According to Webster’s dictionary, a mirror is defined as a smooth surface with spectral qualities.  In other words, a good mirror is one that is able to reflect an image with clarity and precision.  From a theological perspective, the earliest and most important mirror is found in the original creation account.  We are told that God created man and woman in his image.  That is, we were designed to be a reflection or mirror of God in the created order.  After the Fall, the mirror of God’s image in us became distorted and fuzzy.  It is in the incarnation that God enters into our history in Jesus Christ.  It is in Christ that we see God the Father perfectly imaged.  Jesus represents the “perfect representation” of God in human flesh.

Just as God in Jesus Christ entered history in order to show us what God was like, so the church is to embody and reflect the very presence of God in the world.  Missions is a reflection of the incarnation.  The role of the church is not just to bring a particular message, but to embody the message as we image the incarnation and foreshadow the coming New Creation.  Undoubtedly, numerous examples can be cited where we have distorted God’s intention for the church in the world.  Like the distorted mirrors at carnivals, we have sometimes reflected only a crude caricature of Jesus Christ in the world.  However, God in his providence has chosen and sent the church into the world to bear witness to his glory and the salvation which is found in Jesus Christ.

Asbury was the leading pioneer in North America in extending the accessibility of an accredited theological degree through what we called Extended Learning (ExL) and the “virtual campus.”  Today our virtual campus is the second largest campus of the seminary with nearly five hundred students taking courses over the internet.  We have the capability of delivering a class to any location in the world.  Asbury even has its own IPhone app called Asbury Moblie allowing us to reach pepole wherever they may be!  Today you can listen to one of our chapel messages, read my Presidential blog called Global Talk, or watch the video of Bob Muholland’s lectures on the Book of Revelation while you commute to work on a train.  Many of our faculty’s books are now available on Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s new IPad.  Like many of our students, I twitter almost every day.  Twitter is a brief message which cannot exceed 140 characters which is instantly sent out to hundreds who “follow” your twitter.  This is now the world we inhabit.  Asbury must continue to understand how information is accessed, how it is passed on, and how we can utilize this for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Our used of the internet “super highway” is similar to Paul’s own used of the Roman road system in his mission strategy in the first century.

However, like all cultural shifts these new realities do not come without real and serious dangers.  The gospel has never been about merely delivering information; it is about spiritual formation.  The gospel is more about transformation than information.  Information is, of course, an important part of our proclamation of the gospel.  But we must never forget that we utilize the explosion of information in order to call people into communities of faith and lives of transformation.  For, indeed, after God created the world, something infinitely more important happened before Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google.  God became man in Jesus Christ.  God did not just send us an e-mail.  He became incarnate, i.e. he became flesh.  He walked among us in relationship and declared, “I will build my church.”  Information only has value in so far as the church of Jesus Christ is built and strengthened to embody all of the glorious realities of the New Creation in the present age.  This is ultimately what drives Asbury Theological Seminary.  This is what wakes me up every morning.  We will use delivery tool we can to do this work.  However, in the end, we will be judged not on how widely we disseminated information, but how deeply we strengthened and equipped the church of Jesus Christ.

It’s fascinating to think about how much time Mark spends demonstrating Jesus’ encounters with human pain and suffering.  According to one early church tradition, Mark himself had deformed hands.  This may explain his special interest in Peter’s eye witness accounts of Jesus’ healings.  Throughout the gospel, we regularly see Jesus encountering the blind, the lame, the hungry, the leper, and here in this particular text, a deaf-mute man.  The very drama of the Creator of the universe walking in the midst of His creation is a staggering thought.  We spend our whole lives running from sickness and disease and death, and yet here we find Jesus meeting it face to face; and in the life of Jesus, contagion is overturned, and death and sickness flee.

This particular story of Christ’s encounter with the deaf-mute man is an intimate account filled with eye-witness details.  In verse 32, Mark records that the mute man “could speak a little.”  This is an interesting detail that lets us know that the person telling the story was actually there and saw the whole thing.  The man was completely deaf and functionally mute, but he could mumble some words.  In verse 33, Mark records that Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd.  This is a very specific detail that demonstrates to us the intimacy of the scene.  We as readers should feel as though we are being drawn into an intimate encounter between Jesus and a deaf-mute man, rather than just gaping at the whole event from the midst of a great throng of people.

The next fascinating detail of this story is that Jesus put His fingers into the man’s ears, took spittle from His mouth, and used it to touch the man’s tongue.  He then looked up to heaven, sighed deeply, and cried out, “Ephphatha!” (Be opened!)  The natural question we might ask is: Why did Jesus stick His fingers into the man’s ears?  Why did Jesus put spittle on His finger and touch the man’s tongue?  After all, Jesus did not need to touch this man at all.  He could have just spoken the word, and the man would have been healed.  Why did Jesus do something like this?  We probably won’t know for sure until we get to heaven why Jesus healed people in such different ways during His ministry, but I am convinced that this account has something to do with the very nature of the incarnation.  If you ask the question, “Why did Jesus stick His fingers into the man’s ears?” then, if you think about it, you are almost forced to ask the larger question:  “Why did Jesus come to earth in the first place?”  The little question inevitably leads to the big question, because if you ask why Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears, the larger question looms directly in your path.  Why did Jesus come to earth?  Why was Jesus born into a despised race of an occupied people who were discriminated against and dominated by the Romans?  Could He not have found some easier way to save us from a distance?  In the Middle Ages, Anselm wrote a famous little book, Cur Deus Homo? – Why did God become a man?  You could ask the question a thousand ways: Why was God born in a stable?  Why did God touch the leper?  Why did God talk to the woman at the well?  Why did God put His fingers in the deaf man’s ears and put spittle on his tongue?

