April 25, 2021 Easter 4 – God and Christ John 6:41-59

            Many people consider faith and science to be contradictions.  I suppose if you define science as that which can be quantifiably analyzed, and then faith as that which cannot be quantifiably analyzed, then they are indeed contradictions.  But that is a very flawed understanding.  And it completely falls apart when we consider the word “theology.”

            You may remember from language classes you’ve taken that ology is a Greek word and it means the study of, or perhaps the science of.  Theology is then the science of God.  Theology is necessarily a combination of faith and science.

            The problem with the science of God is that God is not given to be scientifically limited and studied – at least not in the same way we could study a rock, or the way air flows over an airplane wing.

            And when we make it specifically Christian theology, then we are indeed in muddy waters.  Over and over again Christian theology ends up with mutually exclusive answers and must answer yes to both.

            That gets frustrating, but many a Christian theologian over the ages has noted that that is indeed one of Christianity’s greatest strengths.  Unlike other religions that seek to understand God and limit God to human logic, Christianity recognizes the limits of human logic straight off.  It’s the classic question of if God can do anything, can then God create a rock so heavy that God can’t lift it?  Of course what you’ve done is invented a bind for the infinite within the finite limits of our own logic.

             Today we look at God and Jesus.  Just saying that is a contradiction in logic.  We say that Jesus is the fullness of God incarnate – or becoming human.  But of course God cannot be two places at the same time – or fully two beings at the same time. 

            Have you ever thought about how strange it is that the Bible records Jesus praying?  To whom is Jesus praying?  Himself?  How does that work?  That stumped early Christians for a long time.  Many said that Jesus could not therefore be fully divine.  He must have had some serious limits – be like a mini-God or a partial God. 

            Now let’s recognize the fullness of the situation.  Among the religions of the world – especially among ancient religions now extinct – much of Christian claims are not unique.  The ancient Greeks had many beliefs about the gods appearing in human form.  Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religions believed in gods or a god being born into human form.

            The idea of a God incarnate is not unique to Christianity.  Neither is it unique to Christianity to say that someone is the son of God.  The Romans made the same claims of their emperors.  A study of the gospel of Luke shows that when Luke says Jesus is the Son of God he is playing on the thoughts and themes of Roman religions.

            What is unique in Christianity is the idea of God coming to live a full lifetime in human form, having that be God’s ultimate revelation of God’s nature, and then dying as an expression of love.  There is where Christianity stands apart.

            But, what of this relationship between God and Jesus?  Or perhaps more specifically God as Father and Jesus?

            No matter what theology leaves us in a bind.  Such a thing does not make sense by human logic or science.  And yet, that is a major image in the Bible.  It is a major image God has used to help our understanding.

            Jesus calls God “Father” and invites us to do the same.  Now no image is perfect.  If your relationship with your father was bad, or maybe non-existent, then the image will give you problems.  John’s gospel does something interesting with that, which I want to come back to.  But the father image on the whole is very significant.

            Remember in those days that children in the family were completely dependent upon the pater familias.  The father even decided if a child would be accepted in the family or not.  Children belonged to their father.  They remained subject to his authority even as adults.  The children were dependent upon the father for food, shelter, clothing, and all of life’s needs.  In families where children might be abandoned they depended on their father for life itself.  Also significant in all of this is that the father gave the child status.  The father’s status was the child’s status.  And the child depended upon the father for any inheritance.

            Though all of those ideas may sound deeply patriarchal in today’s world, I hope you can see why calling God “Father” is a good thing.  We belong to God.  God definitely accepts us into the family.  God provides for us.  God gives us status and identity.  God gives us our inheritance of eternal life.  And in response to it all we remain subject to God’s authority.

            On the whole it is a really good deal!

            We talked about all of this not long ago when we were reading through Mark’s gospel.  I’m not going to expand on it here.  John’s gospel, however, does something very remarkable that I do want to expand upon.

