Passionate Jesus - Taking Our Heights and Depths

Preached on Sunday, February 11, 2018

Scripture readings: Isaiah 40:1-5; Mark 1:1-13

Walk to the Feather River, at Live Oak CA
Just before New Years, 2918

One of my favorite Christian authors is G. K. Chesterton, and he was also a famous humorist. He wrote: “The test of a good religion is whether you can joke about it.”

So, there was a Methodist Pastor and a Baptist Pastor arguing about baptism. The Baptist insisted that the only true baptism was by complete immersion. The Methodist had a question about this: “Wouldn’t it be OK if you baptized a person up to their waist.” “No, the waist isn’t what counts.” “What about the shoulders, if you dipped them up to their shoulders, wouldn’t that be enough? That’s a lot of water?” “No! No! for true baptism the shoulders don’t count.” “What about up to the nose? That’s where the breath of life comes in and out?” “No, no, no, no, no! The nose does not count!” “Then, what about the top of the head? Is that what really counts?” “Yes! Yes! That’s what I’ve been saying all along. The top of the head in baptism is what counts!”

And the Methodist Pastor said: “Well, then; if it’s the top of the head that really counts, that’s the way I’ve been baptizing all along!”

In the Gospel of Mark, we’ve read about both the baptism and the temptation of Jesus. When we’ve read about these same two stories of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, we know three times more than Mark tells us. The temptation takes on a life of its own in Matthew and Luke, and we may even wonder why Mark left so much of the temptation out.

The odd thing about Mark seems to be that, when you read Mark’s telling of it, the baptism and the temptation of Jesus blend into each other. They become extensions of each other. It becomes the same story.

In Mark, the temptation is not a separate event from the baptism; and neither the baptism nor the temptation is separate from the cross. About a half of the whole Gospel of Mark is the story of the road to the cross.

Mark starts this way: “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” “Gospel” means good news. No document or book had ever been called a gospel before. Mark really, simply meant that what he was writing about in his scroll was all good news from beginning to end, because of who Jesus is, and what he has accomplished, is all good news for us. But, since Mark came first, the other disciples decided that, when they wrote about Jesus, their books would have to be gospels too.

What we sometimes forget is that everything in a gospel is also the gospel. Everything related to our Lord and Savior, all of his words and all of his accomplishments are good news, because they all lead to the cross and the resurrection of Jesus the Son of God. They all lead to our salvation and transformation.

The fact that Jesus was baptized is good news for us because it belongs to the good news of the cross and the resurrection. The fact that Jesus was tempted is good news because it belongs to the good news of the cross and the resurrection.

Baptism was the place where the stained and the dirty were washed. Baptism was the place to come when you needed to be born again into a new life, heart, mind, and soul. Jesus didn’t need any of that, but he gave us good news by coming to share with us the place where we need to come.

Jesus came to the place where we need to be clean, where we need to be born again, where we need to die and be brought back to life again. This is good news for us. It’s a picture of Jesus as our savior. It’s the record of Jesus accomplishing his purpose in each of those great needs of ours. Our needs were met in what Jesus truly did.

This good news belongs to the cross, because the cross was the place where those who deserved to die were given a slow and painful, punishing death. In the Gospels we see the good news of Jesus getting himself where he didn’t belong because our sins have a deadly effect on ourselves, and on the world around us. We wound others and we get wounded with hurts that really don’t go away.

Even when our broken bones heal and we become stronger in our broken places, doctors can see where the old break is. Even if we can’t see it ourselves, we may feel it. Maybe our old break predicts the weather now.

Then there are the breaks that may heal and yet they might also come back. A broken shoulder or an injured knee may haunt us again, many years into the future. The bad news is that we can never wipe away old breaks in ourselves or in others. We can never make them as if they had never happened.

The good news is that Jesus can go to the places where we have damaged others, or have been damaged by them. For our sake Jesus has gone to all the places where he didn’t need to go, but he went there for us, to be there with us, in order to wipe away what we cannot.

The cross is the place for the things that cannot be undone, the things that are deadly, the things that are mortal sickness and death. Jesus goes to the place of punishment on the cross in order to make us clean, in order to wipe away what cannot be undone. The baptism and the cross of Jesus are part of one good thing that we call the good news.

Because the baptism of Jesus is the first good news that Mark shares with us, and because it’s the first step of Jesus to the good news of the cross and the resurrection, we should realize that we are on a good news road from beginning to end. So, temptation is good news. No, that can’t be right! And yet it is right.