The answer has to do with the very nature of the Trinitarian God of Christian faith.  The great distinctiveness of the Christian faith is that God has drawn near to us in the person of Jesus Christ.  The gospel is about intimacy and relationship with God.  It is about the nature of God as a relational God.  Christianity alone of all the religions in the world proclaims the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity, or Tri-unity.  One God – one divine essence – but known to us in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  That means that God is a relational God – it is integral to who He is!  There are intimacies even within the Godhead.  As the Puritans said of the Trinity, “God in Himself is a sweet society.”

Mark’s gospel doesn’t point us to the abstract god of the philosophers.  We are not peeking in on Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.  This is the God-Man, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh.  This is God like we have never seen Him, and man like we have never known – fully God and fully man, without confusion, without compromise.  “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” John declares.  Literally, the Greek in John 1:14 says, the Word became flesh and tabernacled – or set His tent up – among us.  It is a picture of God coming into the desert of Israel’s wilderness wanderings, into our barrenness and the ragged edges of our parched existence.  This is one of the great themes of Mark’s gospel: Christ coming to where we are.  God comes out to us, even though we live in the exile of sin and condemnation.  Since the time of the Fall, we have lived in exile, away from God’s immediate presence and His divine favor. But now, in Jesus Christ, God comes to us and touches our broken humanity.  When we see Jesus touching a leper, or putting his fingers into a deaf man’s ears, we should not merely see God’s compassion on those special few with extraordinary maladies.  Rather, we should see ourselves in each of these pictures because, in our own way, we all bear the marks and signs of the crippling effects of the Fall.

In the touching of the deaf and mute man, then, we are learning something about what God is like in His very inner nature.  In the process, we should be challenged to the core about what it means to be called a Christian.  In the miracle of Jesus putting His fingers in the deaf man’s ears and touching his stammering tongue with spittle, the whole of the Christian gospel is present in seed form.  While we live in an increasingly remote world, one in which nobody wants to be bothered getting their hands dirty with other people’s problems.  We serve a God who sinks His hands deep into the filth of our world in order to heal us.

What has become more ubiquitous in our society than the many remote control devices which fill our lives?  We have remotes for our garage doors, our televisions, our stereos, and so forth.  These devices save us from getting up off the sofa or getting out of our car into the rain.  By extension, couldn’t God have thought of a way to save us while remaining in the remote safety and bliss of heaven?  To do this, however, would have been a denial of Himself.  In Jesus Christ, we are learning that there is nothing remote about God.  God has always been about drawing near, rolling up his sleeves and getting His hands dirty in our world, touching us in our brokenness.

Ultimately, the ministry of the church must be lived out in this context.  We often want to carry on ministry from a distance.  We  think, Why set up a food kitchen to feed the hungry when we can just write a check for it?  Or, Why send one of our own children onto the mission field when we can just stay back and send a check to someone else who is willing to go?  This kind of reasoning falls short of the full dignity of our Christian work in the world.  The reason is because we serve a God who became a part of our world, touching our brokenness and putting His fingers in our ears.  We serve a God who was willing to get his hands dirty in this world.  Jesus did not love us remotely.  Jesus, the Great Physician, has made a “house call” on the human race!  Our condition required a house call.   There are people all over the world who will not be healed unless you pay them a house call.  Christ calls us to get our hands dirty in the world because that is what He did.  We are to bring the life and light of Jesus to places of darkness and pain.

When Jesus healed the deaf-mute man, Mark records that Jesus sighed deeply, and cried out in Aramaic, “Ephphatha!”  This is an Aramaic word which means “be opened.”  In  this intimate moment, Mark does not want to mediate the words of Jesus by giving it to his readers in translation.  Instead, we are hearing the very word Jesus spoke – Ephphatha!  It is one more attempt by Mark to draw us into the intimacy of this encounter.

When those gathered saw the deaf-mute man speaking clearly and able to hear, the text tells us that they were “overwhelmed with amazement.”  Then they declared, “He has done everything well!”  Why did they say this?  He had healed one man.  It is, of course, remarkable, but is it grounds for declaring that He does everything well?  Why did they say this?  The reason flows directly from the passage.  Any God who would come down from heaven, become incarnate in human flesh, be born into a despised race, and stick his fingers into a deaf-mute man’s ears, will do everything well.  In the healing of the deaf-mute man, the entire incarnation, and indeed the whole nature of God, is present in seed form.  In the same way, every act of compassion, every act of grace, every deed which we do in the name of Christ is a re-enactment on a tiny scale of the incarnation; for in every authentically Christian act, the incarnation is again proclaimed: God is still coming near through His Spirit in the people of God.  This ennobles all Christian activity in the world.  When the world sees our lives and we let His light shine through us, they will declare afresh in our own day, “He does everything well.”

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This Sunday is the Sunday when the church around the world remembers the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ.  It marks the last Sunday in the season of Epiphany.  Epiphany is the more neglected of the seasons of the church year.  Everyone seems to know about Advent, Lent, Pentecost, but poor Epiphany seems to draw empty stares.  But, not at Asbury – we believe in joining Jesus each year as we circumambulate around the year, remembering the life of Jesus from prophetic promise (Advent) to birth (Christmas) to manifestation (Epiphany) to ministry leading to passion (Lent) and Resurrection (Easter) and the coming of the Spirit (Pentecost).

Epiphany means the great manifestation or appearing, referring to the magnitude of God’s revelation to the world in the coming of Jesus… for God so loved the world that He gave…  Even the early church was in awe that Gentile kings – magi from the East – came and laid gifts at the feet of Jesus.  Unlike our modern celebration which telescopes the coming of the Magi into the Christmas narrative, the biblical text in Matthew (which, by the way, is the only gospel that records the visit of the Magi), makes it clear that the Magi did not come to the manger.  The saw the star at the birth, but by the time the magi make the long journey to Bethlehem Jesus is probably 1 or 2 years old, a small child living in a house (Matt. 2:11), not in the manger.  The early Christians understood this and wisely separated the celebration of the birth (Dec. 25) from the celebration of the Epiphany (Jan. 6).  That is the date we celebrate Jesus’ revelation to the Gentile world – the nations streaming to Jesus in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Isaiah 60:3, “nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”  The season of Epiphany runs from the manifestation of Jesus to the Gentile world all the way to the Transfiguration, another one of the great manifestation moments in the NT and it is here that our text resides today.

