was overturning the sacrificial system of the temple and opening the way into the presence of God for everyone.

Jesus actually visited the temple twice.  He went there briefly upon his arrival in Jerusalem, then stayed that night with his disciples in Bethany, a couple of miles outside the city. The next day he came back into Jerusalem to visit the temple again (this is when Jesus overturned the tables) and on their way into the city Mark records the story of the fig tree (verses 12 - 14).

Middle Eastern fig trees bore two kinds of fruit.  As the leaves were starting to come in the spring, before the figs came, the branches bore little nodules, which were abundant and very good to eat.  Travelers liked to pick them off and eat them as they made their journey.  If you found a fig tee that had begun to sprout leaves but had none of the delicious nodules, you would know that something was wrong.  It might look ok from a distance because the leaves had emerged, but if it had no nodules it was diseased or maybe even dying inside.  Jesus seizes the opportunity to provide a private, memorable object lesson, a parable against hollow religiousity with the fig tree as a visual aid.

Jesus finds the fig tree not doing its appointed job.  The tree became a perfect metaphor for Israel and beyond that, for those claiming to be God's people but who do not bear fruit for him.  Jesus was returning to a place that was religiously very busy, just like most churches are: tasks, committees, noise, people coming and going lots of transactions.  But the busyness contained no spirituality.  Nobody was actually praying.  There are many things we do that can appear to be signs of real belief but can grow without real heart change.  Evidently we can be very busy in church activities without real heart change and without real compassionate involvement with others.

Later that day, Jesus would clear the temple of all that fruitless activity.  He would take the private object lesson of the fig tree and turn it into a necessary public spectacle.  Jesus is saying that he wants more than busyness; he wants the kind of character change that only come from realizing that you have been ransomed.  

There is a final irony to all of this.  Jesus, who unites such apparent extremes of character into such an integrated and balanced whole, demands an extreme response from every one of us.  He forces our hand at every turn in the story.  This man who throws open the gates of his kingdom to everyone, then warns the most devout insiders that their standing in the kingdom is in jeopardy without fruitfulness, is forever closing down our options.  This man who can be weakened by a touch in a crowd on his way to bring a little girl back from the dead is a man you dare not tear your eyes from.

He is both the rest and the storm, both the victim and the wielder of the flaming sword and you must accept him or reject him on the basis of both.  Either you'll have to kill him or you'll have to crown him.  Those teachers of the law who began plotting to kill Jesus at the end of this episode in the temple - they may have been dead wrong about him, but their reaction makes perfect sense.

Chapter 14 The Feast

For Jews the Passover is an annual meal that commemorates a defining moment in the history of Israel.  More than a millennium before the time of Jesus, the Israelites had been enslaved to Egypt's pharaoh, trapped in miserable bondage.  After sending many plagues to Egypt to loosen the pharaoh's opressive grip on Israel, one night God sent the final plague; he unsheathed the sword of divine justice.  And this justice would fall on everyone.  In every home in Egypt - of Jews and Egyptians alike - someone would die under the wrath of justice.  The only way for your family to escape was to put your faith in God's sacrificial provision, namely, you had to slay a lamb and put the blood on the doors as a sign of your faith in God.  In every home that night there would either be a dead child or a dead lamb.  When justice came down, either it fell on your family or you took shelter under the substitute, under the blood of the lamb.  If you did accept this shelter then death passed over you and you were saved.  You were saved only on the basis of faith in a substitutionary sacrifice.  

This is how God delivered the Israelites and led them into freedom, into the Promised Land.  Every year the Passover meal commemorated this deliverance (the exodus) which had been the most important moment in the life of Israel as a nation and as a people.

Mark 14 verses 12 - 16.  The Passover meal had to be prepared in a certain way and had a distinct form  It included 4 points at which the presider, holding a glass of wine, got up and explained the feast's meaning.  The 4 cups of wine represented 4 promises made by God in Exodus 6 verses 6 and 7.  These promises were for rescue from Egypt, for freedom from slavery, for redemption by God's divine power and for a renewed relationship with God.  The third cup came at a point when the meal was almost completely eaten.  The presider would use words from Deuteronomy 26 to bless the elements - the bread, the herbs, the lamb - by explaining how they were symbolic reminders of various aspects of the early Israelites' captivity and deliverance.  