            Theologian Gail O’Day points it out.  In John’s gospel God is referred to as “Father” about the same number of times as God is identified as “the one who sends”.  Now that’s something we don’t think about much.  We’re familiar with the father image.  We’re not too familiar with “the one who sends” image.  Let’s let the full impact of that frequency sink in… God as the one who sends.  Over and over again God is referred to as the one who sends… sends Jesus, and also the Holy Spirit.

            As Christians I think we would do well to spend more of our time recognizing God as the one who sends.

            God as sender, especially of Jesus, reminds us of our relationship with God, or perhaps of God’s relationship with the universe.  Theology tells us that God is bigger than the universe itself.  There is no way we can get to God.  We just can’t.  So God, wanting to be close to creation – wanting to be close to us, comes to us.  In the sending of Jesus God reaches from the infinite and into the finiteness of our own time and place.  I think it is good to imagine God as one who is reaching out with a hug rather than one sitting back with arms crossed in judgment.

            While God sending the Son is an historical event that does not mean God reached out only once.  God is Father and God is one who sends – or One who reaches out.  I believe God reaches out to us over and over again.  God doesn’t reach out to us once and then quit.  No, it is repeatedly.  God does not give up.

            I think every person at some time or another, or perhaps very frequently, feels like God is distant.  We want to feel God but just can’t.  Why this is so I can’t explain.  What is true though is that God will continue to reach out over and over again.  If you can’t feel God now, don’t worry.  Just as often as John’s Gospel calls God “Father” John’s Gospel also calls God the one who sends.  God will be reaching out to you again.  We can live secure in that.

            God as the one who sends Jesus I think is also the one who sends us.  After all, being a Christian is not just being reached out to.  It is being sent out.  We also reach out into the world around us.  We reach out to those we like and those we don’t like.  We do it repeatedly too.  We do it when it is easy.  And we do it when it is hard.  After all, God did not give up on humanity as humanity became increasingly complex and messy.  Think about most of the people Jesus associated with.  They were the “sinners” and tax collectors and outcasts.  Don’t get the image in your mind that as soon as they felt the love of Jesus they reformed their ways and became upstanding citizens.  No, their messiness and brokenness continued.  But Jesus stayed with them.  The same goes for God with us.  And therefore the same goes for us with others.

            God as Father and Son is an impossible combination, but it is true.  The Father sends Jesus to us.  And we are sent out as well.  That is an uncertain adventure.  It is certainly less certain than staying put.  But it is God’s way of reconciling us and the world. 

April 18, 2021 Easter 3 – Truth and Wisdom John 1:1-18

 We read the opening words of John’s gospel a few minutes ago but to start looking at today’s topic of Truth and Wisdom I think it’s helpful to jump to a scene near the end of the gospel.  It’s the scene in chapter 18 where Jesus is being examined by Pilate.  Jesus says, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth…” And Pilate asks him, “What is truth?”

That’s an age-old question and one that’s been pondered by countless philosophers.  Truth is a wonderful concept but one that gets complicated when it meets the real world.  Of course there are very basic truths.  If you put six apples in a basket the truth is there are six apples there.  If I insist there are seven apples there no matter how much I argue and badger there are still six apples there.

I think a lot of people want truth to be that simple.  Many people believe the field of science delivers such simple undeniable truth.  But once you’ve gotten past the most rudimentary science experiments you do in middle school you know that even science doesn’t deliver absolutely clear truths.  When you become more advanced you discover that if you run the same test exactly the same way over and over again you are going to get a variety of answers.  Standard method is to run an experiment often enough to get a statistically valid sample, and that sample will probably look like a bell curve.  The body of your data will suggest a central reality.  But there will always be variety, and there will always be outliers that you just can’t explain.

I suppose the coronavirus vaccines that we are currently using make a great example.  Ask the questions, “Are they safe and effective?” and you could answer, “Yes.”  But are they 100% safe and 100% effective?  No.  Based on widespread testing and field evidence they are some percentage of safe and effective.  We have decided that that percentage is high enough to declare them to be safe and effective.