On the eve of the passion, the gospels remind us in the Transfiguration that even in His humiliation, He is the exalted One.  The eternal Son of God, who came from the bosom of the father and walked among us in meekness and in humility, this Jesus Christ did not leave behind his deity when he walked among us, He only veiled it.  But here, in this text, the veil is dropped for a moment and we, along with the disciples, catch a glimpse not only of His own divine dignity, but even something of the inner life of the Trinity…. it was one of the unforgettable experiences of the disciples and something which makes us stand back in awe and reminds us why you as Trustees, faculty and staff have given yourselves to support the ministry of Asbury Theological Seminary and why you as students are here to be equipped to be his faithful ambassadors into the world.

The memory of the Transfiguration spills out into the entire New Testament.  The account is recorded in Mathew, Mark and Luke, but even John alludes to it in his gospel.  You may recall that it is the Apostle John who declares in those opening words to his gospel in an almost certain reference to the Transfiguration, he says, “we have seen His glory.” (John 1:14)… It is John’s way of saying, our forefathers in the wilderness saw the Shekinah glory – the cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night… it is what led them through the wilderness…they testified to that glory… we thought that glory would never return to guide the people of God through the wilderness of our own making… but now we see that even that Shekinah glory was a mere shadow compared to what we have seen… “we have seen His glory….”  This glory will lead us out of a much more profound wilderness… not just the desert, rocks and barrenness of the Sinai… but the wilderness of our sin – the barrenness of our lives without  God, as we are wandering about without God or without hope in the world – Christ comes to us and leads us to a far greater promised land than the Israelites could ever have imagined.

Peter alludes to the Transfiguration in his epistles.  This is what Peter is talking about in his 2^nd epistle:

We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.  For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, ‘This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased.”  We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.” (2 Peter 1:16-18).

Peter is saying, I know our proclamation about Jesus seems incredulous… Jesus – fully God and fully man -  but we are eyewitnesses… we have seen His majesty…. on the mountain, the veil was lifted for a moment… the curtain was drawn back and we saw His majesty – Even the mountain was made sacred by it… he calls the Mt. of Transfiguration the sacred mountain.  … They saw Moses and Elijah… and they heard the commendation from heaven… “This is my Son, whom I love…listen to Him.”

Let me try to put this account into its context in Mark’s gospel. We are at the turning point in Mark’s gospel where he records three times Jesus predicting that He must suffer.  It occurs in Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31 and Mark 10:33  – it occurs with almost identical wording in each of the times Jesus talks with his disciples:

“The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and then he must be killed and after three days rise again.”

He is preparing the disciples for His rejection, His passion and suffering and the horror of His crucifixion.  The declarations of His coming are alternately juxtaposed between manifestations of His glory:

Messianic Glory:

Peter’s confession of Christ.. thou art the Christ….  1^st prediction of suffering (8:31)

Transfiguration                                      ….       2^nd prediction of suffering (9:31)

His power and wisdom: Ministry of miracles and teaching  …  3^rd prediction of suffering (10:33)

Even in His humiliation, He is the exalted One.

The inner circle of disciples, Peter, James and John accompany Jesus to a High Mountain.  Any good Jew hearing these words about Jesus going up a high mountain would have brought to mind images of Moses going up on the Mountain  – Mt. Sinai – He or she would be remember about the amazing Shekinah glory which Moses entered into on the Mountain.  That glory was so bright that Exodus 34 tells us that Moses’ faced glowed  when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the stone tablets… the Ten Commandments- his face was radiant.. (Exodus 34:30).  He had to cover it with a veil lest the people be afraid of Moses.

The Apostle Paul later uses this imagery to describe the glory which should appear in the face of every Christian – as you reflect Christ into the world… we with unveiled faces reflect the glory of Christ and – Paul even uses the word – as we spend time with Jesus we are ‘transformed’ or ‘transfigured’.

Like Moses, Jesus also goes up onto the mountain… But unlike Moses, Jesus does not reflect anyone else’s radiance…We are like the moon – we may reflect some light from the sun – but He is the source of light and life. He is not a mirror… He is the source of the glory.   He is the radiance of God… the true radiance of Jesus manifest itself on the mountain… the Shekinah Glory begins to spill out.

“He was transfigured before them.”   Peter, James and John were eyewitnesses of this.  Jesus became so bright, they grasped for some analogy that people would understand.  They said it was whiter and brighter than when you bleach your clothes… it is such a crude analogy, it is another one of the great signs that it is based on an eye witness account.  These are real people trying to describe something for which there are no categories….  bleaching your clothes was the whitest thing they knew in the ancient world

The disciples are overwhelmed and the text keeps building, because if it was just the transfiguration that would have been enough to talk about for the rest of your life, but there are actually three parts to the transfiguration… first the manifestation of the shekinah glory… but right on the heels of that comes the second wave of the Transfiguration… the appearance of Moses and Elijah.

This is, indeed, a remarkable event…why Elijah and Moses?  Why not Abraham?  Why not Isaiah?  Why not two angels as with the resurrection?  Why Elijah and Moses?  This is not some haphazard choice… the Lord didn’t look around heaven and say, ‘who is available today’ – no, these two and no other were chosen…  why?

Moses, was the one who ascended that other mountain, Mt. Sinai – Moses is the one who first saw a glimpse of the shekinah glory in the burning bush… Moses is the one who led the Israelites out of their Egyptian bondage and to the promised land…. but most importantly, Moses was the one who gave them the Law – the Ten commandments which summarized the Law and the expansion and application of those ten in the entire structure of the Jewish law.  Every Jew worth their salt would know that Moses represents the Law…. In Moses, the entire Jewish Law is embodied and in Moses the Law is coming to pay homage to Jesus who finally fulfills and completes the Law.

