Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
29 December 2019
Mark 1.9-13
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was
baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And
just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and
the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11 And a
voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well
pleased." 12 And the
Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 He was
in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild
beasts; and the angels waited on him.
So that was Christmas…
I hope you
had fun,
to
paraphrase John Lennon.
But now, it’s all over for another year.
Have you
taken your tree down yet?
Or
does it get to stay up until twelfth night?
Are your
thoughts already starting to turn to the coming year,
maybe
going back to work,
or
planning holidays,
or
new year’s resolutions…?
For the next few months here at Bloomsbury in our preaching,
we’re going
to be looking at the story of Jesus
that we
find in Mark’s gospel,
and with the carols of Christmas still ringing in our ears,
it’s
interesting to note that Mark
is
definitely the least-Christmassy of all the gospels.
Neither Mark nor John have shepherds, wise men, a stable, a
star,
a virgin, a
doubting husband, or the archangel Gabriel.
If you want those, and indeed most of the things
we think of
as essential to the Christmas story,
you have to go to Matthew and Luke’s versions of the Jesus
story.
John’s gospel has the wonderful prologue,
which I so
much enjoy reading each year at the Bloomsbury Carol Celebration;
and Mark’s gospel has… well… not much.
It starts with John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness,
and then
jumps straight to the baptism and temptation of Jesus.
There’s no nativity story at all in Mark,
which is,
of course, the earliest of the four gospels to be written.
And we could engage in all sorts of interesting speculation
about why
it was that when, firstly Matthew, and then Luke,
decided
to expand Mark’s gospel with extra material,
they
decided to add the stories that we now know as the Christmas.
Did they feel, perhaps, that Mark wasn’t quite clear enough
on the
subject of the incarnation?
Maybe they thought it needed spelling out a bit more clearly
what it
meant to say that Jesus was the Son of God?
Maybe they wanted to give Jesus a birth story
that would
rival the origin stories of the Greek and Roman gods?
Maybe they wanted to show how Jesus
was the
Jewish Messiah in fulfilment of the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible?
But the thing is, Mark addresses these issues too,
just much
more succinctly.
So, in our reading this morning,
we hear a
voice from heaven
proclaiming
that Jesus is the son of God,
we have a
moment of divine anointing
as
powerful as any mythological initiation,
and we have
a clear parallel between Israel’s years of wandering in the wilderness,
and
Jesus being sent to the wilderness to be tempted.
So, whilst I’m not suggesting that we don’t need Matthew and
Luke,
I am suggesting
that if you’ve had enough
of
choirs of angels and singing shepherds,
you might
find all you need to know about Jesus
in
the rather briefer, and less seasonally festive, gospel of Mark.
These five verses that we’re looking at today
are immensely
rich in symbolism, imagery, and theology.
The first eight verses have covered John the Baptist
preaching in the wilderness,
which, for
those of you who were here last Sunday,
ties in
with the story of his birth to Zechariah and Elizabeth.
And then Jesus comes from Nazareth in Galilee
to be
baptised by John in the Jordan.
So far, so good.
John has
clearly been baptising for a while,
calling
people to repent of their sins,
and prepare
themselves for the arrival of someone
who
would baptise with the Holy Spirit rather than with water.
And so Jesus is baptised, but as he is coming up out of the
water,
he has what
can only be described as an ‘apocalyptic’ moment.
If you remember our sermon series last year
on the book
of Revelation,
you may remember that the world ‘apocalyptic’
actually
comes from the Greek word for ‘unveiling’ or ‘revealing’.
And within the first century Jewish tradition,
stories of
heavenly visions, or divine voices,
were always
stories of revelation, of unveiling otherwise hidden realities.
So, here at the baptism of Jesus,
we suddenly
find the baptism is invaded
by this dramatic, apocalyptic, imagery,
with the
heavens being torn apart,
and things
otherwise unseen being made known.
There’s a reference here to the Hebrew Scriptures,
but you
have to be slightly alert to spot it.
We’ve seen in our sermons during Advent,
that the
Old Testament prophets longed for a day
when God
would intervene in human history.
And they often expressed this longing most strongly,
when things
were not going so well for the people of Israel.
So the times of exile or warfare or political uncertainty
are the
points where the prophets speak most longingly
of their
hope that God will be revealed in power.
The book of Isaiah captures this longing beautifully
in chapter
64 v.1
‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence.’