Jesus was the presider at this Passover meal with the disciples and Mark recounts what happened when Jesus raised the third cup - verses 22 - 25

Jesus departs from the script!  He takes the bread and says "This is my body".  In other words "This is the bread of my affliction, the bread of my suffering, because I'm going to lead the ultimate exodus and bring you the ultimate deliverance from bondage."  It was an oath - taken very seriously and was literally marked with blood.  You were making a covenant - a solemn relationship of obligation - between you and another party.  Like signing a contract.  But this covenant was established and sealed by killing an animal, cutting it in half and walking between the pieces as you stated your oath.  This was a very vivid way of making the covenant binding.  Verses 23 - 25  Jesus' words mean that as a result of his substitutionary sacrifice there is now a new covenant between God and us.  The basis of this relationship is Jesus' own blood "my blood of the covenant."  When he announced that he will not eat or drink until he meets us in the kingdom of God Jesus is promising that he is unconditionally committed to us.

With these simple gestures of holding up the bread and the wine with the simple words "This is my body ... this is my blood" Jesus is saying that all the earlier deliverance, the earlier sacrifices, the lambs at Passover were pointing to himself.  Just as the first Passover was observed the night before God redeemed the Israelites from slavery through the blood of the lambs, this Passover meal was eaten the night before God redeemed the world from sin and death through the blood of Jesus.

Whe Jesus stood up to bless the food, he held up bread.  All Passover meals had bread.  He blessed the wine - all Passover meals had wine.  But not one of the Gospel mentions a main course.  There is no mention of lamb at this Passover meal. Passover was not a vegetarian meal.  There was no lamb on the table because the Lamb of God was at the table.  Jesus was the main course.  John 1 verse 29, Isaiah 53 verses 6, 7 and 12.

On the cross Jesus got what we deserved: The sin, guilt and brokenness of the world fell upon him.  He loved us so much he took divine justice on himself so that we could be passed over forever.  

All love, all real, life-changing love, is substitutionary sacrifice.  

The first Passover meal in Egypt was an actual meal.  It was not enough that a lamb was slain and its blood put on the doorposts.  The lamb also had to be eaten; it had to be taken in.  In the same way, the Lord's Supper is a way of "taking in" the death of Christ for yourself and appropriating it personally.

"While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples saying, "Take it, this is my body." verse 22

Jesus says, "Take it".  He lets us know that we have to take what he is doing for us.  We have to receive it actively.  You don't get the benefit of food unless you take it in and digest it.  To be nourished by a meal, you have to eat it.  Taking it is the same as saying "This is the real food I need - Christ's unconditional commitment to me."

The "mealness" of the Lord's Supper is a reminder that no one can appropriate the benefits of Jesus' death unless he calls them into a personal relationship with him.  Jesus is saying that we need a personal relationship with him if all the benefits of his perfect, substitutionary, sacrificial suffering are to come to us.

The Jews celebrated each Passover by eating the feast with their families.  The Passover is  a family meal.  Jesus was creating an altogether new family with his disciples.  

The Lord's Supper points toward our future with Jesus.  As he presides over the Passover with his disciples, he tells them the rest of the story of the world in 2 sentences This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many ... I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God."  He is saying that this Passover meal makes the ultimate feast possible and in so doing, draws an inexorable arc between the event of the ensuing 3 days and their consummation in the future.

If you trust in Jesus' substitutionary sacrifice, the greatest longings of your heart will be satisfied on the day you sit down for that eternal feast in the promised kingdom of God.

Chapter 15 The Cup

Mark 14 verses 32 - 36 Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane

Jesus opens his heart to his disciples, to God, to the readers of Mark's Gospel and lays bare his struggles, his agony, his fears about facing death.  He turns to God and pleads, "Is there a way this cup can be taken from me?  Is there any way I can be let off the hook?  Is there any way I can get out of this mission?"  Up to this point Jesus had been completely in control.  Nothing seems to have surprised him so far.  Jesus always knows what's going on.  But all of a sudden we read that "he began to be deeply distressed."  The Greek word translated "deeply distressed" actually means "astonished."  But here, suddenly, something he sees, something he realizes, something he experiences, stuns the eternal Son of God.

Jesus is also, according to the text "troubled."  The Greek verb here means "to be overcome with horror."  He says "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death."

Something happened in the garden - Jesus saw, felt, sensed something and it shocked the unshockable Son of God.  He was facing something beyond physical torment, even beyond physical death - something so much worse.  He was smothered by a mere whiff of what he would go through on the cross.  Didn't he know he was going to die?  Yes, of course he knew that; he had told the disciples so repeatedly.  But now he is beginning to taste what he will experience on the cross and it goes far beyond physical torture and death.  He says "take this cup from me."

