What I think is helpful is first go wide. Get an overview of the lessons. The scripture readings for Sunday are from Genesis, Psalm 29, Acts 19 and the opening chapter of Mark’s Gospel.

I’ll start with an exploration into why these are the readings and not others, or something of the logic of a lectionary presentation. Mark is the center around which the other three radiate, so why these three?

As we get our bearings we can drill down, and speak to the special notes that are sounded on this Sunday.

My goal is to queue up and stir up your own scriptural reflections. And join up with your own weekly pastoral thoughts and concerns. 

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It is useful to think of the main Gospel reading as setting the other readings up. We will see exceptions to this over the course of the year, but some clear principles can still be appreciated. Genesis and Psalm 29 and Acts 19 are read because of their relationship to Jesus baptism.

Over the coming weeks we are going to see the main outlines of Jesus, ministry prior to his turning to Jerusalem, as the Gospel of Mark sets these out. So we begin at the start of his narrative. In that 16 chapter long narrative the announcement of the decision to go to Jerusalem and there be crucified forms a pivot around which the two halves of the book turn.

Mark omits—or presupposes—the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke and gets right down to adult business right at the opening verses of chapter one.

The baptism of Jesus is an inaugural moment in all the Gospels, and significant in a way all four wish to emphasize. For Mark, this significance is enhanced by having the baptism as the very first thing he wishes to say.

Note that cleansing water and cleansing spirit are central to his account. In John’s Gospel one can say that the reason Jesus is baptized is entirely to do with recognition, with God wanting him to be recognized as his son by us. It is for this reason, John the Baptist says, that he baptized with water. So that of the scores who came to him in response to a cry for repentance, one who needed no repentance might be identified by the voice from heaven.

With the baptism of Jesus as the centerpiece for this Sunday, we might imagine a number of supporting passages from the Old Testament. The prophet Nathan’s promise of a Davidic line under the eternal protection of God. Psalm 2’s exalted language to David and that divinely chosen line, “You are my son, today I have begotten you.” It is this language of course that appears verbatim, again on God’s own lips, identifying this Jesus son of Joseph as the Son of his own loving, begetting, and choosing. Combined with language from the prophet Isaiah, for Israel, servant.

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

I have put my spirit upon him;he will bring forth justice to the nations.

And in years other than this one, these OT passages will indeed appear on this first Epiphany Sunday.

So we note with interest the selection from the Old Testament that serves to illuminate the Baptism of Jesus: the opening verses of Genesis. Why Genesis 1?

In Genesis 1 we have, like the waters of the Jordan, the primordial waters divided to fashion a good creation pleasing to God. The waters of chaos and a formless void are made beautiful and good. The Spirit of God is present with God as creation takes form.

But another important feature must be seen in its full significance. The “beginning” of Genesis 1 is not simply a temporal marker. The ‘in the beginning’ is also ‘in the agency of beginning.’ The word is grasped most fully in the light of Christ incarnate, and the meaning was always deeply imbedded in the creation account itself. Through the agency of beginning (arche), an agency eternally begotten in God’s self, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, in reshith, in arche, was the word, as John’s prologue states it. The Jewish metaphysics of Philo saw in beginning the agency of God’s word as well, which was understood to be God’s torah. Proverbs speaks of this beginning within God’s self as a wisdom partner through whom the good creation is brought into being. Colossians speaks of Christ as the arche of creation.

22 The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways, the first of his acts of long ago. 23 Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. 24 When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. 25 Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth— 26 when he had not yet made earth and fields,[d] or the world’s first bits of soil. 27 When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, 28 when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, 29 when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, 30 then I was beside him, like a master worker;

By him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, he is the beginning,

Mark’s Gospel begins with his own special nuance on this theme, “the arche of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” That which was at the beginning with God is now the good news of Jesus Christ in the flesh. At his baptism, Jesus cleaves the waters, just as at the first creation, and what emerges is new life, new creation, the very good of God’s only son. The spirit of God that brooded over the waters, in the company of God and the word, here comes down in full majesty to crown the arche of God in the flesh. The beginning of the gospel of new creation is set in motion.   

One point of clarification. The NRSV renders the opening verse of Genesis 1 in the form of a subordinate clause: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void” instead of as a finite clause: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (so RSV, NIV and most translations). This translational difference can open on to a theological disagreement about whether creation is made out of nothing, or out of a chaotic mass, which takes us afield of our task. It is doubtful whether one can made the determination of the matter turn on Genesis 1 alone, for this is not the only place in the OT or NT where the topic is discussed.

Hebrews 11:3—"By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" and Revelation 4:11, "For you [God] created all things, and by your will they existed and were created."

"I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them of things that were not; and so was mankind made likewise." (2 Maccabees 7:28)

What is to be emphasized is the creation of light, which pierced the darkness for the very first time. This is followed by the division of the waters, so that a stable heaven and a stable pooling of seas makes room for the earth to appear in its own stable form. Again we hear echoes of this when the NT refers to the logos at the beginning as being life and the light of humanity, in John’s prologue. The light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it but gave way to it -- its out-of-nothing but the eternal word of God’s power and piercing truth.

It is this light and life that breaks forth again as the waters of the Jordan are divided and Jesus Christ the light of the world emerges. The voice from heaven tells us that this is the beloved Son on whom the Spirit rests. 

Let’s move now to Acts chapter 19. As we shall see in the weeks to come, the NT reading, usually from the Letters of Paul or the Acts of the Apostles, moves consecutively through the epistle and so has not been specially chosen to come alongside the OT and Gospel pairing. Instead we hear portions of the letters as they appear sequentially. This Sunday, however, we see a different principle, where a single text from the 19th chapter of Acts has been chosen because of the Gospel account of the baptism of Jesus. The Christian disciples at Ephesus, Paul learns, had been baptized “into John’s baptism.”

Paul rightly tells them that the baptism into Jesus Christ was in fact not John’s baptism, but a new kind of baptism that followed in the wake of Jesus’s own baptism and that it was John himself who pointed to him as bringing about a new order. The gift of the Holy Spirit is inaugurated for the Christian because of the Spirit’s bodily presence upon the Christ emerging from the waters. What John promised—a baptism in the Holy Spirit, made possible by him whose sandals John would dare not even touch—Mark tells us Jesus experienced. “As he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove.” It is this inaugural gifting of the Spirit upon Jesus that in turns transmits the Holy Spirit to those baptized in his name. To be baptized in Jesus name is to have released in real form the selfsame Holy Spirit. Not the heavens are torn this time, but rather the otherwise stable and predictable patterns of speech, which give way to ecstatic tongues and prophecy so as to confirm that this new baptism is indeed not the baptism of John but baptism in the dead, risen and exalted Lord Jesus Christ.

And finally our psalm for today, Psalm 29. With its perfect seven plus one refrain ‘the voice of the Lord’ the psalm offers something like the bass notes supporting the main themes for today. The voice of the Lord is indeed a powerful voice, a voice from heaven, a voice above the waters, the waters of the Jordan, the waters of creation, a voice of splendor, and above all a voice of authority and power, shaking the creation just as once it brought creation into being. At the psalm’s end it is not the voice of the LORD but the Lord himself enthroned above the flood, seated as king, giving strength and giving blessing. No wonder John reckoned with a baptism of the Holy Spirit far greater than his own, for which his own was but a human prelude and pointer. The Lord Jesus and the voice of the Lord are one and the same Lord, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

We can imagine several images or metaphors to capture the way the Bible reinforces itself across its various parts, which the collection of lessons for today seeks to underscore. The church father Irenaeus spoke of pieces of a mosaic, when rightly assembled, bringing to our eyes the King Jesus in splendor. If you are musical, you might think of a beautiful chord, where all the various notes combine to produce harmony and a piercing music. Or a symphony orchestra, whose conductor is the Holy Spirit, bringing what is old and what is new into perfect coordination, brass and woodwinds and strings and even the little triangle attuned to God’s purposes in his Son. Each Sunday will offer its special notes. For this Sunday we catch the majesty of the baptism of Jesus refracted through Genesis 1, Psalm 29, Acts 19 and Mark 1, as individual witnesses and in combination in support of one another.

Two things we should note. The NT reading from 1 Corinthians introduces the sequential walking through this letter we encounter in the Sundays to come. It has not been chosen—like Acts 19 last week--to illuminate the Gospel reading in a specific sense. And as for the Gospel, it is not from Mark but John.

Nothing would prevent there being a four year cycle with each year devoted to one of the four Gospels. But instead we have a three year cycle. John is spliced into significant moments in each of the three years, especially in Easter and Lent. This matches the character of the 4th Gospel, which offers a more penetrating commentary on the narrative line we find in the 3 synoptic Gospels.  The beloved disciple remains close to Jesus from first to last and in this posture he sees and reports things he feels need greater attention.

I want to start then with John and the OT passage chosen to introduce his narrative, and then turn to the psalm which has been chosen to illuminate them both.

One effect of hearing any two accounts from scripture set side by side is that the similarities and distinctive features are drawn out through attending to the details of each. You can see this in the case of pairing 1 Sam 3 with John 1, the calling of Samuel and the calling of Nathanael.

In both cases we have the obvious detail of confusion. Samuel cannot tell who is calling him. He keeps getting up to respond to Eli, ‘here I am for you called me.’ Nathanael is not sure how Jesus knew him before having laid eyes on him.

But there are also obvious differences. The boy Samuel obediently waits to hear the LORD’s own voice, as directly instructed by Eli, once he knows what’s going on. Nathanael counters the enthusiast testimony of his friend Philip with a dismissive ‘can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Samuel is everywhere depicted as good and true. The elder Eli and his sons stand under judgment. Philip and Andrew are agents of spreading the good news. Eli is too, once he catches on to the young boy’s confusion and properly interprets it as a sign of God’s ways. Eli is of course a complicated figure, in contrast to his wicked sons. In the end, he intuits that the silence of Samuel has to do with him and the judgment of God, and he demands that Samuel not hide the truth but speak plainly. And when the verdict is delivered by the obedient Samuel, he obediently receives it as true. ‘It is the LORD. Let him do what seems good to him.” Nathanael’s conversion to the truth follows a different, shorter and more humorous or ironic path.

One place where the stories do seem to converge is over the sovereign timing of God. Jesus identified Nathanael before any human exchange from Philip. “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” This matches the calling of the LORD to Samuel before he could comprehend what he was experiencing. Samuel did not know the LORD, the narrator tells us. He thought Eli was calling him. Nathanael thought Philip was calling him – and he mocked the testimony. But it was in reality the Lord Jesus himself who saw him and would enlist him with the other followers, overcoming his doubts. And giving rise to the bold confession, “You are the Son of God, you are the king of Israel.”

The calling of the disciples is one of the main themes of Epiphany lessons, coming as it does amidst the manifestation of Jesus to the world, as teacher, healer, wonder worker. He does what he does in the midst of friends and co-workers—who must be trained to understand him and his mission.

John handles this theme a bit differently than the other three gospels. Jesus gradually manifests himself, not only to the world, but to those who will work closely with him, individually, one at a time. First there is the unnamed disciple who along with Andrew stays with Jesus. Then Andrew tells his brother Peter. Then Jesus moves to Galilee and finds and calls Philip in Bethsaida, the city of the brothers Andrew and Peter. Philip finds his fellow Galilean Nathanael and speaks of a conviction shared by the three altogether: ‘we three agree we have found him about whom Moses wrote in the Law and the Prophets.’ Jesus, son of Joseph from Nazareth.

Here, John’s and Jesus’ irony merge. It is the northerner Nathanael who questions the northern home town of Joseph and Jesus as suitable for the one they are testifying to in such grand terms. The one he himself will shortly call Son of God and King of Israel. Philip says only, come and see.

Jesus addresses him and though Nathanael said what he said out of earshot, it is clear Jesus knows what was said. And so he responds in a way that hints at just that. You are an Israelite—you are a Jacob—in whom there is no Jacob, no subtlety and craft, as one would expect from that ancient trickster. You said your mind. Nathanael therefore responds “where did you get to know me?” How did you know what I said and who I am? Jesus says he knew him before he uttered a word. Before Philip called him, just like the boy Samuel, who did not yet know the LORD.

Jesus now refers to an otherwise obscure detail: he saw Nathanael when he was under the fig tree. What fig tree and when, other than sometime prior to Philip’s calling. John has told us nothing about this. Jesus alone knows the time and the place he refers to.  He doesn’t infer it, as did Eli with Samuel, but speaks of a very clear place.

Here is where the scriptures open and close both. Is the fig tree a place for studying the scriptures and for prayer, as the rabbis sometimes infer? Was Nathanael reading the law and the prophets and seeking for the one about whom Moses wrote there? Is the fig tree a sign of the coming age of God’s reign as foretold by Micah 4:4, when nations would stream to Zion and swords would become ploughshares and every one would sit under his own vine and fig tree? and so the age to come Nathanael was longing for and awaiting, before Philip greeted him? Is it a place only Christ and Nathanael know and so important for that reason alone, a place that Jesus wants Nathanael to know that he knows, and so he knows him as he is in the privacy that has his name written on it? So he can come to us in the same way, and does. Opening and closing are both ways God can communicate through his word, law and prophet and Gospel account, with its mysterious reference to the fig tree.

But N’s response is all in without any deceit or mystery, by contrast. And Jesus responds even more boldly. There will be a ladder like Jacob’s, and our Israelite without guile will see angels ascending and descending on it. Jacob’s ladder become now Nathanael’s, in the Son of Man standing before him as he upon whom the angels will come and go from heaven.

After hearing the stories of the calling of Samuel and of Nathanael, the psalm for the day really comes alive.

Lord, you have searched me out and known me; *you know my sitting down and my rising up;you discern my thoughts from afar.

Yes, under my fig tree

Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *

but you, O Lord, know it altogether.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; *it is so high that I cannot attain to it.

Your eyes behold my limbsall of them are written in your book; *

The psalm does not just capture the themes. It does not just give us a front row seat on the action. It casts us in the main roles alongside David and Samuel and Nathanael. It gives us voice and participation in the acts of God. We are written in the book. I sometimes wonder if we would do better on a Sunday like this to just read the psalm in unison after the readings and after the sermon for the day.

I mentioned at the beginning that the Epistle reading is part of a continuous reading through the letter—in this case 1 Cor—that we will resume next week and the weeks to come. It wasn’t chosen in the same way as Acts 19 last Sunday. But of course, that isn’t really decisive since all scripture has a word to speak and to come alongside other readings.

Paul is describing the place of fornication and the damage it inflicts. We may believe it is a secret place, but this is exactly why it is so destructive and why Paul sternly cautions us. Our bodies our temples of God’s Spirit. Our bodies are not our own, in fact, but are seen and known and created by God for God. Our under the fig tree life is a life under God and his word, seen by him from afar, lovingly knowing us better than we do ourselves, whether Samuel or Nathanael or the psalmist or you and me.

The brevity suits the message. Punchy, direct, get down to business. The time is short, St Paul says. One thinks of the Nike ad, ‘Just do it.’

And of course the Gospel of Mark takes this kind of tone not just today but throughout. This is the Gospel in which greek adverb euthus: immediately, straightaway appears over forty times. Immediately upon coming out of the water Jesus saw the heavens opened, immediately they left their nets, immediately he called James and John, and in the passage preceding ours today, immediately the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. This text we will encounter at the first Sunday of Lent. In just this first chapter of Mark alone, as if to set the tone for what follows, the word immediately is repeated ten times in 45 verses, slowing down only for the scene in which Jesus stops to pray, early in the morning, by himself, in a lonely place toward the chapter’s close.

I was privileged thirty years ago to hear the British stage actor Alec McCowen perform his celebrated rendition of the Gospel of Mark for which he had received a Tony nomination. He had memorized the entire Gospel and appeared in the church sanctuary with only a stool as a prop. Hearing again and again the word immediately underscored the drive, the electricity, the economy, the urgency of this Gospel. No time to waste.

It is as if, once the heavens are opened at Jesus’ baptism a kind of forcefield is unleashed. Drawing disciples, healing the sick, teaching with authority, raising demonic hackles, driving ever forward.

The more formal listing of the twelve apostles will come later in chapter 3. Jesus climbs the mountain and of those he calls he appoints twelve to preach and have authority over demons – as he has demonstrated this before them.

Here in the midst of the unstoppable forward movement of Jesus he catches four men in the midst of their daily routines, casting nets and mending them, by the sea and in the boat, brother and brother, side by said, father Zebedee and hired workers there too. Doing what they do and have done over generations. They will fish now for men, Jesus tells the first pair. Immediately they drop their nets and follow. Immediately, going a bit further, he calls James and John, and they leave their father and follow.

Our collect captures the theme. “Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ,” it reads. The four answer readily. Immediately. Without any reflection. They stop doing what they had done always. And they continue what they were doing now with a new purpose and goal. And above all with a new reason to do that: Jesus Christ.

Our prayer is so right to speak of the gift of grace as what we pray for. Only this can get us out of ourselves. Only this has the capacity to teach us to see Jesus as the way ahead, in ways we cannot understand but find overwhelming, compelling, reorienting, life changing. Immediately and urgently.

The prophet Jonah began by famously heading in an opposite direction. After some time out-in the whale or big fish, he got reoriented himself. Today he has accepted his call and sets out to deliver the message God has given him. Straightaway, in the language of Mark. Nineveh is a big city. Notorious for its evil. Jonah prepares himself for a three day journey. Yet the reaction to his 5 word sermon is immediate. Fasting. Repentance. Belief in God Everyone. Like the forcefield unleashed around Jesus, the entire three-day-journey wide Nineveh believed and acted on that conviction. King included, and beasts in sackcloth for good measure. God’s reaction is likewise immediate. He forgives.

Jesus announces that the kingdom has come. Repent. Believe in the good news. Allow this kingdom and its grace to fall upon you. Its transforming power is witnessed to in Nineveh and on the banks of the Sea of Galilee in four men who dropped what they were doing and followed.         

We who hear the 3rd chapter of Jonah know as well the opening chapters and especially the one to follow this one. Here we have the famous Jonah. First disobedient and unwilling to expose himself to the dodgy business of preaching to the wicked Ninevites. What if God forgave them? Then the Jonah who sits down after this miraculous repentance, just outside the city, to see if it would stick. Forty-days is a long time.

But God does not engage in this conduct. He tries to get Jonah to see sense. It is tough work! Even the trick with the shade tree doesn’t get through to him entirely.

Yet the message of Jonah does not turn on Jonah’s getting it. Heck, in chapter one he is prophetic even as he hides and sleeps. The sailors figure it out and know his God is God alone precisely because he isn’t doing his job. And in the end, the Ninevites are precious to God no matter how much Jonah can’t get his head around that.

God’s intention in Jesus Christ is to bring Good News. To set up a kingdom of grace and truth. With immediate force. In him. The older son can object to the father’s lavish forgiveness of the younger prodigal, just as Jonah questions God. But the Kingdom and the Good news aren’t about keeping score but about a new chance, a new kingdom, new, good news, made possible because of Jesus and his word. The time is now here. Turn around. Leave your old nets behind. Believe in the Good news. Follow me.

The Psalm positions itself within this solid kingdom of hope and trust and new life. For God alone my soul in silence waits, truly my hope is in him; He alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold so that I shall not be shaken.

In some ways the Psalm tracks nicely with the Epistle reading for today, as much as for the OT and Gospel reading. Paul is speaking of holding things of this world loosely. The nets of our boat that preoccupy us and rightly mean our daily bread. They can be set down when we are sure where our final trust is. The four men saw in Jesus a way ahead, a new and compelling way. And then he became the only way. For God alone my soul in silence waits. The four men will continue to be fishermen, but different kinds of fishermen, with a different captain now to direct them where to throw their nets. Let those who deal with the world be as those they had no dealings, Paul writes. There is something of genuine substance in being able to say and to pray: For God alone my soul in silence waits. This isn’t an add-on to make we judge important go well. It is the heart of our disposition as we follow our Lord. A solid rock, a sure refuge.

It is possible to think of the psalmist as behind us. It may be even a reflexive instinct. But time and time again we learn he is ahead of us. That the prayers being uttered are advanced in faith. God has spoken once, and it echoed twice in me: power belongs to God. For God alone my soul in silence waits is the language of someone there to teach us. To fit us out with words we need.

St Athanasius wrote with enthusiasm about the special book the Psalter is in his Letter to Marcellinus. He said many wise things there and I commend the entire letter. But this bit captures the sense of the Psalter to which I am referring.

…the marvel with the Psalter is that…the reader takes all its words upon his lips as though they were his own, and each one sings the Psalms as though they had been written for his special benefit, and takes them and recites them, not as though someone else were speaking or another person's feelings being described, but as himself speaking of himself, offering the words to God as his own heart's utterance, just as though he himself had made them up…everyone is bound to find his very self in them and, be he faithful soul or be he sinner, each reads in them descriptions of himself.

In this case, descriptions of himself and herself we need for the road ahead, when we drop the nets of our daily patterns and ask to be reformed to a new purpose, following him, and waiting for him both. For the present form of this world is passing away, and that includes the things we release so that we can say with conviction, For God alone my soul in silence waits.

The man in the synagogue is literally in an unclean spirit. So much so that when he speaks it is the demon alone speaking. Two questions are rapidly posed, and that the answers are known is revealed in the third statement. Yes Jesus has something to do with them and yes their destruction is the point. Some think that the naming of Jesus is an effort at control and counter-attack. That the entire realm of Satan is here at stake is revealed by the individual demon’s first person plural us. It is the individual demon who is then addressed, rebuked, silenced, and driven out.

That this more dramatic exorcism is preceded by Jesus’ synagogue teaching is of a piece with the kind of authority Jesus is manifesting. No invitation by officials is mentioned or intimated. He enters and teaches.

The character of his teaching is not one of explication of scriptural authority, but is an authority like unto it. The source for it. In a word: Prophetic. The same direct authority that is what makes law and prophecy what they are. Just as there is no mediation separating Jesus and his kingdom from the direct encounter with the kingdom of Satan, so his teaching is unmediated and incarnated. It comes out of himself with authority. Here we have the explanation for why the final response of the observers that day has collated both displays of authority under the single rubric ‘a new teaching’ including an exorcism as part of its classroom manifestation. He commands and he is obeyed.

The selection from the Old Testament – the raising up of a prophet like Moses – helps bring the Gospel in Old and New Testaments into coordination. The chapter from Deuteronomy begins with reference to the tribe of Levi. Holy. Set apart. Different than the other tribes and called to a specific purpose with reference to them all. Deuteronomy is situated on the banks of the Jordan, a last speech of Moses to a new generation. From this vantage point life in the land—its challenges and its institutional rapid response teams—are envisaged. Priesthood, prophecy, kingship.

Life in the land is life in the midst a different kingdom – described as full of abominable and death dealing practices. Soothsaying, divination, augury, sorcery, offering in death daughters and sons, necromancy, wizardry, consulting mediums – all of this is anticipated and an alternative kingdom and an alternative form of revelation proposed. Just as Moses spoke from the mountain for God, so God will raise up a prophet like unto Moses. The request from the people that Moses speak for them, at the time borne of fear, is here taken as fully appropriate to God’s plans then and now and into the future. God will put his own words in mouth of the prophet.

Here the subsequent history of prophecy is being anticipated, as we will see it from Joshua to Malachi. The notion of a generation to generation lineage of prophets—Elijah passing his mantle to Elisha—is not developed here in any specific way. The subsequent history is content to use the catchall phrase ‘I warned them by all my servants the prophets.’ And we know that the formal collection of prophetic writings counts 3 major and twelve minor prophets with books bearing their names.

From the standpoint of the last words of Moses on the other side of the Jordan, all this lies in the future. At some point in time this prophetic legacy does not so much end as it lives on in the writings the prophets names bear. Their words live on and remain alive speech in that form. In that form the reference to a prophet with authority promised by God to Moses remains live speech, and for one final moment in time the prophet like Moses takes the form of John the Baptist and even Jesus himself, in his Elisha-like healing and teaching ministry in Mark’s Gospel. We can see the outlines of this theme in Mark’s gospel. Jesus prophet mighty in word and deed. The kingdom of the Spirit in bodily form.

The epistle reading returns us to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. You may have noticed that  this isn’t exactly a non-stop continuous reading; the letter is too long for that. So selections can be made with an eye toward their appropriateness alongside the OT and Gospel reading. That may be the case today.

First a note about modern translations and their use of quotation marks in this eighth chapter. In verse 1 Paul is referring to the claim being made by the Corinthians, or some of them: they say “all of us possess knowledge” and they mean that in a positive sense. That is, they know that food sacrificed to idols oughtn’t to be a problem because such gods as are claimed to be sacrificed to don’t in fact exist. No big deal.

This is confirmed at verse 4 where again quotation marks appear. “An idol has no existence” is what these Corinthians know. “There is no God but one” – this is something one can know by reading Deuteronomy 6, for example.

Paul’s response is in part confirming. As a faithful Israelite he knows that the Lord God is Lord alone. He also knows that though Israel may confess this to be the truth, they live in a world where other deities are not just vying for attention but are succeeding. “You shall have other gods before me” is an acknowledgment of this reality on the ground, and of Israel’s rejection of it. The OT confesses God to be one because of the knowledge they have been privileged to receive from God. Yet the on-the-ground reality is omnipresent and threatening. Aaron makes gods when Moses is gone, as he has it, for too long.

Knowledge isn’t the same thing as reality.

And this is of course his point of departure. Knowledge puffs up, but loves edifies, builds up. Better than to know is to be known by God, and to love him in return. To think that knowledge functions otherwise is the best indicator that the wrong kind of knowledge—without charity—is in play.

Having made these two key points, Paul speaks of the actual situation on the ground in Corinth. In antiquity meat was sacrificed to idols, and it was eaten in that context, taken home, of given to the priests who could in turn sell it. So what of Corinthian Christians who knew the meat came to their table in this way, or weren’t sure, or were eating in the context of others, at non-Christian meals. Paul makes it clear that some of these new Christians once did indeed know well that the meat had been sacrificed to gods, and because of that their conscience is objecting. No knowledge will lift them up and out of that.

So Paul counsels that their liberty can be a stumbling block and so to major in love and forbearance, following his example.   

The word for liberty in this case is the same word usually translated as authority, force, the freedom to do as one please due to power. The Centurian is one in authority, who tells those under him to do what he wishes. The liberty of the Christian is grounded in the true authority, that which Jesus exercises in today’s Gospel. There is no freedom or liberty for the Christian that isn’t a participation in his freedom, which is love in saving authority.

The choice of the psalm for today takes some reflection. It doesn’t seem to marry up to the usual OT-Gospel pairing, except in the most general way. It is an acrostic poem, the beginning of each line starting with the letters of the alphabet. A skilled production. It’s theme is wisdom. Not knowledge. Wisdom which finds its alphabetic beginning and ending, its comprehensive life, grounded in the fear of the LORD.  This fear enables those in the synagogue to acknowledge the giver of life and truth, in astonishment. It leads to wisdom that builds up in obedient praise and daily living, and not puffed up knowledge or cowered conscience. In that sense love’s cousin is wisdom, found in the fear of the LORD, which builds up and strengthens.

In the language of Miles Coverdale, which has stayed in my head: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, a good understanding hath all they that do thereafter, the praise of it endureth forever.

In the Christian Year Easter is of course the fixed moment, the GM line.

And it found its place in time with reference to Passover and Jesus’ Last Supper. In time Easter was fixed as the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, at least in the West. So the date of Easter can move forward and backward in our calendar time by 4 weeks.

The Lenten season leading up to Good Friday and Easter is a fixed period, replicating the forty days of Jesus in the wilderness and OT counterparts, as a season of Christian fasting and waiting. It always consists of five Sundays and Passion Week.

This means that the Epiphany ordinary time leading up to it also expands and contracts, given the movement of the Easter date.   

The final Sunday of Epiphany-tide always commemorates the Transfiguration. There could be as many as eight Sundays prior to it or as few as four. This year there are five.

I’ll have more to say about Transfiguration and its place before Lent next week. It’s really a Sunday for preparing for the coming Sundays when Jesus walks to Jerusalem to his passion for us. It is less a last Sunday of Epiphany and more an entry window on Lent.

It also marks the next to last Sunday we see of the Gospel of Mark until after Easter. Then the continuous reading in Mark will resume.

So this is the final Sunday of our slow walk through the first chapter of Mark. Lent begins with the short account of Jesus in the wilderness. We return in Pentecost time to Mark chapter 2.

The Gospel of John replaces Mark for the Sundays after Transfiguration and Wilderness in Lent and Easter. We see the same general pattern in Matthew and Luke years. It gives us the opportunity to hear John’s clear baritone voice.

As we look at the passage from Mark for today I want to say a little bit about the last section of chapter one which follows it, so as to get a good sense of the direction of the chapter as a whole before we leave it.