And of course this is precisely what we are told happened at
the baptism of Jesus.
Mark is
trying to signal something important here.
He’s saying that Jesus is the fulfilment of the longing of
Isaiah,
and the
tearing open of the heavens,
the
apocalyptic unveiling of otherwise hidden truths,
speaks of
the removal of the barrier between humans and their God,
and
of a new relationship between God and humanity.
The revelations continue,
with the
Spirit of God descending on Jesus like a dove.
There’s another allusion here to the Hebrew Bible,
this time
to the story of Noah in the early chapters of Genesis (ch.8).
Dove with an olive
branch, Catacombs of Domitilla, Rome
We all know the story of the great flood,
of how the
waters of chaos overwhelmed the earth,
bringing
destruction to all except the faithful few on the ark.
And how after forty days and forty nights of rain,
the waters
started to subside,
and so Noah sent out a dove three times,
to see if
the waters were subsiding.
The first time the dove simply flew around and came back to
him,
the second
time it came back with an olive leaf in its beak,
and the
third time it didn’t come back at all,
and so Noah knew that the chaos was ending
and soon
the new world could begin.
But also, perhaps less well known, within the Jewish
rabbinic tradition,
the spirit
of God which swept over the waters of creation (Genesis 1.2)
was said to
resemble a Dove hovering over her young.
And then there’s another reference to the prophecy of
Isaiah,
where the
suffering servant, who bears the sins of the world,
is
described as:
My servant, whom I
uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit
upon him;
he will bring forth
justice to the nations.
Isa. 42.1
And in the descent of the Spirit on Jesus at his baptism,
these
images combine,
to signify that God is coming to the chaos of the world
to bring
new hope, new life, a new start,
and to bring forth justice to all peoples.
But the revelations continue…
Not only are the heavens torn apart in fulfilment of
Isaiah’s prophecy,
not only
does the Spirit descend on Jesus as the primal dove of peace and justice,
but a voice is heard coming from heaven,
declaring
Jesus to be the son of God,
and
speaking words of approval over him.
And, yes, of course,
there is a
reference to the Hebrew Bible here too…
This time it’s Psalm 2.7, where the king in Jerusalem
is declared
to be the anointed one of God, and says:
I will tell of the decree of the LORD:
He said to me, "You are my son; today I have begotten you.
This was a text which directly fed into the Jewish messianic
hope,
and the
reference to it at Jesus’ baptism,
firmly positions
Jesus not just as God’s son,
but
as the long awaited messiah of Israel.
And so you can see that in just these five short verses,
Mark piles
layer upon layer of symbolism,
with
reference after reference to the Hebrew tradition,
all the while building his case
that Jesus
is the son of God
in a way
that worthy of attention by those reading his gospel.
I want to return for a moment now
to what I
described as the ‘apocalyptic’ nature of Jesus’ baptism,
and I’ve already suggested that we have here an event
that is
apocalyptic or revelatory
in
the sense that it reveals something profound
about
how heaven views the life, ministry, and person of Jesus.
But there’s another layer to this:
In Mark’’s time, apocalyptic was the popular language of political
dissent.
Apocalyptic imagery envisioned the “end
of the world”,
that is,
the world ruled by the powers of sin and death.
Just as you or I might say that the death of a loved one is
‘the end of the world’,
so
apocalyptic literature proclaimed that the old world was passing
and a new
one was coming into being.
Books from the Hebrew Bible that used apocalyptic imagery,
such as
Daniel or Ezekiel,
were always written in times of political turmoil,
and they
expressed the hope of the oppressed but faithful people of God
that the
world dominated by wicket powers would come to an end.
So whenever you get apocalyptic imagery in the New
Testament,
it’s worth
paying attention to what it’s saying politically,
as well as
spiritually.
And there are some clues here…
Following his baptism, with its apocalyptic rending of the
heavens,
Jesus is
driven by the Spirit further out into the wilderness,
where he
engages in a struggle with a figure called ‘Satan’ (1:12f).
I don’t have the time this morning to give a detailed
exploration of Satan in the Bible,
but just to
note that what we’ve got here is not some kind of bad-version-of-God;
this
is not a satanic Magneto to a divine Professor Xavier,
or
a Satanic Joker to a divine Batman,
or
a Satanic Lex Luther to a divine Superman…
you
get the idea…
Rather, the name ‘satan’ in this context simply means
‘accuser’, or ‘adversary’.
