Uncompromising Facts

1 John 2:22-23

          Sometimes in life, you just have to accept the facts. The facts slap you in the face and you must acknowledge them. There is no getting around them, or explaining them away. They are just there.

          Like the snow in the northeast. At its worst, it was yards deep, burying everything in sight. You could act like it wasn’t there, but you still got nowhere when you try to travel. The fact of the snow stopped you in your tracks. There was nothing you could do to avoid it except stay indoors. And even then, your heating bill at the end of the month told you something was going on outside.

          There are certain uncompromising facts about the character and nature of God that must be accepted. The first one is that He does exist. Acting as though He doesn’t exist won’t make Him go away. He won’t melt when the spring temperatures arrive. He won’t change because we want Him to change.

          Lying about the facts doesn’t change them either. Even if we convince everyone we know to agree with our lie, the facts are still the facts. We can tout the low unemployment rate as a sign of a recovering economy, but that still doesn’t change the fact that more people have stopped looking for work than have found jobs. Fewer people are working! Fact.

          Our text today points out several facts that John’s antagonists try to hide. They lie about the relationship between the Father and the Son. They want to create a less then Jesus. They want either a fully human part God Jesus, or fully God part human one. To deny the essential nature of Jesus is to deny Him.

          But that is not all. Since the Father and Son are both deity, three persons one God, then they end up denying the Father as well. You can’t change the nature of Jesus without changing the nature of the Father. To put it another way, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are a package deal. You either take them all, or you don’t get any. There is no BOGO offer. And you certainly can’t get one free without buying one.

          But if you accept the nature of the Son, you accept the nature of the Father as well. But what does that mean for our relationship with God? For John, and by extension us, denying this truth turns you into a liar and an antichrist. Remember, not all lies have the same consequences. John highlights this lie because the consequences strike at the very heart of the Gospel. If Jesus is not fully God and fully man, then what He did on the cross is much less than redemption. He might as well be a labeled a fool and dismissed. His death means nothing. He was a psychopath who thought He was something He wasn’t, and deceived His followers in the process.

          For John, denying the Son is a death nail to the Gospel. Because you can’t have partial truth, once you get rid of Jesus, you are now believing a lie. But when you accept Jesus, you are believing the Truth. Everything hangs on Jesus.

One in the Crowd

Mark 10:47-48

      Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing the agencies involved poured over thousands of images of the crowd that day trying to find clues about who had left the bombs. They were looking for the one person who had planted the bombs. One face in the crowd. And when they found it, or at least they thought they did, the images were splashed across the media in an attempt to get more help, more images, all in order to identify the suspects more accurately.

       Sometimes there is one person in the crowd who is just annoying. They keep interrupting the flow of an event. Like protestors carrying signs and shouting at a news conference, some people use their voice to get noticed. They yell until they get what they want.

      But this doesn’t always work. In New York city recently there was a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the heart of a Jewish business district. The few dozen protestors soon found themselves surrounded by hundreds of pro-Israel supporters. The protestors didn’t stand a chance. They were soon overcome with supporters shouts.

      A blind man was sitting by the roadside as Jesus and His disciples walked by, along with a crowd. He began to shout to Jesus. He wanted mercy. Mercy is not getting what you do deserve. He wanted Jesus’ intervention in his life. And he wasn’t going to shut up until he got it. The crowd wanted him quiet. They didn’t want his kind of noise erupting and disturbing their peaceful, gentle walk with Jesus.

      This man had determination. He knew there is One who can do something about his blindness, and he is not going to stop until he has his moment with Jesus. He knows mercy is something that can’t be demanded, but he is desperate.

      What is interesting is that this blind man acknowledges Jesus position as the Messiah, the promised one, the heir of David’s throne. He isn’t afraid of what might happen to him if he declares this truth. What could the religious leaders do to him! He was already blind. What is worse than that? He was already at the bottom. He was already at the fringe of society. He was already dependent on others.

       Have you ever been desperate enough to cry out for mercy? Have you ever felt the weight of your sin, or the weight of your situation and wondered if you could ever get out from under it? You felt as if you were being crushed, and you just wanted a little relief.

      Mercy is what you need. Perhaps it is time to request mercy for your opponents instead of justice and punishment. The measure you use will be the measure used on you. Start giving mercy so that you can receive mercy as well.

Fear Driven Silence

Mark 9:30-32

      Have you ever been so afraid of someone’s reaction that you kept silent? You had something to say, but you didn’t say it. You had a need or a want that you wanted to express, but you knew the reaction was not worth the answer. We see this so much in marriages. A person gets tired of asking for help and not getting any. They get tired of reaching toward the other person and not having them reach back. Then they give up trying to reach. Reaching only leads to disappointment and pain. The reaching is replaced with silence.

      I remember in elementary school having questions about the lessons and not asking the question. I didn’t want to look dumb or slow. What the other kids thought about be was important. I moved several times while I was growing up, so I was always trying to figure out how I fit into this new crowd. Where was my place? What could I add to the mix? So asking a question opened up my world of unknowns to the class. They would now know that I didn’t know what they so obviously did know. I now know that there were many others who had learned to be silent when they had questions.

      Jesus has again told His disciples very openly and plainly that His enemies were going to kill Him and then He would rise from death. But they still don’t get it. They are in Jesus’ classroom, but they aren’t willing to raise their hands and ask the question. They all seem to have the same question, but no one asks it.

      I think that Jesus’ plan looked so different from what they understood about the Messiah, that they weren’t able to see the exact fulfillment of those Old Testament Scriptures that had seemed so puzzling before. For centuries the Jewish people had read Isaiah 53 and were puzzled. How could the Messiah suffer? The Messiah is our triumphant hero, so there is not way He could suffer this kind of death. Even today in many Jewish circles Isaiah 53 is puzzling. They have reconciled this puzzle by making the singular person in that text be the whole population of Jews, the Jews collectively.