In Hebrew scriptures the cup is a metaphor for the wrath of God on human evil.  It's an image of divine justice poured out on justice.  All his life, because of Jesus' eternal dance with his Father and the Spirit , whenever he turned to the Father, the Spirit flooded him with love.  What happened visibly and audibly at Jesus' baptism and at his transfiguration happened invisibly, inaudibly every time he prayed.  But in the garden of Gethsemane he turns to the Father and all he can see before him is wrath, the abyss, the chasm, the nothingness of the cup.  God is the source of all love, all life, all light, all coherence.  Therefore exclusion from God is exclusion from the source of all light, all love, all coherence.  Jesus began to experience the spiritual, cosmic, infinite disintegration that would happen when he became separated from his Father on the cross.  Jesus began to experience merely a foretaste of that and he staggered.  

"I don't like the idea of the wrath of God.  I want a God of love."  The problem is that if you want a loving God, you have to have an angry God.  Loving people can get angry, not in spite of their love but because of it.  If fact, the more closely and deeply you love people in your life, the angrier you can get.  When you see people who are harmed or abused, you get mad.  If you see people abusing themselves, you get mad at them, out of love.  Your senses of love and justice are activated together, not in opposition to each other.  If you see people destroying themselves or destroying other people and you don't get mad, it's because you don't care.  You're too absorbed in yourself, too cynical, too hard.  The more loving you are, the more ferociously angry you will be at whatever harms your beloved.  And the greater the harm, the more resolute your opposition will be. 

When we think of God's wrath, we usually think of God's justice and that is right.  Those who care about justice get angry when they see justice being trampled upon and we should expect a perfectly just God to do the same.  But we don't ponder how much his anger is also a function of his love and goodness.  The Bible tells us that God loves everything he has made.  That's one of the reasons he's angry at what's going on in his creation; he is angry at anything or anyone that is destroying the people and world he loves.  His capacity for love is so much greater than ours - and the cumulative extent of evil in the world is so vast  that the word wrath doesn't really do justice to how God rightly feels when he looks at the world.  So it makes no sense to say "I don't want a wrathful God, I want a loving God."  If God is loving and good, he must be angry at evil - angry enough to do something about it.

If you don't believe in a God of wrath, you have no idea of your value.  A god without wrath has no need to go to the cross and suffer incredible agony and die in order to save you.  Picture on the left a god who pays nothing in order to love you, and picture on the right the God of the Bible, who, because he's angry at evil, must go to the cross, absorb the debt, pay the ransom and suffer immense torment.  How do you know how much the  "free love" god loves you or how valuable you are to him?  Well, his love is just a concept.  You don't know at all.  This god pays no price in order to love you.  How valuable are you to the God of the Bible?  Valuable enough that he would go to these depths for you.   Your conception of God's love - and of our value in his sight - will only be as big as your understanding of his wrath.

When you look at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane he appears to be taking the first approach.  He's certainly not taking the way of detachment; he's pouring his heart out.  He's undone.  And he's honestly and desperately asking God to change the circumstances, praying "that if possible the hour might pass from him."  He cries out "Abba, Father ... everything is possible for ou.  Take this cup from me."  He's contending with the Father, asking him for a way out, asking for another way to rescue us without having to go personally under the flaming sword.

He's actually not taking his circumstances into his own hands.  In the end, he's obeying - relinquishing control over his circumstances an submitting his desires to the will of the Father.  He says to God, "Yet not what I will, but what you will."  He is wrestling but obeying in love.

He's begging the Father to carry out the mission some other way, but he doesn't ask him to abandon it altogether.  Why?  Because as horrible as the cup is, he knows that his immediate desire (to be spared) must bow before his ultimate one (to spare us).

Often what seem to be our deepest desires are really just our loudest desires.  But at one of the supreme moments of personal pain in the history of the world, Jesus doesn't do that.  He says, "Yet not what I will, but what you will."  He's not even saying to God, "I think you're wrong, but I'm going to let you win this one."  No; he's saying, "I trust you no matter what I'm feeling right now.  I know that your desires are ultimately my desires.  Do what we both know must be done."

And in so doing Jesus is absolutely obedient to the will of God.  Yet not what I will, but what you will.  Jesus is subordinating his loudest desires to his deepest desires by putting them in the Father's hands.  As if to say, "If the circumstances of life do not satisfy the present desires of my heart, I'm not going to suppress those desires, but I'm not going to surrender to them, either.  I know that they will only be satisfied, eventually in the Father.  I will trust and obey him, put myself in his hands and go forward."

Jesus doesn't deny his emotions, and he doesn't avoid the suffering.  He loves into the suffering.  In the midst of his suffering, he obeys for the love of the Father and for the love of us.

And when you see that, instead of perpetually denying your desires or changing your circumstances, you'll be able to trust the Father in your suffering.  You will be able to trust that because Jesus took the cup, your deepest desires and your actual circumstances are going to keep converging until they unite forever on the day of the eternal feast.

