Sermon 4th December 2011

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Trevor Tayleur, preaches based on the reading from Mark 1 verses 1-8.

Get the Road Ready

What day is it in exactly three weeks time? Of course, it’s Christmas Day! I expect that if you asked the person in the street, “What is the most important Christian festival?” the majority would answer Christmas. I don’t propose to answer this question myself. After all without Christmas, the birth of Jesus, we wouldn’t have Easter Sunday, the resurrection of Jesus. But I expect that in the popular mind Christmas is the number 1 festival. So I think many people would be surprised to learn that Mark’s Gospel, probably the first Gospel to be written, skips out Christmas, and the first event it records is John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness.

One Lent, probably about 15 years ago now, I listened, with some others, to a recording of Mark’s Gospel, and it was very dramatic listening. Mark’s Gospel is the shortest Gospel, and it’s action-packed. Mark doesn’t beat about the bush. He wants to give us the real Jesus; he wants to make us face the truth, the truth about God, the truth about Jesus and the truth about ourselves. And he starts by getting straight to the point. He tells us Jesus is: “Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

I think that for many people Jesus and Christ mean the same thing. Some may even think that Christ is Jesus’ surname, and that he’s Jesus Christ in the same way that today someone is called John Smith. But Jesus and Christ do not mean the same thing. Jesus was his name, the name his parents gave him when he was born, following the instructions of the angel Gabriel. Jesus is a name full of meaning, because it means “God saves”. So Jesus wasn’t just any old name.

Christ means “the anointed One”. It refers to the old practice of anointing future kings with oil. The anointed One was to be the King who was going to usher in the Kingdom of God. In fact “Christ” is the English word for the Greek Khristós; the Hebrew equivalent is Messiah.

And not only is Jesus the anointed King, he is also the Son of God. Now, for Jewish people at that time the Son of God was a title for the Messiah, but Mark also makes it clear that Jesus was God’s Son in an even deeper sense.

So, in the first few verses of his Gospel Mark gets right down to who Jesus is: the anointed King, the Messiah, God’s Son. And there are two questions I’m going to address this morning.

· The first is - who exactly is this King? And

· The second is – where do we meet him?

So, firstly then, who does Mark say the King is? In verses 2 and 3, he quotes a prophesy from Isaiah 40: “It is written in Isaiah the prophet: I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way—

a voice of one calling in the desert, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'”

I suspect that today we don’t get the full impact of these words,

Isaiah had prophesied that there would be a messenger who would call out, “Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.” Mark identifies the messenger as John the Baptist, and that means that Mark identifies the Lord who Isaiah says is coming as Jesus. But what’s so amazing about that? I gather that if you go back to the Hebrew passage, the word translated as our English word ‘Lord’ is the word YAHWEW, the personal covenant name that God gave to Moses, that God revealed to Moses in the burning bush. It’s the personal covenant name the Jews considered so holy that they didn’t speak it, they didn’t write it. And Mark is saying that the YAHWEH of Israel, the creator God of the universe, the rightful ruler and judge of the earth, has come to earth in the form of Jesus Christ. Do we realise how amazing this is? The immortal has become mortal. The unapproachable is something – actually someone­ - you can approach. The totally invulnerable has become vulnerable: the impossible has become possible.

God is so loving and so intent on our salvation that he has burst into our world and was uniquely born in Jesus Christ. God became human in Jesus Christ in a history altering, worldview shattering and life transforming event that sets Christianity apart from all other religions. Jesus is not only the Son of God, but he is also God the Son. Many people find that hard to accept, hard to believe. They agree that Jesus was a great man and had a divine consciousness about him. But God the Son – that’s too hard to believe. Maybe people in the 1^st Century AD could believe it, but it’s no longer believable in the 21^st Century. Actually, though, it wasn’t particularly easy to believe in the 1^st Century.

Remember that most of the original believers in Jesus were Jews, including Mark. And they had as many, if not more, cultural and intellectual barriers in believing that God had become human as we do. The name YAHWEH - they wouldn’t write down that name, and it’s still the same today for many Orthodox Jews. The idea that God could become a human being was totally and completely alien to what they believed in. It was against their culture, their intellect. Their barriers were huge. Yet something shattered those barriers. The original believers had as many barriers to believing that God became flesh as we do, but something broke through those barriers.

Many people believe that God is way out there; distant and far away and difficult to reach. We have to work very very hard to reach him. Yet the incarnation – God becoming human – tells us that we don’t have to strive to reach God. God himself has come to us. God himself has come close to us. God has given himself to us, so that it’s possible for us to know him.