Elijah you will recall from the OT did not have an ordinary death.  At the end of his incredible ministry he was caught up in a whirlwind… chariot of fire and horses of fire (2 Kings 2:11, 12) – It is the Shekinah glory again… the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night…. Elijah was caught up in that glory and transported directly to heaven -  there is nothing quite like it – the closest thing would be Enoch… this was a dramatic departure.  Just as Moses stands at the head of the Law, Elijah, in Jewish reflection, came to symbolize and represent all the Prophets.  All the prophets who came after Elijah acknowledge his uniqueness and his importance –  – echoes in John the Baptist’s question, “are you Elijah?” the belief was that somehow Elijah would return and testify to the Messiah…and certify that the Messiah fulfilled all the Messianic expectations.

Do you remember how the entire Old Testament ends… everybody knows how the OT begins… “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” but do you remember how the OT ends?

“See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the Lord.  He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I strike the land with a curse.” – Malachi 4:5

This why they keeping asking John the Baptist when he begins his prophetic ministry after a 420 year gap of prophetic silence…. between Malachi and John the Baptist… they ask him repeatedly, “are you Elijah?”

Elijah represents the Prophets.  So in Elijah all the Prophets are symbolically on the mountain. So in Moses and Elijah we have the entire OT – the Law and the Prophets symbolically present to worship and acknowledge that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets.

So we have now had two major experiences on the mountain…. the transfiguration of Jesus revealing His divine majesty through the Shekinah  Glory, the appearance of the two seminal figures of the OT…the third is yet to come…but the disciples are overwhelmed and they begin to talk nonsense.

They suggest that they erect three shelters – one for Jesus, one for Elijah and one for Moses…   they erected shelters in the wilderness… this is totally out of place…and the text acknowledges that they were speaking nonsense.  But to this day, we so much want to capture God’s presence in a building or a structure or a denomination or a bureaucracy – we want to manage God’s presence….  Jesus will have none of that… but before they have time to fully absorb the foolishness of their suggestion, the third and final part of this experience occurs… they are suddenly enveloped in the cloud of God’s glory.

They heard the divine voice:  This is My Son, whom I love.  Listen to Him!

It is one of only three times that the Father speaks audibly from heaven to Jesus during his earthly ministry… but this is the most dramatic.  It not only is a specific fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy that God would raise up a prophet like him from their own midst and “you must listen to Him”… the Father says, “listen to Him.”  Much can be made of that… but, more importantly, it reveals something of the inner life of the Triune God.  The love of the Father towards His eternal Son, Jesus Christ…  One of the fundamental truths which separates Christianity from all other religions is that we believe that God by nature is relational.  There is love and community and affection even within the Godhead.

Finally, the disciples look up and the text says, profoundly, that they see only Jesus.  This is our passion for our students here at Asbury… that they would graduate and look only unto Jesus.  We may assist you, we may plant some seeds, we may water, but God causes the growth… look only unto Jesus.  Jesus has fulfilled and taken over all of the cherished signs of the OT covenant.  All the “pearls of great price” which they leaned on, the law, the temple, the prophets, the messiahship, the kingship, the city of Jerusalem, the prophets, the covenant…all of those wonderful pearls must be traded in for the one pearl of great price, Jesus Christ.  He fulfills and completes all other signs… there is no need for any of the other.  You no longer need the temple, or a king, or a fiery cloud… we have Jesus Christ.  Amen.

The title of this reflection is “The God Who Passes Us By.”  This is the kind of title which may cause a few readers to move quickly on to the next chapter.  However, this particular passage falls into a category of miracles in the New Testament of which there are very few examples.  Indeed, this is outside of everything we normally think of when we think about the function of miracles in the New Testament.

This is the account of Jesus walking on the water.  The question which I want to pose is this:  Why did Jesus walk on the water?  The disciples are out on the Sea of Galilee struggling and rowing against the wind.  Did He walk across the sea because He saw the disciples were in need and He was coming to help them?  If so, this miracle may be just another example of Jesus exercising His divine authority over creation on behalf of His children.  But is that why Jesus went out onto the water?   Why did Jesus go out to them on this particular occasion?   What was Jesus seeking to demonstrate by walking on the water?  If you carefully read this passage there is a little phrase in Mark’s account which might be easy to miss, but is extremely important.  Mark records the phrase, “He was about to pass by them… when the disciples saw him walking on the water…”   It is this phrase, “He was about to pass by them” which I want us to reflect on more deeply.  Peter, who was an eye-witness of this miracle, remembered that Jesus did not walk out on the water directly to them.  Rather, Jesus was actually walking past them when they spotted Him.  If Jesus was about to pass by them, then his primary purpose was not coming directly out to help the disciples in the midst of their crisis.

This, I think, is why this is a difficult miracle for modern readers to understand and appreciate.  We cannot imagine a miracle which is not in some way “for us.”  When Jesus touches lepers, restores sight to the blind, or heals the lame, we all understand that these are examples of divine miracles on our behalf.  All of these miracles are about God in Jesus Christ coming directly to us and ministering to us in our needs. Certainly we have seen over and over again in these reflections on Mark’s gospel how God in Jesus Christ has taken the initiative to come out to us.  After all, isn’t that what lies at the heart of the incarnation?  The incarnation is about God coming into our midst to live on our terms.  God in Jesus Christ becomes the greatest missionary of all time, bridging the great barrier between divinity and humanity to rescue us and save us and redeem us.

However, this passage brings out another point which we need to hear.  On either side of this passage Jesus is found feeding the 5,000 (6:30-42) and healing the sick at Gennesaret (6:53-56).  Yet, in the midst of these passages where God in Jesus Christ is healing us and meeting our needs, we catch a glimpse of the inner life of Jesus Christ apart from us.  We catch a glimpse into the mystery of God apart from us.  In the study of theology, this is known as the aseity of God.  It refers to God as He is in Himself, independent from us.  It was Job who declared, “He treads on the waves of the sea.”  Job, as much as any writer in the Old Testament, understood through his own trials and sufferings that God is unfolding purposes much bigger than us, and far grander than the limits of our imaginations.