One important phrase sits quietly there in verse 38. It could sum up the force of Mark’s opening chapter. Translated variously:

for that is why I came out (RSV)

for that is what I came out to do (NRSV)

That is why I have come (NIV)

for to this end came I forth (ASV)

for therefore came I forth (KJV)

Because the greek verb implies a place Jesus was that he has left, the Fathers typically thought of that place along the lines of the Gospel of John. Jesus has come forth from his life with the Father. Mark does not develop this idea though in some ways he is consistent with it.

In Mark’s opening chapter we could infer that, if Jesus had a place, its location is far from clear. Nazareth, Capernaum, even the wilderness are contenders. Mark has no birth narrative. John appears in the wilderness. People go out to him, including an adult Jesus, from a Nazareth we hear nothing more about. In Galilee the action shifts to Capernaum, the synagogue there and the home next door that as the next chapters of Mark imply, seems to be his base of operations. It is he house of Peter where his mother in law lives. Leaving the synagogue he heals her and she serves him there. The whole town gathers around the door for healing. It will have been a busy day. After the sundown marking the formal end of the sabbath the people begin streaming to him for healing.

With little sleep, Jesus gets up long before day break to go pray in a wilderness place. Perhaps the wilderness is his real home: the place where he prays is home. Or maybe the point is that for Jesus no place and all places are the place of his activity, his life such as it is, with us. He has come forth and is forth and must be so.

We also get a clear sense that his healing ministry has briskly taken off, but equally could be all he does.  Yet he has come forth, and will be forth. He silences the demons and insists at the end of the chapter that a man he has healed out of compassion not blaze it abroad. But he does. Yet Jesus cannot be constrained and must continue on through the neighboring towns, likely on the west side of the Sea of Galilee, moving from synagogue to synagogue. That is why he has come forth.

The chapter ends with Jesus again returning to the desert, given the fame spreading due to his healing and man warned not to speak ignoring him. People come out to him there in the desert all the same, much as they had done for other reasons to John in the wilderness, as chapter one opened. Even in the wilderness Jesus is forth. The demon last Sunday was right to note that Jesus had come out against him. In the spirit of God Jesus is always forth and must be so. His ministry is who he is.

So while Mark does not have any developed thought about Jesus’ preexistence, in the same way as John does, Jesus has come forth into this world and is tirelessly in his very self manifesting the kingdom of God.

Our lesson relates that immediately after teaching and driving out a demon in the synagogue Jesus steps straight into the house of Peter. # 2 Main Street, Capernaum. Before he can sit down for a meal, the one who will attend him must first be attended to. Lifted up, healed. The verb to lift up is redolent of resurrection and was likely heard in that way in time.

One cannot miss the emphasis on just how pressed and crowded about Jesus is. His coming forth strikes the world like lightening, and he is overwhelmed but up to it fully. With little sleep, like the prophets of old running before a chariot, he is off to the next stop, taking only precious time to pray.

Listen then to Paul’s account of his ministry. In the wake of Jesus, himself like an urgent prophet, he cannot be constrained. This comes in a section where Paul is defending his apostleship and how he goes about it. He demands no wages. Yet he must of course live. Though he maintains his rights, he is prepared to forego them. If he works freely, his only ground of boasting is that he has the privilege of sharing the gospel without cost. Preaching is not something he wills, but something that has been laid upon him. A commission. Here we find interesting parallels with Mark’s account of Jesus, working tirelessly, immediately, urgently, for this I have come forth. Paul’s reward, such as it is, is the joy of sharing the Gospel as he proclaims it and brings others within its saving orbit.

Our OT passage comes from the comfort, comfort section of Isaiah. Israel in exile has received double for all her sins. Her debt is paid. Yet she is sluggish and worn down, like those Jesus confronts in Peter’s mother in law, and those thronging his door. God speaks here as Jesus acts. God remains fully in charge and fully able to create anew. Kings and rulers are at their best agents in his hand, doing his bidding. They come and go, but God remains king forever. He is tireless in giving power to the faint and the weary. He lifts them up as Jesus lifts up and serves. They not only arise but run without wearying. They are made like unto him who lifts them up, and made ready for service like Peter’s mother in law or the man with leprosy in Mark’s conclusion. Jesus is moved with compassion as God speaks the double word of comfort to Israel.

The Psalm for the day doubles down on Isaiah and Mark. The Lord has pleasure in those who fear him, who wait for him, as Isaiah says. The wicked who come to destroy men and women are brought down and driven out. God gathers the exiles, he lifts up the lowly from their sick beds. He delights in rebuilding and remaking and is forth for that purpose 24/7. To which the only response is, then and now, Halleluia.        

Because of the significance, registered annually, of the Transfiguration, preparing us for the Lenten season to follow, all of the lessons have been selected in coordination for this Sunday. So the roughly continuous reading from Paul moves away from 1 Corinthians to a brief excerpt from his second letter to Corinth. The light that shines out of darkness is the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, he writes. The selection has been made in order to link the knowledge in our hearts, granted by the Holy Spirit, with Jesus Christ transfigured, who appeared before three of his disciples on the mountaintop to grant them this vision of his dazzling eternity.

We are at that point in all of the synoptic Gospels where Jesus is turning from his epiphany earthly ministry and heading to Jerusalem and his passion and death. In the account provided by Luke this is actually the topic under discussion when the transfigured Jesus is conversing with Moses and Elijah, concerning his NT exodus.

The Gospel of Mark provides three statements from Jesus to his disciples about this exodus, each with a slightly different reaction, from Peter’s rejection and rebuttal in chap 8, to misunderstanding and fear in chap 9, to silent following in chap. 10. In Mark the Transfiguration comes just after the first of his declarations, and his charge that all who follow will take up a cross as he is to do ahead of and for us all. That is our Lenten walk in 2018 of course, and our daily walk in this life following him.

So it is significant that after this difficult charge we are made privy, as readers of Mark’s Gospel, to the encounter three of his followers, chosen by him, including the brash Peter, privately experienced. On a high mountain apart, as Mark compactly puts it.

Before we look more closely as this our signal reading for the day, the Old Testament passage is important to consider, since it provides some key information concerning the prophet Elijah, whose conversation with Moses and Jesus is at the heart of the Transfiguration event. So let’s go there.

Earlier in Epiphany Deuteronomy 18 spoke of a prophet like Moses who would arise. Though the text appears to refer to the prophets who appear in the wake of Moses, prophets like Elijah and Elisha, in time, after the twilight era of prophecy, it was understandably taken to refer to a resumption of prophecy, in one final appearance. Prophecy in totality focused in Jesus incarnate.

In these two mighty prophets we see today a passing of the torch, from one generation to the next. The references in the chapters concerning the affairs of Elijah and Elijah—fully 16 in total—point us to prophecy in a distinctive mode. We hear of bands/sons of prophets (NRSV = company), characteristic dress—Elijah’s famous mantle—feats of healing, rain-making, fire from heaven, fasting and great strength, an abbot or father and even a possible tonsure – Elisha is referred to as baldy in 2 Kgs 2 and not very wisely. One thinks of powerful monastic figures, like Bernard of Clairvaux, founding monasteries, counseling popes, defending the faith.

Elijah’s abbot ministry is coming to a close and he knows it, as do his sons, his prophetic followers.  Elisha knows too. Elijah tries to move out of sight, to Bethel, then to Jericho, and at last to the Jordan, and though he asks Elisha to stay put, he refuses. With his mantle he parts the Jordan as Joshua, Moses’ follower, did once long ago. At last he confronts Elisha and asks what he would have him do. He wants a double portion of his spirit – and given what we have seen of it at work in him, we can understand Elijah’s statement that this is a hard thing. He does not so much give what Elisha asks as provide for the conditions under which it could happen: if he sees him going up into heaven, much in the same way, though for the last time, he has persistently accompanied Elijah in these his last days.

And the narrator shows us the prophet Elisha, keeping on watching, until he could see Elijah no further, and only then tearing his clothes in two, as the two prophetic men—son and father—are torn in two from one another. His last words are curious, “father” is clear enough, given the monastic like fellowship. But what of “the chariots of Israel and its horsemen”? The identical phrase is used just before Elisha himself is about to die, by Joash, the king of Israel, as he accepts this unwanted fate (2 Kgs 13).  Most agree “chariots and horsemen” refer to the greatest in the human military arsenal – of Pharaoh, the Syrian commander of Elisha’s day, later empires of Assyria and Babylonia. The air, sea, and land assault weapons mighty nations today wield. Elijah and Elisha are that arsenal for Israel, more powerful than any force.  The prophetic chariot is now separating and a whirlwind carries Elijah bodily into heaven.

Having gone bodily into heaven, the return of Elijah remained a feature of reflection. So he appears, mentioned before Moses here. Moses was of course the preeminent OT figure and so in time ideas related to his assumption into the heavenlies would emerge. Whether the pairing Moses and Elijah suggests “the Law and the Prophets” as the totality of scriptural testimony is plausible enough though not underscored. Both Elijah and Moses had significant revelatory experiences at Sinai. The “after six days” reminds us of Moses ascent after six days at Exod 24:16 though Origen also saw this pointing to the sabbath seventh day of paradisial time. The dazzling clothes also suggest the glorious garments traditionally held to be Adam’s eternal clothing in God’s unmediated presence in the Garden of Eden, before garments of skin, of corporality, were taken up after his disobedience. Mark does not refer to a shining face, but clothes with an intensity of whiteness unlike anything humanity could make or imagine. We should take it that this signaled already the different status of Jesus compared with the two heros with which he was conversing. In the Old Testament the eternal Word spoke to Moses and the Prophets. Now that fact is disclosed for what it in truth it was and is, and shown to the three privileged witnesses.

Peter did not know what to say so he proposed a building project. He was afraid. This is never the best time to make concrete proposals. Notice the difference here. Peter and Jesus. Elisha and Elijah. Elisha wanted to go wherever Elijah went and he refused to leave him. He did not seek to make him stay, but wanted only the means to move forward, with his spirit, in double strength. A model disciple. Taking up his cross and following.

The voice from heaven says just what was said at the Baptism of Jesus, with which our Epiphany reflections began. Here is however added the important words: “listen to him!” “He has just told you what he will do and where he is going. This prophet mightier than Elisha will walk to his death and he bids us follow. Listen to him. Not build anything or try to freeze the frame.” The path to new life, to eternal life, to dazzling fellowship, to victory over death goes through Calvary. The three cannot know the details of the path or of following, but they see before him the end point Jesus is tracking and that he will gain for us all.

The dazzling clothes are the clothes of his eternal life with God. He will put them on in the end in his resurrection body. They can count on that. They are given to see who this Jesus is, in his life with God, that he has come to give us.

He will not be whisked into heaven. By his act of love in dying for us he will claim for himself the bodies Moses and Elijah; of and all of the Old Testament saints; the halting three and the twelve and us now in our building proposals, our fears, our rebuttals. And he will make us like unto his eternal self. Robed in his glorious Body.  In and by the Spirit, Paul says, he has “shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

As our psalm summarizes it.

Out of Zion—in the eternal Son—perfect in beauty, God reveals himself in glory.

The enmity between man and animal, in consequence of the fall, is here gone. The prophecy of Isaiah 11—wolf lying down with lamb and a little child in safe company—is likely part of the background of Mark’s terse account. The snake tempter of Eden is here without effect. “Jesus was with the wild beasts and the angels ministered to him.”

Notable is that the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus at his baptism is the same Spirit who immediately drives him, tosses him in the Greek, into the wilderness. Matthew and Luke say the same thing but the link with Jesus’ baptism is not present in the same way because of their more amplified presentations. In Mark’s case, less is sometimes more. The Holy Spirit of baptism and filial declaration—you are my son--drives Jesus into a confrontation with the king of demons, Satan. In and by that same Spirit Jesus heals and drives out demons as chapter one unrolls. We have been witnesses of that.

Here is one of the places where the symphony of scripture can produce such compelling full-chord music. Coming alongside Mark’s compressed account of baptism and wilderness authority is the pairing of Noah and some very challenging lines from 1 Peter. Chosen because of the reference to baptism, and its pre-figurement in the ark, riding safe and high above the flood waters. The seas of destruction bearing upon them the eight saved, baptized, members of Noah’s family. The cycle of adamic sin and evil, stretching from the garden to Cain and Abel, to the spread of wickedness in the wake of angelic encroachment in the sphere of mortals, as rendered in Genesis 6. The wickedness of man on the earth, and the continual evil plotting of mortals reaches its limit for God in Genesis 6 and the decision is made to start again, and to save Noah and his family to do that.

1 Peter understands this period as one in which God waited patiently, but it does not say exactly for what, and it does not clarify the period of waiting. From Adam to Noah? Presumably for others to repent and join the 8.  But only 8 were saved. Here 1 Peter and Genesis are in full agreement. Baptism is like the ark because the salvation is out of chaos and death. Peter calls it an appeal to God for a good conscience, the conscience of the suffering but righteous Christian he has just commended. Christ suffered and died for all, and so the anti-type is greater and more final than the noah type prefiguring it.

The baptism of Jesus brought with it the descent of the Holy Spirit in fullest measure, which in turn drove Jesus to confront Satan and drive out and put on notice the demonic realm at work on earth. We are baptized into that baptism and empowered by the Holy Spirit given by his life and death for us. His life and his death were a confrontation with evil and death, beginning in the wilderness and extending to the Cross and empty tomb. The cosmic dimension is underscored in places like Ephesians 4, and Colossians 2, Romans 10 and Revelation, in the scenes of earthquake and broken tombs and the rising of the saints at his death, in Matthew’s crucifixion account.

What is being described in 1 Peter 2:19 has been the subject of enormous discussion over the history of interpretation, with greats like Augustine changing their minds, Luther admitting the text is just not open to convincing single interpretation, Calvin disagreeing with Aquinas. Further opening onto notions of the afterlife and purgatory, the descent clause in our Creed, Holy Saturday liturgies of captivity taking captive, leading even to the ambitious musings of von Balthazar over Christ’s work on Holy Saturday, dropped into utter deathly godforsakeness so as to redeem all things. These latter topics of course do not trade on 1 Peter alone and it is important to keep this in view but on a wider grasp of what the time between Cross and tomb and Easter morning entails in God’s purposes in Christ Jesus, and the scriptures point to this.

The listener can breath easy. Our job does not entail giving the final word on this matter, but rather in trying to understand 1 Peter in relation to the main themes of Mark and Genesis. Baptism, spiritual authority, salvation, waters of chaos returning in Noah’s day for a work of judgment, and the waters of the Jordan releasing into our lives the spiritual authority of Jesus Christ the savior. 1 Peter describes a movement from death to resurrection to ascension and exaltation over angels and authorities and powers. What began at the Jordan, was prefigured in Noah and in the sacramental work of Christ in Israel in former days, is completed through cross, tomb, resurrection and exaltation.

Our baptism is a baptism into that full journey of triumph. It is an appeal to God himself, in and by Christ’s triumph, for a conscience worthy of our present life and calling. A conscience he has forged for us. The resurrection has forged this. The exaltation has put paid to it.

If Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 and our text are speaking of similar things, and I believe they are, the interpretation closest to hand is that the spirits in prison are the fallen angels of Genesis 6, responsible in part for the wickedness unleashed and judged in the days of Noah. Between death and resurrection, the quickened spirit of Christ made proclamation to them, as part of the defeat of and exaltation over powers and authorities and angels with which our reading concludes. There is an arc of Christ’s saving work, from Noah to Jordan to Cross to tomb and back again, in final proclamation.  The Spirit at work in Christ is not quelled even in death but continues at work, until raising our Lord to his new spiritual body amongst us on Easter, and lifting him into the heavenlies to sit at God’s right hand in authority.

The crucial thing to note is how the symphony of scripture, when properly conducted, helps clarify what are the main and reinforcing themes across passages. There will not again be a flood to eliminate the evil that persists on earth and in our hearts. Instead God sends his only Son to contend and win. Destroying death and sin reaching all the way back to Adam and Noah and putting Satan and the powers on notice in his life and death and rising and ascending, all four, that this is so. Mark’s linking of baptism and wilderness has to do with his terse style but it also speaks of his conviction about what the Spirit’s descent upon Jesus was truly about. 1 Peter extends that to the Spirit of Christ at work in death.

A variation on this interpretation is that “in that state” in Greek refers to his being made alive, not to his spirit preaching after death, and so to his resurrected state. The proclamation is then himself before the angels and spiritual powers opposed to him. I prefer the interpretation given but like Luther will admit the passage is difficult if taken in its own. We need the wider symphony of scripture to illumine those parts that at times are harder to understand. Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension are his saving victory for us over death and the powers of death, and we have been baptized and noah’s arc-ed into that new creation life with him.

The Psalmist entrusts his enemies to God, that they not triumph over him. Christ is our victor. Our own sins against him, as we remember them from days gone by, he asks that God look at through his love and compassion. And see us in that light. The covenant with Noah has in Christ been extended to all the children of Abraham, including us far off who have been brought near. The compassion and mercy of the LORD are from everlasting and forever, for those who lift up their soul to him.   

The covenant with Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 17

Paul’s reflections on Abraham in Romans 4

9 verses of Psalm 22

The open announcement of Jesus in Mark 8 of his intention to go to Jerusalem

The metaphor of a symphony commends itself because it describes so well the character of scripture in its parts and as a whole. The Holy Spirit’s conductors baton signalling this instrument, dampening that, calling for more from the seemingly incidental oboe or French horn. Bringing into concert. The waters of creation and the waters of the Jordan. The resolute watching and following of Elisha and the Lord’s seeking to make Peter into the same. The ark and baptism. The immediately of Nineveh and of Galilee. John the Baptist and Elijah. Wilderness tempting at Sinai and at the Jordan. Promised wolf lying down with lamb, Jesus with the beasts.

Old and New. Former and Latter. Elder and younger. The lessons move like a weaver’s shuttle. Not a single direction but, as in a symphony, mutually reinforcing, coordinating, the providential disclosing of God’s purposes through time.

In Mark’s Gospel the announcement by Jesus that he will go up to Jerusalem and there be crucified, and rise again, is stated three times. Peter can only hear the former—persecution and execution--and does not like the full scenario in any case. He rebuts Jesus, and is himself rebutted, sternly corrected, and put in his place publicly before colleagues, and fellow risk-taking followers. In the next two instances, and by his simple moving forward toward this divine goal, we find the twelve quieter in response, and moving along with him. There is some mysterious pedagogy at work, set in motion by Jesus’ firm handling of Peter today. And perhaps the mountaintop scene of final glory he and James and John share, who knows? John has his own version of this, where it is Peter who concedes, “to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Our readings from Romans—like last Sunday, a special selection—and from Genesis obviously set before us the man Abraham, and his wife Sarah. There is nothing intrinsic in Mark’s Gospel that we might observe that links the text to Abraham, in something of the way we often observe that, as with Elijah last week, or Samuel or Jonah, in weeks preceding. The tightest link, orchestration, weaver’s shuttle, is from Romans to Genesis, via the figure of ancestor Abraham, and Sarah.

Paul’s point is that Abraham’s faith in God preceded the giving of the law, and before the command to circumcise. It came when he was old and had no reason to ground his faith in what God was promising—land, children, home—in anything in the human realm. Only in God’s word to him. Here Paul, in Romans 4, is referring to the faith of Abraham in chapter 15 of Genesis, where the author says that his trust in God was accounted to him as righteousness – a righteousness apart from the law. But Paul wants to build on a further point, out beyond the initial promise and the initial response in faith in chapter 12 and its reiteration in chapter 15. Abraham will be a father of many nations, not just one. His progeny will be as the sands of the sea and will also constitute many nations and not one bursting at the seams. His changed name underscores it.  Hence the choice of Genesis 17 as our first reading, which builds upon the first and second encounters. Paul has conflated three episodes so as to stress that the promised Abraham’s progeny will be the multitude of nations who can call him their father, and not just those who in time were given the law.

This makes the reference to never wavering in faith a touch ironic, for the careful reader of the Genesis chapters. Both he and his wife take the promise after three declarations, and the birth of Ishmael as an option B, as worth a laugh. But Paul’s point is likely that they kept receiving and holding to God’s promises in spite of all and even with a laugh to relieve the couple now in their nineties. The three solemn encounters with God compounded their need for patient waiting, but also enlarged the promise in a way Paul’s sees as anticipating each and every one of us in Christ.

Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

The psalm captures the force of what Paul is seeing retrospectively, and what Abraham might well have said prospectively from Paul’s vantage point.

26 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, *and all the families of the nations shall bow before him.

27 For kingship belongs to the Lord; *

29 My soul shall live for him;my descendants shall serve him; *they shall be known as the Lord'S for ever.

In the Gospel reading for today we wrap up our 6 Sunday walk through the early chapters of Mark with a selection appropriate for Lent from chapter 8. Next week we turn to John.

Mark says that Jesus is speaking openly. Let there be no doubt. That this plain speaking comes as a strong force is evident from the response. Whatever the disciples might have intimated of his ultimate mission in their time with Jesus until now we may assume was minimal, now halfway through Mark’s narrative line. Whatever else they knew about Jesus, they have come to know him as a relentless, powerful, triumphant, indefatigable and unstoppable life force. A man among men, unlike men. Suddenly he speaks of a stopping – in death, and an unspeakable death, and so taken by Peter to be a death that should not be part of what they have witnessed thus far. Should not be and need not be. His private rebuke is met in turn with public rebuke, stern and unwavering. At least this much is clear. Whatever Jesus is bringing to his relentless public ministry in this life he is bringing to his final confrontation in death. Not just bringing it – here we have no martyr – but seeing to its accomplishment. Describing it in details. This must be why the final part of the design—rise on the third day--doesn’t seem to be heard, given the route to it, and so offers no mitigation. Jesus is neither a martyr nor a superman meriting our awe either. That Peter rebukes and is rebuked is part of the very real drama unfolding, stripped of myth or tragedy. Jesus looked at each one of them the text says when he delivered the rebuke. This will be neither myth nor tragedy but God’s way of confronting Satan and defeating him in all his guises, even ones coopting his disciples in their fear and in their alternative plans. Jesus will show himself fully able to walk this road. He requires for assistance nothing from men and women except their presence and their testifying, to a death that will lead to life.

Abraham stepped out onto a road whose direction and purpose he could not know in details, guided only by the God who would tell him three times, formally, that he was good to his word. Alternative schemes and doubt and detours and stifled laughs came on the road he and Sarah were following in faith. The sheer implausibility did not involve their dying – most of their life was behind them now – but it did involve dying to what was familiar and what could have made worldly sense for the balance of their days. Instead, they heard God’s voice and they left familiar ways to head onto the king’s highway.

Jesus asks his disciples to follow. To listen to God’s son. The cross they take up is the one he has made for them and for us, and which is a yoke lifting off life’s burdens in exchange for the profit of new and eternal life.

But what this does allow is for John’s use at the Lenten season, where our attention is on Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem for a final time, by giving us additional insight into the character of his confrontation with religious authorities there. So today we are in the temple during Passover, and witness Jesus driving out those who changed money so that animals could be bought for sacrifice, by pilgrims coming from regions of the Jewish diaspora. Matthew, Mark and Luke report that at the final Passover of his life he entered the temple and “drove out those who sold” as Luke has it in his laconic version of just two verses, whereupon he began his teaching there—so Luke--and healing—so Matthew. Jeremiah is the OT text quoted by Jesus, a house of prayer has become a den of robbers.

It has been convincingly argued that John has been written for its own sake but also for readers who know Mark. At a number of points, parenthetical comments he makes presuppose a reader with knowledge of the narrative line in Mark, to which he is making additions.

So he splices in things in order to augment, supplement, emphasize. This early encounter in the temple during Passover culminates in what is taken to be a prediction of the temple’s destruction, which is consistent with the charges brought against him at his trial, which the synoptics all report. In John’s gospel, moreover, the culminating incentive for hostility and death seeking comes in the wake of the raising of Lazarus, and the fear that “everyone will now believe in him.” The end of Chapter 11 is crystal clear on this point, and for John, it is here that Jesus turns to Jerusalem for a final time, being anointed by Mary before entering the city. So the encounter at Passover is but the first in a series, which we learn was retrospectively understood in its full significance as a prediction of his own death and not so much the temple’s destruction.

“But he was speaking of the temple of his body.”

Our readings for today are less straightforward in the way they work together. Or more subtle. I take that to be a good thing, asking us to probe, stop and ponder and pray and meditate. Hear, read, mark, learn, inwardly digest – as Thomas Cranmer wrote about how scripture gets into, finds it path into us, as God’s word.

Let’s identify the links and then tease them out.

Jesus action in the temple brings to mind, to the scripture-marinated disciples, Psalm 69:9 – a psalm which otherwise is important elsewhere as prefiguring Jesus’ suffering. “They gave me poison for food and for my thirst vinegar to drink.” The verse that rises up in them as they witness Jesus’s actions in the temple is “zeal for thy house will consume me.” 

In the ten commandments God is a jealous God, a God who is to be first and God alone. Worshipped in this spirit. Unlike all he has made and above all other claimants to be God, holy in making his commandments known. The same word in Hebrew for jealous is here as in Psalm 69. In John’s gospel it is the zeal of Jesus Christ, jealous for the temple and for the right worship of the Holy God of Mt Sinai there, in the here and now of the temple, God’s holy sanctuary. In the psalm, the righteous one is zealous to such a degree that he is all-consumed in his efforts. Like the all-consuming fire of God’s holiness. Yet the psalm also makes it clear that this zeal of the righteous one provokes attack. The insults of those that insult thee fall upon me, the verse continues. Perhaps this is what is meant in the final line from John for today. The further confirmation of the scriptures and Jesus word together is remembered by the disciples who witnessed the encounter, and it is just this: Jesus would not just be all consuming in his zeal, like God himself, in putting right what false worshippers have distorted. In addition, because of his zeal in this cause, the insults against God which he condemns and overturns would fall on him to his death. The temple where God dwells, which the temple on earth was to be by God’s holy design, is embodied in his son. “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this.”

In 1st Corinthians Paul speaks of the power of this same cross in leveling and reconfiguring what humanity means by wisdom. Jews demand signs, he says, and Greeks desire wisdom. When Jesus acts with righteous authority in overturning the exchange tables, Jews who were present asked what sign he might give for doing this. They apparently do not dispute the action for its own sake, but instead ask for some sign for why he is the one sent by God for this kind of action.  

Now this is a statement rife with possible meaning. Jesus does signs in John’s Gospel. He has just done one, his first, the turning of water into wine. Like Moses’ producing frogs, hail, grasshoppers, the death of the first born, or the birth of Immanuel, the sign given to Ahaz by Isaiah, the sign demanded of Jesus would be something concrete and present. Following the turning of the water into wine he will heal the official’s son on death’s door. And the man born blind. And call Lazarus from the tomb. Concrete signs and wonders.

Here there is a sign which he gives in response, but it is enigmatic. Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. Enignmatic and having to do with the future yet to unfold. Not unlike the sign God gives to Moses at the burning bush, which is the eventual worship of God at the mountain where he now is, yet after the ordeal of the confrontation with Pharaoh yet to come. Jesus is speaking of himself as a sign, indeed the ultimate sign, his body as the temple of God’s holiness, which will be destroyed but which will be raised up again, after three days.  For those demanding signs as proof when they do not see the actions for what they are, the sign given by Jesus is himself. As Paul puts it, Christ crucified is the sign proclaimed by God himself, whose weakness is stronger than human strength. Whose wisdom is the prefect law of the LORD, reviving the soul, giving wisdom to the innocent.

The symphonic links across the readings may be subtle but they are profound. Wisdom is to be found in God’s law, which is embodied in the jealous obedience of Jesus, whose life is the sign given by God for new life, upsetting what we demand but showing us him for whom we long. The scriptures bear witness to him. Some things we can only understand over time, as we hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, just as did his first disciples. Even present with him, their vision was at best partial. But after he had risen from the dead the scriptures would come alongside the words he spoke as remembered and shown them both redolent of life giving truth and the wisdom for which the psalmist longs.

I want to begin the scriptural reflections for Lent 4 with the verses chosen from Psalm 107. I believe they help us understand what Jesus is doing when he reaches into the collective memory of Israel and likens himself to the serpent which Moses raised as a means of healing and salvation.

Israel cultivated recollection. Memory is a key faculty in her life with God. She was regularly commanded to tell about the past and present to future generations – see Psalm 78 or the book of Deuteronomy or the opening chapter of Joel. Just to the degree that her life with God gave her life and gave her identity, she cherished the past. It told her who she was and who she is. It is the arena of God’s election life with her and defines her life. But the real surprise is the cultivation of the past which involves her weaknesses, rebellion, and unfaithfulness. For that part of her life was precious just because it was her life with God, because God is Holy, and also because it included the memory of God’s patience, forbearance and love.