That love - whose obedience is wide and long and high and deep enough to dissolve a mountain of rightful wrath - is the love you've been looking for all your life.  No family love, no friend love, no mother love, no spousal love, no romantic love - nothing could possibly satisfy you like that.  All those other kinds of loves will let you down, this one never will.

Chapter 16 The Sword

All through the book of mark - and all through Matthew, Luke and John, too - Jesus is constantly talking about "the kingdom of heaven", "the kingdom of God" and also about "the kingdom of this world.  A kingdom is an administration - that is, a way of ordering things and getting things done.

The things the world puts at the bottom of its list are at the top of the kingdom of God's list.  And the things that are suspect in the kingdom of God are prized by the kingdom of this world.  What's at the top of the list of the kingdom of this world?  Power and money ("you who are rich"); success and recognition ("when all men speak well of you").  But what's at the top off God's list?  Weakness and poverty ("you who are poor"), suffering and rejection ("when men hate you").  The list is inverted in the kingdom of God.

These 2 kingdoms, these 2 administrations of reality, these 2 sets of priorities and values meet dramatically in the Garden of Gethsemane - Mark 14 verses 43 - 46.

The term kiss of death came into our English vocabulary from this incident.  The phrase means an intimacy with something that subsequently causes your destruction.

The problem is not that Judas is intimate with Jesus.  Intimacy with Jesus is always the kiss of life, never the kiss of death.  Judas' problem is that he's intimate with swords and clubs.  Why all the subterfuge?  Was he expecting that Jesus would be armed with swords and clubs too?  After all, Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, and any new kingdom had always used money, politics, military might or some combination of these to get into power.

How does the King react to this kiss and to his arrest?  Mark 14 verses 46 - 49

Judas seems to be expecting armed resistance, otherwise he and his squad wouldn't be coming in this fashion.  Jesus responds, "Am I leading a rebellion that that you'd have to come with firepower and deception to capture me?"  The word translated rebellion means a guerrilla movement that is using violent tactics (the sword) to overthrow the existing order of things and bring in a new order - a revolution.  Jesus is saying "If you come to me with swords, because you think I will retaliate with the sword, it shows you don't understand me at all.  The kingdom of God is different from the kingdom of this world."

What Judas and those with him do not understand is that Jesus is indeed leading a revolution but it is different kind of revolution and a much greater one that history has ever seen.  What happens in the kingdom of this world is that revolutions basically keep the same old thing on top of the list.  They're not real revolutions, money and power and politics always stay at the top.  Most revolutions have been merely a fine-tuning of the same old order. Every revolution brings a new set of people into power and then the next one puts a different set of people in power; he is bringing a totally different administration of reality - the kingdom of God.  Jesus is not a revolutionary you can stop with swords, because he's not about the sword all.  Judas doesn't get it.

But Judas is not the only one who doesn't get it.  We read that when Jesus is arrested "one of those standing near drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear."  In the Gospel of John we're told it was Peter.  Peter knows about the kingdom of God.  He has heard Jesus' teaching about it over a period of years.  Yet when push comes to shove, what's his instinct?  Pull out that sword.

We say we're on the side of justice, of peace, of fairness; but when a challenge arises, we feel for the sword hilt.  We merge the kingdom of this world - sword on top, then money, power, success, and recognition - into our philosophy whether it's Christianity or something else.  We settle for the kiss of death.  We're exactly like Peter.

To Peter and to all of us, Jesus is saying "My kingdom is not of this world.  It's completely different,  This is how I'm going to change things; I'm going to put others ahead of myself.  I'm going to love my enemies.  I'm going to serve and sacrifice for others.  I'm not going to repay evil with evil; I'm going to overcome evil with good.  I will give up my power, my life.  Weakness, poverty, suffering and rejection will now be at the top of the list.  My revolution comes without the sword; it is the first true revolution.

"Then everyone deserted him and fled."  Peter and the other disciples, who had spent years by his side, desert him at the first real test of their fortitude  One young man is so intent on saving his skin that when Judas' crowd grabs hold of his garment, he is willing to shed it and run away naked down the street.  In the Bible, nakedness is a sign of shame and disgrace and it's perfectly appropriate in this case: this man's an absolute coward so the shame of running home naked suits the occasion.  Everyone has failed Jesus.

By recounting this young man's naked flight from the garden Mark may be reminding us of another garden.  In the Garden of Eden too there were people who were given a test and they failed.  They were exposed as naked and fled in shame.  Centuries later, another garden and another test and everybody fails in one way or another. They're either waving swords around or fleeing in naked shame.