The Jewish people identified the sea with the primordial chaos out of which the world was brought into order by the creative act of God.  The sea is a symbol of chaos.  This whole miracle is surrounded by the chaos of the Fall.   Before and after this passage we find people who are sick, ill and oppressed by demons.  Mark does not shy away from giving us a full glimpse into the horrible plight of the human race.  But Jesus is not consumed by these tragedies or by the enormity of the Fall.  He was about to pass by them because this miracle was not about them.  It was much grander than that.  Jesus was asserting His very reason for coming to earth at all.   He was asserting His divine prerogative over the weight of human sin, the Fall, and the chaos of our existence.  To walk on the water or, to use the words of Job, to “tread on the waves of the sea” is to demonstrate Jesus’ authority over the entire chaos of human existence.

Sometimes things happen in our lives which we do not understand.  Our prayers seem to go unanswered.  God does things which don’t seem to make sense.  Sometimes when we expect him to come directly to us, we find that He is treading on something else which we don’t understand.  Sometimes God appears to be passing by us.  However, in those times, we should remember that God is unfolding a plan which is greater than anything we can imagine.  In the end, Jesus did come to his disciples.  He did calm their fears.   He did speak his word to them.  However, the real lesson which Mark conveys to us is that God is much bigger than the disciples’ fears.  He is unfolding a plan much bigger than anything we can imagine.  So, learn to wait upon the Lord.  Be patient.  Know that God is unfolding His plan in His own time, and in His own way.  We can trust that when the canvas is fully pulled back and we see the full workings of God in our lives and in the world, we will see that even when God seemed to be absent, or silent, He was working powerfully on our behalf.

This text in Mark, as much as any, helps us to see this point by showing us precisely who Jesus is.  The text begins with a well known and respected synagogue ruler known as Jarius coming and requesting that Jesus lay hands on his twelve year old daughter who is gravely ill.  For those of us who have children, we can identify with the desperation and anxiety which must have filled the heart of this man.  This man was a ruler in the synagogue, so he had to be aware that he was risking his name and reputation by coming to make this request of Jesus.

On his way to the home of Jarius, Jesus got caught in the midst of a great crowd, pushing and shoving.  In a crowd of this size, there must have been dozens of people who were suffering and in need of the touch of Jesus, but Mark highlights one woman of faith.  This woman is in almost every respect the opposite of Jarius.  He is an important official and he has a respected name and religious pedigree.  We do not know the name of this woman;  she has no status or title.  All we know is that she had been suffering from a hemorrhage of blood for the last twelve years.  This meant that, as a perpetually unclean woman, she would not be granted access to the Temple.  She could not engage in worship.  She could not speak with a priest.  She could not offer the appropriate sacrifices.  In short, she was effectively cut off from God in any way that could possibly be understood in the world of first century Judaism.  Despite her great need, she had no access to God, temple, priest or healing.

But, as we discovered in chapter four of our study, the Lord Jesus Christ is the New Temple.  Everything in the Jewish system is fulfilled in Jesus Christ.  He is the Temple.  He fulfills the priesthood.  He is the fulfillment of the Law.  He is the Final Sacrifice.  Jesus fulfills everything that was held sacred by the Old Covenant:  the Law, the Priesthood, the sacrificial system, the Temple – all of it was being fulfilled in Jesus.  Though this woman was shut out and couldn’t go to the Temple, in Jesus Christ the Temple was coming to her!!

This afflicted woman saw that Jesus was passing by, and she decided to risk it and reach out and touch the hem of his garment.  She knew that the Law forbade her from interacting with, or touching, a ritually clean Jew.  But, she thought, if I can touch the hem of his garment, I just might be healed.  Remember, the Jewish view of holiness was that if someone unclean touched something or someone clean, it made the clean thing or person unclean.  It never happened in reverse.  When anything unclean touches something clean, that clean thing becomes unclean, never the other way around.  In this interaction, however, something different is happening, something we saw earlier when Jesus encountered the leper.  When this unclean woman touches Jesus, she becomes clean!  Just as sickness fled from Jesus’ life, so uncleanliness flees from His purity.  The woman touches just the hem of His robe, and cleanliness floods through her body and heals her.

So, there are two people in this passage who are reaching out to Jesus in faith:  a well known, named, and respected synagogue ruler named Jarius, and an unknown and unnamed woman who was ritually unclean and banned from the Temple.  This woman risked her dignity and the anonymity of her suffering by touching the hem of Jesus’ garment.  To the amazement of the disciples, Jesus instantly stops and asks, “Who touched me?”  The disciples are aghast at this question.  “Lord, you see the crowd pressing against you and yet you ask, who touched me?”  You see, for most of us life is just a bunch of accidental contacts.  We push and shove our way through life, but Jesus was the most sensitive man who ever lived.  He knew when someone reached out in faith to touch him.

The disciples had a singular view of the mission of Jesus:  Get to Jarius’ house.  They didn’t want any interruptions.  However, Jesus was a man who never minded being interrupted.  He did not run to Jairus’ house.  He wasn’t in a big hurry.  He continued walking.  There is a book by a Latin American Christian entitled, “The Three Mile Per Hour God.”  The thrust of the book is that the reason most of us miss the Lord in our daily lives is that we are running and dashing through life while God is moving at three miles per hour, which is the pace of walking.  We are commanded in Scripture to “walk” with God.  Jesus walked through the world.  It is amazing to realize that Jesus accomplished the redemption of the entire world at three miles per hour.  Jesus said to the woman, “Daughter, your faith has healed you.  Go in peace and be freed from your suffering!”  By this time, Jairus’ daughter was already dead.  About the time this woman was receiving new life, the 12-year old girl was losing her battle.  But Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life.  Even death itself flees from His life.  He took the dead girl by the hand, and the text retains the very language of Jesus as He spoke to her in Aramaic: “Talitha Koum” which means, “Little girl, get up.”  Immediately death fled from her and, like the woman with the hemorrhage of blood, life fled into her.