In Books Four and Five of the psalms especially, we find reflections on the past, and more specifically the past in the wilderness. Israel remembers with gratitude God’s power and mercy in bringing her out of bondage and suffering, through mighty acts, that are recited as though still fresh in her memory. Or just to be sure they are and remain fresh. But she also recalls episodes of failure. Embarrassing moments we would prefer to forget. They are also recited as if yesterday. Because they remind her of God’s patience through it all, manifest in her present ongoing life in him. They are part of the role of the book that is the album of life with God. They are precious for being exposures of her weakness and sin and in just those moments, the discovery that God was more than tit for tat. That he had a love whose purpose was furthering his life with Israel and teaching her through forgiveness more and more about himself.

This morning in Psalm 107 we see a striking further reality. The psalms preceding this one clearly rehearse the past and the scenes of God’s authority in the wilderness, in power and in forbearance. But reading the psalm in its entirety for today we see that the distant past is not in view, but a more recent rendition of it. The psalmist speaks of God’s gathering the dispersed of Israel from north, south, east and west, whose experience of hardship and threat, on land and on sea, are present examples of God’s care, like unto his care in the past but shown to be fully contemporaneous in like manner as well.

When Jesus then speaks of the serpent Moses raised in the wilderness he is speaking in like manner. Of a past that remains real. And of a present in him that takes a form like unto it, and now with the final stamp of his purposes forever.   

In the recital psalms where Israel’s punishment in the wilderness is recalled, the past become an occasion for the present reciters to acknowledge the failures of previous generation and in so doing to seek forgiveness and present help. In the case of the serpent of Moses, the generation of Moses cried out for help and for forgiveness. We are at that place in Numbers after the most serious moment of rebellion in the wilderness – the spy story of Numbers 13-14. Israel is ready to enter the land. There was no need for a forty-year wandering. Yet they squandered it out of fear and failure to trust in the manifest power of God, already made so clear to them with Pharaoh and at the Sea. Only those under twenty would enter the land, and the generation who had witnessed God’s acts of mercy would die in the wilderness, save Joshua and Caleb, who had brought a good report. So even with this dire verdict over them, God acts in mercy to save them, in spite of an ongoing rebellious spirit, exceeding even the tenfold description on the occasion of that earlier rebellion. Bitten by snakes and dying they cry out. They acknowledge their guilt. “We have sinned against the Lord and against you.” And the Moses who will die in the wilderness, having bought through intercession the lives of those under twenty, prays for the people here. The LORD provides a remedy. The very means of their punishment and dying becomes the means of their salvation and life.

As Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians. We are all like the Israel of the wilderness. We are dead in our trespasses. In the DNA of rebellion. Even after reprieves we followed the course of this world. In his stark language we are children of wrath. But matching this stark verdict is the serpent of Moses set up high for us to see. In the starkness of death and poison in our veins. To show the power of God’s love. God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world. But to give us access to an entirely new, cycle breaking Son of Man lifted up that whoever believes in him may have not just life but life eternal. Those over twenty, those under twenty, those who believe, who in believing will not perish but have eternal life.

Again Paul puts it well. In looking at the Son raised up. In believing in the power of God at work in him. We are made alive by grace. Seated with him. This is the unearned gift of God, an undeserved serpent on a pole, given in the midst of death and trespasses, with the poison of death in our veins, that a person may look, believe, live and be seated with the one lifted up and bruised that we might have eternal life.

We see of course—or used to see—the words of John 3:18 raised up on a pole, like the bronze serpent, at sports events. The odd looking man with the sign board. In a funny way, one could take this as a sentimental account of the amazing grace of God in sending his son. When in reading John further beyond this single verse we see that the amazing act of grace is not universally received for being so, anymore than the basketball game stops as all kneel down in homage.

Not believing is for John a kind of self-condemnation. It is an unwillingness to accept the potion necessary for life, because this would mean crying out in need, acknowledging as did Israel that our predicament isn’t just environmental but inside of us. The laser beam of God’s light worked with special force with those he chose and loved, the people of Israel, much to their joy and their punishment both.

In crying out for God’s mercy the link to God’s love is made available. One looks on the only son given in love and is saved. The deeds done in God are those which flow from our relationship of salvation in him. Not of boasting. It is not our own doing, as Paul says. Not the result of works. But a gift that enables giving in that light.

And that is why John does not sentimentalize God’s gift of the Son. Jesus was raised high on the cross because of the evil men prefer in their hearts, an evil that has bitten us all. But that same cross is also the means of, the place of, the permanent pole star of, our forgiveness. There is no untangling of the darkness and the light on our side. God’s triumph to win us is into and through darkness, bringing us forth into his life where deeds can now be done in him, which flow from him and his saving embrace of us. In that light the unbearable weight of sin is transformed, conquered and set to a new purpose in Jesus Christ.

As we have noted, in John’s Gospel it is the raising of Lazarus that triggers the decision to bring Jesus to trial. The culminating sign—the dead Lazarus come forth alive—creates just too great a draw in its wake. “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation…So from that day they took counsel how to put him to death.” So the end of chapter 11. 

John has shown Jesus coming up for Passover previously, earlier in his ministry. So in John’s Gospel the plotting against Jesus zeros in on this Passover time and place because the authorities can expect him there and then. And they are right about that.

The crowds come out to see him, because of the fame surrounding the raising of Lazarus, and John says his death, the risen Lazarus, too is under consideration by authorities scandalized by his living testimony. Yet one more time John records that the crowds swarm Jesus because of the testimony of those at Lazarus’ tomb, as he enters the holy city in John’s version of the Palm Sunday hosanna, king of the Jews episode. “The world has gone out to him” is their concerned verdict.

All of this serves as a trigger, or triggers, for John’s narrative unfolding, as the forces against Jesus observe the reality on the ground. The signs are too effective, especially the final one.

But Jesus has his own trigger, his own timing, his own sense of God’s work in him, and we hear him express it clearly in the lesson for today. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

As with other things said unwittingly by those who claim to be in power, a truth was prophesied. The whole world has gone out to him means just that. In our lesson for today we hear that the Greeks have come to see Jesus. Gentiles. They go to Greek speaking Philip and Philip gets Andrew and they together go to Jesus. Andrew and Philip were those who were the first communicators of his long-promised arrival, Philip finding Nathanael back in chapter 1.

Understated but unmistakable. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is spilling out beyond the nation and temple—the proximate concern of the authorities—and into all nations. In the temple that is his own body, ironically to be destroyed after all, as feared by the authorities of the temple structure by the Romans. Something is happening, mysteriously, inexorably. The hidden grain which will blossom and grow and bear much fruit. By dying. And already drawing all people to himself in anticipation of his final lifting up from the earth. Those who may not know who they are seeking to see, but who know he is the one they must see all the same. Sir, we would see Jesus. The whole world is going out to him. They have rightly prophesied. The hour has come.

It is perfectly possible that the Greeks—the term used for Gentiles elsewhere at John—were actually gentile proselytes, like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts. Some hold we cannot know that for sure since pagans also on occasion might bring gifts to the Court of the Gentiles, as the outer region of the temple precincts were known, in tribute, during festivals. But in either case, the import is the same. The Gospel is making inroads which will find their high point at the Cross.

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

The Epistle reading from Hebrews comes alongside this scene with its reference to the father’s glorification, and also the prayer of Jesus that the cup might pass by. This is registered only to be set aside in the triumphant manner of Jesus in John. Hebrews speaks of loud cries and anguish such as we find described in the garden scenes of Matthew, Mark and Luke. But as with the one verse “Jesus wept,” Jesus soul is also here troubled, in John’s compact syntax.

Hebrews wants to emphasize the obedience of Jesus, who did not glorify himself but participated fully in suffering submission before God. The judgment of this world, as John calls it, is the confrontation of Jesus with the ruler of the world. Hebrews reminds us that this confrontation was costly in a way that Jesus did not seek to avoid in the days of his flesh. His obedience to death amounted to a kind of perfection, whose purpose was to win eternal salvation for us. This is the unique priesthood of Jesus. A prefect offering for us and our salvation. A priesthood Jesus, the risen and ascended Jesus, continues to exercise for us as Hebrews elsewhere states it.

It is here, then, that the cries of the psalmist and the promise to Jeremiah converge and find their place. The psalmist longs for a pure heart. A right spirit. Deep within. To put his soul at peace with the God against whom he has sinned. A broken and contrite heart is a sacrifice pleasing to God. Jesus in dying has entered into that space and heard us in his saving priesthood. Has heard the psalmist: blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart.

And here the promise of God to Jeremiah embodied in the new covenant. The covenant which God made with Israel when he took them by the hand to lead the out of bondage, they broke it. This was a covenant they needed to teach to each generation. So that they might come to know the LORD. Here Jeremiah and Deuteronomy come close. Teaching is at the heart of relationship. Yet even the final chapters of Deuteronomy envision clearly an Israel that will fail. That will break the covenant and will in consequence experience the judgment Jeremiah announces to his generation, and like Moses before him, will share as well. Deuteronomy promises that God will hear the penitent Israel and renew the covenant even for a wayward people. Jeremiah sees something out beyond that in the promises of God. Ezekiel will come alongside him in describing a new heart, the heart clean and pure that the psalmist longs for. I will write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they will be my people.

And the how of his doing that we see in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Something is happening, is lifting him up and drawing all people to him. By his death new life and new growth new fruit blossoms forth. So the grain dies that the harvest may come. The forces that seek to thwart God and undermine the teaching that makes him known are to be confronted and defeated. When the Gentiles approach the disciples and ask to see Jesus, Jesus announces that the hour has come. The new covenant reality will involve not just the hearts and wills of a disobedient people whom he loves, but will draw all people into its saving life. The again of saving health of the penitent psalmist join the now of the hour that has come for Jesus and for all those he has come to save.     

Because it is Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday together, this protracted aspect of Mark’s Gospel comes to the fore for us in church, giving us potentially 130 verses of text to hear. From the entry into Jerusalem to the death and burial of Jesus, with a stone rolled against the tomb. And even this leaves out scenes equally related to the final days of Jesus life, all of significance in the culminating presentation of Mark. Cleansing of the temple, exchanges with religious leaders, predictions of coming tribulation.

The juxtaposition of the reading concerning the triumphal entry in Mark 12 with the Passion story, beginning with anointing and Last Supper, and extending to flight of disciples, trial and crucifixion, is intended to capture one feature of theological significance, that indeed is there in Mark itself. The crowd that hailed Jesus at his entrance suddenly and genuinely without explanation calls for his death, enrolling itself as blood-thirsty allies against Jesus and leaving Pilate alone as confusedly sympathetic. Demonic possession, such as we see it earlier in the Gospel, appears to overtake the crowd now as Jesus comes to his final significant hour.

The careful listener may also notice the parallel structure of the entry account with the Last Supper account. In both cases Jesus tells his disciples what they are to do for him, and just how they may anticipate the encounters that will befall him in doing what he asks for. “If anyone asks you,” and bystanders do ask. “You will find a certain man, who will lead you to the owner of the house,” and so it happened. Disciples are indeed taking up their part, at least for now, before things darken beyond their strength.

In the first instance, moreover, scripture bears witness and oversees all that is transpiring. The crowds cry out Hosanna, straight from Psalm 118. The cry is addressed to God there and to Jesus here. John’s optional reading makes a bit more of this by explicitly identifying the conveyance on a colt with the prophesy of Zechariah, with rumblings of Genesis 49 in the background, details Mark is content to let speak for themselves at this level. One has a sense from John’s reference to an eventual remembering in time, that certain things in scripture were written about him, and that we are coming in contact with one of the most ground level realities about Jesus. During his life and after his death the scriptures were bearing witness to him even when it took time to read them and see them delivering precisely this further sense.

Though it could appear that Jesus is entirely outgunned and abandoned, at another level the text makes it clear he alone knows what is going on. And God has prepared by his word from scripture the unfolding last days and moments, down to minute details. Vinegar to drink, wagging heads, friends at a distance, parting of garments, failing strength, back to smiters, and even the haunting cry of dereliction itself. The colt and the hosannas are there too. And of course the general and crucial Passover timing. Jesus did not die on groundhog day, but in line with God’s word, in accordance with the scriptures.

So these events are not out of God’s control and here Jesus and God operate on the same secure ground of agreement and strength, in a march into disagreement, weakness, brutality and death. When at the end the Centurian says surely this man was God’s son he has been moved away from human sight and into a different plane of perception, has left the cruel soldiers, demonic crowd, bitter thieves, plotting authorities, hapless but powerful Pilate, and edged to the side of the women and Joseph of Arimethea in acknowledging this man was no ordinary executed criminal enrolled with the thousands who suffered this fate. Like a lot of people in this Gospel he probably says more than he can know, even if in this last testifying he is closer to the truth of the matter than either bellowing crowds or fleeing disciples or those present before this curious life-changing display of divine power.

The absolute control over things unfolding is displayed for Mark in God’s overseeing word of accordance from scripture, and in the resolute strength of the man Jesus who marches forward into the jaws of injustice, brutality, abandonment and refuses to stop the frame. He stays awake; they sleep. He receives the kiss of death and forbids retaliation: let the scriptures be fulfilled. Attacked by false testimony, itself at odds, evokes not a word from him but silence. When pressed, he cites scripture. In the middle distance we see a man broken on the wheel of his own vain promises, his strength exposed as fraudulent. No grief or contrition can slow anything down, just the same. They bound Jesus and led him away, though who is really bound except everyone but this man? Pilate is confounded, even as no one has the right to speak to him, the ruler of the world, as does the condemned man who answers questions with non-answers. The crowds prefer a crook to the one who had healed and taught and defeated sickness and death.

Almost in exact proportion to all going wrong as the world sees it, all is going to plan as God and Jesus agree to it.

Along the way Simon is enrolled. Jesus’ never wavering and pressing on as no man could, would or should, before or since, has taken its toll. His sons’ names are given in an odd moment of memorandum. That they are likely the men mentioned as members of the church in Rome means that at this darkest hour Jesus was winning souls, men not present, but soon to be enrolled as was Simon that day. Taking up a cross alongside in anticipation of the one we now carry a cross behind, in the wake of that saving victory in spent-ness and surrender. The final taunts are of a piece with all that has transpired thus far. What the scriptures are revealing was planned from long ago, and calibrated to this moment. Alone on the human plane, and after he has accomplished all God and he agree to accomplish, the centurion confirms the truth.

Here the lesson from Isaiah chosen for the day summarises what did not get said that day but was being said in its own silent, forward moving, strength-in-death way. The suffering servant, soon to be put to death in Isaiah’s prefiguring rendition, foreshadowing our Good Friday, opens here his mouth on behalf of Christ Jesus.

I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;

I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.

The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced;

therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near.

Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together.

Who are my adversaries? Let them confront me.

It is the Lord God who helps me.

As promised in the opening verses, this strength inside assault is

instruction of the most educational kind imaginable, prepared in

the servant and his testimony long ago for the silent work of the

King of Kings. Sustaining the weary.

Isaiah has worked his way into the Epistle Lesson from

Philippians as well. The name above every name is that name by

which God himself swears in Isaiah 45, promising there solemnly

that every knee would bow to him, the LORD God. The name above every name, the divine name, The Lord, grounds the solemn prophetic oath. That name is the name bestowed on Jesus Christ, showing him so united to God that to call him Lord is to call on God himself, having emptied himself and taken the form of a servant, now exalted at God’s right hand in victory.

Then there is the summary of Peter in Acts 10 that ends with Jesus resurrection from the dead and appearance to chosen witnesses.  Either as the first or second lesson. The alternative for the first reading is the more typical OT lesson, here from Isaiah 25. With death swallowed up, and tears wiped away. The Lord for whom they waited-women, disciples, angels, the whole world—has come. “Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” Jesus was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, that is, in accordance with Isaiah 25 and other OT texts.

And this is what St Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, which is the first option for the Epistle reading. This is Paul’s turn to tell us what he has received, the good news he proclaims and in which the church now stands. Jesus Christ died and rose in accordance with the scriptures, and appeared to Cephas, he writes, and the others of the twelve, and yet five hundred further, then James and finally to himself, untimely born. 

And the Psalm for the day is a selection from Psalm 118. The “I” voice is that of the risen Christ. “I shall not die but live.” The “we” voice is ours who witness that on this day the Lord has acted. “We will rejoice and be glad in it.” And it is the righteous sufferer speaking of God’s victory in Christ in all ages, in “which we stand,” as Paul would put it.

It is the year of Mark and his resurrection account is unique, as given for this Sunday and as likely existed in this form before the longer ending came into play, given its 8 verse brevity. Christ’s dramatic and terrifying absence that Easter morning is itself the warrant of his risen presence and God’s promised vindication, as Jesus had promised. Was Mark content with that, perhaps consistent with his understated style? Was there a longer ending that got lost? Is the ending we now find attached a compilation based on the other Gospels? Is John 21 Mark’s lost ending?

These are the puzzles that have tantalized faithful interpreters from Eusebius and Jerome down to the present age. That the manuscripts have not eliminated the issue means it is wise to rule out some kind deficiency, or obvious problem on Mark’s part, needing to be corrected. The longer ending is itself a study in disbelief and non-recognition, as if breaking the silence didn’t make that much difference measured against what God had dramatically done all the same.

The shorter ending, whatever else we make of it, is also a reminder that we have the Gospel of Mark in a fourfold Gospel collection, and alongside the resurrection accounts given by Peter in Acts and Paul in Corinthians, and the according word of the scriptures of Israel. It is a wrong account of the character of the Gospel to think of Mark in an isolation: a single book detachable testimony. The present longer ending of his Gospel likewise reflects this wisdom.

At the same time, Mark’s bracing conclusion in verse 8 needs to be, and can be, heard for its own sake and within the context of the 8 verse pericope beginning in verse 1. Three women arrive to anoint the body. Joseph had very little time before the Sabbath and did the bare necessities: got permission (Jesus died quickly), provided a tomb (Jesus had no family), wrapped the body, and had the stone placed.

Now at the end of the long and silent Sabbath, the cohort of women buy the necessary spices, and get up early on the third day. Two of them had noted where the tomb was, Mark tells us, at the end of that day of death. They pose the obvious practical question as they make their way there, and it also anticipates the dramatic sight they encounter when they do arrive. For the stone that worried them has been rolled away already. They enter the tomb and are alarmed to find a live young man there. He tells them that in the niche where they might expect to find him, they will not. He points to the vacant place. He tells them everything is going to plan and just as he had said. They are to tell the disciples—and yes indeed Peter, too—he is going ahead just now and will be seen in Galilee. The Gospel ends with the women in terror and unable to speak.

But of course we know that this silence was broken, broken by God himself. The readings all testify to Jesus being indeed seen in Galilee as the young man had promised and as Mark’s terse but pregnant ending states it. Galilee is where he appears, as Peter tells us in Acts. Of the twelve he appears first, or in some signal fashion, to Peter, as Mark, Luke, John first Corinthians all agree.    

But before the reconciling encounter with the disciples he has chosen, who fled from him, we have the encounter with those who stayed closed by at that fateful hour, and are also the first to attend to the body they had loved and that had cared for them in his day.

The point may need emphasizing. The emotional link joins the practical. Mathew, Mark, and Luke all stress that at the cross, or near enough to watch Jesus passion, final hours and death, were women companions. Named in Matthew and Mark and including Mary Magdelene and at least one other Mary. Mark is probably the clearest in showing this fact enables the two Marys to know where the tomb is, and be aware that more attention to the body is in order than what Joseph was able to undertake. And so they are the first to confront the reality of an empty tomb, whose rolled away stone makes their visit possible, but then not necessary for the loving tasks they had come to do.

John’s longer and different resurrection account, which can be read this Easter Sunday, agrees that women were first to the tomb, again it is Mary Magdalene. She sees the stone rolled away and runs to tell two key figures in John’s presentation: Peter and the Beloved Disciple. They will remain in critical frame from here to the end. In John’s Gospel the beloved disciple was at the cross, with Jesus’ mother, the Magdalene and again another Mary.

The famous footrace is won, surprisingly, not by the ever active Peter but by the other disciple. As he remained with Jesus at the very beginning of the Gospel, at the Last Supper and at the Cross, so he remains at the tomb’s entrance. The runner up, true to form, rushes in. The narrator and the beloved disciple being one and the same, we can assume he is reporting what Peter sees as he also sees it, before he goes in. Jesus has walked out of the wrappings of death. The belief, comprehension, understanding of the beloved disciple comes as he remains and contemplates. As at the cross, the scriptures still veiled for others are sounding forth clearly for him. Perhaps Mark’s shorter account would have suited him just fine!

Now John saves the special, first encounter with the Risen Jesus for Mary Magdalene. It speaks for itself in emotional depth. Jesus is in his resurrection body and in that body is recognized in special ways, as we see.  In this new recreated life Jesus is bringing us we should think of a renewed garden of Eden and so how good that it has a gardener, so Mary supposes upon seeing Jesus. The sound of her name from his mouth brings forth new life. Easter life. What she sees and what the beloved disciple knows by scripture and his posture of remaining , assisted in both by the Spirit poured out at the cross, is then relayed to the others. “I have seen the Lord.” Welcome happy morning. The symphony of scripture pours forth to and from this Easter fulfillment. 

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ was raised on the third day. In accordance with the scriptures.

God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses. All the scriptures testify about him.

Let’s take a moment to look ahead a bit now, as Easter is not only a single decisive day, but for churches using a lectionary a season of seven Sundays. Seven Sundays conforming to the seven times seven weeks of the Feast of Weeks, Shavuot in Hebrew or Pentecost in Greek. The wheat harvest festival which in time became a festival associated with the giving of the Torah, a pilgrimage festival – and so we see it in Acts at the Day of Pentecost. Pilgrims present from all the areas of the Mediterranean basin.

The opening chapter of Acts is the one source supplying a forty day time period during which Jesus’ Risen life was experienced by his disciples and others chosen as witnesses, as Peter stated it last Sunday. “appearing to them over a period of 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Ascension Day is traditionally set as the Thursday in week six, consistent with this 40 day reference and Acts own account of Jesus’ ascension, preceding his promised sending of the spirit, for which they are to pray and wait.

This Sunday we have an opportunity to hear another resurrection account, the continuation from John chapter 20, and next week from Luke. For the remainder of the season we will shift to earlier chapters in John for our Gospel reading, a pattern that holds in the other two years of the 3-year cycle. More on that for Sundays to come.

The Easter season is also a time when we hear from chapters in Acts. Selections, as again Acts also appears in the other two years. Sometimes cued to the Gospel, sometimes to the Epistle, sometimes the Psalm.

The Epistle reading to be followed in Year B comes from the First Letter of John. Next year, Revelation. Last year it was First Peter. It is the second Sunday of Easter that introduces this special Easter Season Epistle. We do not hear it in its entirety, but sequentially and fairly completely just the same.

The opening section of John 1 is our Sunday Epistle reading, concerning the word of life. This isn’t a specific reference to Easter or Resurrection but of course includes it as the culminating confirmation of the loving fellowship of the Father and the Son, which fellowship we now share. We also have the detail in the first verse about Jesus being seen with eyes and touched with hands, often thought to counter the heresy of Gnosticism. In the flesh Jesus was a real man. But it also resonates with accounts of the Risen Christ. Jesus offers to his disciples that he be touched (“handle me and see,” Luke 24; “put your finger here, and see my hands,” from John 20 today).  

More generally, John is speaking here about walking in the light that has broken out among us, and shunning the darkness that marked our former life, and which was defeated by the atoning work of Christ on Good Friday. In the light of that, we have an advocate with the Father. John makes two points on the same theme. To say that we have no sin would be to deceive ourselves and render the work of Christ on the Cross meaningless. Or in the liberal Christian version, a tragic end for a morally heroic good man. No, we are sinners and God’s work in his son has cleansed us. That work has a continual cleansing action as well, John’s second point. If we sin, and acknowledge it and its power, we have an advocate to whom we can turn. An advocate for us individually, whose death on the cross was also for the sins of the whole world.

The reading from Acts, replacing the usual OT reading in Easter, speaks of the fellowship in the light—John’s language—in concrete form. The believers shared what they had and took care of the needy in their midst. They didn’t do this by drawing up action plans and exhorting those to do their part, but rather we hear that great grace was upon them, and that they lived so close to the resurrection light that their testimony was empowered and empowering. This is doxological living, and Acts is proud to declare it as alive in and enlivened by the Spirit of the Risen Lord Jesus.

The psalm is there to capture the mood well, with exclamation point at the ready. How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity. The oil of anointing, anointing even the body of Christ, runs now down over the believers, like the dew on Hermon. For there, in the Hermon of Christian fellowship in the Risen Lord, God ordains blessing: life forevermore.

John’s account of Jesus appearance to disciples follows on from Easter Sunday and Mary’s announcement to the fellowship, “I have seen the Lord.” Having walked out of linen wrappings he appears to them behind fearfully locked doors. Having breathed on Mary life by calling her name, he now breathes forth the Holy Spirit. Jesus resurrection is a life changing fact with a life changing charge and purpose. The Holy Spirit is a spirit of forgiveness and new life, for the sins of all the world, as the Epistle reading put it.

Being a twin is hard. Thomas, upon hearing that Lazarus had died and that Jesus was going to see him, volunteered. “Let us go too that we might die with him.” Whatever the reason for his absence when Jesus appeared, he is not content with being left out and getting their report only. Back in their company—not to be left out again—a week later Jesus appears as before and repeats word for word the same hello. He turns directly to Thomas and without a sign of knowing addresses him and his week-ago complaint, lavish to the point of extreme. Doubt is to have no place. Jump in. Side and hands are at the ready.

To say this does the trick is an understatement, belied by Thomas “My Lord and my God.”

Now John lifts Jesus eyes to us who are receiving this testimony but not within the privileged circle, but on account of their testimony. As Peter put it in Acts, not to all, but to those chosen to bear witness. If John could step harder on the lavish pedal I believe he would. Fine for Thomas, Jesus stood ready to defeat doubt within the circle of those who would be witnesses. But what is written is fully competent, by the work of the same spirit breathed on the disciples, to make the Risen Lord alive for us. Not second string latecomers, but blessed as those who have not seen yet have been empowered to believe.  

I will let John have the final word. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life, life as rich in blessing as those in the chosen circle in their way, that you may have life in the church, in the fellowship of light, in his name.

There is a certain irony in this pattern during Easter season given that in the resurrection accounts, which predominate on the first three Sundays, we can see the emphasis on the disclosing role of the scriptures of Israel. We see it today in Luke’s “that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” In view for Luke is not just the way the suffering, death and raising of Jesus are in accordance with the scriptures, the Old Testament, but also the message of repentance and forgiveness of sins he charges the disciples to carry forth. He opens their minds so that this according significance might be grasped and conveyed both. Acts picks up where Luke leaves off. Paul will happily set aside three whole weeks for OT Bible study, seeking to establish from the scriptures the Gospel, Acts 17 tells us. What a lively encounter that will have been.

This is helpful to note because what Luke is referring to here is the global hearing of the Old Testament as this will transpire in the church, from beginning to end, and not a search for proof texts or isolated passages.  In the preceding Emmaus Road story, which we hear in Year A, we are not to imagine a burning within the hearts of the disciples as the scriptures are opened, a roster of favorite proof texts, capable of being reeled off during a 7 mile trip from Jerusalem. Rather, what Luke is getting at with the phrase “and beginning with Moses and the Prophets he interpreted in all the scriptures the things concerning himself’ is the inexhaustible and indispensible role of the scriptures from beginning to end, in conveying the significance of Christ, now to be grasped in the life of the church.

John has his own version of this idea, as we have seen. During Jesus’ life, the scriptures spoke of him, but the disciples failed to grasp this. But later, John tells us, they would yield up their riches. The beloved disciple at the cross is the lone exception and serves as a model for future Christian apprehension. He who saw it has born witness—his testimony is true and he knows that he tells the truth. For these things took place that the scriptures might be fulfilled, “Not a bone of him shall be broken.” And again another scripture says, “They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” And another and another and another.

I say irony because at this very same season the Old Testament is replaced by Acts. But perhaps the significance remains all the same. The truth of the Passion and Resurrection to which the scriptures point, and which they disclose, does not amount to selections of OT passages. Luke is rather pointing to a new kind of mindset about the scriptures, a mindset the church remembers is set in motion by Christ himself. During his life: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words” (5:46-47). And especially focused in his Risen Life.

As noted, our Gospel reading for the day is the conclusion of Luke’s resurrection appearances. Luke’s initial visit to the tomb, like that of Mark, has the women see that a tomb is empty and nothing more. It is angelic testimony that he is not dead but risen, a report that is taken to be nonsense by the eleven. The Emmaus Road story which immediately precedes tells of appearances to two unnamed disciples. Yet we need to be careful in describing that character of what we mean by appearance. On later reflection the two speak of their hearts burning when on the road a stranger opened the scriptures earlier that day. The eyes that were kept from seeing earlier are not opened to him due to better lighting, or a decision by Jesus to bring himself into frame in some new bodily risen way. It is in the breaking of the bread that he is recognized, after which he vanishes from human sight. At this moment the scriptures disclosing power is also grasped by them as having burned on the road, now having been themselves grasped. 