If you’ve ever done any fact checking on our political leaders to see if they are lying or telling the truth you’ve probably found that what they say may not exactly be an outright lie, but it is the data arranged in such a way as to back up what they want to say.  When was the last time you heard a major political leader say, “I was wrong.  We should have done things my opponent’s way”?

I don’t kid myself into thinking that if I were in government leadership I’d be any better.  Oh, I tell myself I’d be a bit more honest, but I know I’d always be nuancing what I say so that I could weasel out if something blew up in my face.  I think “plausible deniability” is in the thoughts of just about anyone in a leadership position!

And so we know that the truth is not as straightforward as we would hope.

In John 14:6 Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”  And in 8:32 Jesus says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

So what is this truth that Jesus so often talks about?

Well let’s go back to Pilate when he asks Jesus, “What is truth?”  Perhaps, given that Jesus was there right in front of him, he should have said, “Who is truth?”  That gets us to the answer we need.  John’s gospel is all about who is truth. 

One of the greatest current scholars on the gospel of John is Gail O’Day.  Of the opening verses we read today she says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (1:1) and “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (1:14) are the foundation on which the entire gospel is built.  “Jesus is the incarnate Word of God.  That is, Jesus derives from the most intimate relation with God.  Jesus provides unique and unprecedented access to God because Jesus shares in God’s character and identity… Yet, it is as the Word made flesh that Jesus brings God fully to the world.  Jesus’ revelation of God is thus not simply that Jesus speaks God’s words and does God’s works, although that is part of it.  It is, rather, that Jesus is God’s Word.  No line can be drawn between what Jesus says and what at does, between his identity and mission in the world.  Jesus’ words and works, his life and death, form an indissoluble whole that provides full and fresh access to God.”  (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 9, Pg. 495)

What is truth?  Or perhaps, who is truth?

Jesus

Jesus, fully revealing God’s nature in human form, was there at the beginning.  Jesus fully reveals God’s logic, God’s wisdom, God’s organizing principles behind the entire creation.

And most importantly, when Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (15:13)  Then Jesus goes on to do just that.

I think our imaginations easily see God’s ultimate nature and power as a great bearded man in the clouds with a lightning bolt in his hands.  John’s gospel would say that God’s real nature – the truth of God’s power – is in love; self-giving love.  That creates a very different scene.  We’re going to be exploring parts of John’s gospel for the next four weeks.  We’ll be dwelling on that in the time to come.  For today though let’s say something that is going to sound very much like Mark’s gospel that we just read through:

If you want to picture God – clearly, absolutely, as God has revealed God’s nature, God in as God wants to be envisioned; in other words, if you want to envision God truthfully;

the truth – the absolute TRUTH – God as most glorified;

then your picture of God needs to be that of Jesus crucified and dying.

            That is truth.

            That is not to fill your mind with a picture of gore.  Nor is in to make you feel bad or guilty or anything like that.  It is to be a statement of love.  It is God saying, “This is how much I love you.  This is how much I want you.”

            As John’s gospel presents it, this is the truth we are to build our lives upon.  It is to make every decision based upon being loved by God.  It is to have every action based upon being loved by God.

            John’s gospel begins with the grand poetic words of creation.  John wants us to understand how creation – existence itself – has come into being through God. 

God created life – and life is stronger than death.

(Or perhaps that beingness is greater than non-beingness.)

God created light – and light is stronger than darkness.

God is love – and love is stronger than anything.

            So many people live in darkness.  So many people live in fear.  So many people live in shame.  So many people live feeling worthless.  Those people can be people who live in the gutter to people who live in penthouse apartments.  You never know.

            “Truth” is that God’s love gives you -and everyone else- undeniable value, a sure and certain future of goodness, and a safe abiding place now.

            If the world were to ever be willing to let God’s light shine, then the simple truth would become real.

            As children of God our purpose is to live the truth – God’s love.  That would be to shine light into the darkness.