In the middle of this garden there's someone who is passing a test.  Why are all the other people fleeing and failing?  Their only reality is the world's sword.  they're afraid somebody is going to arrest them, kill them or start a revolution that will remove them from power.  But Jesus is standing firm and he's facing something even worse than the world's sword.  Remember that when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, they turned around and saw the flaming sword of justice, keeping them from ever going back.  Their sins separated them from God.  There's no way back into the presence of God unless someone goes under the sword of divine justice.  Jesus was in the garden facing the ultimate sword of divine justice and he stood firm for Adam and Eve, for me, for you.

On the cross Jesus is getting what we deserve so we can get what he deserves.  When you see that this great reversal is for you, when you see that he gave up all his cosmic wealth and came into our poverty so that you could be spiritually rich, it changes you.  The kingdom of this world teaches you to base your identity on status, money and power.  Without them your identity is gutted.  If you play by the rules of the kingdom of this world, you might do anything to keep your job.  Maybe even lie or cheat or stab others in the back.  But if you're starting to get rooted in the kingdom of God, you know losing your job is not going to be easy or pleasant, but you have learned that when weakness and suffering, poverty and rejection are near, the kingdom of God is near.  It's the time when you come to grips with your real treasure, your real identity.

Christians are free to take or leave money, power, recognition, and status.  How?  These things at the top of the kingdom of this world don't have to control them the same way anymore.  When you understand what Jesus has done for you, it frees you.  When you realise that you are made righteous by his grace and not by your achievement, and that you are loved in Jesus Christ, it changes the way you look at power, money and status; they don't control you anymore.

If you're trying to save yourself, trying to earn your own self esteem, trying to prove yourself, you'll either hate money and power too much or love them too much.  But if you know you're a sinner saved by sheer grace, you can take it or leave it.  You're free.  If money or power comes, there's a lot you can do with it.  But if it starts to go, you know that's one of the ways God's kingdom power is going to work in your life.  The sword is exiting from your life.  The compulsion is dissipating.  You work but your work does not define you.

If you're living for yourself, spending all your money on yourself, striving for power, focusing on your success and your reputation, you may be having a wonderful part, but according to the Bible, that kingdom is going to be inverted.  The days of that kingdom are numbered.

Chapter 17 The End

Mark 14 verses 53 - 59.  There's nothing more dramatic than to be on trial for your life, and no more dramatic moment in a trial than when the defendant is called to testify on the witness stand.  And perhaps there's never been a more dramatic and shocking testimony given on a witness stand than the one Jesus Christ gave during his trial.

Mark 14 verses 60 - 62.  The high priest puts Jesus on the witness stand, and asks if he is the Christ (the "Messiah"), the Son of the Blessed One.  At other times in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has avoided similar lines of inquiry about his identity (Mark 7 verses 5 and 6) or turned the question back on the questioner (Mark 11 verse 29).  This time Jesus answers this central question of the Gospel of Mark head on - positively and fully.  "I am" said Jesus.  "And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."

By saying "I am" Jesus claims to be the Messiah, the promised one.  Jesus goes on to amplify the meaning of the label Messiah by identifying himself as the Son of Man and also by saying he will sit at the right hand of God.

"Son of Man" see Daniel 7 verse 13

"at his right hand" see Psalm 110 verse 1

In both of these allusions the Messiah comes as a judge.  In Daniel 7, the Son of Man comes from the throne of God to earth in the clouds of heaven to judge the world.  And the clouds of the heaven are not the same as the clouds of earth, just water vapor.  These clouds are the shekinah glory, the very presence of God.  Therefore by replying as he does, Jesus is saying "I will come to earth in the very glory of God and judge the entire world."  It's an astounding statement.  It's a claim to deity.

By his choice of text, Jesus is deliberately forcing us to see the paradox.  There's been an enormous reversal.  He is the judge over the entire world, being judged by the world.  He should be in the judgment seat and we should be in the dock, in chains.  Everything is turned upside down.

The response is explosive - Mark 14 verses 62 - 65.  The high priest rips his own garments apart, a sign of the greatest possible outrage, horror and grief.  And then the whole trial deteriorates.  In fact, it's no longer a trial; it's a riot.  The jurors and judges begin to spit on him and beat him.  In the middle of the trial, they go absolutely berserk.  He is instantly convicted of blasphemy and condemned as worthy of death.

But the court of the Sanhedrin did not have the power to pass this death sentence.  It was empowered to judge many cases, but capital cases needed the confirmation of the Roman procurator.  As soon as they are able, the Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to Pilate, the governor appointed by Rome, so that he can put Jesus to death.  