Make a point of slowing your pace down so you can be sensitive to the pain of those around you.  You will find that great things can be accomplished at three miles per hour!  The world is full of people who feel shut out from the presence of God.  They feel they have no access to healing, hope or salvation.  If we slow down enough to allow them to touch us, we will find that Christ will still extend his healing power and gracious salvation through us to those in need.

The earlier text in Mark 4 is the account of Jesus and His disciples on the Sea of Galilee in the midst of a great storm.  The text tells us that Jesus is asleep in the midst of a great storm which emerged on the Sea of Galilee.  When you step back and look at the entire Gospel of Mark up to this point you see that, in fact, Jesus is asleep in the midst of several storms.  This makes Jesus’ calmness, and indeed his slumber, in the midst of these storms even more remarkable.  Before we reflect on Jesus calming the storm, it is important first to appreciate His calmness in the storm.  In fact, to be true to Mark’s gospel we should say, His calmness in the storms (plural).  What are these storms?  There is the obvious storm on the Sea of Galilee – fierce squalls which would appear suddenly on this Sea and could be quite violent.  As you step back and look at the larger context in which Mark has placed this story, however, you are struck by other storms surrounding Jesus.  Mark, more than any other Gospel writer, very quickly unveils the opposition which Jesus faces.   He delivers it at a relentless speed and pace.  In chapter one of Mark’s gospel we find that the forces of evil are arrayed against Jesus and He is challenged by an evil spirit.  In chapter two we hear how the Pharisees and the teachers of the law are already grumbling against Jesus.  In chapter three Mark records that the Pharisees and the Herodians (traditional enemies of one another) were already conspiring together, plotting how they might kill Jesus.  The whole movement of these early chapters seems to reach a climax where, in chapter four, Jesus is actually going to die by a powerful storm in the midst of the Sea.   Everything seems to be moving and conspiring to destroy Jesus: The hosts of hell, evil spirits, Pharisees, teachers of the Law, Herodians, and now, even creation itself.  Yet, in the midst of these storms, Jesus is asleep in the back of the boat!

As the storm rages, the disciples glance furtively at the storm and back at Jesus again.  They are incredulous that anyone could possible sleep through this.  But there He is, at rest.  Finally, as the storm reaches a fevered pitch, they agree they must awaken him.  They awaken him, and the whole thrust of these early chapters – as they have encountered storm after storm – finally finds voice through one of the disciples who asks, “Master, don’t you care that we are going to perish?”

Sometimes we feel like this, don’t we?  We may feel at times that the Lord doesn’t care that we are about to be destroyed, or that we are overwhelmed by the storms of life.  However, Jesus does not jump up out of his sleep in a panic, offering an apology for sleeping before calming the sea.  No, Jesus wakes up in perfect calm and peace.  Jesus has no fear, either for his own life, or for the lives of his disciples.  Here we meet one of the profound truths of the gospel: The indestructibility of Christ!  Despite the storms of opposition which rage around Him, Jesus is not worried. Jesus is not full of anxiety.  The reason is because Jesus is indestructible.  This is stated quite clearly on the eve of his passion when Jesus declares in John 10:18: “No man takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord.”  Jesus is in complete control.  The hosts of hell, the religious leaders, the Herodians, the Judaizers, and the Romans all conspire together and eventually nail Jesus to a cross.  But three days later He is risen and His divine work on behalf of the human race continues to unfold.

Much of the activity in the church is carefully calibrated towards our self-preservation.  We are fearful for the demise of the church, so we work to preserve it.  We spend a great deal of effort worrying about and managing our own survival.  As long as the church stays united to Jesus Christ, however, we share in His indestructibility.  The church has no fear of demise.  God has an eternal plan for the church, and it will be preserved throughout the annals of time.  Jesus  promised this himself in Matthew 16:18.  The church is indestructible because it is united to an indestructible Christ!  This assurance is, of course, not granted to any particular church institution or church bureaucracy.  Denominations come and go.  That is not the point.  The point is that the true church will always be those who remain united to Christ.  The gospel advances and the church is strengthened not because of better techniques or clever schemes.   The church is preserved and strengthened through its union with Christ.  In the church’s infancy, it was so small that the entire church could fit into a single small boat.  They were all there, and they were caught up in a great storm.  But never has the church been more secure than that day, for in the midst of an array of storms, the disciples caught a glimpse of the indestructibility of Christ!

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The image above is “Peace, be still” by HE Qi

You see, we often forget that throughout the history of the church this Parable has never been called the Parable of the Soils.  It has always been known as the Parable of the Sower!  We are so eager to make ourselves the subject of every parable, that we often miss the point of a parable like this.  This parable is giving us insight into God’s nature as much as it is into our own nature.  If you read the parable and keep your eye on the sower, how does that change your reading of the parable?  What should strike us is how extravagant, even wasteful, the sower seems to be.  This sower never gives up, sowing even on the rockiest soils and the hardest hearts.

All through the Bible you find examples of people who did not respond to God’s call without the persistence of God in their lives. Moses started his career as a murderer, but God kept working on his life through 40 years in the Midian desert until he could be used in the way God wanted to use him.  The Apostle Paul began his life as Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of the church, but God persisted in His call upon Saul’s life until he was turned around.  This parable is about the extravagance of God’s grace.  In the Wesleyan tradition, we call it prevenient grace – a measure of grace that has been sown into everyone’s life.  God’s call to salvation is not like one of those smart bombs that flies through the air, making precise turns, deftly avoiding all the hard-hearted people, veering away from all the thorny-hearted people, and steering clear of all the shallow people in order to zero in on the ready, receptive hearts.  God’s grace is extravagantly poured out.  His call is like a Sower who scatters deep handfuls of seeds on rocky paths and weed-ridden soils.  He lavishly pours out His Word on all people, knowing that at various times in all of our lives we cannot hear it, and sometimes we won’t hear it for long, and sometimes we will hear it but quickly lose it.  But sometimes, praise God, we hear it and bear fruit!  All the while the Word keeps coming because God keeps sowing.  Even though there is nothing more valuable or precious than the Word of God, He is extravagant, even wasteful by our standards, in the way that He sows.  We as Americans are so programmed to be efficient and practical that this picture is hard for us to understand.  We often don’t embrace or reflect the extravagance of God in our sowing of His Word in the world.