            Our theme today is truth and wisdom.  I have not brought up wisdom at all yet, and I barely need to so.  To live wisely is to live by the truth.  As Jesus said, know the truth and the truth will make you free.

April 11, 2021 Easter 2 Mark 16:9-20

            I don’t plan to preach so much on the actual texts of our gospel reading but to use it as a platform to talk about the Bible in general and its creation.  The diversity we find in the endings to Mark’s gospel is actually a good window into the Bible’s creation.

If you ask just about any Christian how the Bible came to be they’d probably say it is a writing inspired by God.  And that would be a theologically accurate statement.  But if you pressed the average Christian harder you’d find they don’t know much more.

Ask who wrote the Bible and some might give you a blank stare.  Some might be a bit better educated and say it is a collected work from many authors; after all the name itself means a collection of writings.

Ask people when the Bible came to be written and they won’t be able to tell you.

Ask people who decided what was in the Bible and what wasn’t and most people wouldn’t be able to tell you.  Of course you would probably come across a number of cynics who would say that the Bible was created at the order of Roman emperor Constantine; and that he did it to codify Christianity, which helped him to more firmly establish his imperial power.  While that is a very tempting argument many Christian skeptics like to make, it has no basis in reality.

So, who wrote it?  When was it written?  Who decided what’s in and what’s not?  And when did they make those decisions? 

And significantly, who decided the Bible was going to be the absolute authority for Christian beliefs?  If it agrees with the Bible it is probably orthodox, and if it disagrees with the Bible, then it is necessarily heresy?

Let’s get at all of those questions by recognizing a very unfortunate truth about many American Christians’ faith.  Colleagues and I frequently lament that many Christians are highly educated and critical thinkers in most aspects of their life, yet when it comes to faith they revert to a very childish simplicity.  It is like when it comes to faith they leave their critical thinking behind and enter into an almost magical world of fairy tales.  Good is good and bad is bad.  Miracles happen for the good and bad things happen to the bad.  God hears, sees, knows, and shapes all things in one clear consistent grand design.

The problem is that doesn’t translate into reality at all.  The world is immensely complex and sometimes the Bible’s answers seem either simplistic or out of date.  Also, when faith is in the world of this magical thinking even the slightest critical examination makes it crumble.

In recent decades that happens when children grow up and go to college.  They enter the complex world of critical study and their faith just can’t function in it.  They see it for what it has been to them – ancient myths and fairy tales.  At best it slips away as irrelevant.  At worst they scoff at it.

 

One of the things I try to do when teaching confirmation class is to introduce the confirmands to critical Bible study.  I want to move their faith from the concrete operation thinking that was appropriate for their younger years and begin to move them into the critical thinking they are becoming capable of.  Though they’re 7^th and 8^th graders we approach the Bible with the same literary critical tools used at a graduate school level.  Certainly they aren’t mature enough to actually engage the scripture at that level, but at least they can experience the root of critical scholarship in a church setting rather than elsewhere.

The truth is that our scripture, and its origins is a complex and messy affair; just like the endings to Mark’s gospel.  If you want it to be simple and straightforward – as if a divine text fell from the sky one day – then I can’t help you.

However, for those who dare to dive into it, the complex messiness of Christian scripture is, I think, one of its greatest strengths.  The Bible does not bring simple solutions to life’s complex problems.  The Bible will bring its inspired complexity; and faithfully equip you to journey in whatever complex messiness there is in life.

None of the authors of the New Testament wrote with any thought that their writings would be collected with others and become something that would be authoritative for all Christians in all times and all places.  All of the writings in the New Testament originally circulated independently.  And those texts were among many – perhaps thousands of – writings by early Christians.  Most all of them have been lost to history.  However, there are many in existence.  I have this book called The Other Bible which I’ve shown before.  It contains many early Christian writings and writings from other faiths.  They can give a good context of what did not make it into the Bible.  Some of the things in this book are just downright bizarre.  Some are clearly unorthodox.  They help you sense what was really going on.  That was that a consensus began to emerge early on about what Christianity was about.