Mark 15 verses 1 - 5.  Jesus is on trial again, this time before Pilate.  The religious leaders offer a battery of charges.  Jesus does not answer them, to the marvel of Pilate.  He vacillates and stalls in an attempt to get out of it.  But he has another card to play; He may be able to escape the responsibiity of a decision through the time-honoured custom of releasing a prisoner amid a time of general rejoicing.

Mark 15 verses 6 - 10.  Pilate is still trying to find a way out.  He knows that the religious leaders are only accusing Jesus out of envy; they don't have a case.  Barabbas is a violent man who has been convicted of murder.  Will Pilate knowingly free a guilty man and condemn an innocent one? 

Mark 15 verses 11 - 15.  Pilate is extremely reluctant to execute Jesus, but despite pronouncing that Jesus is not guilty of a capital offense, he hands him over to be crucified.

Crucifixion was designed to be the most humiliating and gruesome method of execution.  The Romans reserved it for their worse offenders.  It was a protracted, bloody, public spectacle of extreme pain that usually ended in a horrible death by shock or asphyxiation.  But it is noteworthy that Mark gives us very few of the gory details.  He aims his spotlight away from the physical horrors of Jesus' ordeal in order to focus it on the deeper meaning behind the events. - verses 20 - 24.

Although Mark makes no explicit reference to the fulfillment of prophecy, his choice of wording here shows that he is thinking of Psalm 22.  Imagine what Jesus' followers felt as they watched this scene around the cross, as they watched the man they had followed for years being crucified.  Here was a man who calmed storms, banished sickness and cheated death by the miraculous power of his word.

Verses 25 - 33 In their depictions of Jesus' death Mark and the other 3 Gospel writers show a consistent concern for what visual artists call "values" - that is, the interplay and contrast between darkness and light.  All 4 Gospel writers take pains to show us that all the critical events of Jesus' death happened in the dark.  The betrayal and the trial before the Sanhedrin all happened at night, of course, but now at the actual moment of Jesus' death, though it is daytime, an inexplicable darkness descends.  "At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour."  The sixth hour was noon; the ninth hour was 3 pm.  So from 12 to 3 in the afternoon as Jesus was dying there was total darkness.

This was a supernatural darkness.

In the Bible, darkness during the day is a recognised sign of God's displeasure and judgement.  Think of the penultimate plague at the time of the first Passover in Exodus 10 verses 21 - 23.  So when this darkness fell, we know that God was acting in judgment.  Who was he judging?  Mark 15 verses 33 - 34.  Jesus said "My God, my God."  On the cross Jesus was forsaken by God.  That's the language of intimacy.  In the Bible "my God" is covenantal address.  It was the way God said someone could address him if he or she had a personal relationship with him.  "You shall be my people and I shall be your God."

But this forsakenness, this loss, was between the Father and the Son, who had loved each other from all eternity.  This love was infinitely long, absolutely perfect and Jesus was losing it.  Jesus was being cut out of the dance.

Jesus, the Maker of the world, was being unmade.  Why?  Jesus was experiencing our judgment day.  It wasn't a rhetorical question.  And the answer is; For you, for me, for us.  Jesus was forsaken by God, so that we would never have to be.  The judgment that should have fallen on us fell instead on Jesus.

Physical darkness brings disorientation, but according to the Bible, so does spiritual darkness.  Spiritual darkness comes when we turn away from God as our true light and make something else the center of our life.

The Bible sometimes compares God to the sun.  The sun is a source of visual truth, because by it we see everything.  And the sun is a source of biological life, because without it nothing could live.  And God, the Bible says, is the source of all truth and all life.  If you orbit around God, then your life has truth and vitality.  You are in the light.  But if you turn away from God and orbit around something else - your career, a relationship, your family, as the source of your warmth and your hope, the result is spiritual darkness.  You are turning away from the truth, away from life, toward darkness.

When you are in spiritual darkness, although you may feel your life is headed in the right direction, you are actually profoundly disoriented.

If anything but God is more important to you, you have a problem with direction.  It's impossible to discern where you're going, let alone where you ought to be going.  Money, career, love - for a period of time you may feel you have something to live for.  But if you actually get the thing you have been seeking, you suddenly realise that it's not big enough for your soul.  It doesn't produce its own light.  If you centre on anything but God, you suffer a loss of identity.  Your identity will be fragile and insecure, because it's based on the things you center your life on.  It's based on human approval.  It's based on how well you perform.  You don't really know who you are.  In the darkness you can't see yourself.  In spiritual darkness you are isolated.  You are wrapped up in the things that you're living for, so you're always scared or angry or proud or driven or full of self-pity.  As a result, you become isolated from other people.