It has been a busy Easter day, it is evening, and the day is not over. Back they go to Jerusalem. Here they learn that Peter has been gifted by an appearance, a fact otherwise not narrated. As the two tell of their heady day to eleven and others, Jesus appears in his Risen Body. This risen body, brokered not by bread braking or the retrospective comprehension of a scripture lesson like no other, but standing before them as  a death-defied flesh and bone body terrifies them. As perhaps also with Mary, the voice carries them to a less terrified, less confounded, recognition. The phrase is a Lukan winner. They are in a current, tumbling in waters of disbelieving for joy. The body which is a risen and different one—surely that has been established well enough—is all the same a body of continuation and identity, voice, form, function.

But none of this is for its own sake alone but pours into a second more obvious immersion in scripture, and especially the creation of a new mindset for a new risen reality.

Luke’s concern for repentance and forgiveness as a message bringing the scriptures and Risen Lord into conjunction plays itself out in Acts. And in the first instance the nations to be addressed with this scope of this message are God’s people Israel. 

The tone is sharp. Harsh. Peter rebukes his fellow Israelites for their failure properly to understand the agent of the healing as the Risen Christ. ‘You preferred the murderer to the Author of Life.’ But a better word than harsh or sharp is urgent and concerned. You did not know what you did, as Luke might have put it, imitating Jesus on the Cross. You acted in ignorance. Yet in all this God was unrolling his plan from long ago. The scriptures were fulfilled, the very ones Israel has been graced to carry in her life with God. The oracles of God entrusted to the Jews, as Paul puts it in Romans. Repentance is to be preached by the Lord’s command as consistent with these oracles, not to condemn but to bring new life.

The psalm gives the words. Know that the Lord does wonders for the faithful, when I call upon him he will hear. The call of Israel then, of Israel before Peter, and for the Israel the Church today.

All who have this hope purify themselves, just as he is pure. Sin can break in, but it cannot have an abiding place. For who we are will be revealed in him, and those who abide in him will see themselves in him when we meet him face to face.

We have been using the word symphony to speak of the way four lessons have been chosen, or orchestrated, so as to bring forth the stunning music of God’s word week-in and week-out. OT, Psalm, Epistle and continuous reading of the Gospels, over a three year period. The challenges are obvious: cover as much of the Bible as is possible (a Bible in which the OT is about 7 times larger than the New). Read through the Gospels in years A (Matthew), B (Mark), and C (Luke) with John spliced into key moments of the year. Since there is a good deal of farewell discourse and kindred material in John’s Gospel, it suits the Easter Season particularly well. As we have seen, the OT selections are usually keyed to the Gospel by way of accordance, typology, figural anticipation and correspondences of various kinds. The call of Nathaniel and the call of Samuel. The waters of baptism and the waters of creation. Elisha and Peter. And so forth.

The Epistles are sometimes chosen to come alongside the OT-Gospel pairings, or they represent a continuous reading through an individual letter. The Catholic Epistles and Revelation appear in Eastertide. So too portions of the Acts of the Apostles, which would otherwise fall to the side. The psalms are chosen Sunday by Sunday to reinforce one or more of the other lessons. This Sunday is a good example. What better psalm for John’s discourse concerning the Good Shepherd than Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd. God’s presence and victory through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the table set in the presence of enemies, the green pastures of a garden with an empty tomb from which new life springs forth.

In Easter the OT-Gospel pairing, so familiar from other times of the year, falls to the side. One might assume that the correspondences between a continuously read Acts and First John and the Gospel of John would be happenstance, depending on just where we happen to be reading as we move along on three different tracks. But some care has been taken to select the portions of Acts over years A, B, and C so they fit as best as is possible with the other readings. One should not be surprised to find correspondences between the Gospel of John and the First letter of John, since they have typically been taken to have the same author, John the Evangelist, “the beloved disciple,” John the Apostle, or one and the same, as has been traditionally held.  Comprehensiveness, proper associations, continuous reading and proper fit with the liturgical season are four goals and they are a challenge to accomplish. But then again, all scripture is God breathed and profitable for instruction, so even where the selections conform to principles other than direct association, the attentive reader can see important reinforcing themes and contours.

In Easter, after three Sundays of Resurrection narratives, passages from John chapters 11-17 are read for the final four Sundays of the season in years A,B, and C: Jesus’ farewell discourses on the Good Shepherd, the True Vine, the Love Commandment, Protection in the Name, and so forth. This Sunday 1 John 3, Psalm 23 and John 10 all speak of the Good Shepherd, the one who lays down his life for the sheep.

Beyond this we can also see minor associations of various kinds. Let me highlight just a few. Note the repetition of the word commandment at the close of the Epistle reading from 1 John. The command of the Lord is that we believe on his name, and that we love one another in that name. In the Gospel Jesus speaks of the commandment he has received from the Father who loves him. In whom he abides and in just the same way we abide in him. The commandment he has received is the power to lay down his life. Jesus goes to death in the power of God, not as a victim, but as the Good Shepherd laying down his life for the sheep that are his own. With the intention to enlarge the flock and bring in all the sheep who are his very own. God’s commandment to Jesus is the power to lay down his life and receive it back again from the Father. Such are the good commandments of a loving Father.

1 John speaks of the commandment we receive in turn from Jesus, to love one another and to believe on his name. Acts picks up with the episode from last week, where a man lame from birth has been healed by Peter. After a night in prison he and John are brought up before the leaders of the community and asked to explain by what power—note the same word—the man born lame has been restored. The power consists in the name of Jesus Christ, the name 1 John speaks of in terms of a commandment given to us, to believe on his name, which enables us to abide in him and do his works by the Spirit. It is that Spirit which speaks in and through Peter. The psalmist speaks of a revived soul, of being guided along right pathways for his name’s sake.

Then there is 1 John’s emphasis on love. Love in action. Not just in speech, but flowing from the active love of the Father for Jesus, which Jesus foregrounds in his Good Shepherd discourse. The Father loves the son, and that love is expressed by the Son in his gift of his life for the sheep he loves, who are his very own. This love has the power to surmount the human heart itself! That heart we believe is the source of love, but which can falter and even condemn us. No, the love of God is the love of God expressed in his son’s giving of himself and it is greater than our hearts, because it is of God himself. Once that surmounting love is granted by the Spirit, it gives us boldness and a receiving spirit, to take on what God has to give to those who abide in his love.

And as we have come to expect, the psalm often builds bridges across more than one text, and how true this is of the 23rd psalm. There is Peter in the midst of imprisonment and public challenge. And there is a table unseen but carefully spread out in the presence of those who seek to trouble him. The cup running over is the Spirit’s empowering. Bringing good health to the man born lame and to all who come within the range of the name of Jesus Christ. The shepherd’s rod and staff are signs of the concrete life-giving and spirit-protecting love of the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ. Who is no hireling doing a job from a distance or for personal profit, but enters into the valley of the shadow of death where the sheep need protecting, lays down his life and by that act of love takes it up again.

So on a Sunday where we hear selections from Acts, 1 John, John’s Gospel and the Psalter, though the pattern and manner of selecting is different, rich are the linkages, correspondences, key themes and contours all the same. Thomas Cranmer was right to understand that it would take five verbs to describe how scripture makes inroads, in the collect he composed for Advent. “Grant us so to hear them,” he said, “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them.” That we might embrace and hold fast the gift of eternal life. A collect he wrote with an eye to the lesson for the day, taken from the 15th chapter of Romans.

“For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.”

The symphony of scripture has this power, and we witness it in full orchestration again on this 4th Sunday of Easter.  

The reading from Acts is one of the most compelling in the narrative line of that work, as introduced in chapter one. The Gospel is to be preached in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, Jesus says before his ascension. The Ethiopian official hails from modern Sudan, in the region north of present day Khartoum, known in biblical times as Cush or Ethiopia – men of stature, from Saba, as Isaiah says. A month long journey by wagon if one sits on the accelerator. So the Gospel is moving out from Jerusalem, to Judea, aided by the ministry of the Hellenistic deacons chosen in chapter 6, including our Philip; into Samaria, after the stoning of Stephen; and now to the very ends of the earth. From Jews coming up to Jerusalem at Pentecost, to Jewish citizens in the capital, to Greek-speaking Jews in Judea, to Samaritans, to God-fearers and proselytes, and at last to the Gentiles -- as the same Isaiah had promised in fulfillment of the oath sworn to Abraham, in whom all the families of the earth were to find blessing. 

We need to stay with the details of this rich account in order to catch all the significance of what is being related. Candace is a title and not a proper name. Like Caesar or Pharaoh. The region over which she is queen or queen mother is renowned for minerals and mining riches. Our unnamed official is in charge of her entire treasury. The trip is not an easy one, so he must be sufficiently high-up to be given the months-long time away. We should imagine a sturdy covered vehicle with a driver, a Winebago for its day. Scrolls are very expensive and he has his own private one, from which he reads aloud. He is either a proselyte or a God fearer, who has come to the court of the Gentiles during Pentecost. He is likely literally a eunuch, though the term can be transferred to mean simply court official. If a eunuch he cannot participate fully in the rites of Judaism in accordance with Levitical Law, which would make him a God fearer. That would make his plea to be baptized and incorporated into Jesus Christ all the more urgent and poignant, overcoming his physical impairment. Isaiah chapter 56, just after the passage he is reading, promises just this for the eunuchs and outcasts who fear the Lord and seek to do his commandments. So we have before us someone like the powerful Syrian Namaan, with his high office and grand chariot, but who is on the margins in deep ways all the same, plagued in his case by leprosy until healed by Elisha. Emblematic of the inroads the Gospel is making to the ends of the earth.

People read aloud in antiquity (Ambrose noted the curiosity of someone reading whose lips did not move, that is, to himself). Philip has been dispatched from his very successful ministry in Samaria and whisked off to the road which literally goes down from the heights of Jerusalem to Gaza, and which is literally a desert way where water is scarce. When we see him again in Caesarea it is in a meeting with Paul in chapter 21 later in Acts. His divine appointment appears in the form of a black official, riding in a limosinz, reading aloud from Isaiah, with him running alongside before invited to take a seat. The passage from Isaiah is the one we know from the Greek version of 53:7-8. The suffering servant who bears the sins of others though marred in appearance and treated ignominiously. The question he asks is not an unusual one, as the passage speaks of someone’s suffering and death and not with obvious reference to the prophet Isaiah himself. The passage is a source of longstanding discussion in the sources of the period and also later – the suffering Israel, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Jewish Israel in persecution in the Middle Ages, and even an unknown prophetic figure in historical Israel’s day. Philip takes this as his point of departure for proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.

Why this passage – because it is so pregnant, because it speaks of a generation and so points to his un-generative affliction? Coming from Jerusalem had he heard of Jesus the crucified one now being proclaimed, and so was searching his scriptures with the kind of probing mind Luke and John and others commend, by the Lord’s own practice and command? Baptism is an initiatory rite and it may have been familiar, but in this case Philip knows just what kind of baptism is being called for and he complies, getting into the act himself as we read.

Now let’s overlay the psalm. Our unnamed convert goes on his way rejoicing! A new day has broken in on him. His praise is indeed in the great assembly of the church, now stretching to his destination 1600 miles away. His descendants are those who hear the Gospel because of him. “They shall be known as the Lord’s forever.” “All the ends of the earth shall turn to the Lord.” The true King he knows to be the Lord who has suffered and born the sins of many, and “he rules over nations.” And the report of him from Isaiah, from Philip, from the Spirit’s commendation of Christ through scripture and the word of interpretation “will be known to a people yet unborn” as the Gospel sounds forth from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria into all the corners of the world.

Moving to the Epistle and Gospel reading, which are closely associated, the striking thing about the portion from 1 John is the emphasis on love. Not love as we mean it today—a sentiment rising up in our hearts, thought to validate this or, in its absence, disqualify that. Love is from God. God is love. Love is defined as the giving of the son by God. Love takes up where the love of God is made known first. We love because God first loved us. It is because God so loved us that love is now there to be shown by us in turn. This it is all because we find our abiding place in God, by confessing Jesus is his very Son, itself a gift of the Holy Spirit.

And of course the verb “remain” or “abide” or “lodge/stay” is the theme word of John’s Gospel, literally at beginning and at the end. The beloved disciple and Andrew remain with Jesus upon first meeting him in chapter 1.

They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”

39 “Come,” he replied, “and you will see.” So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him.

The beloved disciple remained alone at the cross. Remained and contemplated at the mouth of the tomb and so came to believe. His remaining after Jesus’ word to Peter that he would die by crucifixion disturbed Peter—did he mean he would not die before Jesus returned--as the very final verses of the Gospel relate it. Remaining is the signature bearing of the beloved disciple, seemingly beyond death itself. “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me.”

The disciples of Jesus are to remain in him, stay in him, abide in him in the same way branches are organic extensions of the vine. For that is how Jesus is organically connected in love to God the Father. As he bore fruit in dying and bringing new life, so we are to do the same. Our pruning, while at times painful, is just what allows us to bear more fruit. It is the indication that we abide in him and so are and continue to become his disciples.

As we have been observing, the Acts of the Apostles shows the Holy Spirit moving resolutely, mysteriously, and in ever-widening circles. Beginning with the circle of Jews coming up for Pentecost upon whom the spirit falls, who then return to their homes across the entire known world of the day. And as the narrative line of Acts unfolds, from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria, then to a lone black high-official headed back to Sudan to tell of Jesus Christ, newly baptized, rejoicing as he goes. A God-fearer become Christian.

Today it is Cornelius’s turn. We know a good deal about the specifics of his religious life. So let’s rehearse these as Acts provides them en route to today’s reading. Like the Ethiopian eunuch, Cornelius too is a God fearer. And a high official, a centurion in the Italian Cohort: “a devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms liberally to the people, and prayed constantly to God.” And we learn, his prayers and his benevolence are noted by the One God of Israel to whom he prays, rising up in memorial. He is to go find Peter, which he does with his servants and a devout soldier. They set out for Joppa from Caesarea.

Next it is Peter in prayer, on the following day, and he receives a vision that perplexes him. Pondering it, the contingent from Cornelius arrives and beckons Peter to come and visit, as they describe him “Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and God-fearing man, who is well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation.” The spirit tells Peter to go and he does. Upon arrival Cornelius kneels before him and does obeisance.  Peter’s vision has prepared him to enter and he bids Cornelius rise, who promptly tells of his own coordinated vision the day before. In less than a 100 words Peter responds with the story of Jesus, for opening his mouth he says, “in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him.” The spirit falls on all who hear his report and now we learn there are Jewish believers who have accompanied Peter. It is their turn to be amazed. The same Holy Spirit manifesting himself just as he did with the Jewish Christians prompts Peter to baptize Cornelius and all on whom the spirit fell.

So it is that a devout God fearer, pious almsgiver, well-spoken of by the whole Jewish nation becomes the first Gentile convert, following the man from Cush. This time there are witnesses present, bowled over by the Holy Spirit’s claim on all who hear Peter’s testimony, and Cornelius is not headed off to a distant land but is based in Caesarea itself. He is no garden variety Gentile any more than the official reading Isaiah in his chariot, but he paves the way for just that development as we read on in the coming chapters of Acts. The Council of Jerusalem evaluates what this development, long prophesied, will mean practically-speaking for the Jewish Christians.      

It is striking to hear the portion from the last chapter of First John selected for today. “Everyone who believes Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” Cornelius, those who heard Peter’s report, upon whom the spirit fell, the Ethiopian eunuch, and all those whose numbers are building as the Spirit moves forth from the Jewish Pentecost gathering in chapter one through Samaria and to the ends of the earth, with Paul finally in Rome itself as Luke’s two-part story ends. The life of faithful obedience testified to in Cornelius is front and center in Acts account: “a devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms liberally to the people, and prayed constantly to God.” As Peter opened his preaching he made it clear “in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him.”

First John speaks of the Christian as one who does what Christ commands, whose commands are not burdensome, but belong to a different sphere of life than the commandments of centurions or queens of Cush of this world.

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.

He who believes Jesus is the Christ has overcome the world – much as John chapter 16 put it as well. They are new men and women rejoicing on their way, filled with the Holy Spirit.

This same Jesus Christ fulfilled all righteousness by submitting to the baptism of John. He came by water, in obedience to the commandment of God, and conquered the world. Not by water alone, but by water and the blood that gained his victory and ours. Interpreters through the ages have seen here the sacraments of baptism and eucharist in the church, which is an obvious extensional sense. But the ground meaning is found in the literal beginning (water) and end (blood) of Jesus coming—he came by water and by blood—to save the world. In John’s Gospel the beloved disciple saw blood and water pouring forth from the wounded side at Jesus’ death and proclaimed in this a great significance: the blood which saves and the water of the Spirit’s release, rising up within him to eternal life, as Jesus had promised the Samaritan woman at the well. The order is different as is the emphasis in First John, “not water only, but water and blood” -- still one can see why patristic interpreters wanted to link the sacramental to the literal sense. First John itself goes on to speak in the verse that follows our Epistle portion of the three together: water, blood and spirit. Baptism, death, and Holy Spirit, grounded in and flowing from Christ’s earthly obedience.  

He writes: And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth. There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree.

We have strange and confusing commands issued in Acts, to Philip last week, to Cornelius this week, and to Peter as well. All are obedient and from this obedience flows new life and ever widening fellowship in Christ. Peter commands that water be brought and baptisms follow, in the crowning moment of obedience to the heavenly command. His faith in the heavenly vision overcomes the world, just as the prophets has promised long ago, and the Holy Spirit enters in majesty and renewal. “I have said these things that my joy might be in you and that your joy may be complete,” Jesus says in our Gospel, from the 15th chapter of John.

The faith that overcomes the world shows a world where commandments and joy are able to kiss one another as do truth and mercy in the psalms. In today's psalm it is hard to keep up with the joy and singing and clapping, trumpeting, shouting, noise making, ringing out, harping and rejoicing, as nature breaks forth to respond to the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth. A new song befitting the Holy Spirit’s renewing and new-world making work.

And all of this springs forth because the Lord Jesus has laid down his life for his friends. There is no greater love this. And therefore because he obeyed the command of his father, so he commands us: You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I have appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, as we see witnessed in the Ethiopian, in Peter, in Cornelius, and all those in the widening circles of his flock, and those of another flock, he is bringing step by step, by the Spirit’s work, into the kingdom he has come to give us.

We have been noting the movement through selections of Acts in the Easter season, and today we reverse direction and find ourselves right at the start in chapter 1. Anticipating Pentecost. In the verse that precedes our reading we are given a precise listing of the apostles who remain praying in Jerusalem, after the ascension, together with Mary and the male relatives of the Lord. Counting, we see of course that eleven is now their number.

Our reading picks up at this point with the decision to elect a replacement for Judas. The point is being made—both in this portion of Acts and in the Gospel reading—that Jesus had chosen twelve and lost not one of them. Jesus underscores this at several points in John’s Gospel. Judas was allotted a place with the others, as Peter stresses, and Jesus did not lose him – he forfeited his place. So that place is to be filled with one who like them all had accompanied him right from the beginning.

This is made even clearer in the psalms Peter refers to, and if the verses were not left out (Acts 1:18-20), we would see the clear references to two psalms – 69 and 109.

For it is written in the book of Psalms,

‘Let his habitation become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it’;

and

‘His office let another take.

Judas had a place, an office. He gave it up by his own choice. So it will be filled with another, and the special number 12—like the twelve tribes of Israel—is to be preserved.

Here is one of the places where the lectionary has decided to omit verses from a reading, presumably because they are too harsh in tone, in this instance. And instead of using these one of these two psalms referred to by Peter as fulfilled scripture as our reading for today, we have instead the opening psalm of the Psalter, Psalm 1. The psalms quoted in the missing verses, Psalms 69 and 109, have traditionally been referred to as two of the imprecatory psalms, in which God is called upon to bring down curses upon the wicked and end their assaults against the righteous.

Both John and Acts seek to make it clear that the threat from Judas and his ultimate fate were fully in God’s hands. What happened to him was consistent with the scriptures. The righteous come under severe assault in this life, are betrayed, are physically attacked, and are mocked for their faith in God. The psalms in particular testify to this, and they give space for the righteous sufferer to speak forth to God a cry for vindication and restoration and to put the betrayer and the evil in God’s capable hands. Judas was not a mistake. He was one of the twelve who God chose alongside all the others. He is never described in any way but as fully one of the twelve, like unto them in being chosen by God. As we heard from John’s Gospel last week, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” None of the others are morally superior, and all fled Jesus and denied him in various ways; they were not chosen as moral exemplars but as those capable of testifying to Jesus on account of their presence with him from the very beginning. So the allotment given to Judas, which he surrendered, is given to another, who like the 11 were always present with him. As two are capable of fulfilling this role, they pray and put the matter in God’s hands. The lots are not a means of picking Matthias and rejecting the other, but only of confirming the choice God has made in response to their prayers. As the righteous sufferer puts the fate of the wicked in God’s hands, so the apostles put the righteous replacement to be alongside the 11 in God’s hands as well.

On the face of it, it is clear that hearing psalms of imprecation in church requires significant and profound understanding of just what is going on. Very few of us suffer for our faith in the ways being described in the psalms, and rare among us are those who can claim to experience what the psalmist describes.

20 Insults have broken my heart, so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. 21 They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

2] For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues. [3] They beset me with words of hate, and attack me without cause. [4] In return for my love they accuse me, even as I make prayer for them. [5] So they reward me evil for good, and hatred for my love.

But the savior of the world did experience just these, and in consummate fashion. He is no stranger to what is being described. Our hopes are placed in him, not in a calculus of righteous pay-back as we reflect from afar on the propriety of the cries of the afflicted, which are cries for God’s sake. For a righteousness that has a face, the face of Jesus Christ dying, forgiving and rising again. The place given to Judas he forfeited, and it is not for us to plumb fully how God means eternally to deal with that. But his place as an apostle in this life is given to another, not marked as a tragic void. The scriptures are fulfilled. No balance scales in the sky are brought into comfortable alliance but instead the plans of Jesus for his witnessers in this life are made complete in spite of all attacks on him and on those he is keeping in his name.

Though Psalm 1 may appear to be a more anodyne, less blunt account of what God’s character as just means in confrontation with the conduct and plans of men and women in this life, it is fully consistent with the main contours of both psalms 69 and 109. In the mystery of his sovereign will, the wicked heart delights not in the law of God, the night and day calling to him, the planting of us in his very heart and name, but in shunning these is left to blow away like chaff on the wind. We might hope that that be so for all those parts of us that walk, linger and sit down where God’s name is absent. Were it not for God’s protecting of us in the name, the work undertaken by Jesus himself, the only righteous one, we would have no place to stand.

The Gospel for the day drives that home. Jesus protects us in the name that is God’s personal name, the LORD, “I am who I am,” and as such, we are guarded and kept fully in God himself and at the heart of all he is as righteous and holy. That constitutes our planting in streams of water, the hope of our prospering, as Psalm 1 puts it, and our bearing fruit, as Jesus the True Vine put it last week. Those who do not believe in God are in forfeiture, as 1 John puts it, because not believing in his testimony is absenting the self from the eternal things of God.

While the psalms referred to by Peter may be harsh in tone and may be difficult to have placed on lips which do not know extreme suffering and affliction as Christians, this makes their message no less true. They also warn us by testifying to a fate of being cast away when we lose our place of planting and flourishing in Christ. He has come to protect us in the name God has given him. He does not leave us defenseless but as his final act of love before laying down his life for his own sheep, prays to God and brings us fully within earshot, alongside the gathered apostles. We are like Matthias given a place to stand alongside them, and to receive his promises to protect us in God’s very name.

I will end with the last lines of our Easter Epistle reading:

And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this is life in his name. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.

The other consistent reading, for all three years, is the psalm chosen for the day, 11 verses from Psalm 104. The creating and sustaining and renewing power of God consists of his wisdom, his word, which creates and sustains every single thing in creation he has made. O Lord, how manifold are your works, in wisdom you have made them all. To withdraw this wisdom means a hiding of God’s face. “You send forth your Spirit,” by contrast, “and so you renew the face of the earth.” What the world does not know of the Father and the Son, in the language of John’s Gospel, is a distorting, obscuring, of God’s will in creating and renewing the whole face of the earth, down into the depths of the seas, where that rogue Leviathan lives, who cannot thwart God in spite of his power and seeming independence. God made him for sport, and for his own sheer enjoyment.

We have the option of returning to Old Testament readings on Pentecost Sunday, chosen from Numbers 11 – the marvelous story of the spirit falling on Eldad and Mehdad outside the camp (Year A), Ezekiel’s spirit renewing, death defying in the Valley of bones, (year B), and Genesis 11, the creation of a single language by all nations so as to construct a tower into heaven, rather than looking to, counting on the rainbow placed there to guarantee shalom in a language divided world of God’s good creating. The division into nations, languages and tongues such as we read in the preceding chapter 10, is a good thing, a part of God’s wisdom creating design. Seeking by human technology or craft to rise above it misunderstands how God means to connect us and communicate with us, in the calling of Abraham and the sending of the son, and the blessing of the Holy Spirit. The Tower Story forms the obvious backdrop to our language-divided-but-fully-enlivened-in-that- state-of-affairs work of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We all hear in our own languages and tongues and national identities the mighty works of God. It takes a bit of imagination to understand the account as Luke relates it in Acts 2. The 12 are obediently waiting and occupying themselves in the Upper Room prayer and fellowship “in one place” place. The wisdom obedient creation begins churning as the heavens release the mighty wind as at creation itself. As a wildfire noisily releases sparks and flames of fire into the atmosphere, in the shape of tongues, so the Holy Spirit descends and in this distributing form lands on the heads of each one of the twelve. Here we find the source of the otherwise strange haberdashery, the Bishop’s miter: a flame or tongue shaped hat sitting atop the head. Corresponding to this tongue-shaped crown are real tongues or languages, called forth at the Holy Spirit’s bidding, and spoken forth by the twelve so endowed. This odd manifestation is not for its own sake but comes as an act of clear and life-changing communication. By whatever common language we might expect the pilgrims from all these various regions to speak with one another at the feast, as they went about their common affairs, they had deep inside themselves a mother tongue, the language of their own day-to-day living and loving and toiling and praying. And the amazing feat to which they are treated is hearing the mighty works of God in the language most deeply identifying of who they are. All at the same time and in the same place, not an esperanza language tower they construct to go up, but a loving and life changing language of God come down into their deepest place of communication. A marker as well, as we saw last week in the house of Cornelius, of a unifying work of God, reaching out beyond the differences within the Jewish communities with their different tongues and homes, into the entire world of national, often hostile, pilgrimage-less divisions. They were unified in their pilgrimage worship and hope and now the unity and power of the Holy Spirit spills like wildfire into their lives and futures.

Paul speaks of the work of the Holy Spirit coming to address the groaning and longing of the creation, in labor pains to become all God would have in his fullest wisdom-driven renewing work. Full adoption, full redemption of our bodies, belongs to the world of sure and certain hoping. In that time of our earthly life the Spirit helps us, giving us the words necessary below our words, in the arena of our present sighing and longing, as God searches us out and as the Spirit intercedes for us in his name.

When John speaks of leading into all truth and of those things that are appropriate for our Christian walk after he has departed, he has in view just this kind of scenario. The Spirit interceding and helping as we await the redemption of our bodies. We can also think of the language we find in Acts, when the Holy Spirit goes about the work of bringing in the other sheep, the gentiles and God-fearers of his blessing, the sheep of another flock beyond the pilgrimage makers at Pentecost. “Then I remembered the word of the Lord,” Peter will say of the spirit’s guiding into truth in his decision to baptize Cornelius and his house, as he explains it in chapter 11. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how Jesus had said, John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. In the language of Jesus in John’s Gospel for today. The Spirit takes what is mine and he declares it to you.

We should stop and ask why lectionary readings might be thought appropriate to our Sunday at all. Are they a kind of two-dimensional curtain at the back of the stage, setting the scene but in front of which the real trinity drama plays out.

Given the non biblical terminology, a real challenge is getting around think of the Trinity as piece of subsequent theological reflection arising from church councils, as the orthodox position defeated bad alternatives on either side. A 4th century idea one would have to back-date into a lectionary context.

If instead we are to think of the confession as arising from the sentences and paragraphs of scripture, which was the orthodox position en route to Nicaea and Chacledon, just how a might a lectionary properly display that. Which OT, Epistle, Psalm and Gospel readings will we hear. If the confession is out beyond the NT in time, then why any readings from it much less the OT at all? Just recite the creed and let that carry the post-biblical weight.

Of course it could be possible to say—as in a debate with Jehovah’s Witnesses—that the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit does indeed have a NT warrant, in at least some kind of germ form, pregnant form, if not more explicitly, and cite the relevant texts – John 1, quotes from Paul’s letters, or the Book of Revelation. Once this argument is nailed down, so it would go, the OT texts would come alongside as warrants in a retrospective sense, working back from a NT base. A search for threesomes in a witness whose literal sense is being manipulated, or recalibrated, though of course for understandable reasons of subsequent development in thinking. Seeing the beginning on the basis of the ending, where the clues have been provided.