It appears as if by late in the 1^st century collections of Paul’s writings were being copied and circulated.  By late in the second century you start to see that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John emerging as the accepted accounts of the ministry of Jesus and others are being rejected.  There are loads of other gospels out there.

Even so, countless variations of texts emerged.  As we just saw several major variations to the end of Mark’s gospel were created.   The longest one appears to be from the second century by drawing in parts of Matthew, Luke, and John.

Remember, Christianity at that time was not an organized religion.  It was scattered all around the Roman empire and in nations to the east.  There was little churchwide communication.

Actually it is remarkable, and I consider it to be the work of the Spirit, that most heresies are pushed aside and that despite the lack of communication, a consensus begins to emerge.  If there is any truth to the creation of the New Testament it is that – it just emerged as a consensus over time.  And a long time it was!  We’re talking hundreds of years.  Our nation’s only 245!

The earliest listing of the books of the New Testament that exactly match what we have today is from African theologian Athanasius in the year 367.  In the year 382 we start to get hints of the same in Europe. 

Gatherings of church leaders, often called “councils”, began taking up the issue of what was scripture and what was not.  Most scholars agree though, that these were hardly debates.  They were more ratification of the consensus that had already emerged than anything else.

As to the fables that the emperor Constantine pushed the Council of Nicea to create the Bible in the year 325, they are just that.  Fables.  Don’t believe books like The Da Vinci Code that suggest there were political motives behind the Bible.  Constantine did, however, commission copies of the consensus of Christian scripture to be made and distributed.  Indeed the oldest existing copies of the Bible do begin to show up in the 4^th Century.  The Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are, I believe, the oldest existing copies of the New Testament actually bound together.  They are for the most part what we have today.

Even so, these councils did not establish hard and fast lists of what is in the Bible and what isn’t.  It is not until the Council of Trent in the year 1546 that the Roman Catholic Church firmly defined what the Bible is.  The Anglican Church made a definition of the Bible with its Thirty-Nine Articles in the year 1563.  For most reformed churches, they didn’t define the Bible until The Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647.  For Eastern Orthodox Churches the Bible wasn’t defined until the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672. 

If you are one who likes to fly the Lutheran banner over your faith, well, it’s the year 2021.  The Lutheran Church, for all its talk about the authority of the Bible and “scripture alone”, has yet to make a formal definition of the Bible.  We just rely on the ancient consensus that emerged.

And once you’ve decided what’s in and what’s out you have to ask yourself what version?  The oldest complete copies of the Bible we have are written in Latin.  But the Bible was originally written in Greek.  Latin’s already a translation away.  And we have no early Greek copies.  We have thousands of fragments in Greek but nothing’s complete.  And do they vary!  There’s variety among the Greek fragments.  There’s variations in the Latin versions.  What was original?  When copies are made of copies are made of copies and these copies of copies are made all over the world you’re sure to get mistakes, and they compound! 

I have the 27^th edition of the Greek New Testament.  At the bottom of each page of the Greek text are lists of the variations between ancient manuscripts.  There are thousands of variations among the ancient manuscripts.  Those who invest their lives in studying the ancient manuscripts think that we have figured out our way back to the original words over 99% of the time, but still not perfectly.  This is the 27^th edition after all!  Not quite perfect as it is, it is considered to be the worldwide authoritative version of Christian scripture.

I believe the Bible did not magically fall from the sky.  I believe it is the work of the Holy Spirit nudging Christians over centuries.  The Bible does not glow in our hands with divine perfection.  Quite bluntly, it is a messy book.  It is the work of God along with humans to bring us to faith.  It is a book that you strive with, wrestle with, understand in some places and are confused by in others.  It does not give simplistic and absolute answers to problems.  Rather it is your guide to relationship with God and with each other.  And in that way it is a sure source of the truth of God and will not lead you astray.

April 4, 2021 Easter Mark 16:1-8

  After the Good Friday worship service Jim Spawton and Gary Boisseau were packing things up from doing the support work of Zoom.  I’m not sure why but Jim brought up on his computer King Herod’s song from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar.  Every time I think about that musical I can’t help but smirk, and I did it then too.