Missionaries who work among Muslims often go years without seeing a single person come to faith.  They work year after year building relationships, sharing and praying, but often see little fruit.  If the church were to judge such ministries on the basis of “efficiency” and “return on investment” it would surely seem a poor use of God’s servants and a waste of hard earned resources.  But God does not see it this way!  The missionary who continues to throw seed on what appears, at the moment, to be hard, rocky soil is merely reflecting the extravagance of the Divine Sower.  Church growth is, of course, a wonderful thing. However, faithfulness to God and His Word cannot be judged merely by whether a church is growing or not.  The key is to be a faithful sower; God will take care of the harvest.  After all, He is the Lord of the harvest!

In Christ, God sows His salvation extravagantly and offers it to the hard-hearted and the receptive alike.  The Devil will always try to snatch away God’s seed.  He will try to choke it out.  But we must see beyond our own hearts, and even beyond the work of Satan, and keep our eyes on the extravagant Sower.  Someday, at the end of time, we will all be able to look back and see the full story of human history.  We will be able to look back and see God’s amazing interventions in the human race.  We will also be able to look back and see the full extent of Satan’s wicked opposition to God’s rule in the world.  However, the overall testimony of that final day will be about the extravagance of God’s sowing in the world.  We will see clearly that His sowing has been more consistent than the Devil’s snatching!  His sowing has been more powerful than the Devil’s eating!  His sowing has been more enduring that the Devil’s tribulation!  His sowing has been more consistent than the Devil’s choking!  May we learn to live in the light of this reality.  Make it your ambition to sow extravagantly into the lives of everyone you meet.  This is how we will live if we always keep our eyes fixed on the Extravagant Sower!

The Sabbath is interwoven into the very fabric of creation itself.  At the dawn of creation, God established the Sabbath when He rested on the seventh day.  When the Scriptures say that God rested, it certainly does not mean that God was exhausted or tired after creating the world.  It is impossible for God to be tired or to need rest.  Sabbath does not mean to rest so much as it means to cease.  God ceased His work in order that He might enjoy a creation of His own making that He called “very good.”  Unlike the other six days of creation which all came to an end, the seventh day was never brought to an end.  It was never intended to end.  The Sabbath was not so much a “day” as a condition – a time to cease and to celebrate God’s rule.  When Adam and Eve rebelled against God’s rule in the Fall, they broke the Sabbath condition and brought the seventh day to an end.  They fell, not just by violating some minor offense, but by shattering the ongoing celebration of God’s rule and reign that lay at the heart of the Garden of Eden.

With this background in mind, there are three important points about the Sabbath that come from this text.  First, the Sabbath is not just about our not doing something.  It is not just about inactivity.  That is the very problem Jesus encountered with the Pharisees in this text, who had made the Sabbath into a legalism of “not doing.”  Instead, the Mosaic law called for the Jews to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.  Moses was not establishing something new, but rather calling us to remember what once was.  It is a weekly reminder that the world today is not as it should be, that we have all been touched by the Fall, and we long for the day when God’s Sabbath reign will be reestablished in the New Creation.  We honor the Sabbath and keep it holy by remembering what the world was like before we messed it up with sin.  We cease from our labors so that we can remember why we work the other six days and recognize that the most important things that happen in our lives are the things that happen through God’s work.

Second, the Sabbath is our weekly opportunity to break our trust in work.  The Pharisees had missed this entirely because they turned their inactivity on the Sabbath into a “work” that they trusted to establish their own self-righteousness.  Jesus makes it clear that the Sabbath is not an obligation which we grudgingly undertake to make God happy.  The Sabbath rest is God’s gift to us.  As verse 27 points out, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”  Jesus is saying that we’ve gotten it turned the wrong way around.  We’ve turned the Sabbath into a law of inactivity which is somehow going to gain us favor before God.  In fact, the Sabbath has little to do with our not working, but with God’s ongoing work in our lives.  It is a day to quit trusting in our works and allow God to work.  The reason we cease from our labors one day of the week is because we need to take time to remember.  It is a weekly reminder of our dependence on God.  For most of us, our work gives us three things: our self worth, our sustenance, and our sense of independence.  The Sabbath reminds us that our self worth comes first and foremost from God, that He is our provider and sustainer, and that we are totally dependent upon Him.  Breaking our weekly trust in work actually enables us to work better and more effectively the other six days because it is now kept in the proper perspective.

Third, the Sabbath is a celebration of the resurrection and the future re-establishment of the Sabbath.  In the Old Testament, the fourth commandment looked backwards at the original creation and how God ceased his work on the seventh day.  In the New Testament, the Christians wisely shifted the focus from the seventh day to the first day of the week, which was the day of the resurrection of Christ.  By doing this, they were looking forward to Christ’s second coming and the New Creation when the Sabbath reign of God will be re-established.  We no longer look back and remember what should have been; instead, we look forward and eagerly await the new heavens and the new earth.  In Christ, we see the in-breaking of these future realities and a foretaste of the health and wholeness and full reign of the Kingdom that is to come.  The man with the withered hand who comes forward in this passage is a picture of all of us, crippled by the Fall and withering away because of sin.  When Jesus heals him, He is not breaking the Sabbath.  Rather, the Sabbath is breaking into this man’s life!   Whenever Christ moves in our lives, He’s inbreaking into our lives with a glimpse of the true Sabbath!  He’s giving us a glimpse of what life under God’s Sabbath reign is like, the true rule of God where sin and decay have no hold.  Jesus embodies the very essence of what Sabbath is – the rule and reign of God perfectly demonstrated in the life of the Son of God.  A whole new life is present in the person of Jesus, a life that reverses death and decay, a life that gives a foretaste and a glimpse of what God’s rule is like.