      For the disciples, the resurrection was totally out of their realm of experience. They had seen Lazarus be raised by Jesus, but Jesus did the raising? Who would raise Jesus? They have questions, but they aren’t willing to ask. The text says that they were afraid.

      Fear can stop us from asking, from reaching, from growing. They feared the unknown response. They didn’t want to seem slow on the uptake. They wanted to blend into the crowd. They wanted to blend in and be a team player. They didn’t want to rock the boat.

      So instead of asking an important question, they get sidetracked onto very unimportant matters. We either deal with the important or our lives become a series of unimportant moments. Which do you want?

Get Up!

Mark 2:8-11

      I would love to know what other people were thinking. But I would also hate it! Unless I was able to turn off the messages, it would drive me nuts. Sometimes people tell us what they are thinking with their faces, or their body language. We can see all sorts of emotions and understand them by being observant. This is how “psychics” and con-artists practice their trade. They have gotten good at reading other people and then they use what they learn to their personal advantage.

      But our text doesn’t say that Jesus saw their faces and knew what they were thinking. It says that Jesus’ spirit knew what they were thinking in the deepest part of them, a part so often hidden from the outside world. He was able to read their hearts. This should not surprise us. God knows all our hearts. He knows the deepest thoughts and intents of our soul. So Jesus knows us as well, just as He knew their thoughts.

      This can be a scary thing! For the religious leaders in Jesus’ day it challenged the very core of their theology. Jesus was not the kind of Messiah they were expecting. They wanted a conquering hero, not a servant, especially one that would suffer and die. They wanted one with military power able to overthrow the oppressive Roman yoke, not one that would take the yoke of sin, freeing us from its tyranny and oppression.

      And Jesus wants to demonstrate His authority over sin. He does this by setting up a simple test. If I can heal this paralyzed man, which you can easily verify with your own senses, then I can also forgive sins. Jesus recognizes that words can be cheap. Anyone can claim authority, but to really have authority you must be able to prove it in actions. Your life must reflect that authority in everyday life. Jesus has proven his authority over physical illness in the past. Mark wants us to know that His authority as the Servant of the LORD goes well beyond physical healing. It reaches to a soul’s eternal destiny.

      Three things Jesus tells the man to do. Each one important. Get up! Without getting up, the healing is not manifest. The action of getting up shows that he is healed. Then he is to take his mat. This marks the transition from the previous life where the mat carried him, to the present life where he carries the mat. And the third action is to go home. This marks the beginning of a new life in God. All three are needed. Leaving the past, embracing the present and moving toward the future.

      Jesus uses the title, Son of Man, to refer to Himself. This is the usual way that Jesus talks about Himself. He uses a title, grammatically in the third person. He doesn’t say “I” am going to do this, but “He” or “the Son of Man” is going to do this. We don’t talk this way too often. But some cultures do talk about themselves as if they were talking about someone else. This is exactly the way Jesus talked about Himself.

      But that’s not all. He uses the title “Son of Man” which is the title for the Messiah in the book of Daniel. Mark records thirteen times when Jesus used this title when referring to Himself, most in the later part of the Gospel, after Peter has declared that Jesus is the Messiah. So not only does Jesus demonstrate that He can heal physical illness, but He makes the connection between Himself and the Messiah of Daniel’s promise and the authority to forgive sins. What a powerful combination of declarations in the healing of this crippled man.

This is Personal

Matthew 16:15

Jesus is a different kind of religious leader. With all the other religions in the world, the focus is on the content of the teaching. With Christianity, the focus is on the person of Jesus. For Jesus and His disciples, it was a personal matter.

Jesus asked His disciples, not what they thought of His teaching, but who they thought He was. These are two very different questions. As I read the Gospels I hear Jesus again and again asking questions that focus the discussion in this direction.

In Matthew 22:41-46 and the parallels in Mark 12:35-37 & Luke 20:41-44, Jesus focuses the religious leaders on this question. They had developed a theology of God that rightly included the Messiah as the one who would come and again make things right. But they had concluded that Messiah was just a human king.

Jesus confronts this belief when He quotes the Old Testament Psalm, and shows that Messiah is more than just a human king. He is more than a descendant of David. David calls him Master, something a father would never say to his descendant. Even the original language of this passage demonstrates clearly that the writer of Psalm 110:1 spoke of someone to whom David was subject in addition to God, someone with whom God communicated.

Jesus invites them to examine more carefully what they believe and why. Jesus says the Messiah is more than just David’s descendent. This Lord is asked to sit at God’s right hand, the position of power and authority. He is told that enemies would be subject to his power. They would be under his feet.

In recent years we in the West have learned that many modern cultures, especially Muslim cultures, have very different standards of insult. A shoe-throwing incident with former President Bush comes to mind. For us a shoe is just a shoe. For them, showing someone the bottom of your feet is a grave insult. As helicopters flew overhead, they were insulted by seeing the bottoms of soldier’s feet hanging out of the aircraft.

This practice goes back into antiquity when defeated enemies were held under the victor’s feet as a way to humiliate them. The leader of the victor group would often place his feet on top of the loosing group’s leader. This is the image used in our passage. Do you remember after Saddam Hussein was defeated and the Iraqi people pulled down his statue and stood on top of it, or trampled his picture with their feet?

The Psalmist says that David’s master will sit at the right hand of the Creator God until his enemies are defeated. And Jesus is recorded as saying that this greater status afforded to Messiah should be given to Him. Jesus’ questioners are silenced.

What status do we afford Jesus? Just a really good guy, or something much more? What else does the Scriptures have to say about the person of Jesus?