If you remember Jesus Christ Superstar was controversial from the beginning.  There are many reasons.  One of the biggest was that there is no depiction of the resurrection.  Lyricist Tim Rice objected to including the resurrection because he wanted to depict Jesus as just a man, and because he was opposed to anything to do with the miraculous.  So, the musical ends with Jesus dying on the cross.  

I find myself thinking, “Tim Rice, for a man who was so opposed to including Christian theology in the music, you inadvertently hit the nail on the head!  Your musical is one of the 20th Century’s biggest expressions of the absolute core of Christian theology!”

If you know the musical you know that throughout are little whispers and hints of the title phrase, “Jesus Christ, superstar.”  They’re like teasers all along.  But at the moment of Jesus’ death it finally comes in full force.  It’s full band, full cast, full lights, everything is reverberating “Jesus Christ, superstar!”

Yes Tim Rice, you got it perfectly; the core of Christian faith!  Jesus dead.  And in so doing you put any Christian exactly where they need to be in their relationship with God.  We call it the Theology of the Cross.

All four of the gospels in the Bible -Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - put far more emphasis on Jesus’ death than on the resurrection.  But of the four, none focuses to exclusively on the cross as Mark does.

Our gospel reading today is the original ending of Mark’s gospel.  There’s nothing more.  That’s the end of the story.  How much space does Mark give to the resurrected Jesus?  Jesus is the main character of the story after all.  None, not one bit.  Jesus leaves the stage when his body is carried off to the tomb.  He does not return.  There is no resurrected Jesus.  The young man at the tomb tells the women they will see him in Galilee, so we know Jesus is resurrected and the resurrected Jesus will be interacting with his followers, but as far as his role in what Mark wrote is concerned, Jesus is done.

We don’t like this ending.  Or I’ll admit I don’t.  I want to spend time with the resurrected Jesus.  I want to see him, hear him, touch him.  The other gospels record such interactions.  Mark does not.

Is Mark being careless or sloppy?  Is he being mean?  Was writing the gospel a school project and he’d reached the minimum word limit set by the teacher and so he decides to wrap it up as quickly as possible?  Given that he ends with the word “because” you do wonder what is going on!?!

No.  Mark is a concise, deep, and profound theologian.  He knows, he can anticipate, exactly what’s going on the hearts and minds of his readers.  Mark knows full well – probably because he felt it within himself – that instead of being Theologians of the Cross (which is what we need to be as Christians) we are strongly drawn to being Theologians of Glory.

Don’t mistake what being a Theologian of Glory is.  That does not mean, as the name may suggest, someone egotistical seeking fame and fortune.  A Theologian of Glory is simply anyone who wants to see the world through human terms.  It is someone who wants to see measurable success for their efforts.  It is someone who thinks, “I am a good person.  I work hard, I earn a living, I am generous, and I deserve what I have.”  A Theologian of Glory thinks, “I know I’m not perfect, but I try to be a good and upright person.  I have good morals.  I am a model of what God desires.”  I think we are all like that.

A Theologian of Glory does a very logical thing with Holy Week.  A Theologian of Glory likes to come to worship on Palm Sunday and welcome Jesus in with fanfare like the rest of the crowds; and then come to worship again on Easter and celebrate the resurrection.  What’s been left out?  Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

No one actually likes those days.  Who wants to spend time on Jesus being betrayed and arrested, his followers failing and scattering, and him being tortured and ultimately executed?  No one does.  We all have tendencies towards being Theologians of Glory.  We want faith to make sense on our terms.  We want to live our lives and have them be good with God.

We do not want to be what we need to be – Theologians of the Cross.

Yet over and over and over again as we’ve been reading Mark’s gospel Mark has been pointing us to the cross.  And here we are on Easter Sunday and Mark is still pointing us backward towards the cross.  