You know that when we get hard of hearing, our deafness usually doesn’t begin all at once all across all sounds and pitches. When I did farm work, when I was young, some days I would come home with my ears ringing, depending on whether I was using some really noisy machinery. You might ask: “Why didn’t you wear ear plugs?” Well, if you used ear plugs, you wouldn’t hear the quiet sound of something getting stuck or broken. If I begin to lose my hearing, it will probably start with the pitches of the noise those harvest machines made long ago. I understand that, when you’ve been married for a long time, one of the first pitches a man loses is the pitch of his wife’s voice.

Because sin is like deafness, we (who are deaf in the wrong places) think that temptation is the voice of the evil one luring and drawing us to the dark side, the selfish side. That’s wrong. When you read the longer temptation stories of Matthew and Luke, you realize that temptation always has two voices.

Jesus heard the voice of Satan, and Jesus heard the voice of the Father. We know this because his Father’s voice came out when Jesus answered the magnetic voice of the devil. When the devil spoke, Jesus answered with the words of God. He answered the Devil with scripture. But the scripture of the Bible is the voice of God. The Bible is, in so many ways, the test of how we recognize the good voice, the saving voice, the voice of love.

It is a test. Temptation has two voices. Temptation isn’t only the seductive attraction of evil, or sin, or selfishness, or compromise. Temptation tests which voice you want to hear. Jesus had no trouble making sense of the two voices and choosing what was right, and rejecting what was wrong. Jesus had no problem making sense of the voice, to know what was love, and what was defection and unfaithfulness.

Temptation was good news because Jesus went to be with us, where we need him to be. Jesus becomes the voice of God amplified within us, because he embodies the love of God. Jesus is the one who comes to our rescue, and rescue is what salvation is all about.

When Jesus went to the place of the cross, he went to the place where he cried, “Why have your forsaken me?” He wasn’t really forsaken, but he carried our deafness and our blindness on the cross. He came to the place where we live when we can only hear the wrong voice, and not the voice of love. The cross is the place where the wrong voice is finally silenced, and you can say, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

This is not the place of death, as it may seem.

To know that your Father is there and holding onto you, and to be able to say “It is finished” is life. “It is finished” is only another ancient way to say: “Everything is whole. Everything is put back together. Everything is where it belongs and makes sense. It’s all good at last.”

The cross is the good news that temptation has life beyond it. The good news is that temptation is not the final word. There is the place where, because Jesus passed the test, he will hold onto us from the cross and we will pass the test with him. He will be close enough to us, on the cross, so that we can here God’s voice: the voice of love.

The baptism and the temptation being one story tells us that Christians can get into a lot of trouble by following Jesus. Of course, some of our Christian trouble comes from living down to the world’s low expectations. The world expects Christians to think they are God’s favorites and that we will be accusers instead of being rescuers.

The name “Satan” actually means accuser and enemy. And Christians have the reputation of being that in this world.

When we remember how the Lord comes to our rescue, we will show our friendship with Jesus by coming to the rescue of others, because rescue is what salvation is all about. Rescuers always go to the place where the other people need them.

We really did need Jesus, and Jesus came to us where we were and (even now) Jesus comes to us where we are: because we haven’t stopped needing him, and we never will stop.

If we remember this, we will go to where other people are, and we will act like people who have come to help and to serve them. We will do that with our neighbors, with our communities, and with our nation, and with our world.

We will not be there to judge or to accuse. We will be there to help. We will be there in order to bring the image of what Jesus wants. Whether we seem to succeed, or seem to fail, we will work to make our world into a rescuing place. We will do this with the power that comes from having Jesus as our rescuer.

The world needs this. The people of the world will not admit this is so. Jesus teaches us that this is so, and he came to the rescue of many who refused him. In Jesus we have the will, and the patience, and the peace to do the same, if we will come to the water with Jesus and rise with him.

Then we will rise out of the water, and step onto the road with Jesus, and we will hear the voice that says, “This is my son, this is my daughter, in whom I take delight.”

Whether we were baptized as babies, or as grown-ups, we came to the waters to wash all our sweat, and stink, and dirt away. We went through the waters and we came out like babies squeezing out of the waters of the womb to a brand-new life. Like the drowning victim who goes into the water, and dies, and must be brought out and given the breath of life again, we came to the waters to be saved from death and all the other evils of this sad world.

We came to the waters just as we come to the Lord’s Table. Here the Lord, who died and rose from the dead, feeds us with his life that will never end. We come to this table like children who should have been sent to our rooms but we had our sentence lifted and so we come to the table. This table is where our home really has its center and its heart, just as the real heart of our life is at the great feast in the kingdom of God, in the new heavens and the new earth.