Yet in fact the movement was the reverse. Texts like Proverbs 8 and Genesis 1 – which are read in Years A and C—were central to the arguments early Christians made about God as trinity based upon a Bible they shared with Jewish interlocutors, and in time, others. While the NT was itself coming to form. The NT itself testifies to this. What was happening in Jesus and who Jesus was, was in accordance with the scriptures. Jesus opened eyes to the scriptures everywhere about him in his resurrection eye opening time with them.

In His earthly life he defended the first commandment –The Lord, He along, is Lord God–and at the same time said I and the Father are one. These two seemingly distinct things rhymed. David called him Lord. Before Abraham I was. Moses spoke of me.

The use of a Greek gloss kurios, already in place, for the divine name Adonai, Lord, and its application to Jesus himself in confession and in worship makes the point efficiently. And it is the Holy Spirit as Lord that enables our seeing this and confessing it as in act of praise and worship.When we cry Abba! Father! It is the spirit bearing witness with our spirit. So our reading from Romans 8. As Paul puts it elsewhere: No one calls Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit. In the central poem of Philippians, and in our lesson from John a few weeks back: God has highly exalted him and given him the name above every name —The Name of the One God—so that in turn at his name, Lord Jesus, every knee shall bow to the Glory of the Father. This is a Holy Spirit driven congruence itself arising from the promise of Isaiah given to Israel in the Holy Spirit speaking to him. For by myself, by my name, I swear, to me every knee shall bow. So Isaiah 45.

When this central and fairly uncomplicated central fact is in place—one Lord God, one Lord Jesus, one Lord Spirit—one can see that there is no back curtain and main stage but one and the same divine drama across time and scripture both. The lectionary itself – no matter when its sets down—is a testimony every Sunday to this central theological fact at the heart of OT and NT together. The creeds use a different conceptual framework—God of God, light of light—but the same judgments link them both.

A shorthand form of Trinitarian and scriptural alignment is found in the Nicene creed’s brief declaration, that the Holy Spirit “spake by the prophets.” By the prophets is meant the prophetic character of the OT scriptures taken as a whole, through and through. So while certain specific texts were favorites in the history of the church’s exegesis, it is God himself and the way the monotheism of the OT functions to describes his dual majestic and intimate character that is prophetic.

God spoke in creating. His word is his intimate disclosure of himself toward us. In the beginning was the word. And God said. Elohim is the plural, majestic divine self. His voice is himself toward us and toward creation. His voice is upon the waters, is a powerful voice of splendor, it splits flames, makes calves skips and raises up in us a voice in response, as all in the temple cry Glory. His voice is his incarnate Lordship. The Fathers routinely had recourse to this way of conceptualizing, as did the early Jewish tradition as well. Moses did not look on God’s majesty, but by his voice God made himself known. Isaiah knows he is in God’s presence, what he claims to see of God’s self can only create in him a sense of being lost, of being unclean, of needing to have his sin expunged. God’s guarding attendants oblige. Then he can hear God’s voice, the voice of the Lord, in plural reference, “who will go for us.” “Let us make man in our image.” The “spake by the prophets” work of the Holy Spirit, the voice of the Lord, and the Abba Father are the Elohim LORD God of Israel’s experience and through them, by this speaking shared through them to us, our own. And the word became flesh and dwelt among.

The Gospel reading from John 3 focuses on this Holy Spirit disclosing now when it pertains to the voice, word, Lord himself incarnate, and not made known under signs and figures as to the prophets of old. For this disclosing, for this grasping of Jesus as Lord God, one will need to be born from above. The Holy Spirit will act as before he spoke by the prophets, appropriate now to this final disclosing act. Jesus incarnate and standing before Nicodemus is the very Lord God one with his Father, present in him, as Nicodemus confesses, and by that presence able to do signs in his earthly frame. He has descended from above, the veil of signs and figures now giving way to a distinct manner of Lordship in the flesh. This is no easier to grasp, or more proximate in some special metabolic sense, for even as incarnate Lord those around him struggle to comprehend him as Lord God. Descended from heaven and returning in glory. And for the time of his sojourning as this descended Lord, he will be lifted up in his incarnate frame, just as the serpent figure of death and life and healing Moses lifted up in his season, in the wilderness of God’s speaking by the prophets.

The very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit is that spirit speaking by the prophets, bringing new birth from above as promised to Nicodemus, and enabling us by his adopting power to cry out Abba Father, Jesus is Lord, and come Holy Spirit in threefold Holy, holy, holy.

That pattern involves a first OT reading and Psalm which have been chosen to complement the Gospel reading for the day, and at times the Epistle as well. “In many and various ways” the OT, Psalm and Gospel selections display important relationships between God’s work in Israel and in Jesus Christ.

With this Sunday we enter a different terrain. The patterns referred to just now continue, but on a Track Two optional path. Track One corresponds to a different conception, one in which the OT readings are not chosen to correlate in a conscious way with the Gospel, but rather are provided to allow the church to follow the narrative line within an OT book. This is not really possible, however, given the size of the OT, so the readings are a sort of ‘greatest hits’ of a book. So for the next 11 Sundays, reaching into the month of August in the long Pentecost Season, or Ordinary Time, we hear portions of 1 and 2 Samuel for the first reading. Yet all told, there are 55 total chapters in the twin books of Samuel so Track 1 can do its job only in this piecemeal sense. (Compare the continuous reading of 2 Corinthians we are also pursuing at the same time, and how it is able to cover the letter given its much shorter length). What it seeks to do is depart from a selection-for-complementarity approach and allow the OT to ‘have its own voice,’ so to say. 

Let me say a word further by way of commentary. Since Pentecost Season runs over several months and is the longest sustained lectionary period of the year—with as many as 30 Sundays—it offers the preacher, reader, church in general an opportunity to do some narrative style exposition. For the OT, if Track one is chosen, or of the Epistle. I am not going to pursue that tack here, but mention it just the same. The lectionary is a servant and not master and it offers flexible choices for setting forth the Christian Bible as a whole.

Track one introduces narratives about the prophet Samuel, beginning with his call as a boy in the Temple, and we will hear three episodes in which he plays a role in the run-up to the anointing of David, over the coming Sundays. This is the same reading which was used back at the very beginning of Year B, for Epiphany 2, where it was paired with the call of Nathanael in John’s Gospel. There it played a complementary role, in contrasting the ready obedience of Samuel with the incredulity of Nathanael, and the surprising persistence of God and Christ with them both. There we had Psalm 139, read for this Sunday, as well. “Lord you have searched me out and known me, like the boy Samuel, you know my sitting down in the temple and my rising up to run to Eli, you discern my thoughts from afar.”

The call of Samuel comes to set a new direction, away from the direction of the Book of Judges, and the wickedness of the sons of Eli. And who is this obedient and righteous Samuel but the surprising son of Hannah, whose aged giving birth to him launches the people of Israel onto a fresh new path. So the Books of Samuel open. Her song of joy is the model for the Magnificat sung centuries later at the surprising birth of another Savior, King David’s Greater Son. God is moving in mysterious ways, working past the obstacles on the human plane to bring into being his way. Eli demands to hear about this fresh new direction even if it means judgment over him and his own house. And from that sober request of the young boy spirals forth his important recognition: It is the LORD; let him do what seems good to him. And so it will be.

Our Gospel reading for the day takes us back into the early chapters of Mark, where our journey in Year B first began. Chapter One’s “and immediately Jesus” punctuated narrative line hurtles us past the introduction to and baptism by John, wilderness temptation, Galilee preaching, calling of disciples, exorcism and healing in Capernaum, the cleansing of a leper, the healing of a paralytic and calling of the tax collector Levi. And with this last action a new theme emerges which will track right through to the end: earthly hostility and opposition, matching the spiritual opposition in Chapter One. The whirlwind honeymoon of Jesus stunning, “and immediately,” activity in chapter one has come to an end. The Book of Judges and the wicked sons of Eli enter in the form of Jesus’ opponents.

Jesus insists that the Sabbath was not created by God as a means of preventing acts of mercy – the details of which disputed within the Judaisms of the day, for which we here find one harsher Pharisaic version. David himself operated within the parameters of mercy and necessity, Jesus reminds them. The scriptures do not present the picture they are distorting so as to attack him. He then enters the synagogue for round two, this time concerning his response to a man with a withered hand. Their silence before his question shows he has got to the heart of the matter. And he rounds on them in anger. So the battle for the authority of God in the Kingdom Jesus has come to bring is on. His destruction is now a matter of conscious planning – a conspiracy of certain Pharisees with the political party of the Herodians.

The complementary OT reading chosen for the day is from the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy’s chapter version. Here we find the longer grounding logic than in Exodus. Those outside the community—resident aliens and slaves—are also to enjoy the Sabbath. The generosity of God extends to them. In this manner, they are to be put in mind that they were also once slaves and that God had shown compassion to them in delivering them. The Sabbath commandment is intended to teach compassion, by recalling the conditions under which it was given. As such it captures the inner nerve of Jesus response to the Pharisees who would condemn—and plot to destroy him. His actions as those of God himself, as Deuteronomy extrapolates it. 

Psalm 81 helps forge the link, in case we miss it, between Deuteronomy and Jesus in Mark’s depiction on the Sabbath. The statute and the law for Israel, given by the God of Jacob, was a solemn charge laid upon the Israel coming out of Egypt, which in turn lifted off a burden: I eased his shoulder from the burden, his hands were set free from bearing the load. Jesus in the flesh does just this and acts in just this spirit. Deuteronomy reminds Israel that the law, and the Sabbath expressly, was given in order to remember this. I saved you. Listen to me, Jesus says to those Pharisees opposing him, I admonish you. I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt and said in my burden lifting statute: Open wide your mouth and I will fill it. To conclude our overview for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, we have the Epistle reading shared by tracks one and two. This is part of a semi-continuous reading of the second lesson, a pattern familiar throughout the lectionary year, here in Paul’s 2nd letter to the Corinthians. What is weak and fallible in us—our earthen jar lives in Christ—is precisely so. We proclaim not ourselves nor our capacities, for they are clay, but Jesus Christ himself, the only source of strength and hope. Our weakness is not something to overcome so we might be better, but the way in which we come to understand the glory and power that come from God. We have this treasure in clay jars so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power, made manifest in acts of mercy in the synagogue on the Sabbath, comes from God.

Let me start by offering a brief summary of the contents of 1 Samuel, the focus of Track One, that is, those portions left out between the Sunday selections, the call of Samuel in chapter 3 and today’s reading about the anointing of the ill-fated Saul in chapter 8. This will help us fill in the blanks and better understand the portions from 1 Samuel Track One is providing according to its “let the OT have its own voice” plot. I can recall, parenthetically, doing a major Track One type walk through the OT and NT organized in a teaching volume called The Story. For my part, I found catching people up on what got left out far more interesting, and why what was chosen, chosen.

What the overall narrative line makes clear is this: Samuel preserves Israel during his faithful tenure. He is a prophet who assures that assaults from enemies do not overwhelm God’s people. His leadership is sound and reliable. The threats are real and sustained, but God uses Samuel to best purpose.

When he becomes old, in time, the people fear the future without him. Their request, however, for a King is not favorable to God; fear is handled by God in his sovereign ways. When grounded as well, “to be like the nations” – that is exactly not what Israel is to be. She is to be a light to the nations. Different. Holy. In relationship with a Saving Lord on their behalf. God tells Samuel to warn the people about their request and he does. They ignore him and double down. God clarifies it is a rejection of him as King, as Lord of a different idea of nationality and kingship, and not a rejection of Samuel.

In chapters preceding this Samuel is sent to anoint Saul as nagid. Ruler. God has heard the cries of Israel for help. We hear in this nagid a concession to a request but on different terms as a King “so as to be like the nations.”

The people react to this, however, as consistent with their cry for a King. Samuel warns them. Strict obedience is the name of this game they have demanded they will play. We watch as Saul is strictly obedient vis-a-vis his son Jonathon but not in respect of Samuel. And so this Kingship suffers the fate appropriate to it and those who requested it. God rejects Saul under the conditions of Kingship as strict obedience to him, in spite of Saul’s stature, good looks, and obvious success as a nagid in battle. It is hard not to view him as caught up in the vortex of wrongly grounded requests and a high bar for compliance. One usual way of handling the complexity of the narrative unfolding is to assign the bits in tension to sources or different authors. But this only defers the interpretation of the text as it presently stands. I think it is better practice to assume the tensions have been left there precisely to convey the complexity. You want a King, you will have one, but things wrongly predicated run their course in strict ways and not generous ones.

I mentioned last week the way the Gospel of Mark transitioned from chapter one’s depiction of Jesus confronting spiritual forces of satan to his confrontation with the religious leaders who challenge his fellowship with tax collectors and his conduct on the Sabbath.

Today the two realms merge. The religious leaders seek to claim that Jesus is himself a challenge to them because he is at work for satan. Going out of one’s mind is often a charge of demonic possession. His very success in healing and carving out inroads in the territory of Satan – so much so that he can barely stop for food – ironically occasions their charge of possession. Jesus makes two responses, the first long and the second a summary statement the actual fact of the matter. To bind up the strong man is to attack the realm of satan at its source, so as to plunder and destroy his house—his earthly domain of death and bondage. That is the reality of what he is up to.

The longer introduction to this succinct point consists of his rebuttal of the leaders’ charge that he is operating at Satan’s behest. That is nonsensical on its face, Jesus replies. Why would Satan dispatch Jesus to defeat his earthly authority. The charge they level is an admission that Jesus has been successful. He drives out demons. Even they get that much. Silencing them has not prevented their being recognized as driven out at his command. Satan would be divided against himself if he allowed such an activity and was the motive force behind it. No, Jesus is plundering the house of the strong man, and anyone who claims he is acting demonically shows themselves to be themselves on Satan’s side as such. The unpardonable sin is to see Jesus acting to defeat sin and death and bondage and attribute that to the Devil. 

The strong rebuke to his mothers and brothers and cousins must be heard in this even stronger context. They seek to restrain him. That is wrong. He must be about his Father’s business, as Luke’s milder version of his push-back goes. It is the people who have wondered about his mental state, and they act on that basis. Presumably out of concern.

As our reading ends they appear as those calling for him to come aside. He refuses and it is to those gathered that he directs his words. You are brothers and sisters and family. In the work I am given to undertake, such will be the charges made about me, and the challenges I must defeat. So it goes. Follow me. Do not try solace or concern, well-motivated though that might be on a human plane or in human families. To be in my family is to allow me to do my Father’s work, who is Your Father.

The rejection of Samuel is a rejection of God himself. A request to have things as seems best to us on the earthly plane—let us have a king like other nations—is a rejection of God’s kingdom and the King he has in view, whose coming is in his timing and purpose. Jesus’ kingdom brings confrontation from those who cannot see how God is working in him to bring about healing and the defeat of all hostile forces. Yet he is creating through this his special family.

The Genesis reading shows us just how deeply the assault on God’s good creation rends the peace he intended. Fear has entered the stage, fear like that of the people requesting a king. Dissembling and accusation. Satan strikes the head of all humanity. It will take the offspring of Eve to strike back in victory, even a victory over death and enmity. And along the way it will be the forgiveness and forbearance of God with his people which demonstrates his love so strong it teaches us fear and reverence. So Psalm 130. The Psalm chosen to come alongside 1 Samuel 8 reminds us that whatever King God does come in time to bring will only be King in praise and in obedience before God’s Kingship, unlike the ways of nations, who must find their own praise before the Lord. This is the safe refuge from enemies the people cry out for, and only this, as Samuel has taught them.

Or in the words of today’s Epistle. 

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

For last Sunday we tried to summarize the main story line of the Samuel material. In spite of grave threats from the Philistines and others, during Samuel’s long tenure Israel was faithfully preserved from attack. The people feared his passing and asked for a King. Samuel warned them solemnly against this and they persisted in their request, which God granted. However this would require a very strict obedience on their part and Saul’s. In the passage which precedes ours today we hear that God has withdrawn whatever even reluctant support he sought to give on behalf of Saul and the people’s request. Saul refused to carry out the direct command of God and Samuel, and using his handsome head, spared the most handsome portions of the spoils he had been directed to destroy. Pragmatics are not what God requires, but obedience. When confronted by Samuel, within earshot of the bleating reserves, Saul confesses he feared the people and acted in that spirit. He desired their approval. Following on from a similar occasion of cutting the bed to fit his own best sense of things, this time God’s patience and Samuel’s has run out.

The entire complex of narratives involving Saul and the request of Israel, wrongly predicated—“that we might be like the nations”—offers a chilling tale that nevertheless raises up in us sympathy even as the morale of the story is clear. Watch what you ask for, especially out of fear, for the requirements laid down for this are sometimes worse than patiently waiting upon God. Even Samuel finds it in himself to grieve. But that doesn’t change the reality. God dispatches him, and he goes on what he considers a dangerous mission. Here the coming depiction of Saul is anticipated, wherein he becomes the erratic, unpredictable, dangerous, unstable shadow tracking the Lord’s anointed, David, son of Jesse for the remainder of the books of Samuel.

The outward appearances—strength, stature, the grandeur of nations with their battle machines and kings—these are of no interest to the Lord. He looks inside. The ones we do not think the world will admire, these he puts to service. David is young, untested, not the one we would instinctively choose—so too Samuel’s instincts are off. He thought the eldest son of Jesse the best candidate. But God has in view the one he has in view. Saul anoints him. The spirit comes mightily upon him.

The psalm captures the scene well. “Now I know the LORD gives victory to his anointed. Some put trust in horses and chariots. But we call upon the name of the LORD. O Lord, give victory to the King.”

The other OT reading is not only chosen because it comes alongside the sowing parables of the Gospel lesson from Mark, with its image of a spring which becomes a noble cedar. It is also likely directly influencing the parable of the mustard seed as detailed by Mark. From smallest to greatest, this is the kingdom God is sovereignly bringing to flower. The parable in Ezekiel describes the competition amongst the nations, Babylon and Egypt, and the last of the Davidic rulers, Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, one preserved and one blinded and hauled into captivity, caught up in the machinations of warring powers. Yet from the Davidic tree brought down, God will take a sprig. It will grow on a mountaintop, like the mount Zion of Micah chapter 4. And all the birds of the air will find shelter under it. In Ezekiel the reference is to the nations of the earth. The phrase emerges in Mark as “so that the birds of the air can make their nest in its shade,” the shade of the great mustard plant with the tiniest and most improbable of beginnings. In the kingdom Jesus is bringing, and whose inner truth he explains to his disciples, all the nations of the earth will find place in its shade. The first parable speaks of the need for sowing the word, and after that God produces the growth in ways hidden and mysterious. The second speaks of the mystery whereby the seemingly small and insignificant is by design en route to becoming a plant capable of sheltering all nations. In a funny way, the reading from 1 Samuel – the choosing of the boy David – fits here as well. David must be brought into view, for no one bothered to let him pass before Samuel. And yet this is the one who will become King and will portend the coming of the King Jesus.

The Psalm chosen for Track Two speaks of the righteous flourishing like great trees, the palm and cedar, because planted in the house of God’s purposes. They shall be green and succulent.

Mark’s double parable—the seed growing secretly and the mustard seed’s grand outcome—belongs in a longer section, which begins at the start of chapter 4 with the parable of the soils, rocky, thorny and good. Quick growth is not sustainable, and thorny growth is hampered from the outset. But good soil produces good growth, and it happens according to the mystery of God’s designing, just as the soil all by itself produces by stages stalk, head and full grain. The parables have the effect of closing ears, Jesus tells the disciples gathered around him. Isaiah and Ezekiel precede him in this truth. But to those close to him, the true meaning is given so that comprehension is possible, and so growth in good soil will occur. Even if mustard sized, the way ahead is prepared. Mark puts the readers in a position to come alongside the disciples, in the good soil it is our privilege, close to Jesus, to inhabit.

In our epistle reading we see one of those remarkable places where, though a serial reading crossing the main terrain of 2 Corinthians, we nevertheless have a remarkable symphonic fit with 1 Samuel and the Gospel and even Ezekiel 17. We walk by faith and not by sight. We regard no one from a human point of view. God looks on the heart. God is taking care of the smallest of our comprehension, and seeing to its growth according to his purposes. This way of walking in faith means much is hidden from our view. But this is not a hindrance but belongs to a new way of thinking and living. We are no longer living for ourselves but have been transported into a new soil where God is bringing about growth. We have a king who is not our heart’s desire, nor our fear’s longing, but is the one God’s has called forth from the baggage where his eye alone sees. This is not seeing from a human point of view, but can only be described with the language of new creation. Old and familiar patterns—let us be like the nations—are passing away. The kingdoms of Jehoiachin and Zedekiah have been brought low. But a sprig no larger than a mustard seed is all that God needs to produce the noble cedar of his kingdom. We are given the secrets of the kingdom that his parables otherwise veil, by sitting at his feet. There the good soil is, there the secret growth goes from stalk to head to full grain, and there the cedar capable of sheltering all the nations makes its way into the heavens. Jesus is himself the sprig, the mustard seed, the ruddy David behind the baggage, the first stalk. And he is at the same time the noble cedar in which is room for all the nations on earth to find shelter, who look to him as Lord and King.

But equally, we can see in both the instruction in parables and in the stormy sea God at work behind the scenes, as it were. Seed growing secretly. Surprising tiny seed growing to grandeur. Jesus asleep but fully in charge. A kind of anti-Jonah, obedient and all in, surprised at the fear but competent to make the seas obey him. The sea is that unruly force that seems to challenge God’s dominion, but over which he rules, from the moment of creation, through the great flood, and as the psalms describe it, a powerful voice over the waters day by day, sitting enthroned above the flood. As is Jesus arising from his sleep enthroned on the waters. “Peace, be still.” Any number of Old Testament texts might be called upon to reinforce the point, but our selection from Job is a very good one. We find ourselves at the opening of the divine speech from the whirlwind, in God’s response to Job in chapter 38. For Job though the speech is a fearsome thing, it is also a response to him that silences his friends and moves past the subtle wisdom of Elihu, if that is the correct appraisal of the young man’s contribution. Job will be converted in this encounter and enabled to return to his famous intercessory prayer role, prior to being healed of his bodily afflictions. In this manner we see Satan defeated, who had said that no one would serve God for naught, for nothing but God’s own sake. Job does just that. “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear but now my eye sees you.” 

Or in our NT version, “Who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?”

God speaks from inside the windstorm. Job is being girded up in his being addressed and being made privy to things God alone has seen. At the moment of creation where no man was, there Job is made to glimpse, through the eyes of God, to see as God sees, through God’s sharing of those memories to our persevering hero. As when he said to the waves of chaos, “Thus far you shall come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped.”

As God spoke and brought creation into orderly, obedient form, and as he shares that moment with Job who was not there anymore than anyone of us was, so in Jesus God acts in like manner. “Peace, be still.” Like Job, the disciples stand in awe. He who neither slumbers nor sleeps is sovereign over land and sea, over soil and over proud waves. “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” I am here, and even in crashing storms, and taking my rest, I am in charge. He rebukes the waves and shows that it is so. Faith is that endowment hard to summon up that is assured of secret growth, or deep roots in good soil, of tiny seeds being enough when God in Christ is the Lord of the Kingdom.

The Psalm, 107, with its glimpse at life for sailors on the seas, brings in dramatic chords to accompany Job and Mark. The psalm gives eloquent testimony to palpable fear. The God who brings the terrifying storms is the same Lord to whom appeal can be made, with the power and authority to still those storms. 

Then he spoke, and a stormy wind arose, * which tossed high the waves of the sea. They mounted up to the heavens and fell back to the depths; * their hearts melted because of their peril. They reeled and staggered like drunkards * and were at their wits’ end. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper * and quieted the waves of the sea. Then were they glad because of the calm, *

What a perfect accompaniment to the Gospel reading and God’s divine word to Job provided for this Sunday.

Paul’s litany of hardships borne for the sake of the Corinthians also comes nicely alongside the hardships at sea. But for Paul these testify to what empowerment in Christ has enabled in him and in the way of his service. “…through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger. We are treated as dying – and see we are alive. Poor but having everything, as having nothing yet possessing all things.” What comes to mind is the promise of the parables of sure growth and deep roots. The disciples get a taste of the power of God in the midst of hardship, and of captaining their boat. Paul gives witness to just how strong this captaining is and what it allows in his ministry through all manner of hardship. And by this means he seeks to offer shelter to the birds of the air in Corinth. “Open wide your hearts also.” Join us in this rich soil with strong roots able to withstand storms and thorns and affliction. 

Finally then, Track One continues the walk through 1 Samuel, here offering two choices for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost. The well-known David and Goliath encounter. Talk about a battle for survival and a fearsome encounter with the world’s mightiest and most dedicated warrior! And what does David say, brushing off the warnings and armor of Saul. “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hand.”

The bravado and fearlessness come across as unthinkable and a bridge too far, but in many ways they find their absolute fulfillment and accordance in the posture of Jesus himself before a deadly storm. “Where is your faith? Peace. Be still.” “Goliath, you are through.” The young David’s victory is fully plausible—striking the giant with his sling—since it is simply not what the giant thought fighting entailed. So he is doomed with one stone hurled from out of hand-to-hand fighting range. “You never forsake those who fear you, O Lord,” our Psalm 9 reads. “The ungodly have fallen into the pit they dug. The wicked are trapped in the works of their own hands. Rise up O Lord, let them be judged before you.”

The alternative reading from later in the same chapter 17 is provided for this Sunday without any explanation. Is the Goliath story too well known? Too violent? Does Track One admit of choices and variations, given that it has too much good material to work with? 

Here we have a David accepting the vesture of Jonathan, Saul’s son, where Saul’s armor he left to the erstwhile King. David will not find in Jonathan an obvious rival, as claimant to the throne, but a comrade and ally. We begin to see the paranoia and mood swings of Saul as he realizes here is his replacement, and not his son Jonathan. Evil spirit, fear, envy, awe begin to invade by strokes our rejected and yet still king Saul. Now we will have to see how David chooses to react. His loyalty to Jonathan gives us a clue. It will not be his instinct to retaliate in kind but will call forth from him the challenge of patience and respect. How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. And how very hard. It must come as a gift from God and responded to with psalms of thanksgiving. 

One of the main challenges of the narration is the overshadowing fact that Saul remains King even as David has been anointed by Samuel as his replacement. Saul is not an old man. How will this play out, for David is successful, winsome, and indeed in position to replace him. What these 14 chapters convey is the extreme patience and care David exercises toward Saul, to the degree that in saner moments Saul refers to him as his son and successor, instead of Jonathan, David’s close comrade and Saul’s real son and successor. It makes for an impossible quandry. Saul remains King and David not only defers to that but believes himself divinely constrained to do so. And he is faithful to that constraint to the point of risking his own life, needing to take cover in difficult circumstances, encountering threats in consequence, negotiating his friendship with Jonathan and evading the ensuing attacks from an increasing demented Saul – conjuring up Samuel from the dead being one of the more painful episodes in his decline.

Why 14 chapters and not just a simple summary. At one level the answer is, such is life. There is no early retirement home for rejected but functioning Kings. The dilemma is equally David’s. And so we cover that terrain in the second half of 1 Samuel, in part I believe to make sure we sense something of the balance in David’s long term time on the stage. To recall and place in the record these moments of difficulty and challenge, for any one, much less the one who God has personally and prospectively and providentially placed on that stage, was important for the narrator. David, warrior and success-at-all-things, is David the patient and deferential.

We come then to today’s reading. Saul and Jonathan die in battle, as the final chapter of 1 Samuel relates it. Along with his two other sons, at the hands of the Philistines, on Mt Gilboa. Saul does not die outright but is gravely wounded by an archer’s arrow. The request for his armor-bearer to finish him off is refused, so Saul dies at his own hand, rather than be made sport of by the victors. Yet that fate is still in store for him anyway as we read on. In the end, the men of Jabesh Gilead are able to rescue the bodies, such as they are, and give them burial and proper mourning.

David’s moving tribute today comes after a man’s report to him that such has transpired. More than this, he claims to have finished Saul off. This is one of those places where sources have been posited to account for the divergence. Yet equally it creates a scene in contrast to all David has himself endured and borne, and through which he has faithfully stayed his hand. We have an opportunist eager to lie to gain favor, not realizing he claims to have done precisely what David refused to do, with far more reason to have done so.

The elegy speaks for itself, given all this. The full 14 chapter full journey of David, vis-a-vis Saul and his family, over rough terrain for them all here tragically ends. Verse 21’s reference to ‘not anointed’ with oil is unlikely an effort to claim Saul was never truly king, but rather refers to his shield; so too the implication of Hebrew poetry, where A and B lines repeat and reinforce. And this is the point of all that has ensued since the day of his anointing, the painful cry for a king and the painful burden placed on him for whom it was so, and his own son, and indeed David himself. Elegy indeed.