The Satan
who confronts Jesus in the wilderness
is
that seductive voice which whispers doubt or temptation
to
our deepest needs and desires.
The wilderness is the place where Jesus goes to gain
self-knowledge,
to face his
demons and his temptations, and to overcome them.
Which of us can truly say that we know ourselves,
if we
haven’t faced up to our demons.
And before Jesus could begin his public ministry
of casting
evil out of the world,
he needed to be very sure that evil didn’t have a hold on
his own heart.
There have been enough cases down the years,
of
religious leaders falling prey to their base desires,
for Jesus to need to make sure
that he had
faced his humanity squarely
and
confronted his demons.
But this isn’t just a forty day wilderness journey of
self-knowledge,
because
Mark tells us that there is a deep spiritual battle going on.
Jesus is waited on by angels, and the Satan is in league
with the wild beasts.
To understand this properly, we have to again delve into the
Old Testament,
this time
into that deeply apocalyptic book of Daniel,
which was written about two hundred years before the time of
Jesus,
to inspire
the Jews of that time to resistance against the Greek invasion of Israel,
by telling
them stories about the hero Daniel during their time in exile in Babylon.
In Daniel, the oppressive rulers are described as ‘beasts’
(Dan 7.1-7)
and the
angels of heaven do battle against them. (7.10; 12.1)
So the mention in Mark’s gospel
of the wild
beasts and angels in the wilderness with Jesus and Satan
give us an insight into the nature of Jesus’ ministry as it
will unfold over the coming years,
as an
apocalyptic battle between good and evil,
with him coming to the world to cast out evil,
and to
bring release from those powers that oppress and distort humanity.
And in many ways this, surely, is still the mission of the
church,
to bring
release to those who are captive,
to bring
healing to those who are sick,
to bring
new light to those living in darkness,
to cast out evil and announce that a new and better way of
being human
has been
made real in the coming of Jesus.
But we’re not done with the imagery yet…
I told you
Mark packs a lot into a few verses…
The forty days of Jesus temptation is no accidental number.
We’ve
already seen in it an echo of the rain that fell in the story of Noah,
for
forty days and forty nights.
But there
is also here an invocation of Israel’s forty years
of
“testing” in
the wilderness.
You remember the story,
they people
of Israel had been suffering in Egypt,
and
Moses led them through the waters of the Red Sea
into
forty years of wilderness wandering
before
they eventually entered the promised land.
It’s as if Jesus in the wilderness is somehow reliving the
experience of Israel
as he
prepares to lead humanity itself on a journey from slavery to freedom.
Just as Israel discovered its identity as a nation when it
escaped from Pharaoh,
so Jesus
has his identity confirmed at his baptism.
Israel is God’s people, and Jesus is God’s son,
and both
must struggle in the wilderness
to discover
what this vocation means.
It’s as if Jesus has to go back to where it all started,
to revisit
the wilderness of the Exodus,
in order to begin the new exodus
of leading
people from all nations
from their enslavement to the powers of sin and death
into new
life and forgiveness.
But Mark tells us that he is not alone in this struggle,
as he is
ministered to by angels.
And here we find our final reference to the Hebrew Bible,
and it
takes us to our first reading.
In Psalm 91 we read:
he will command his angels concerning you to
guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you
up,
so that you will not dash your foot
against a stone.
Mark doesn’t give us the specific details of Jesus’ temptations,
we would
have to turn to Matthew and Luke for that,
and if we did, we would discover that this verse from Psalm
91 is used
as part of
the temptation for Jesus to put God to the test.
But it’s firmly there in the background to Mark’s much briefer
temptation story,
and the
message is clear,
which is that Jesus is not actually alone in the wilderness,
because
God’s angels are there with him.
He doesn’t need to test their presence,
by throwing
himself from a high place;
they just are there, waiting on him,
surrounding
him with love and care.
And so to us,
and our
experiences of wilderness testing and temptation.
Each of us, at different times, and in different ways,
knows what
it is to be driven into the wilderness.
Each of us knows what it is to hear the deceptive, seductive
voice in our minds,
whispering
words that will take us away from God’s love.
And in those moments, there is great comfort to be had here,
because we,
too, are children of God.
We, too, are dearly loved,
and we, too,
are held within that love
even
through the darkest times.
This is how Christ comes to us,
by his
Spirit, when we need him most.
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