When God returns he will judge every action, every thought, every longing - everything our heart has ever produced.  And if there is anything imperfect, then we will not be able to remain in his presence.  And being out of the presence of God, who is all light and all truth, means utter darkness and eternal disintegration.  

This was our trajectory and Jesus' death was the only way to alter it.  This is why Jesus had to go to the cross.  He fell into the complete darkness for which we were headed.  He died the death we should have died so that we can be saved from this judgment and instead live in the light and presence of God.  Mark 15 verses 35 - 39

The curtain said loudly and clearly that it is impossible for anyone sinful - anyone in spiritual darkness - to come into God's presence.

At the moment Jesus died this massive curtain was ripped open.  The tear was from top to bottom, just to make clear who did it.  This was God's way of saying "This is the sacrifice that ends all sacrifices, the way is now open to approach me."  Now that Jesus has died, anybody who believes in him can see God, connect to God.  The barrier is gone for good.  Our trajectory has been permanently redirected toward God.  And that's only possible because Jesus has just paid the price for our sin.  Anybody who believes can go in now.

Mark immediately sows us the first person who went in - the centurion.  His confession, "Surely this man was the Son of God" is momentous.  Why?  Because the first line in the first chapter of Mark refers to "Jesus Christ, the Son of God."  Up to this point in Mark no human being had figured that out.  The disciples had called him the Christ, though in the prevailing culture the Christ was not considered to be divine.  All along, Jesus' teachings and acts of power - and even his testimony in front of the chief priests - had been pointing to the fact that he was divine.  All along, Jesus' teachings and acts of power and even his testimony in front of the chief priests - had been pointing to the fact that he was divine.  And people had been asking "Who is this?"  But the first person to get it was the centurion who presided over his death.

He was a Roman.  The only person a loyal Roman would ever call "Son of God" was Caesar - but this man gave the title to Jesus.  And he was a hard character.  Centurions were not aristocrats who got military commission; they were enlisted men who had risen through the ranks.  So this man had seen death and had inflicted it, to a degree that you and I can hardly imagine.  Here was a hardened brutal man.  Yet something had penetrated his spiritual darkness.  He became the first person to confess the deity of Jesus Christ.

Contrast with everyone else around the cross.  The disciples - who had been taught by Jesus repeatedly and at length that this day would come - were completely confused and stymied. The religious leaders had looked at the very deepest wisdom of God and rejected it.

What penetrated the centurion's darkness?  The centurion heard Jesus' cry and saw how Jesus died.

Christianity is the only religious faith that says that God himself actually suffered, actually cried out in suffering.  To Jesus' followers assembled around the cross, it certainly seemed senseless; that there was no good in it at all.  But in fact they came to realise that Jesus' suffering was of immense good to them, as can we.  Why?  Because they would eventually see that they had been looking right at the greatest act of God's love, power and justice in history.  God came into the world and suffered and died on the cross in order to save us.  It is the ultimate proof of his love for us.

And when you suffer, you may be completely in the dark about the reason for your own suffering.  It may seem as senseless to you as Jesus' suffering seemed to the disciples.  But the cross tells you what the reason isn't.  It can't be that God doesn't love you; it can't be that he has no plan for you.  It can't be that he has abandoned you.  Jesus was abandoned and paid for our sins, so that God the Father would never abandon you.  The cross proves that he loves you and understands what it means to suffer.  It also demonstrates that God can be working in your life even when it seems like there is no rhyme or reason to what is happening.

Jesus Christ not only died th death we should have died - he also lived the life we should have lived but can't.  He was perfect obedience in our place.  There is forgiveness and grace for you.

Chapter 18 The Beginning

What made the Christian faith different?  Christians would say it is because of what happened after the leader of this movement was killed.  So what did happen to cause explosive growth in Christianity after its founder's death?  In the course of 300 years Christianity had spread through the entire Roman empire.

Mark 15 verses 37 - 43  Jesus died in mid-afternoon and the Sabbath began at sunset.  The Jewish law permitted no work on the Sabbath, which meant they could not bury the body of Jesus that night or the next day.  So Joseph goes to Pilate, hoping to be able to bury the body in time.  Joseph though a Pharisee shows enormous courage and independence of thought by asking for Jesus' body.

Mark 15 verses 44 - 47  Mark is certifying that Jesus was really dead.  Joseph of Arimathea is named here as an identified witness who actually ad Jesus' body wrapped up and sealed it in a tomb  A Roman centurion (who would be an expert) bore witness of Jesus' death to Pilate (who would be the legal authority on the matter).  Finally 2 women are cited as eyewitnesses to the burial.  So multiple experts and witnesses prove he was really dead.  