When last we left Jesus he was crossing to the other side of the Sea of Galilee to the predominantly Gentile Decapolis. This Sunday he is returning to the side where he had previously been met by opposition from the Jewish officials. He didn’t arrive, touch the shore, and return immediately. Rather, we are passing over the healing of the Gerasene demoniac, after which Mark says he published widely throughout the Decapolis the great things Jesus had done for him. “And all were amazed.”

This time the reception on the Jewish side of the sea is favorable. One of the leaders of the synagogue, whose name, Jairus, Mark supplies, falls at Jesus’ feet and begs him come and heal his sick and dying daughter. This is the first of a series of healings on behalf of those who cannot ask for themselves, and so means Jesus must “cross over” to meet them on the other side. Sick and dying she is unclean. Off Jesus goes with Jairus and the crowd.

En route however we have an unexpected urgency of its own. A woman with a chronic flow of blood, making her ritually unclean as well, who has dumped a savings on false physicians for years, summons up the courage to touch the healer as he passes through the crowd en route to Jairus’s home. The touch, that will do it, just as Jairus has requested for his daughter. She senses in her familiar flesh of distress and chronic isolation instant electric healing. Jesus senses this as well. Mark’s Jesus is authoritative and virtually clairvoyant, but he demands a personal exchange for a personal crossing over to his side by this poor woman trapped in disease and chronic spiral. In fear and trembling—so the disciples in the boat—she responds to his demand and like Jairus falls at his feet. Now he crosses over. Your faith is a solid compass and it brought you home to me. Be at peace. This was not a one-time fluke. Your scourge is gone.

Now this delay along the way, while doubtless encouraging Jairus in what he has witnessed, yet like in the story of Lazarus, has meant the passing of precious time. Flowing from his house is the bad news. Death got here first. Jesus turns to Jairus and says “keep believing.” He takes the big three with him, Peter, James and John, entering the house where the professional mourners are underway. He sends them packing, leaving him alone with the four, and now joined by the distraught mother. Her sleep is no more final than was the deeper sleep of Lazarus, but it was death just the same. He takes her little hand in his own. Arise. She does, and like a good mother Jesus moves things back into the daily rounds. “Get her something to eat.” Amazement ensues. And it will continue. There is no one like this man. He is an unstoppable force of healing, life from death, release from demons, power over waves and seas of doubt. The three are there to bear testimony, and what they do there with amazement they will do later with bold speech. After the forgiving Jesus reroutes them by His Risen presence. But not until his final assault on death, his own, is done. Here is the key to the call for secrecy of course. His hour is not come, but come it will.

Our accompanying poetic texts allow us a choice between Lamentations, which captures the plight of the woman with a flow of blood, or Psalm 30, which speaks of life from death. Lamentations 3 is the central of five panels of lament, confession, and a sitting inside sin and loss. It is the first-person poem, daughter Zion, Everyman, Israel – all can claim this speech. Jesus enters it and does not erase it but forgives and new-creates out of it. It is possible to imagine Jairus telling his daughter how remarkable was that day she came back to life, and later as a young woman hearing this psalm summarize her plight and its life giving reversal.

There is very little internal OT commentary on the story of Adam and Eve, surprisingly. The Wisdom of Solomon’s opening chapter offers the first such reflection. It matches nicely both the healing of the woman afflicted and the young child brought back to life. Death is foreign to God’s good purposes. It came as an alien intrusion. All generative forces made by God are wholesome. Jesus comes to defeat the devil who out of envy sought to distort and kill, scourge and condemn. The woman with the flow of blood touches this time the Tree of Life and the Knowledge of Good and Evil and in that act, Satan’s destructive ploy is brought to an end. Envious not for knowledge but for life, her act is acknowledged by Jesus to be the end of his rule over her.

With the death of Saul, the drama of the final chapters of 1 Samuel stabilizes so far as David’s own health and safety are concerned. But as with aftershocks following an earthquake, the transition to his own secure rule is not yet here. A son of Saul remains and he has sufficient following to be made king as Saul’s successor. And the military retainers for the House of Saul and the House of David remain on violent auto-pilot—Joab and Abner and their respective camp followers. Saul’s son is killed by treachery and the ringleaders receive the same fate as did the opportunist who claimed to have slain Saul, and for the same reason. David did not seek to eliminate all rivalry, but rather avenged those who sought to end the reign of Saul’s house in the hope David would find that cause for their advancement. Only the lame son of Jonathan, mentioned in passing so as to alert us, remains of the House of Saul. The men of Judah and of Israel are now as one, and David is king over them both, and his long reign in the newly named City of David is here chronicled. We will now wait to see the future unfold, with only Mephibosheth left of the lineage of Saul.

Psalm 48 has been chosen to offer praise to Zion, place of God’s dwelling, place of his special choosing, place where he defends his life with his people against earthly threats. And the place where above all kingship, including that of his chosen one David, he is King.

1 Great is the LORD, and highly to be praised; * in the city of our God is his holy hill. 2 Beautiful and lofty, the joy of all the earth, is the hill of Zion, * the very center of the world and the city of the great King.

As in the opening Psalm 2, paired with Psalm 1, we are reminded of God’s Holy Hill, and of his promises to his Son, the King, who will be protected from assaults, for assaults there will be, only because of God’s infinite kingship and upholding promise.

Our Gospel reading fast-forwards us to just such an assault, now in the fulness of time. Jesus is manifesting power and authority and wisdom such as only God can give. In this is his kingdom come, and yet offense is taken. He can only be who he is as all others are, son of Mary, here is his family, known by a trade. Where did this man get all this?

Jesus responds as did the prophets of old, who were known as different, as prophets, as men of God, precisely to the degree they were impossible to understand on human terms only. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Zechariah, Hosea and on the list goes. They all had fathers and they all had hometowns yet these remain but footnotes on the depository of testimony they have left to us, which continues to bear witness long after their passing. Isaiah was not heard; he is told his address will shut ears, close eyes, make hearts fat. But his testimony is preserved and opened to a new generation. Ezekiel is given woe and lamentation to eat like Jeremiah, and God yet provides an antacid and fills him with a spirit that sets him on his feet and sends him on his “Thus says the Lord” way. Jesus is provided with a long list of valiant forerunners so that he can be sure his path is well prepared for him to walk in. At another place Ezekiel, anticipating Jesus’s hometown comments here, speaks of having to address his own people, for whom his words are so much foreign babble, unlike the nations who do not know his tongue but who would ironically “get it” by contrast.

Just as there is a lineage of prophets in which Jesus stands, so he now sends forth those who will work in his name and with his authority. They too will encounter push back and refusal to welcome. They could be well equipped with the prayer that is the psalm chosen for the day. To you Lord Jesus I lift my eyes. As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, so our eyes look to the Lord our God. When contempt comes, have mercy. Defend us from scorn and derision. And so it is. They cast out many demons, anointed with oil those sick, and cured them. Looking to the Master.

Paul’s description of his thorn in the flesh can come alongside as well. He gets there however by a very specific route. The super apostles in Corinth claim spiritual visions and experiences. Paul can speak of himself in similar terms. But he does so by means of avoiding his first-person and speaking as if of someone else. For 14 long years Paul kept this experience to himself and never used it to boast. The third heaven is an expression of the day, sky, starry night, and the abode of God. Paradise. The experience was both real and also not for publication. For edification. For an example of how not to puff up, even as it served to place Paul in God’s personal presence.

And indeed Paul speaks, not of special revelations or of boasting, but of his affliction and his weakness. A physical, mental and spiritual thorn, from which Paul prayed unceasingly to be released. His apostleship does not lift him into lofty places of peace and boasting, causing envy, but means rather a constant reliance on the strength of God alone. The only answer to his prayer for relief was in fact the answer he received inside his affliction: my power is made perfect in weakness. That says it all. The presence of the power of Christ is such that it cancels out whatever afflicts and whatever condemns us on account of that very shortcoming in our flesh. That is an answer to prayer. That is a cause for real confidence and empowerment.

When last we left the venerable ark it was in Kireath-Jearim, to the west of the City of David, where it had remained, we are told in the first chapters of 1 Samuel, now twenty years. You will recall it had been taken away by the Philistines, who doubling down to avoid the fate of the destroyed Egyptians of Moses’ generation, routed Israel in battle. Good news, bad news, for the ark’s presence in their victorious midst caused tumors to break out throughout the coastal land. Sending it from one city to another to get rid of the freshly renewed and potent Egyptian-like plagues brought no better results. At Gath it was finally sent by cart, accompanied with sin offerings, on its way, where it promptly headed straight for home territory. A sign the priests had properly anticipated, meaning the judgment in their midst had been no accident. At its last staging point, the men of Beth-Shemesh dared to gaze into the ark and they were ominously slain. But the ark was how back home, back in its proper 20-year resting place in Israel. It is always intriguing to see what verses our readings may from time to time leave out—this Sunday, vv 6 through 12a, which appears to be a surgical excision from the middle of our chapter 6.

Here is the account of one Uzzah who reached out to steady the ark en route, on its mobile journey to Jerusalem, and was struck down, giving rise to a popular name for the place and event and striking fear in David. The ark can take care of itself as we saw clearly in 1 Samuel, traveling around the hostile Philistine territory. It steadies Israel; it isn’t steadied.

Parenthetically, I often find these “steadying efforts” in the lectionary readings, that is, leaving out the more challenging verses from our readings, a missed opportunity. David’s dancing and rejoicing and shouting, amid trumpet fanfare, happens not in diminishment of the ark’s sacred potency but in the light of it. It is dancing and rejoicing after great fear and respect have been experienced by David. The despising by Saul’s daughter, Michal, of which we read today, elides David’s genuine fear like a concerned lectionary editor, and leaves his leaping and rejoicing without a proper context for interpretation. “With all their might” means an exertion like as in battle, matched by the disciplined offerings of respect as they go. The terror-and-tumor wielding arc must be brought forward with care and exertion, such as David and his chosen men are capable of, after the years of discipline we have closely followed in previous chapters.

The psalm speaks of the founding of the seas and the stabilizing of the deep in the same breath as the ascent to God’s dwelling. Who can ascend, who can stand in his holy place? The generation capable of this must seek him with a pure heart and clean hands, untethered to falsehood. The King of Glory is entering his holy place. The Lord of Hosts, seated upon the cherubim. He is the King of Glory. He steadies, secures, defends, founds the seas and dwells in safety in his holy place.

The choice of Amos chapter 7 to come alongside Mark 6 draws our attention to the parallel between Amaziah and King Jeroboam in the northern kingdom of Israel and the Galilean King—better Tetrarch—and Herod. And also between the prophet Amos and John the Baptist, the former banished, the latter tragically beheaded, both prophets strong in word and deed. Lectionary comparisons are also useful for calling attention to kindred features and also to subtle contrasts, so sharpening our eye on what is being depicted.

The plumb-line vision is the third in a series of four vouchsafed to Amos, or five if chapter nine’s later vision is to be included. After each of the first two—locusts and judgment by fire—the prophet begs God to relent. Amos the stern is as well a dedicated prophet of intercession for a wayward people. And God relents due to his plea.

The third vision he receives is just as harsh. The sanctuaries and the royal house will come to an end. Amaziah’s banishing of Amos from the sanctuary tragically means the sole person able to plead successfully with God for Israel, and who has done so, is now silenced. Nothing will stay the judgment because of the priest’s banishing response. So the final vision confirms the reality. An end has come upon Israel. Amos sees qayits, “summer fruit”, God says qets. The end.

The depiction of Herod is more complicated than Amaziah’s. He likes to hear John. There is something compelling about him. “When he heard him he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.” This complexity may be entertaining to him, but his is a view of the matter not shared by his wife. John’s condemnation of Herod’s wrongful marriage to his sister-in-law – did Herod understand its sharp truth? Mark seems say so: Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man. But Herod is clearly a wavering, impetuous, weak ruler. A rash vow to a dancing daughter, his own or his wife’s, seals John’s fate. (Any commentary will disclose how inbred and overly Herod-named was the family tree). Keeping face before his guests, he has the order given and John is slain. A harbinger of the fate awaiting Jesus at the hands of those equally compromised and feckless, as Mark will in time report.

This tragic event is provided in retrospect by Mark, as a means of explaining that—while others had other explanations–Herod believed Jesus’ mighty work was being done in the power and risen presence of this John whom he beheaded. So much for getting rid of him, even by rash vow. Here in Mark’s Gospel we face the question of how to fit this Jesus into some known frame of reference. A prophet come back? Elijah? The carpenter, son of Mary surrounded by relatives?

In the scene that follows we have no report of John’s death such as Matthew supplies, but both have Jesus withdraw to a lonely place. One senses the somber atmosphere. Luke refers to the death but does not report the details. At issue is who Jesus is, and what is that going to mean in the face of this kind of demonic assault.

Our psalm speaks of mercy and truth embracing. The truthfulness of John and the righteousness and mercy of Jesus. The way of prosperity is a way of righteousness even into the jaws of death and demonic cruelty. John has prepared the way yet again, even at his death, and Jesus will follow and lead on, onto a new pathway of peace. Those who turn their hearts to him will know this peace passing all understanding.

Our Epistle reading for today shows the start of a new walk, leaving 2 Corinthians and entering now Ephesians. The big picture is in frame. The plan for the fullness of time is a mystery truly there from eternity, witnessed in the law and prophets, and now shown forth in boldness. We have been chosen according to this plan, from before the foundations of the earth. His death is part of this plan, it is no John-the-Baptist-tragedy: in Jesus we have redemption in his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses. John as well, even in death, is part of this same plan. The riches of God’s grace freely bestowed on us includes John, and is on offer for the sins of the whole world, including a wicked Herod and a dancing Salome. Who is this Jesus? Just this Jesus.

Left out here in Mark is the feeding of the five thousand, followed by a terrifying sea crossing where Jesus walks on the water and reassures his closest disciples.

This same sequence is found in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, one of those places where John and Mark have a similar arrangement—feeding of five thousand, and walking on the sea. There, in John, it leads onto fuller discourses about the bread from heaven. 

In Year B, Mark’s year, the lectionary has chosen to let John speak at this point next Sunday, taking over from Mark, since they share the same sequence, and to bring into association as well the rich treasure house of feeding stories from the OT. Manna in the wilderness, Elisha multiplying scarce resources, and so forth. For five Sundays running. I will say more about this next week but note that Mark’s omitted section is not like unto last Sunday’s excision from 2 Samuel 6. Rather it occurs so as to offer space for the 4th Gospel to speak, otherwise not represented in the three-year Matthew, Mark, Luke cycle except on occasions like this. It brings a complementary word and also in this case a much a fuller one.

The transition from the death of John the Baptist, which we heard last Sunday, to today’s scene is only roughly provided in Mark. The disciples of John come and take care of his executed body (v. 29). The apostles of Jesus, as Mark calls them here, return from their successful missionary work and give report (V. 30). Yet the death of John hangs in the air, so to say. Jesus will begin to focus on his chosen twelve, after John’s death and his disciples mourning of him. The apostles go with Jesus into a desert place. The reference to sheep without a shepherd tracks closely the words of Moses in the wilderness, as provided in Numbers 27. Moses is about to die. He will not enter the promise land. God provides Joshua as his replacement, in compassion and in response to Moses’ request, seeing that “the people are like sheep with a shepherd.” Shepherd will become a general term for proper leadership, focused on the Davidic monarchy, but also encompassing the Moses foundational teaching-and-leading role in the wilderness. Moses too provides miraculous food for the sheep he shepherds. Jesus is about to feed five thousand. Jesus ends the retreat with his apostles to come ashore and have compassion. To give instruction, torah. To feed.

We cross over the feeding story that follows and the harrowing boat trip and land with Jesus on the western side of the sea of Galilee. The crowds throng Jesus wherever he goes, here bringing their sick, seeking like the woman with the flow of blood, only to touch his garment. And so be healed. The call for secrecy, a theme in Mark’s Gospel, cannot succeed in anything but slowing down the crowds by a trickle.

This is a Sunday where the Old Testament readings from Tracks 1 and 2 actually both suit the Gospel. Jeremiah speaks of a history of bad shepherds, in his frame of reference meaning the Davidic kings that have ruled over Judah, and for a brief time, the United Kingdom of David and Solomon. We have come to the end. The exile is near. The kings’ negligence over centuries of God’s patience has left the flock scattered. But God’s promises to David are not in vain even as the shepherds have with but rare exception—Hezekiah, Josiah—failed. God will be shepherd for the season of bringing home the scattered flock. This sequence matches the movement of the Psalter as a whole work. Book Three sees the end of the monarchy and the promises to David dashed to the ground. So the end of Psalm 89 whose first section only has been chosen for today’s reading. In Book 4 the Lord is King. And in the final book five psalms of ascent bespeak the ongoing hopes and pledges for David, Zion, God’s people, all nations and a renewed creation of endless alleluia.

In Jeremiah’s words: “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The LORD is our righteousness.”

The personal gathering, shepherding by God himself undergirds all that he means to pledge to David. To the degree that in coming days, this Son of David will himself be the LORD our righteousness, the good shepherd, the compassionate Jesus the crowds press forward to touch so as to but touch his garment and be healed. 

Psalm 89 underscores the promises to David and all his lineage. I will punish them for all their transgressions. Even to the point of casting them off, as the end of the psalm soberly laments. But Psalm 89 is not the last word of the Psalter. And its “I will not take my love from him” and “his line will endure forever” override his punishing for a season, and indeed point ahead to Jesus Christ himself. The good shepherd. Psalm 23 captures this well. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, because in the Lord my shepherd, the Lord God, the Lord Jesus, I shall not be in want. David’s psalm become out own.

The reading from Ephesians moves us to chapter two and one of the most important asides in all the New Testament. Here Paul raises his eyes to speak directly to one group only: those previously outside the covenants of promise, strangers, without Christ and without God in the world. All those of us who listen in on God’s life with Israel, in the promises of 2 Samuel, in Psalm 23, Psalm 89, Jeremiah, and in Jesus with his chosen fellow Israelites. Whatever reconciling work God was doing in Jesus Christ, he did with one cross, not two. And in that one cross, God redeemed his people, and brought near those of us far off. Whatever dividing line existed by which God elected and promised and planned the future of good shepherds for his people Israel, involved equally the creating of new citizens, the issuing of library cards so we outsiders might read and see ourselves within the life and promises of Israel. The Holy Spirit makes this so. One new humanity made of two formerly, elected and adopted, with Jesus Christ the cornerstone.

The lectionary brings us into range and inclusion of all God has been saying to his people. A foundation of apostles and prophets, a symphony of prophetic witness, the OT, and an according testament now to be called New. Elder and Younger. Enduring and according. Promise and fulfillment. One Lord Good Shepherd in whom mercy and truth have embraced. The table spread before us, arcing over the valley of the shadow of death itself, is this Lord in whom all want is turned into praise and thanksgiving. Wherever he went, those in need had only to touch the hem of his garment to be healed. In him is our peace. For in his flesh he has made us into one new humanity. A new temple, the church, built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. 

Many of the details, moreover, are the same and shared by the two Gospels. Five loaves and two fish, the command to sit down on the grass, the eucharistic-like blessing and breaking and distributing, 12 baskets of leftovers, fear from the disciples at Jesus approach on the water. In John the reference to Passover likely underscores the eucharistic overtone, especially as the Fourth Gospel provides no Last Supper scene alongside the other synoptic witnesses.

In the continuous reading through the books of Samuel, which Track One presents, we land on the terrible chapter of David’s affair with Bathsheba, the wife of his stalwart mercenary warrior Uriah the Hittite. The heretofore flattering and salutary portrayal of David suddenly shifts to its shocking nadir, with the men in the field defending Israel and David prowling the rooftop in indolent free time. In one episode we witness coveting, adultery and false witness, as well as the first commandments of the Decalogue, in breach. The Psalm summarizes David in this wretched loss of integrity, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” But God looks down from heaven all the same, high above David on his rooftop, with the same clear-eyed truthfulness as our narrator. David contriving to cover up his misdeeds and Uriah holding fast to his integrity, frustrating David’s scheme and leading to his own death, left alone on the front lines at David’s command, in the end. In the Annals of the Assyrian Kings there is never a misstep, only flattery and victory without ceasing. Israel’s record of its self allows the horrible light of truth to shine, even on God’s anointed and sustained David, because it is a sacred record guided by the God of Holy Truth, Righteousness, and Mercy.

If read as the OT lesson for this Sunday it is hard to imagine a greater, more stunning contrast with the Davidic King Jesus. Stingy, self-indulgent, conniving, a spiral into Godlessness, where in Jesus is healing, feeding, multiplying, compassionate service. God himself. “O that deliverance would come out of Zion,” our Psalmist cries, restoring the fortunes of a broken people. And there he is come.

Over the coming weeks we will stay with the storyline of David and then Solomon. David’s confession before the prophet Nathan comes next week and alongside it the penitent psalm 51. “Against you, you only have I sinned. And done what is evil in your sight. Create in me a clean heart O God.”

The OT lesson chosen to come alongside the NT’s feeding of the 5000 is the brief account of Elisha’s multiplication of twenty barley loaves and ears of grain. It has likely influenced the multiplication stories in the NT, if not also Jesus own sense of his mission, in showing Jesus to be a prophet greater in spirit than Elijah or Elisha, his predecessors. Elisha is well on the way to becoming a powerful wonder worker. It is a time of famine in the northern kingdom. In the section just preceding ours he has turned a pot of lethal food into healthy and sustaining soup.

Now a man arrives with a sack of food for the man of God. Elisha insists that it will suffice for his hundred fellow prophets and commands it be set before them. His servant, like the disciples, objects that it will only be enough for a few. They eat and as Elisha had promised, there is bread left over after the filling meal. The way is being prepared for the Bread of Life, present there in Israel’s manna and twenty loaves, and present in the flesh feeding 5000 with five barley loaves and two fish, 12 basketfuls left over.

As the grace we said at my parents’ table put it, from the 145th psalm read in response to 2 Kings 4 today. “The eyes of all wait upon Thee O Lord, and Thou giveth them their meat in due season. Thou openest thy hand and fillest all things living with plenteousness.” The LORD is near to those who call on him faithfully, in Jesus and in his prophetic forerunners.

Our Ephesians reading is the soaring pray of Paul for the church, which points to a kind of doxological excess and overflowing, equivalent to twelve baskets left over after starting with but five loaves and two fish; and feeding multitudes. There is a richness untapped and fully on offer, that God the Father is ready to give, due to the work of Jesus Christ, there for the saints living and those gone before. Paul strains to find adequate spatial terms to describe this richness of glory God wants to impart, and thus he must pray and bow his knee. “That you may have the power, Christ dwelling in your hearts by faith, to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ surpassing knowledge,” and be filled with the loaves of God’s very life and spirit to basketfuls of overflowing.

As indicated, over the coming four Sundays of August the Gospel reading remains in the sixth chapter of John, and the various discourses on the true bread from heaven found there. I am the bread of life. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever. Eucharistic teaching in the manner of the fourth Gospel. Track I takes us from the revolt of Absalom—part of the temporal punishment for David’s sin—and into the reign of Solomon. The next four Sundays will bring us to the end of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. And the OT paired readings focus on feeding and new life as the OT dwells on the theme – manna in the wilderness, the desert feeding of Elijah, the feast of wisdom in Proverbs and the final chapter of Joshua where new life in the LORD is chosen.

In our little village here in France, next to the parish church where you can sometimes hear the bells ring in these podcasts, the long days of August are here. The lovers of holidays, the French, are ensconced in their vacation time in earnest. So too where you are in Canada and the US and elsewhere, during the summer dog days. I, too, will take the month off and return for Pentecost 15, the first Sunday in September.

We have been moving along for 30 episodes now. Do you have suggestions? I will stay with the basic format, which is intended to stay close to the lessons, in their entirety, so as to get you started in your weekly reflections and sermon preparation, or for worshipping with these texts on Sunday. If you have feedback, send it along to our Wycliffe hosts. My thanks to Terry Spratt and Steve Hewko for their excellent studio help and encouragement. Until September then, Godspeed.

The Gospel account for today, Jesus encounter with a Greek speaking Syrophoenician woman, has in recent times been, the recipient of some remarkable interpretations. Jesus was put in his place. Jesus changed his mind because he was properly upbraided. The Syrophoenician woman served as a mirror reflecting Jesus own xenophobia back to him, causing him to rethink his attitudes towards Gentiles. A google search will pull up dramatic titles for recent studies of the text, like “The woman who changed Jesus.”

So let’s start with the Gospel and take a closer look at Mark’s narrative line.

It is obvious that Jesus is increasingly encountering those in need of healing and who lived on the margins: Jews dead or dying—Jairus’s daughter—the woman with a flow of blood, and now Jesus starts to enter traditional gentile regions, in Tyre and later in the cities of the Decapolis where he will heal and encounter those in need who throng to him, having heard of his fame. Lots of cultural questions hover around our text. The region Jesus enters is a gentile one wealthier than the Jewish Galilee and the agricultural labor there from which they benefited – taking food and leaving scraps for dogs, one might say. The woman Jesus encounters is a Greek speaker, and could that mean culturally upper class? Tyre is famous in the OT for wealth, trading, and commerce. Read Ezekiel’s three chapter exordium (26-28) for a sober account of the ravaging by Tyre of neighbors and her sea-faring commerce without peer.

One thing is for sure. At the center of many Marcan stories is the theme and the question of faith. Jesus responds to faith – so the woman with the flow who reaches out in faith, and the ruler of the synagogue: “do not fear, only believe.” To the father of the epileptic child in chapter nine: “all things are possible to him who believes.” “I believe. I have faith,” he says, “help my unbelief.”

In addition, the idea of a history of salvation, first to the Jew, then the Gentile, is resident in Acts and in Paul, and we see it as well in the Gospels. Go nowhere but to the lost tribes of Israel. Let the children first be fed. Five thousand are fed, with twelve baskets left over, on the predominantly Jewish side of the Sea of Galilee. Four thousand are shortly to be fed, after them, during Jesus’ fresh journeys in largely Gentile regions. 

Jesus has upbraided the Jewish leaders for hindering the law’s good intent, and as the law’s good giver he has himself gone into the regions of uncleanness and brought forth healing and life from the dead. He now begins a trek into the Gentile region of Tyre and Sidon, as his fame has become known to a strong character in the person of a woman of standing with a daughter possessed by a demon. He is hidden away, Mark tells us, and he wants to remain so. But this persistent woman breaks through, for such is the powerful draw of Jesus for those in need. Dog is clearly a pejorative term, and most dogs were undomesticated scavengers. A dog under the table is closer to our understanding, awaiting his food. The image can appear in Jewish texts, representing the gentiles who come within their feeding range and dine after them at the final eschatological banquet.

Falling at Jesus feet and begging is indeed her canine posture, and she does not bristle when Jesus confirms the order of salvation. Indeed, she underscores his own point by speaking it back to him. Yet she stands ready in just that posture to receive the food she and her daughter need. Great is her faith. Absent is the pained cry in chapter nine, “help my unbelief,” for she is all in. For saying this, Jesus responds, she has shown her great faith and her daughter’s healing is assured. She went home, found the child in bed, the demon gone.

It is just this strong faith, we may assume, that explains Jesus’s steady movement now, out of the Sea of Galilee western regions, into Tyre and Sidon, and then into the gentile cities on the other side, the region of the Decapolis. Great faith is great faith, and great faith in him is saving faith, spilling over the messianic banquet table and manifesting itself before his eyes. Hidden away, as Mark seems symbolically to imply, in the order of salvation, but breaking forth now. Isaiah had spoken this beforehand, in what Paul calls a mystery, hidden though present beforehand, and now breaking forth in the fulness of time. “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” The same text quoted in Acts 13 by Paul and Barnabas to confirm their outreach beyond Jewish Israel, even as their persistent preaching in the synagogues never ceases throughout the ensuing chapters.

Chapters 40—66 of Isaiah are renown for these notes of outreach, of salvation breaking forth among the nations, as Israel’s punishment by the nations becomes, in the order of salvation, the means of their knowledge of God, diaspora Israel in OT times to become in time the synagogue Israel of Paul’s eventual mission in that context.

Chapters 34 and 35 of Isaiah serve as a harbinger of the latter chapters and anticipate many of the themes found there. So our OT reading chosen for today. Wonders of healing and reversals of affliction, without respect to the recipients save their need. Be strong, fear not. And what an example in the woman in today’s reading. Followed by the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promises in the healing of the deaf and mute man in Gentile Decapolis.

Alleluia is the refrain of our psalm, picking up from where Isaiah started. Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their refuge, the elect of Israel or those of us adopted into that banquet.

The Epistle reading from James is a familiar one, reminding us that faith without actions that it compels is not the faith of God’s gifting in Jesus Christ. Jesus showed no distinction in allowing the cry of the woman from wealthy Tyre to sound forth, even as he spoke from within the saving presence of the God of Jacob. When she affirmed that saving order of things, she received not crumbs but new life for her daughter. 