Unfortunately, the Pharisees miss this altogether.  All they can see is that Jesus is breaking their legalistic rules of what should and should not be done on the Sabbath.  This is one of the few times in the New Testament which records that Jesus was angry.  His was not the kind of sinful anger which we have, but rather a true righteous anger that the Pharisees have so blindly missed the very point of the Sabbath.  It is not a day to get lost in a legalistic debate about what constitutes work, but rather a day to celebrate God doing that which we cannot do.  It is a day to regain proper perspective on our lives, and thus carry that perspective into the work of the days ahead.  It is a day to celebrate God’s reign and rule in the world, and to look forward to the consummation of that reality.  While the Pharisees were lost in their web of regulations and requirements for the Sabbath, they missed what was right in front of their eyes: the very embodiment of the Sabbath of God, the inbreaking of that great reality which they, as the religious leaders, should have been seeking.  They missed the Lord of the Sabbath Himself.

As this second chapter opens, Mark surprises us further by the radical nature of Jesus’ response to the paralytic man.  As the man is being lowered down in the midst of a crowded and packed room, everyone present looks up and sees the man’s paralysis – that is how we see.  But Jesus looks up and sees faith.  He sees as God sees.  And then Jesus speaks as only God can speak: “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  The teachers of the law who are present at once recognize the significance of this utterance.  “Why does this fellow talk like this?  He’s blaspheming!  Who can forgive sins but God alone?”  Even out of the lips of Jesus’ opponents, the gospel is being proclaimed – indeed, who can forgive sins but God alone?

Now when someone offends you or me, we can say “I forgive you” because the offense has been against us.  We understand this way of thinking and speaking.  But we cannot speak a word of forgiveness on behalf of someone else – the offended person must be the forgiving agent.  Now, Jesus has never met this man before, and yet He speaks as though He is the offended party.  This man’s sins are against God, and Jesus speaks in the place of God with the words, “I forgive you.”  Jesus is speaking with authority the word of forgiveness as only God, the offended party, can speak.  Jesus is forgiving as only God can forgive.  He has the authority to forgive sins, which no human being has.  This is why the religious leaders were right in saying that this was blasphemous – unless, of course, Jesus is indeed God.

It is interesting to note that in John 20:22-23, Jesus breathes upon his disciples to receive the Holy Spirit, and then pronounces, “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”  Jesus is giving the church the authority to announce His forgiveness in the lives of those who come to Him in faith.  We do not have the innate ability to forgive anyone’s sins against God, or to withhold God’s forgiveness of sins from anybody.  But Jesus has given the church the authority to act as His regents or representatives in the world, and to speak on His behalf.  We can declare that “God forgives you” with all the authority of Jesus, because we are not declaring our forgiveness, but rather His forgiveness in Christ.  We are merely pronouncing the forgiveness made possible by the sacrifice of Christ.  If someone repents of their sins and trusts in Jesus, the church can say with full authority, “You are forgiven,” and the Father in heaven will honor that.  If, on the other hand, someone refuses to believe the gospel and repent of their sins, the church has the authority to say “Your sins are not forgiven.”  It is upon the authority of Jesus Christ Himself who is the very regent of the Father, and who has commissioned us to be His representatives in the world, that we are able to say, “Your sins are forgiven.”  This great doctrine of pronouncing forgiveness begins right here in Mark’s gospel – as we witness Jesus Himself having the authority and power  to forgive sins, even as the Father forgives.  Jesus forgives as God forgives.

And now we come to the culminating climax of this encounter with Jesus.  There was a religious procedure in Judaism whereby a sinful Jew could go to the Temple, make an appropriate sacrifice before the priest, and hear the words “Your sins are forgiven.”  This was a familiar procedure for the Jews, because the sacrifice took place at the Temple to cover the sin, and the high priest was there as God’s regent to pronounce forgiveness.  But it could only happen at the Temple.  Jesus, however, doesn’t say to the paralytic, as He did to the leper, “Go, and show yourself to the priest.”  He doesn’t say, “Go, and make a sacrifice at the Temple for your sins to be forgiven.”  By simply declaring, “Your sins are forgiven,” Jesus is saying, in effect, “You don’t need to go to the Temple; you are already at the Temple!  You don’t need to go to the High Priest; you are already in the presence of the High Priest!  You don’t need to go to the mercy seat of the altar; you are already at the altar!”  Jesus is the Temple – the place where God’s presence dwelt among humanity.  Jesus is the altar; He is the mercy seat; He is the sacrifice; He is the high priest!  Jesus is saying, “The Temple of God is here in my person.”

This is the main point of the story.  The physical healing of the man afterward serves as an authenticating sign in visible, tangible form that the forgiveness of sins has, indeed, been accomplished.  Which is easier to say: “Your sins are forgiven” or “Be healed, take up your mat and walk”?  Both are overturning the effects of the fall, and bringing forth the rule and reign of God into this man’s life.  But so that we might believe and know that Jesus has the authority on earth to forgive sins (something we cannot see), Jesus gives an authenticating sign that we can see.  And the paralytic “got up, took his mat, and walked out in full view of them all!”  Everyone was amazed – not just because they had seen another miracle of healing, but because that miracle was bearing witness to the forgiveness of sins which only God can give.

In Jesus Christ, the Temple is here!  All the wondrous benefits of the Temple which every devout Jew understood and cherished are now available anywhere in the world where two or more are gathered, because Christ is present.  The church is not merely a gathering of people who look back and remember the wonderful acts of God 2,000 years ago.  The church is an ongoing expression of God’s in-breaking into the world, because Christ has promised to be present by the Holy Spirit whenever the church gathers in His name.  The “Temple” is wherever Christ is, and Christ has promised to be present wherever two or more are gathered in His name.