Mark 16 verses 1 - 3  - 3 times within a span of just 8 lines, Mark records the names of some women who witnessed these events: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses and Salome.  The repeated names of the women here are source citations - footnotes.  These women must have been alive at the time that Mark was writing or he wouldn't have cited their names repeatedly.  By including their names, Mark was saying to anyone reading this document "If you want to check out the truth of my story, go talk to these 3 women.  They're still alive and they can corroborate everything I have said."  So what is it that these women witness?  They have brought spices and are on their way to the tomb to finish the burial rites on Jesus' dead body.

Mark 16 verses 3 - 7  "He has risen!  He is not here."  Imagine how these women felt, what they were thinking, as they heard these words.  They had come to the tomb expecting to find a dead body.  Instead they heard the words "He has risen!  He is not here."

Mark8, Mark 9 and Mark 10 Jesus has said to his disciples "I will rise again on the third day."  Repetition.  On the third day after Jesus' death there are no male disciples around.  Nobody is expecting a resurrection.  The angel in front of the empty tomb had to remind the women: "You will see him, just as he told you."  

The resurrection was as inconceivable for the first disciples, as impossible for them to believe, as it is for many of us today.  The Greeks did not believe in resurrection; in the Greek worldview, the afterlife was liberation of the soul from the body.  For them resurrection would never be part of life after death.  For the Jews, some of them believed in a future general resurrection when the entire world would be renewed but they had no concept of an individual rising from the dead.  The people of Jesus' day were not predisposed to believe in resurrection any more than we are.

If Mark and the Christians were making up these stories to get their movement off the ground, they would never have written women into the story as the first eyewitnesses to Jesus' empty tomb.  The only possible reason for the presence of women in these accounts is that they really were present and reported what they saw.  The stone has been rolled away, the tomb is empty and an angel declares that Jesus is risen.

The angel then instructs the women "Go tell his disciples and Peter.  He is going ahead of you into Galilee.  There you will see him."

Jesus' resurrection body had "flesh and bones".  He was not a ghost.  The disciples were able to recognise him and to touch him.  He spoke with them.  But could they all have been having a group hallucination?  No because the disciples were not the only ones who saw and touched Jesus.  Paul makes a long list of people who claimed to have seen the risen Christ personally and notes that "most of them are still living" (1 Corinthians 15 verse 6).  How could Paul write that "Peter said he saw the risen Jesus" if Peter was saying "No I didn't"?

Paul mentions 5 appearances of the risen Christ, including 500 people at one "sighting".  7 appearances are recounted in 4 Gospels.  And Acts 1 verses 3 - 4 tells us that for 40 days Jesus appeared constantly to numerous groups of people.  The size of the groups and the number of the sightings make it virtually impossible to conclude that all these people had hallucinations.  Either they must have actually seen Jesus or hundreds of people must have been part of an elaborate conspiracy that lasted for decades.  Paul suggests to his readers that they can go and talk to any of the 400 witnesses they like.  If this was a hoax, it would have had to last for years, and each of the dozens of conspirators would have had to take the secret to his grave.

Moreover there has to be some explanation for how the cowardly group of disciples was transformed into a group of leaders.  Many of them went on to live sacrificial lives and many of them were killed for teaching that Jesus had been resurrected.

Jesus Christ came to pay the penalty for our sins.  That was an infinite sentence, but he must have satisfied it fully, because on Easter Sunday he walked out free.  The resurrection was God's way of stamping PAID IN FULL right across history so that nobody could miss it.

When Jesus cried out from the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he was echoing Psalm 22 which foretold the circumstances of the cross and what it would accomplish.  This same psalm predicted that Jesus would be mocked and that they would cast lots for his clothing.

Jesus' death means no death for us.  His resurrection means our resurrection.

The truth of the resurrection is of supreme and eternal importance.  It is the hinge upon which the story of the world pivots.

The resurrection means we can look forward with hope to the day our suffering will be gone.  But it even means that we can look forward with hope to the day our suffering will be glorious.  When Jesus shows the disciples his hands and his feet he is showing them his scars.  The last time the disciples saw Jesus, they thought those scars were ruining their lives.  The disciples had thought they were on a presidential campaign.  They thought that their candidate was going to win an they were going to be in the cabinet and when they saw the nails going into the hands and th feet and the spear going into his side they believed those wounds had destroyed their lives.  And now Jesus is showing them that in his resurrected body his scars are still there.

Why is this important?  Because now that they understand the scars, the sight and memory of them will increase the glory and joy of the rest of their lives.  Seeing Jesus Christ with his scars reminds them of what he did for them - that the scars they thought had ruined their lives actually saved their lives.  Remembering those scars will help many of them endure their own crucifixions.