I know many people in our church family are going through difficult times at the moment, and the incarnation gives us a very comforting message. It tells us that God isn’t a God who lives way out there, who doesn’t care. We have a God who has suffered, who has experienced pain and suffering even more intensely than us. In his book, The Cross of Christ, John Stott described Jesus’ suffering on the Cross as follows:“lonely, twisted, tortured ..., nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside His immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of His. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering."

So, who exactly is the King who Isaiah prophesied would come? Jesus is that King – the Son of God and God the Son. And Mark tells us that the King has come. And what sort of King is he? When I think of kings, I tend to think about famous English kings such as Henry VIII with his six wives, two of whom were beheaded! Now, Jesus was a completely different type of king. He is a King who came to suffer, to die a cruel death on the Cross, so that we might be forgiven.

And, secondly, where do we meet the King? We meet the king in the wilderness. The NIV translation uses the word ‘desert’, but I’ll stick to the traditional translation – ‘wilderness’. If we are going to find the King, we’re going to have to go out into the wilderness. John the Baptist spoke in the wilderness. People had to go out into the wilderness to be baptised. Jesus went out into the wilderness for 40 days where he was tempted by the Devil, as we remember at Lent. Now, the NIV translates ‘wilderness’ as ‘desert’ and for good reason. The wilderness that Isaiah referred to in his prophesy and where John the Baptist preached was like a desert. A visitor to a wilderness area in America once wrote in a visitors’ book, “Chairlifts need to be in some places so that we can get to wonderful views without having to hike to them.” But that visitor missed the point. You may have wonderful views in a wilderness, but a wilderness is not a convenient and easy place to be in.

The wilderness the Bible describes is a place that cannot sustain life. The wilderness is a place of thorns. Nothing grows. There’s no bread out there; you can’t grow wheat or anything; just thorns. There’s no water. It’s a place of thorns and thirst, a place of terrible loneliness because it can’t support a community – it can’t support life. Yet the wilderness played an important part in the OT history of Israel. Because after Moses had led the Israelites out of Egypt, they spent 40 years in the wilderness trying to reach the Promised Land. It was while they were in the wilderness that God gave them the 10 Commandments; it was in the wilderness that they really started to learn what it meant to be the people of God in practice.

Why is the wilderness a place where you meet God? The wilderness is a place you can’t survive without the intervention of God. All the wells ran dry, so the Israelites needed God to provide water out of a rock. All the bread goes mouldy, so the Israelites needed the manna of God. Out in the wilderness Israel had to learn what we all have to learn – that God is not an add-on, that God is not an optional extra. Apart from the saving intervention of God, we have no hope. And ultimately all wells run dry, except for the living water from God, and all bread grows mouldy except for the bread of God, the manna of God.

What does that have to do with us? Just as in a literal desert, we find that all wells apart from God go dry, all bread but God’s bread goes mouldy, so in our lives we often meet God when we go through wilderness experiences. It’s very easy for us to put our hope in earthly things, or indeed other people. If only we get the right job, we say to ourselves, then everything will be OK. Or if we marry the right person, then all will be well. If only we can achieve our heart’s desire, then we’ll be fine. We all have our longings and we often believe that if we get what we long for, then we will be content. But CS Lewis explained that this isn’t so. He wrote: “There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give...[fulfilment], but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with these longings. As our economic crisis deepens, we realise anew how demoralising it is to be unemployed. When marriages break down and families break up, we realise how vital stable marriages are. Learning new skills can be tremendously worthwhile. But ultimately no matter how good a job we may have, no matter how secure our relationships are, they aren’t going to be enough. We need something more. Every well will run dry, except for the water of God. All bread will turn mouldy, except for the manna of God. And when we realise that we are lost without God’s intervention in our lives, only then can we meet the King. Only when we are in the wilderness can we meet the King.

John the Baptist was a messenger, preparing the way for Jesus, the Son of God and God the Son, the anointed King. He was telling the people to get ready for Jesus. It’s now only three weeks until Christmas when we celebrate Jesus’ birth as a human being. How ready are we for Jesus? Do we place our hopes in earthly things – our jobs, our relationships, money? Or do we realise that these things ultimately can never satisfy? Are we ready to meet Jesus in the wilderness?

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we thank and praise you that you are not a distant remote God, but that you loved us so much that you sent your Son to die for us. Lord, help us to follow Jesus as the true King of our lives. Help us to be ready for him this Christmas.

Amen.