I’m not going to dive into all that we dove into on Good Friday, but let me just say that as Mark depicts it, Jesus’ death is God’s ultimate word to humanity.  It is not the final word, but it is the ultimate word.  When Jesus dies indeed it is like the stage lights of the universe all come blazing on, the full band goes double forte, and the whole company sings in unison, “Jesus Christ, Superstar!”

Dead.

In Mark’s gospel dead Jesus as superstar echoes out to the empty tomb.  

One of the reasons I translated Mark’s gospel myself is that I do not know of a single English translation of the Bible that the final verses of Mark’s gospel even remotely right.  I remember seminary professors shaking their heads in frustration at how outright wrong all English translations get it, especially missing Mark’s subtleties.  For Mark the most subtle detail is often profound.

English translations all quote the young man at the tomb saying to the women, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has been raised…”

Nope.

Dead wrong.

They get the verb tenses swapped.  Mark chooses to use the unusual Perfect Tense when referring to the crucifixion and the common past tense when referring to the resurrection.  Whenever a biblical author uses an obscure or unusual verb tense translators need to pay attention.  They often miss it.

Now quite frankly English is just too clunky and impoverished a language to capture the richness of Greek.  So those who attempt to translate into English do have an impossible task on their hands.  However, as much as English can get it, is what we read today, “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who has been [the rare and unusual Perfect Tense] crucified.  He was [the common Simple Past Tense] raised.”  What the Greek says clearly is that Jesus as the crucified one is his ongoing and eternal reality.  That is how we are to relate to Jesus; and the love of God that he embodied.  Resurrection was a moment.  Or put very simply, resurrection tells us nothing about God’s love for us.  Crucifixion says it all.

Again, the dead Jesus is God’s ultimate word.  It is not God’s final word but it is the ultimate word. 

 

And so, speaking of final words, what is Mark’s final word?

In Greek it is [gar] which translates into to our English word “because”:  “And to no one nothing did they speak.  They were afraid because.”

Final word.  Mark puts down his pen.  End of story.

Yeah, right Mark?!?!  How did your grammar teacher in school feel about you turning in writing assignments and ending your stories with the word because?

Did you ever dare do that?  Did you ever write a story for English class and have the final word be “because”?  You don’t have to be an English scholar, you could have gotten straight F’s in English throughout your entire life, and you know full well you don’t end a story with the word “because.”

Mark, the brilliant (probably genius) author that he is, has written what is perhaps the most complex piece of literature you’ll ever encounter.  Word choices, verb tenses, choice of details, story structures, parallels, multiple levels of meaning - it’s all deliberate and expertly crafted…

And he ends with an incomplete sentence.

If know Mark’s gospel well or if you’ve heard me preach on it before you know exactly what I’m going to say next.  

Mark’s gospel ends with an incomplete sentence.

Mark’s gospel begins with an incomplete sentence.

Put them together and what do you have?  A complete, and grammatically correct sentence.  “And to no one nothing did they speak.  They were afraid because… the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

The story is a circle.  It goes round and round.  It has neither beginning nor ending.

Yet typical of Mark that circular story goes two directions.

Indeed the empty tomb and Jesus going on to Galilee where they will meet him is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  

But at the exactly the same time it takes us in the direction of the beginning.

Like it or not I think we are all Theologians of Glory.  Mark knows that.  It is deep in who we are.  We do not like Good Friday.  We want to worship the resurrected Lord, not the crucified Lord.

Even so, we are faith filled enough that we do not put a symbol of the resurrection in the front of our worship space.  Front and center, high above everything else we put an execution device.  That’s pretty twisted when you think about it.  Islamic scholars do a good job about pointing that out about Christianity.  It is a good and accurate critique that reminds us of the center of our faith.

The cross is God’s ultimate word.  And so Mark’s gospel takes us back into the story of Jesus again and again and again.  It is an endless loop that is intended to run throughout our entire lives.  It is an endless loop that encourages us to be that which is contrary to everything we want to be, 

but it makes us what we need to be – Theologians of the Cross.