Our track one reading from the middle of Proverbs, chapter 22, has likely been chosen out of other possibilities in that long collection, as in track two, because of themes it reinforces in the Gospel lesson. So we hear in verse 8: those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor. The gentile women from Tyre may not be poor in worldly means, but she is desperately poor because of the affliction tormenting her daughter. Jesus may not appear generous at first, but is prepared to do everything asked of him by those with the faith of this same woman, as part of the history of salvation at whose center is Jesus Christ himself. For the Lord pleads their cause, as our Proverbs reading puts it. 

Those who trust in the Lord, though they may be in Tyre, are like Mount Zion itself, which cannot be moved, but stands fast forever. In the Lord’s compassion, crumbs become basketfuls of leftovers, and food from his table life-changing, hope-providing nourishment from heaven.  He has done everything well, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the demons are routed. 

This openness and boldness on his side is however not reciprocated and is even rebuffed, today by Peter, and later with fear of further asking; and silence. 

It has been noted that the entire section we are entering, running to the end of chapter ten and the actual events of Passover and death here being foretold—which unfold in the Gospel’s final 4 chapters—are framed by two healing stories, both of them involving blindness. This is a fitting frame. The disciples will struggle to understand, like the man who, at Jesus’ touch, first sees only people who like trees and, with a second laying on of hands, sees things clearly. The gentile mission has continued with the feeding of the four thousand, which is the final episode preceding this frame.

Jesus announces his time has come. The son of man will be delivered up – a theme rooted in Daniel and Isaiah and in its own way in the Psalms and other Prophets – and by this means the struggle with demonic forces will end in victory. Not avoiding death but meeting it head on, bearing its assaults, conquering it. The new exodus to the promised land, mapped out by Isaiah, via this judgment, entails all of Israel, the holy ones who follow in his wake, and it will affect all creation, as Isaiah and Daniel had made clear.

But this path was not the one Peter or the disciples had foremost in their minds or had yet contemplated with eyes fully cleared, for a horrible death as a means of salvation comes naturally to no one, even with the aid of the scriptures. And nothing in the first half of the Gospel had prepared them for this: this juxtaposition of divine insight into who Jesus is, given all he has done, “you are God’s anointed one” Peter declares; followed by the immediate declaration of his coming mistreatment and death. All but obliterating the final triumphant “and rise on the third day” – an incomprehensible adjustment of hopes associated with the final judgment to be wrought at the coming of God’s anointed, moved instead into the middle of time, and placing them behind the one who would accomplish this and also demand their own following cross. Their sight, such as it is, is like seeing trees instead of men, even as they do follow, as we shall see.

Jesus is heading into Gentile territory again, toward the villages of the Caesarea which lies north of Galilee. In response to his question about how they hear the crowds wrestling with just who he is, given all his dramatic and successful work on their behalf, the answers rising up have all to do with a powerful OT saint alive and at work in him. (The Transfiguration account repeats this idea in its own way; Herod had also worried about John raised in Jesus). Jesus belongs to a category that has to do with more than meets the eye in just this human frame. Inspired beyond his human frame, Peter answers the question, “you are the Christ.” Jesus’ vehement admonition to tell no one anything is surely linked to the term “Christ” – a term requiring careful and difficult calibration if Christ is properly to be understood as this man Jesus standing before them and speaking of his destiny. Peter’s rebuke of Jesus makes it clear that for him it is a satanically inspired mis-calibration. We have seen this misstep before. Jesus rounds on Peter and makes it clear his announcement of his identity and mission are divine; Peter’s bold rebuttal is satanic. 

Jesus’ words are then to the disciples and crowds both. Is there any way to get and then give something that would have the value of one’s own life, and capable of redeeming it from death? The answer is obvious enough, No. But deep inside Jesus’ rebuke to the Peter and the disciples lies an answer difficult to see and accept. His cross does have that power. His cross is the only thing given capable of gaining our life. Losing our life into that life and death is the means by which God is redeeming the world and giving us new life, eternal life.

The servant of Isaiah had mapped this all out in the providence of God’s actions in Israel, though the road there is also obscure and hard to follow. The lone servant is the embodiment of faithful Israel. The servant is beaten and afflicted, yet stands fast in faith. The servant dies and by that means recognition comes to the nations of the earth, and Israel confesses it was a death capable of bearing sins and bringing new life for generations to come. “The Lord God helps me, therefore I have not been disgraced. It is the Lord God who helps me.” The servant walks his path and prepares it for the one to come in the fullness of time. 

And this is no isolated walk, but one the psalmist declares in his own manner. The cords of death and grip of the grave are overcome by the God who hears the cries of the faithful. The path Jesus lays out and declares we are to follow him in, is a path of victory through death and sin, fragile and short-sighted though we be. The psalmist tells us our destiny in him, and also our confidence in spite of all we can see now but dimly. “You have rescued my life from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling” following in Jesus strong steps.

The Track One reading is taken from the opening chapter of Proverbs. Wisdom speaks in personified form in Proverbs and is introduced in that role in the very start of the collection. Wisdom is the teacher who sets out the way of wisdom and warns of the dangers of following an easier, seductive, yet ultimately foolish way. “Those who listen to me will be secure” is also the counsel of Jesus Christ, the wisdom of God, prefigured here in Proverbs. The disciples and all followers must take up their cross and walk in his way, his path, even as it seems hard. The way of the world does not offer the ability to save one’s life, and striving along that path paradoxically ends in loss, as Ecclesiastes reminds us in his wisdom. But the wisdom of the cross is greater than all human wisdom, and this is the path in which the wise find life. The psalmist describes this in terms of God’s law, written into creation itself, declaring his glory by doing his bidding unceasingly and effortlessly. Without speech or language yet communicating God’s glory through obedience to his created wisdom. Law derives from this same wisdom, and it is to be desired more than gold. Peter and the disciples and all who follow Jesus must pray to be delivered from presumptuous sins, and must be given clean hearts by God in Christ.

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer” is justly the prayer of the Christian preacher, that she might open her mouth in wisdom, cleansed by God’s word.

Which brings us properly into the range of James chapter 3, our Epistle reading for today. False speaking, preemptory rebuking, path walking as the simple, orienting ourselves outside of God’s wisdom and God’s law – all of these arise naturally in us, and need no encouragement. They are defaults.

James uses the example of the tongue, which though small, steers like the tiny rudder on a mighty ship, and boasts of this great exploit. Taming this organ is harder than any taming known to man in the world of fierce and powerful animals. The challenge is clear. But the gift of correction and rebuke and proper following is before us in the Gospel, behind the Lord Christ who shows the way to life through his death, and who grants us the wisdom of the law written now in our hearts by his hand. His tongue the tongue of the servant, the tongue of wisdom, taught anew morning by morning, and ready to guide our ship along its way.

What has brought on this concern for rank, and do the disciples mean now or at a future time? The third scene is clearer than our present one: there James and John speak of Jesus in his coming glory, and wanting to sit alongside him. The Transfiguration may be partly responsible, where Jesus has taken three aside and elevated them above the others. This was the view of the church father Origen, in seeking to understand the Marcan portrayal and its logic. The announcement by Jesus of his pending death may also have triggered anxieties about the disciples’ role more generally into the future, and recourse to arguments about rank may have served to displace their confusion at this juncture in their walk with Jesus. Making the disputes of course no less misguided, and patient of correction by Jesus. Yet one can imagine, if he is to die and he is their leader, what next and who is in charge?

Mark tells us that on this walk through Galilee Jesus is not engaging in his customary healing ministry, but is rather teaching the disciples in a focused way, away from any distractions. So we may well wonder how all this was registering with the disciples. The silence of them before Jesus’ second announcement in Mark’s narrative portrayal may be an improvement on Peter’s rebuke, but we learn that behind it they have been arguing all the same amongst themselves. “Parking lot talk” as it has been called, after a particularly intense meeting where people do not speak their mind but exit full of uncertainty and start unloading. 

Jesus announcement is couched in the language of Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7, with its use of “betray” paradidonai – literally, “to hand over” (God’s handing over of the suffering servant; the saints being handed over in Daniel). Here we likely find the reason for the OT selection from Jeremiah, thus broadening our examples from the OT. “It was the Lord who made it known to me, and I knew” – that is, the evil deeds of those who will in time put Jesus to death, into whose hands he is handed over. “Let us cut him off from the face of the earth, so that his name will no longer be remembered.”

But Jeremiah’s name is remembered and his words are recorded for us to see and recall, and for Jesus to see in them a pre-figurement, including the words “you O Lord judge rightly, to you I have committed my cause” – a cause greater than Isaiah’s or Daniel’s or Jeremiah’s because gathering them all up into one final march to Jerusalem to face the powers of darkness and so defeat them. The psalm associated with Jeremiah, psalm 54, ends on notes of victory. “For the arrogant have risen up against me, and the ruthless have sought my life” becoming “you have rescued me from every trouble.” The psalmist knows the way of affliction and death and treason, as does Jeremiah, and he puts his trust in God alone, who brings victory through death and not around it.

Jesus takes a child in his arms, having first placed the child in their midst, having called the twelve to him. The child in their midst. A disturbance, an intrusion, a reality-check in the world of adult posturing, like the children who accompany football players onto the field before the match begins. Let the child be the model, and in welcoming that role and place, one is welcoming me. Death is not to be defeated by top rank but by lowest rank, and welcoming me is a welcome of my way of strength and of assurance. Indeed, God himself is welcomed in this way.

It is striking how well James tracks alongside the Gospel for today. “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” “The wisdom from above”—a phrase used previously by James, from the Father of Lights—”is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”

Why are there arguments amongst the twelve on the way? Fear of the road ahead, no map with obvious markings, unsure of the leader, and so looking instead at their own motley group and trying to find “the best,” “the top,” “the strong” – yet no longer sure how those words work. James says disputes arise because of deep cravings, wanting something we do not have, and so striking out. Of failing to acknowledge our fear or our need and so failing to ask, to stop and say to Jesus, help my unbelief, help me understand the way you are going, keep me from falling silent and changing the subject to matters of rank and envy, always quick to fill the void. James’ counsel is direct. Submit yourself to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, take the child whose needs are readily known, and embrace them, and hand them over to him with strength and authority without human ranking. 

What a strong and helpful reinforcement James brings, coming alongside our short lesson for today, where a lot has been left unsaid in the vortex of walking behind the cross of Jesus. Sometimes we need a direct command to cut through our arguments and equivocations. James and Jesus are at the ready.

Every child of course has a mother, who is the wife of a husband, the two of them together having created new life. Proverbs final chapter is devoted to the woman of strength. The text is chosen in the logic of Track One, which is to give us something of a survey—piecemeal it must be—of the OT in its own idiom. Three texts from the 31 chapter Book of Proverbs, opening and closing chapters and one from the middle. The woman of valor, looking ahead, will be joined by Esther and Ruth and Hannah, alongside selection from Job – books which belong to the miscellany collection of the Writings in the Hebrew Bible. These will be our Track One readings for Sundays to come.

The 22 verses of chapter 31 chosen for today represent an acrostic, a skillful composition, each verse beginning with the corresponding letter of the 22 letter Hebrew alphabet. The orderly composition imitating the orderly skill of the eshet hayil. The same term is used by Boaz of Ruth in 3:11. The woman of valor, where can one find her? In the book that follows Proverbs in Hebrew listings, courageous, faithful, prepared to take risks, and upon succeeding, taking up as this valiant woman described today. Ruth, who left her own country and gods, and came under the shelter of Israel’s Lord, and in that place gave birth to the grandfather of King David.

“Give her a share in the fruit of her hands and let her works praise her in the city gates.” And so it is. “The women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, a son has been born to Naomi, they named him Obed, he was the father of Jesse, the father of David.” For in God’s faithfulness to the woman of valor, the healing spills out to include Naomi herself, and the child born is her fruitful blessing as well as Ruth’s. Her husband too praises her: “Many women have done excellently, but you have surpassed them all.”

For this Sunday we have another of the strong women of valor from the OT, Esther. The story of Esther, Mordecai, Haman and the great Persian King Ahaseurus (Xerxes in some versions) is drawing to its dramatic conclusion in the single reading the lectionary is providing from that book for this Sunday in Track One. It is a tale of intrigue, danger, cunning and evil intention, kingly power and great faithfulness. Esther valiantly risks her life to protect her own people, though she could have remained hidden in her Queen’s rank and privilege. A woman of valor, who can find one? Esther is found faithful. And Haman who sought to have all the Jews of the realm executed for reasons of personal slight, ends up on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai, a faithful Jew unwilling to bow down before him. The fool of Proverbs meeting his own just end and falling into the pit he had prepared for others. This is the only biblical book explicitly linked to a religious festival for which its story serves as the warrant. The festival of Purim, or lots, is commemorated annually on the 14th and 15th day of Adar (early March in our calendar) “as the days on which the Jews gained relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into holiday.” To read Proverbs 31 and then Esther allows the symphony of scripture to sound forth.

And so too the Psalm appointed for Track One, from Ps 124. Let us hear its 8 verses: 1 If the LORD had not been on our side, * let Israel now say; 2 If the LORD had not been on our side, * when enemies rose up against us; 3 Then would they have swallowed us up alive * in their fierce anger toward us; 4 Then would the waters have overwhelmed us * and the torrent gone over us; 5 Then would the raging waters * have gone right over us. 6 Blessed be the LORD! * he has not given us over to be a prey for their teeth. 7 We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowler; * the snare is broken, and we have escaped. 8 Our help is in the Name of the LORD, * the maker of heaven and earth.

The Gospel reading from Mark 9 follows on from the healing of the epileptic and the second passion prediction. In the former scene, the epileptic’s father had explained quite frankly to Jesus that the disciples had been unable to drive the demon out. So Jesus went to work and healed the boy.

As if picking up from that thread, ironically, in our reading for today we have John complaining about an unnamed exorcist who is doing successfully what the twelve had been unable to do and reporting to Jesus they had tried to stop him. As if the right thing to do. “Because he was not following us.” Us.

Our OT lesson has been chosen to reinforce the Gospel, where the same language appears from Joshua “My Lord stop them” echoing Jesus’ “do not stop him.” Moses has tired, understandably, from an endless series of complaints and murmuring from the people. He has just – for a second time – seen to the provision of miraculous feeding in the wilderness, manna here followed by quails, now in super abundance. At wits’ end he calls to a sympathetic burden-bearing Lord to help him. Our lesson consists of a selection of relevant verses so as to provide the story of Eldad and Medad at its conclusion. God responds to Moses by having him assemble 6 elders from the 12 tribes, convening at the tent of meeting. There the cloud descends and the Lord God takes the spirit from Moses and apportions it upon the assembled elders, whose prophesying demonstrates their enrollment as his spirit-filled aid.

For reasons not given, two elders were missing, Eldad and Medad, and yet at exactly the same time as the others they received the exact same spirit endowment and prophesied in the camp. When the word comes to Moses from a surprised messenger, Joshua complains that the two had not been there with the others.

Moses responds in anticipation of Pentecost. Would that all would prophesy as have the seventy plus two. The nameless someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name prefigures the spirit at work in the church, as do Eldad and Medad prophesying boldly back in the camp. It will be enough to call upon the name of Jesus and by God’s power watch demons routed in and by his name. “Not following us” presumes a restriction not in God’s plans and in any event, nowhere shown to be decisive given the twelve’s own failure where this unnamed man has prevailed. Marvelous works in Jesus name march forward in blessing and the one working in this wake “will not soon be able to speak evil of me.” Bearing the name of Christ is the vocation, for disciples without distinction, as well as those who do not stand in the way but indeed offer a cold drink of refreshment to any and all doing the work of healing in Christ’s name.

We now get a series of what could appear to be independent sayings, concerning stumbling blocks placed before little ones, the little ones of Jesus, followers; stumbling blocks set up by followers themselves; and a final saying about salt and fire.

The first appears to continue the train of thought concerning hindering those who work in Jesus name. It sharpens the foregoing “do not stop him” into, if one does, a severe fate of judgment awaits, millstone in finality. Then the direction shifts to followers themselves, and the severe judgment theme applied to them: the hand that acts in sin, the feet that transport into sin, the eye that opens the sinner onto wrong paths and wrong actions. From the earliest interpreters on, these warning have not been taken so literally as to commend self-maiming – something strictly forbidden in the law of God. They do serve to warn sternly about hindering the actions done in Jesus name and those that are blocked by believers whose hands, feet and eyes are the cause of their downfall. 

Fire and salt as a pair evoke the language of Leviticus 2. Every sacrifice by fire is to be salted. The sacrifice of Christian service, in Jesus name, requires purging fire and salt – wisdom. Otherwise it is without effect. You cannot make salt without saltiness salty. It is good for nothing.

The psalm lines out the true path of service. The fear of the Lord is clean and endures forever. More to be desired than gold. Cleanse me from secret faults, lift all stumbling blocks, salt and fire my life. Then shall I be whole and sound and innocent of great offense.

And our final reading from James as the Epistle lesson describes as well such a life of service. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Salty. It has the power to lift stumbling blocks, and it has the power to bring back the sinner’s soul from death and will cover indeed a multitude of sins. The salt and fire of Christian work in the strong name of Christ.

Jesus cites verses that appear in Genesis 1 (God made them male and female) and Genesis 2 (For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh). The OT reading for the day is taken from this same section in Genesis 2. The psalm chosen for the day is psalm 8, which is itself a reflection or meditation on the same opening texts from Genesis. 5 What is man that you should be mindful of him? * the son of man that you should seek him out? 6 You have made him but little lower than the angels; * you adorn him with glory and honor; 7 You give him mastery over the works of your hands; * you put all things under his feet:  Mastery over the works of your hands corresponds to Genesis 1 and 2 both: humankind is to have charge of the earth—be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish, birds, every living thing—and the naming of the animals which is related in our OT reading.  8 All sheep and oxen, * even the wild beasts of the field, 9 The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, * and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea

Leaving the Letter of James, our Epistle reading for the next 7 Sundays, that is, right up to Christ the King Sunday, the final Sunday of the lectionary year, are all selections drawn from the Letter to the Hebrews.

The portion for today from the first chapter of Hebrews quotes this same Psalm 8. But you will note that it makes some important alterations. The spatial qualifier ‘a little’ has in Greek become open to a temporal reading, instead of “a little lower than the angels” (or sons of God) “for a little while lower.” 

The effort to render ‘adam (man or mankind) of Psalm 8 into inclusive language (‘human beings’) has the consequence of setting up a clear even sharp contrast, otherwise left more open for Hebrews’ use: On this inclusive language generated version, the psalm promised that human beings would have dominion, but this did not transpire: “we do not see everything in subjection to them.” 

Older translations (man/son of man) left more space for interpretation. The “little while” of the son of man’s lowering could then refer to Jesus and the incarnation, and the subjugation to come a matter of providential inauguration by Christ in his descent, and now crowned with glory and honor. Jesus the descended one having tasted death for all mankind. In this he is our—mankind’s, Adam’s—pioneer and perfecter, therefore. 

And this, in a marvelous turn based upon Hebrews’ final verse use of Psalm 22, allows special notes to sound forth. Jesus the sufferer of Psalm 22’s “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” has walked a path that ends in his proclamation of God’s name in the congregation of those who are now brothers and sisters. “I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters/In the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” The mankind given mastery because of his suffering and victory. “O Lord our governor, how great is your name in all the earth”: the final line of Psalm 8, is true after all, true because of the little while descent the son of man underwent for those of us little lower than the angles, promised mastery and given it by God in his son. 

The Gospel reading from Mark 10 picks up on different verses from the Genesis reading, those involving God’s forming of woman to be a fit partner for Adam, having paraded the formed-from-the-dust animals before him so that he might name them. Naming is not relational conversation, which the man desires, and for that there needs to be a species like unto himself and indeed derived from him. There is ish and ishah, man and woman, a partner fit for him, and he for her. It is to this text that Jesus turns because in the garden the ideal and the original intention are set out. Later commandments arise to deal with divorce, but they are the consequence of human hardness of heart and so signs more of that than of God’s designing. Jesus therefore cites the relevant verses from Genesis. 

The Pharisees are trying to test Jesus, Mark says, with this question about divorce being permissible or not. He gives his response from the same law to which they appeal and indicates the priority for interpretation. We hear no more from them, as Jesus again takes his own disciples aside for instruction.

We then have a brief snippet in which the theme of little children re-emerges. Just previously Jesus placed a little child in their midst to counter the disciples with rank concerns, and his reference to little ones at the end of chapter 9 referred to his true followers. Here we see yet another episode where the disciples are caught rebuking an action that Jesus himself encourages and welcomes and even here blesses.

The embrace of children is consistent with the force of Genesis 2: they shall become one flesh. Jesus embraces and blesses and lays his hands on the designs of God at creation, rejuvenated by the Son of God over the hardness of heart in Moses generation or here before his own eyes in the actions of the disciples. These are not salutary days for the misguided, in need of instruction, disciples.

Track One leaves Esther and moves to Job. The 42 chapter book is given four episodes to speak up, in the logic of Track One’s selections from OT books, during the Sundays of October.  Our selection is taken from chapter 2, the second of two rounds of the Satan given permission to test Job. Job is introduced as the paradigm of righteousness. The prophet Ezekiel refers to him in the same way, alongside Noah. The author of the book locates its hero in primordial times, righteous like unto Noah. He is further renown, we are told, for his life and manner of prayer and daily offering on behalf of his family. Steadfastness is the character trait remembered in the fifth chapter of James. In what does the test consist? The answer is given in chapter one and the entire drama to unfold turns on it, though Job does not know, even as we are given the answer. Satan holds that no one will serve God for naught, for nothing but God’s own sake. God believes Job is such a man. But for Job to prove so, he must demonstrate his steadfast commitment to God through an ordeal in which he loses everything that might be said to cause his steadfastness, and be left alone with God. He does not curse God to his face as Satan promises, but begins a journey into hell on earth all the same, whose verdict we will not discover until he demonstrates his perseverance through it all.

It will take three rounds with so-called friends, but in the end he stands firm, and demonstrates the wisdom our psalm depicts for this day. Give judgment for me O Lord, for I have lived with integrity, and will not forfeit it through an ordeal like no other. 

Job endures three rounds of dialogues with his friends, who after sitting seven days in silence at his dilemma, open their mouths. And open them they do. I take the view that the rounds are not static and repetitive rehearsals of set views, but rather initially Job is counselled to rely on his innocence. However, frustrated at his responses to this counsel, they become increasingly hostile and accusatory. Round three, where we find ourselves today, shows the friends sputtering and running out of gas. Zophar, the third friend, has nothing to say at all. Job remains vigorous in his defense and indeed begins appealing to the wisdom the friends had previously extolled but now in his own defense and on his own behalf. Our discourse for today demonstrates his resolution. This is a matter not for sparring with debaters. It has to do with his own flesh and blood standing before God, and with God himself. Job knows this is a matter for God and God alone. We must now wait only a short time for God to speak up, after one last valiant effort from the young, and impatiently so, Elihu. 

The choice of Psalm 22 gives good indication of what abandonment by God feels like existentially. The Psalmist never shies away from speaking forth his or her anguish. God is named as the source of this abandonment, but named and addressed he is. It is his ear the psalmist speaks to, and for his hand the psalmist waits, in full vent of pain when that is the fate. As we saw last week in Hebrews’ use of this same psalm, known for its use by the son of God at the moment of his shared experience with the psalmist before him, it is a psalm whose final victorious voice is praise and transmission to brothers and sisters in the great congregation. And this will be Job’s final fate as well, though the journey there will cost him everything. Yes, a mortal can serve God for his own sake. With that Satan is silenced, his false claims defeated, and his hand stayed. The path Job walks the Son of God will walk for each and everyone of us, and for our sakes. The type of Job will find its fuller anti-type and accomplishment, through what Barth called Job’s true witness to Jesus Christ.

This is one of our Sundays where the remarkable fit accomplished by the lectionary choice of OT reading needs to be pointed out. Listen to and read Amos chapter 5 carefully, in conjunction with Mark and the story of the rich man (called young by Luke and a ruler by Matthew, though here is not young but an adult with great estates). Mark’s story cannot help but evoke pity and sympathy for the rich man and the path he refuses to take. He is being asked to give up all in exchange for treasure that will last forever, following the man at whose feet he has thrown himself. And he says no, shocked and distressed, and by some renderings of the Greek verb, angered or bitter at Jesus’ request.

To read Amos as a lens on the passage produces a less ambivalent take on what happens and on the rich man before us. The one who reproves in the gate is Jesus, he is the one who speaks truth – and the reaction is hatred and abhorrence. The charges levelled by Amos are rank disregard for the poor, trampling, stealing, afflicting, appropriating, and by these means acquiring great wealth and houses built of hewn stones. Seek the Lord. Hate evil, love the good—good teacher the rich man says in address to Jesus–establish justice in the gate, it may be that the Lord God will be gracious. 

Though coming from a different context, Amos and Mark have measures of possible overlap. Jesus says God alone is good, and though this has been the source of theological discussion in the history of interpretation—in what way is God good but not Jesus?–what we know for sure is that Jesus shows himself here as always his clear, heart-searching and heart-seeing self, just as he is with his disciples and with all those he encounters. He will look at this man and love him. He is the gracious and good Lord God himself in his address to men and women. To call him good apart from this divinely given role and mission needs clarification about the true source of goodness and how Jesus is a teacher whose goodness penetrates into the very recesses of our educational needs and life giving correction. 

Another small feature that lines up with Amos and other OT realities. Jesus produces the second table of the decalogue, the first capable of summary as God is Lord alone, God is good. And though “thou shalt not covet” can be taken to spill out and over from illicit desire only and into action, here we have a summary of the last commandment as “thou shall not defraud.” Defraud is dishonesty and illicit desire in action. It is akin to trampling on the poor, afflicting, appropriating and by this means gaining grand estates – in Amos’ language, house of hewn stones with levies of grain and pleasant vineyards.

When Jesus says one thing is missing, his heart-piercing eyes see something so deeply amiss that his love requires its excision. Seek good and not evil, and the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said – when you called me good and in so doing were calling on God himself. The Lord God of hosts is here and is here being gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and of vast love. He looked on him and loved him. 

Sadly, the one who ran and threw himself at Jesus feet will just as surely walk away. What is never too much for God—with God all things are possible, Jesus will say in private to his disciples—can all the same be rejected by a heart loaded with rich distractions and great estates.

Our Epistle reading from Hebrews brilliantly reinforces the perspective from Mark and Amos. The word of God—scripture—the word Jesus Christ pierces into the deepest recesses. Like the rich man looked in in love, all are laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.  And yet because of this piercing is his own act of love, we have a great high priest capable of all things, ready for our approach. Seek the Lord and live, Amos says. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness so that we may receive mercy in time of need.

Job never relinquishes his quest for the God of his own stricken heart. And so he is, as our psalm says, made glad by the number of days he was afflicted, and more so, the years of his suffering adversity. 

Teach us to number our days means nothing less than God’s love is always the final number for those who trust in him. The minor notes are numbered and limited. This is what makes the major notes so resplendent in God’s symphony or love and forgiveness for us. 

Our Old Testament reading is the final servant song, and its language has clearly found its way into Mark’s account for today. The servant is handed over—delivered—and he is mocked and scourged, and killed. He gives his life as a ransom—God makes his life an offering for sin (Isa 53). His final destiny is however vindication and some form of new life – “he shall see his offspring”—the servants of the servant, in Isaiah’s depiction, and “shall prolong his days. Out of his anguish he shall see light. The righteous one my servant shall make many righteous. He has born the sin of many, he has borne their iniquities.”

This is the cup that Jesus says to James and John is his to drink. It is the baptism with which he is to be baptized. Mark doubtless has this scenario in view, and Jesus in his understanding does as well quite explicitly. Less clear is why James and John ask that Jesus do whatever they ask, a blank-check as it were, at just this moment. Jesus does not comply with this lofty request but, in his usual way, presses the question back to them. Just what do you have in mind? Are we to imagine that after three announcements texts like Isaiah 53 or Daniel 7 have begun to shape how they are hearing these announcements in the final analysis, and so embolden two of them to take Jesus aside and ask for something like the righteous fate of those God gives a share: the righteous one my servant shall make many righteous? He shall divide the spoil with the strong. Or Daniel 7, “one like a son of man was presented before the Ancient of Days, to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom.”

What Jesus says indicates that whatever scenario may be in their minds, their grasp of it is partial at best. The path that ends in glory is not a hero’s trailblazing so as to hand out prizes to two who got first in line and asked before the others. Those who follow Jesus will drink the same cup as he does, and the ten others will be neither higher or lower in whatever way one might imagine that in human terms. Whatever servant following is to look like, ruled out is gentile ranking concerns and God’s final disposing known alone to him. That is getting way ahead of the game and is not the path Jesus or they will find their life on. It is not so among you. For the son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom – so Isaiah’s servant’s path as well. The ‘we’ confessions of those who witness the servant’s fate and offering are the proper responses of the servants who would follow.

Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

The symphony of scriptures gives both an account of Jesus’s fate, guiding him and assisting Mark as he frames his account, as well as providing the lines Jesus is seeking to raise up amongst his closest twelve followers, whom he never abandons, in spite of blindness and constant need for teaching and correction. So it is with us as well, must surely be Mark’s pedagogy.

Psalm 91 comes alongside, then, to script out what all this looks like from God’s side. 14 Because he is bound to me in love, therefore will I deliver him; * I will protect him, because he knows my Name. 15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; * I am with him in trouble; I will rescue him and bring him to honor. 16 With long life will I satisfy him, * and show him my salvation.

The glory that will be Jesus’ final place in God’s disposing will go through the stages set forth by him in the final passion prediction. Because he is bound to me in love, therefore I will deliver him.

Our Epistle reading from Hebrews allows the lectionary a measure of selection, and so the portion from chapter 5 is able to join up nicely and fill out the OT and Gospel reading for today. The great high Priest is a Jesus who is a Son. In his suffering and life with us, he learned obedience and in so doing became perfect, in a way no one can rank in human terms. In this way he has become the source of eternal life for those who in turn obey him. And his high priesthood is one of constant knowledge of the weaknesses of humanity, weaknesses he deigned to face into with the twelve, as we have seen, and so he is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward.

And we have finally in our Track One selections from Job one of the four key episodes the lectionary has chosen to provide, to summarize the extraordinary story that our hero inhabits in his 42 chapter walk with God.

In as strong terms as is possible, the friends and then Elihu the wise, counseled, warned, refused to accept as credible, warranted, or right Job’s demand to be heard by God. Instead they focused on his supposed moral errors or bad theology and demanded he do the same. Job gets from God what he demanded. God. Not an idea about God, or theological explanations, or theories of sin and judgment, or why the innocent suffer, and no offers of condolence or excuse. Job wanted God and God comes to him as God is, from his side and from the realms of his power that only belong to him. Animals are displayed that have nothing to do with human affairs, but do their thing out of human sight, yet as God sees them, knows them, enjoys them. His bold questions to Job require from him an honorable girding of loins, as he is treated as one God is prepared to be God before, this man who has born the burden of days like no man before.

The text is not chosen to sit beside Mark 10 in any conscious sense. It belongs to an absurdly brief four Sunday glimpse at a tale of suffering and a cortex of battle without parallel. Have you seen any one like Job, God boasts. He invests himself fully in this man, whose defeat of Satan involves his free choice to stay on the field of battle for no reason other than God. When Jesus says, “it is not mine to grant,” or “it is for those for whom it has been prepared” or “no one is good but God alone” he bespeaks this same obedient stance, yet as one who has known it and given it up for us and for our sakes. To create a family in eternal life alongside him, just as we wait in his time for Job to receive the glory God will in the end grant him. Along a path that will ask him freely to pray for the friends, even while still on the ash-heap. Our hero defeating Satan by his willed act of love and compassion.

We now enter the frame passage matching the one that opened this middle section of Mark, whose counterpart of healing a blind man is back in chapter 8 at Bethsaida. Centering on three passion predictions. A section, as we noted last week, devoid of specific geographical orientation so the focus can fall on his teaching of disciples in the final days before reaching the fateful arena of God’s action in him. 

Jericho is now the named locale, the city but 12 miles east of Jerusalem itself. The city conquered first by Joshua, now conquered in its own way by the Son of David. The geographical notice is odd: he enters and immediately leaves, a point usually put down to redaction or some other explanation. But Mark likely wants the echo from Joshua to register. This also helps underscore, one can imagine, the urgency of the blind beggar. Last chance. Sitting by the road of his hometown exit, Jesus is setting his face toward the capital, the twelve in tow. Now or never.

And he is up to it. He cries aloud, to the point of disturbing a faceless crowd gathered around Jesus. Their rebuke only intensifies his blind urgency. Rumor has reached his ears that this is Jesus of Nazareth and he wants to see again. Presumably he has lost his sight. Many note this matches the reality of the disciples who had seen and been witnesses to Jesus dramatic work, and then begin to falter as the light grows dimmer and they need to find renewed sight to move forward into Jesus dark night. If so, the healing is a good harbinger. Things need not spiral down at this fateful hour. Cry out for the Son of David. You are right to persist with all your strength. With this messianic cry he further serves as a forerunner of the Palm Sunday crowds upon his entry into the city from the Mount of Olives. 

The throwing off of his cloak has lots of resonance with baptism, and the declaration of the baptizand that she or he want to see, find their new life in Jesus. Justin, Gregory Nazianzus, Clement all speak of baptism as a kind of sight receiving illumination. Jesus asks the question “what do you want me to do?” no matter how obvious the ailment or need, as we have seen previously. We must articulate our needs and not just box the air, if true healing and relationship with the healer are to be ours.

The following on the way is redolent of Isaiah’s second exodus language, and appropriate for one depicted as enrolled behind Jesus on his ultimate Way. Perhaps no bad model for the twelve themselves struggling for sight and insight both.

Our OT reading in Track Two’s pairing comes from Jeremiah, who has his own version of exodus language. We see this admixture in Isaiah as well, where second exodus is joined with pilgrimage, and the return to Zion is from all corners of the earth. There, further, we find the blind and the lame in their midst, a great company. They walk a straight path all the same, throwing off their cloaks of whatever weaving, because called by the one who is Father and Lord. The psalm for the day reinforces the praise called for by the prophet Jeremiah.

1 When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, * then were we like those who dream. 2 Then was our mouth filled with laughter, * and our tongue with shouts of joy. 3 Then they said among the nations, * “The LORD has done great things for them.” 4 The LORD has done great things for us, * and we are glad indeed.

Note as well how the fact of praised thanksgiving for God’s past actions, remembered and relived, becomes the occasion for present salvation as well, as tears sown are turned into harvested songs, and weeping into shouldered joy. A marvelous image of transformation, appropriate for the blind beggar on the way behind the healer.

Hebrews provides his own version of this ongoing, permanent, generation to generation salvation. Jesus holds his high priesthood permanently, because having walked the way of our salvation, he continues now as high priest forever. “Consequently he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.” He is always asking “what do you want me to do for you?” and he is always ready to do just that, in his priestly role, for us sitting by the side of the road who call out in faith and honestly named need. Jesus needs to make no sacrifice for his own sins, for his priestly order is of a different caliber and character, given the sacrifice once for all time he has made for us.

In Track One we come to the final reading from Job and what one can call the denouement of the plot the book has set before us in all its stark unfolding. To speak of a resolution of course implies we know just what the book has set into motion. If it is to explain innocent suffering, it is unclear just how the divine speech or the ending has done that. As an old teacher once put it, “when you’re blue go to the zoo” is hardly an adequate solution. If it is just to reward Job for an ordeal no one can fully understand, except to say he was somehow right and the friends wrong, is true enough in terms of Job’s lavish and well earned final compensation. Sympathy, comforting and double what he lost, with beautiful new children to boot. 

But in my view we must remember how the book set the matter up to begin with, something Job himself did not know and never learned, appropriate if also terribly true to the nature of the test God allowed to befall him. Satan argued no one would serve God for naught. Job did just that, with nothing to show for it except an unwillingness to leave the field where he and God alone met, when all was said and done. Ezekiel 14 reminds us of how Job was remembered: a man of great intercessory power, who daily offered sacrifices for his children just in case they had been wayward. 

I think it is crucial to note at just what point Job is recessitated. He confesses that God has showed himself and that this amounts to a contrast between what one might know by hearsay and deep personal knowledge: “now my eye sees thee.” In the dust he hands himself over to God. And it is in just this posture that Job, we are told, takes up the role that had been his pride and that he was renown for and would always be: he prayed for the three that had turned against him. We do not read that God asked this of him. We do learn that their account of God provoked his anger against them. But in the end Job let all of that go and he prayed for his friends. Here is the denouement of the Book of Job. The Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he, still on the ash heap, had prayed for his friends. The rest of the story is just the sort of ending that is required, fitting for the hero of this long ordeal. Satan is vanquished, and true to form, nowhere on the scene, presumably back to his prowling the earth in search of new victims. Until that final day when he comes forth with all his might and is exposed and defeated by the Son of God himself.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are they who trust in him and never waver. 

This focus on the Second Coming at the close of the year is not accidental. It is significant for its own sake and it also serves to anticipate Advent of the ensuing Christian year. The first Sundays of Advent also speak directly of the second Advent – hard sometimes to hear given the busyness of Christmas in the Cultural Year of Commerce. The one who comes in the cradle at Christmas is the King who will come again and whose coming is the very goal of history itself. Christ is our times and seasons, from his beginning and ending, gathering up our own, in Israel and in all nations under his reign. Before he goes up to Jerusalem to give his life as a ransom he draws attention to where this final death reaches out to gather up all time and space. Year B consists of 52 Sundays of reading, tracking the narrative-line of Mark’s Gospel this year, and providing a rich symphony of readings drawn from every corner of the Old Testament. Including from those psalms whose ancient word resonates in accompaniment with the readings, giving us a seat in the symphony hall before and alongside Jesus, Ruth, David, Elijah and Elisha, Esther, Job, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Eldad and Medad and on the list goes. The accomplishment of the lectionary includes continuous readings from Acts and the letters of Paul, as well as the catholic epistles and Hebrews, our reading at this juncture of the year. In addition, for a great bulk of the year one can hear an effort to provide a continuous reading from the Old Testament, though its size makes for the necessity of a selection. For this Sunday, following the notes set forth in the final chapter of Proverbs, concerning the woman of valor, we move to Ruth. She joins Esther and Lady Wisdom from Proverbs and Hannah, whose song comes at the final Sunday of this lectionary year. 

We are in that section of Mark’s Gospel where the conflict and tensions are heightening, and from various directions. After the triumphal entry Jesus cleanses the temple. He curses a fig tree in what is an ominous gesture. In the temple, he is confronted by the chief priests and scribes and elders and questioned about his authority to act as he does. The parable of the vineyard is delivered and received as a direct accusation, including their murderous intentions, and his arrest is considered and then rejected as potentially too inflammatory. Pharisees seek to trap him into seditious talk vis-a-vis the Roman authorities, a trap he parries with ease. Then the Sadducees engage in a ridiculous resurrection scenario, given that they do not believe in it; it is their chief identity marker. This sets off a dispute amongst themselves, to which today’s Gospel reading makes reference. A lone scribe, “seeing that he answered them well” poses a question of his own. 

The passage is remarkable for several reasons, which should be clear given all we have witnessed about the way Jesus has responded all along his way to this point, with those he encounters. Luke and Matthew go a slightly different way, and make the questioner, consistent with other exchanges, negative. But on Mark’s landscape the encounter is positive, and a welcome sign that there is hope for all, and that belonging to a hostile grouping need not prevent one from seeing the truth. “Not far from the kingdom of God” is high praise from this Jesus. 

Jesus summarizes the Law by reference to the Shema of Israel’s confession, found in our OT reading for today, from Deuteronomy 6. The first table of the decalogue is covered by the phrase “the first commandment” and the second table by the “second commandment.” The quote itself is taken from the 19th chapter of Leviticus. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is enjoined of Israel where the neighbor is a fellow covenant member, but also, at the close of the chapter, for those gentiles who have come into the fellowship of Israel, in both cases reinforced by the solemn refrain “I am the Lord you God” – a nice inclusio which returns to the logic of the first commandment itself.

We could easily move to the Ruth reading at this juncture, which makes the point nicely in narrative form. More on that in a moment.

The scribe commends the summary, and in a striking move, covers the same ground himself in almost the same form exactly. It is this collation, “One Lord God, love neighbor as oneself,” spoken by Jesus and reaffirmed by the scribe, that brings forth the commendation. “Not far from the kingdom of God” means then, even if not knowing that the One Lord God Jesus worships faithfully through his obedient life, is making himself known in the Jesus standing before him, he is close to that truth by what he has said after Jesus has said it. More could be said here given the next section of Mark, where Psalm 110 is interpreted by Jesus as elevating the Messiah to the Lord that David himself addresses. But the conjunction only reinforces the point being introduced here. The Shema is not being rejected, but within its logic Jesus himself shares the identity of the one God who has sent him, whose love of neighbor as self extends to the giving of his life in love, incarnating the love of God himself for all, Israel and Gentile both. In responding to the scribe as he does, Jesus may be speaking metaphorically, but also, in addition, geographically. The Kingdom of God is standing before him. Its loving expression will take place on a hill not far away. “You are not far from the kingdom of God” is literally true. Deuteronomy six gives indication in textual form of the commandment to which Jesus and the scribe refer, as well as the express charge that it be taught to every generation, at all times and at all places, the point being made quite vigorously. 

“Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Jesus is himself this doorpost and this public display, and his words to the scribe make clear there is no separation between his own faith and his own person, the one David himself addressed long ago as Lord. “The Lord said to my Lord.”

We conclude with our Track One OT reading.

It would be hard to imagine a story with more drama and more pathos being told in such a compact and economical way as the opening paragraphs of the book of Ruth. It truly speaks for itself in just the way it speaks and in that way, so commentary must defer to the text’s own unfolding. Read aloud it cannot miss its target. Famine, risky relocation, death of one husband followed by death of two sons and two husbands. Three lone women at a time when inheritance and home is all there is, such as it is. Naomi wisely counsels the Moab daughters-in-law to stay among their kith and kin. Orpah wept aloud, kissed Naomi and followed her advice. But Ruth clung to her and offered up the words we read.

Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. May the Lord do thus and so to me…

And in lifting up the sacred name “the Lord,” the Lord God of Israel is now her Lord. As to the question of Naomi, auspiciously posed, “do I still have sons in my womb?” we must wait as the story unfolds. This book has a surprising ending, is all we can say for now. Though it is a bitter—Naomi—moment, the Lord God of Israel will have the last word.

As the psalm puts it, and as we shall come to learn, “happy are they–Naomi and now Ruth the Moabitess—who have the God of Jacob for their help/ whose hope is in the LORD their God.” 

Let’s start with Track One.

Naomi, Ruth’s mother-in-law, we recall, had indicated how perilous the decision to come with her would be. Ruth is a widow, as is Naomi, but also now without inheritance or support, alone in a foreign country through her decision to cling to Naomi. Naomi’s husband Elimelech had a wealthy kinsman named Boaz. So Naomi conspires to put Ruth in his path. The poor may glean in fields, Deuteronomy tells us, even as in this case it is also risky, given the festivities which mark the final days of the occasion. 

Boaz has already taken note of her, we learn earlier in the story, gleaning with the others, and he commends her for her kind treatment of her mother in law, which has been made known to him. So the situation is auspicious. When Ruth tells her of this, Naomi sees it as a kindness of the Lord and concocts her plan. Ruth complies. 

Boaz is indeed an honorable choice, though we learn he is not the closest kin and so the plot thickens. But the unnamed kinsman relinquishes his claim and Boaz takes on the role of perpetuating the name of the deceased husband. When a child is born to the happy couple, the women of the village speak of the resolution of Ruth’s and Naomi’s losses both. “A son has been born to Naomi.” Indeed, he is the grandfather of David. The path paved by Ruth, we learn in the final verses of the book, had its forerunners going back in time, strong and bold gentile women all of them.

“Children are a heritage from the Lord and the fruit of the womb is a gift” the psalmist says – surprising even Naomi, who had cautioned Ruth—do I have sons still in my womb?– but who now finds a son laid on her own nursing breast.

Having these two widows provided by the Track One reading we are given a helpful entry onto the Gospel story of the widow’s mite. She has thrown herself and all she has onto the mercy of God though her gift of two lepta, the smallest coins there are, but all she has. Our Track Two OT reading has been chosen from the 17th chapter of Kings to also provide a widow, from yet another episode in God’s plans with his people. In Luke’s Gospel the episode is referred to in this way, underscoring the point from another angle: “In truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow.”

Well-known and repeated often are the solemn injunctions in the OT to care for widows, whose fate is especially precarious. Neglecting this or abusing own’s power in probate are to be severely punished. 

In our story from Kings we have a famine like unto that of Ruth. God commands Elijah to go to Sidon and be fed there. On its face one might assume that the idea makes sense if the famine does not reach that far. And that appears right as Elijah’s request for water is complied with by the widow, out gathering sticks. But his request for food reveals how meager are this poor widows stocks. She has been collecting wood for a fire for her last meal, she and her son, and then to lay down and die. Elijah will have none of it, but she must prepare a cake for him all the same. Having done so Elijah provides his OT version of the multiplication of loaves and we learn that having thrown herself all in—so Ruth, so Naomi, so our widow for today with her meager 2 lepta—God is good on his promises. Jesus remembers the same story and holds it up to remind his hometown people just how far the love of God reaches into famines of our lives, yes to Moab or Sidon or at the very steps of the Temple itself. 

Our psalm lines it out nicely: 8 The LORD loves the righteous; the LORD cares for the stranger; * he sustains the orphan and widow, And it also cautions: but frustrates the way of the wicked. Put not your trust in rulers… When they breathe their last, they return to earth, * and in that day their thoughts perish.

Our Gospel reading from Mark has the commendation of the widow preceded by yet a further encounter of Jesus with the religious leaders. In strong contrast with the good scribe who answered Jesus well and was told he was not far from the kingdom of God, here we see Jesus observing other scribes, those who love long robes, clothing of distinction, best seats in church and in culture both, the knowing salutations of admirers. Of course all these things could be tolerable if excessive, one supposes, but we learn they go hand in hand with taking advantage of the least of God’s own, those to be set apart for special care and attention, given their vulnerability. As if instead of Boaz protecting Ruth, she would be violated and thrown into hopelessness without bottom. Naomi’s bitterness tripled. Or as if Elijah stole the last stores of a poor widow and her dying son. Treasury gifts from a poor widow, giving all that she has, so as to finance lavish robes and places of honor and salutations for their public displays of the sale. Devouring widows houses is taking the only thing left to them, through skillful scribal manipulation or by other means not detailed by Jesus. 

Ironically the Levites are also numbered among those needing special attention, given their sacrificial role, without inheritance. Like unto widows. Something has gone terribly wrong here and as his last act before crossing the threshold to final trial, persecution, and death, Jesus takes the time to teach for one last time his disciples. 

Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” And in this action who is she most like, but the one who will give his life as a ransom. Hebrews can have the last word then.

But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”

There is Ruth, Naomi, the widow of Zarephath and our final widow at the threshold of Jesus sacrifice of love.

Also as noted, the focus on the end times, at the end of the lectionary year, which has its correlates in Matthew 24 and Luke 21, continues into the first Sundays of Advent – Advent in this sense, meaning the Second Coming of Christ and not the First Coming alone. So Luke’s apocalyptic material picks up in Year C where Mark’s 8 verses give but a small summary, on the First Sunday of Advent next lectionary year. And Matthew returns the favor in his lectionary year, providing a summary from his Gospel that in turns sends us to Mark chapter 13’s longer account for Advent 1 of Year B, when it comes around again.

Both Luke and Mark situate the long, final, apocalyptic—end of days—speech of Jesus after the story of the widow’s mite, where it fits naturally enough. Jesus is leaving the sanctuary he has cleansed and where he has confronted religious leaders, the scene of the extended action after his entry from Jericho and the Mt of Olives until this, his final farewell. A sanctuary not made with human hands, as Hebrews puts it, will be and is now his present place of intercession, having laid down his life in the manner Hebrews and Mark know is once for all, for all. The departure from the temple evokes scenes reminiscent from the prophetic witnesses, Ezekiel most especially, where it amounts to an ominous withdrawal of the Lord God himself for a season of judgment. This withdrawal by the Lord, this time, is permanent, the culmination of judgment against human sin and rebellion for one final time and forever, with Jesus the Lord and Jesus himself the sacrificial offering of God’s love for the world he has made. 

Upon leaving the temple the disciples, awed at its massive size and seeming permanence – it had stones of huge girth, some weighing up to three hundred tons, and would have been by far the largest structure ever seen by them – they give voice to their astonishment. Imagine the contrast, from a tiny mite in a widow’s palm to the top of the Twin Towers. “All will be thrown down” Jesus says in response to their awe and “not one stone will be left on another.” All standards of measurement will be recast by a single wooden cross about the size the man standing before them.

Whatever one makes of the astonishing details of the end time, about to be spelled out, and their timing–details that have vexed interpreters, including the actual destruction of the temple not long off and how that correlates with the end time, given that it happened now over 2000 years ago and the end time has not come—details our 8 verse section mercifully spares us—one thing is certain. Before going to his death Jesus spoke of a final judgment, and of the end of the temple as it had previously belonged to God’s precious plans. And his own death on a cross is surrounded by just these same apocalyptic features, supplied most clearly by Matthew, and with Mark satisfied to report the dramatic rending of the temple curtain at the hour of his death. With the death of Jesus a new reign of God begins which will take us to the end of time in its significance. The beginning of birth pains, but the conception and the bringing to term are accomplished in this man Jesus and this sets in motion a temporal horizon encompassing all future time, including our own, placing us for the most part gentile outsiders, right alongside Peter and James and John and Andrew.

The Track One reading continues with the roll call of famous women of integrity, following Esther, Dame Wisdom and Ruth. Hannah’s position in the first chapter of Samuel also picks up the Davidic theme at the close of Ruth, where the birth of Obed to Ruth, Boaz and Naomi we learn is in fact the grandfather of David. The hopelessness of the last chapters of Judges, with the refrain, “there was no king in the land; everyone did what was right in their own eyes” represents its own kind of moral famine mirroring that of Ruth. And as the birth of Obed signals a new hopefulness, the barrenness of Hannah overcome opens onto a fresh new horizon in God’s generous and faithful plans with his people. “She named him Samuel, for she said, ‘I asked him of the LORD.’” Following this Hannah breaks out in her Magnificat of praise, whose final lines make the pending resolution of Judges and the famines and barrenness of this life clear: “The LORD will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to his king, and exalt the power of his anointed.” Like all good inspiration, Hannah is given more to sing and say than even she can fully grasp within her own present walk with God. 

The paired Old Testament reading from Daniel 12 also gives a vision of the future not for Daniel’s own day, but for the times outside of his understanding. Far beyond the several generations separating Hannah and Samuel and indeed unto the end times. The reference to making wise has rightly been viewed as an inner biblical interpretation and application of Isaiah’s suffering servant song. “See, my servant will act wisely,” interpreted in the light of the whole poem as the servant making those wise who see in his death God’s final purposes—“by his knowledge my servant will justify many”–including even the nations themselves: “many nations will be amazed, kings will shut their mouths because of him.” Daniel is given to see this as an end time judgment where the faithful servants of the one servant are raised and given eternal life, after a time of upheaval and tribulation. A pre-figurement of the work of Christ on the cross and extended to the end times in the manner of Jesus own final teaching of his disciples, his last teaching before that end-time-in-time event now to unfold.

Our psalm lines out his ultimate fate as we await his coming and the final judgment he announced. 8 I have set the LORD always before me; * because he is at my right hand I shall not fall. 9 My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices; * my body also shall rest in hope. 10 For you will not abandon me to the grave, * nor let your holy one see the Pit. 11 You will show me the path of life; * in your presence there is fullness of joy, and in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.

And finally our epistle reading for this Sunday, the final installment of our semi-continuous reading from the Epistle to the Hebrews. We are in the period between the once for all offering, sacrifice for sins, the author of Hebrews is at pains to set before us, undertaken in and by the unique priesthood of Christ; and the end times, when enemies will no longer beset his kingdom and his accomplishment of love.

We can let the exhortation from the author of Hebrews have the last word for this Sunday, as we next move to the Sunday of Christ the King, the last Sunday of this lectionary year. “…since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

All our readings look toward the end of things brought to completion by the King of Kings. David’s final words. Daniel’s final vision. Revelation’s NT version of that, much of it a recycling of OT apocalyptic visions and figures. We leave Mark for John and Jesus’ own final words to Pilate.

We begin with the last words of David. A man like other men, and a king like those who would follow him, in the steps of God’s Anointed. But also a king inside a special providential place, which in time will be occupied by the King of Kings. And so he is given to see this when, like Moses looking across into the Promised Land, he comes to the end of his days. The Holy Spirit has gifted him quite concretely – a feature Luther paid close attention to in his lectures on the psalms of David, where David is given to see the beloved exchanges between God the Son and God the Father. “He said to me you are my son, today I have begotten you.” “The Lord said to my Lord.” The line he paid attention to we find at verse 3: “The spirit of the LORD speaks through me, his word is upon my tongue.” And so David speaks of things pertaining to the house of God’s making in him. “Is not my house like this with God—like the sun rising on a cloudless morning—for he has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secure.”

The Psalm allows another to reflect on David, one of the few psalms where David is mentioned as the subject of the psalmist’s discourse and not his own. “Lord, remember David and all he endured.” David is himself but he also betokens all of God’s promises through time in him and leading to the King of Kings. “For your servant David’s sake, do not turn away the face of your Anointed.” He continues, “The Lord swore an oath to David; in truth he will not break it,” even in the face of seeming abandonment – in David’s day, so Psalm 89 – nor in the day of God’s Son the Christ. “A son, the fruit of your body will I set upon your throne.” And “I have prepared a lamp for my Anointed.” Mashiach. Messiah. Christ.

Daniel’s vision as recorded in chapter 7 uses the language of Son of Man for the kingship of his conception. The Ancient of Days is on this account the LORD God almighty seated at court, with attendants without number. A royal scene of final judgment, at which time the books recording all deeds done are opened. The Son of Man appears and enters the celestial courtroom. He is presented to the LORD God, and from his hand he receives a kingdom that has no end. In this dramatic depiction we have the OT’s equivalent of the creed’s “of one substance with the Father.” The identity of God and the identity of the Son of Man is both different but profoundly shared. To “sit at the right hand” is to share the selfsame identity of God Almighty. We see a kingship that is never destroyed for just this reason.

The apparel the LORD puts on, as the psalmist depicts it, is indeed, in the fullness of time, the flesh of the Son of Man. In so doing we see an enthronement that in fact has its origins from everlasting, from before the world’s beginning. Eschatology and eternal generation: two sides of the same divine identity and purpose before and through all time.

Revelation speaks of “the one who is and who was and who is to come”, the “I am who will be good on my promises through time,” the LORD, solemnly revealed to Moses. The grace and peace that come from God the LORD come in the same manner from Jesus Christ, who is the firstborn of the dead and the ruler as such of all the kings of the earth. Now the author turns his attention to this same Jesus as he comes a final time, not from the emptied tomb but from the eternal throne. Using the language of Daniel he comes on the clouds. And now we see the nail wounds born for us and permanently identifying the eternal Son of Man. All now see him. All. Every eye he has made, from the creation of Adam through all time. All will stand before the Cross and wail as they bear witness at last to the love shown forth there and from the very heart of God through all time. Crucified before the foundations of the world.

The Gospel reading for Christ the King Sunday comes from the passion account of John’s Gospel. Jesus has been arrested and condemned by Jewish officials. Yet because they seek to put him to death they must bring him to the Roman civil authorities, from the house of Caiaphas the high priest to the headquarters of the Roman governor Pilate. This begins a 35 verse string of episodes involving Pilate, the Jewish officials and Jesus. This is the only scene in which Jesus and Pilate are alone, since the Jewish officials cannot enter the praetorium due to the laws regarding defilement. These they respect, but they need another law to kill Jesus.

In a way the word “king” is a motif word running across all the scenes to follow. Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king, somewhat out of the blue. Jesus responds that he has a kingdom different from the kingdoms of this world. Pilate again asks if he is a king. Jesus does not answer yes or no simply, but turns the question back on him. His is a kingdom of truth, and those who belong to this kingdom hear his voice. Pilate’s question “what is truth” tells us he is not of this kingdom.

But then as we read on it is Pilate who insists on calling Jesus a king, indeed, the king of the Jews. He has Jesus invested as a king, in mockery. The soldiers address him as King. In one final scene of desperation we learn the most powerful man on the scene is now afraid. He has said he is the son of God, the officials tell Pilate. Now it is their turn to call Jesus king, in an effort to corner Pilate. Pilate bring Jesus out one last time, and now the word is in the air without footnote. Behold your King. Shall I crucify your king? We have no king but Caesar. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. What I have written I have written.

And the rest is, as they say, history, under the King of History to whom God almighty has given all times and all dominions. The King “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” as a creed compactly says, “in accordance with the scriptures,” with Daniel, and Samuel, and Isaiah and psalms we read for today and all the scriptures from beginning to end. “And on the third day he rose again,” in accordance with the scriptures. And because of that inaugurated kingdom of truth, “he will come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom will have no end.” As our lectionary year comes now to its end, we will let the scriptures have their last according word.

For he has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secure. The LORD has sworn an oath to David; * in truth, he will not break it: “A son, the fruit of your body * will I set upon your throne.

To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.

Ever since the world began, your throne has been established; * you are from everlasting. Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come Lord Jesus.