Easter 2025 - Isaiah 52.13-53.12

Happy Easter!

Some acts of rescue are so incredible that they leave you speechless.

We all remember Mamadou Gassama - the Malian spiderman - who scaled the facade of a building in 30 seconds to save a child clinging to the 4th floor balcony.

Everyone was just speechless, wondering how he did it.

Or, a few years earlier, the airline pilot who saved all his passengers when his plane's engines stopped over New York by landing on the Hudson River in the middle of New York.

Amazing. Mouths agape.

It's Easter. Easter isn't primarily about chocolate eggs, leg of lamb or flying bells (a tradition you'll have to explain to me).

It's a rescue and a rescuer that will leave the whole world speechless.

Let's go back a few verses before what has just been read - Isaiah 52:10

Easter is the moment when

"the Lord stretches out the arm of his holiness,

for all the nations to see,

And that even the ends of the earth shall see

the salvation of our God".

OK, tell us more. Well, verse 13

There will be a servant (a rescuer) who will succeed,

who will grow and gain in importance, who will be very highly placed.

Great! And verse 15 ...

Before him ... kings ... will shut their mouths,

Easter ... it's supposed to be the story of a rescue that leaves the whole world speechless.

Let's imagine it was up to you to write the rest of these verses.

What would you write?

What would God do that would leave the whole world speechless?

Maybe you'd like us to get up tomorrow, turn on the radio and learn that God has raised up a diplomat who has negotiated a peace agreement between the Ukrainians and the Russians, and another between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

"People would say, "That's the hand of God!”

Or a scientist who finally found a way to eliminate our carbon emissions.

"There's God at work!”

Or perhaps an economist who could convince Donald Trump to drop his tariffs.

"Hallelujah!”

If God were to stretch out his arm for all to see to save the world, what would you expect that to look like?

***

This morning, we are not going to meditate on one of the accounts written by the witnesses to the events of Easter, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, as Christians often do at this time of year.

Instead, we're going back 700 years before Jesus to find out how all this was anticipated by a prophet called Isaiah.

Isaiah lived through a period of political and military upheaval even worse than our own.

In its day, superpowers such as the Assyrian and Babylonian empires rose up and sought to dominate the world.

Against this backdrop of upheaval, Isaiah was commissioned by God to tell the people of Israel that they were going to be defeated by his superpowers and exiled far from home. Not because God couldn't protect them, but because they had turned away from God and this was their punishment.

But Isaiah was also responsible for announcing that this exile would not be the end.

God had a rescue plan for Israel and for all peoples.

He was going to intervene by sending his servant to carry out his plan.

Easter is the culmination of this plan.

Maybe you wouldn't call yourself a Christian this morning - welcome! You know that Easter has something to do with Jesus, his death, his resurrection, but you're wondering how these events, if they happened at all, help with anything. There are plenty of problems around us. A man who gets killed, then comes back, what's the difference?

Maybe you're a Christian, but if you're like me, you're sometimes tempted to think that the events of Easter are really what we needed most.

We have so many other problems that 2000 years later are still with us.

Where is the rescue plan that was supposed to leave us breathless?

Let's have a look together.

The first thing to notice is that this rescue plan revolves around a man, a servant, who will leave us speechless... in the face of his suffering.

Silent before his suffering (52.13-53.3)

Isaiah 53:1

53 *Who has believed our preaching?

To whom was the arm of the Lord revealed?

2 It grew before him like a young plant,

like a shoot emerging from dry ground.

He had no beauty or splendour to attract our attention,

and we weren't happy with the way it looked.

3 Despised and neglected by men,

a man of pain, accustomed to suffering,

he was like someone to whom you turn your head:

we despised him, we paid no attention to him.

Imagine if I told you I could show you a promotional video for a plan to save the world.

You'd probably look at me and say okaaay, what's he talking about?

Since you're being nice, you'll give me the benefit of the doubt.

You put on the video and you expect to see perhaps a scientific or medical discovery, or a brilliant political or economic project.

But after a few seconds you realise that it's not true.

These are images from death row.

We see a man walking, head bowed, escorted by prison guards towards his execution.

You tell me, but I think you've got the wrong video, this can't be it!

This is the reaction that Isaiah anticipates. Who believed our preaching?

He knows that his presentation of God's rescue plan will be almost impossible for many people to believe.

The exact opposite of what we would have proposed.

Saving the world should be a matter for great men and women who achieve great things.

If we had to choose one word to describe the man Isaiah presents to us, it would be 'loser'!

Isaiah sums up this man's life in a few words.

He grew like a young plant,

like a shoot emerging from dry ground.

There are a few potted plants in my house that we don't water any more because we don't notice them, and we don't notice them because we don't water them. There's just some dry soil and a little shoot that doesn't look like much.

This is the servant and saviour sent by God.

To many, he looks like ... a loser. You hardly notice him.

We're 1,000 km from the Hollywood hero with the well-sculpted muscles and the perfect smile.

"He had no beauty or splendour to attract our attention".

You see people panhandling in Paris metro stations. How tempting it is to simply look away. We prefer to ignore them.

Isaiah says that this is the servant of God.

"like a man whose head is turned away".

It will be rejected.

What's more, this rejection led to his death.

Let's go back a few verses.

Isaiah 52 verse 14 ... which says that :

14 Many were horrified when they saw it,

his face was so disfigured,

so different was his appearance from that of humans,

I don't know if any of you have seen Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ, released some twenty years ago now.

It's a film that highlights the bloody side of Jesus' death.

It's striking to see that the Gospels, the eyewitness accounts we have of Jesus' death, are very sober about the bloody side.

They assume that we know that a crucifixion is horrible.

Isaiah gives us a clue as to how horrible it is.

Those who see this servant suffering will ask themselves: is this a human being we have before us? Is it possible for a man to undergo so many torments?

The Roman politician, Cicero, said that the mere word "cross" should be "removed not only from the body of the Roman citizen but even from his thoughts, eyes and ears."

It was so degrading.

Before the suffering of God's servant, Isaiah announces that we will be speechless.

***

We're supposed to ask ourselves: how can this be the world's rescue plan?

Indeed, Isaiah, who will believe your preaching?

It's absurd! It's grotesque!

How can this be saving the world?

***

Notice that we are not at the beginning of the book of Isaiah. There have already been 52 chapters.

These 52 chapters tell the story of the failure of strong men and conventional rescue plans.

They tell the story of the failure of ideas we would have invented ourselves.

It talks about powerful kings delivering Israel ... but only for a while.

There are plans for alliances with neighbouring countries to resist the invaders, which are collapsing.

God knows that strong men and human plans, however ingenious, offer no permanent security.

So when God sends us a weak and suffering man, it's because he knows it's the only solution. He is not naive. He alone sees reality perfectly.

***

But how does his suffering help us? That's the question.

This is the second point.

Mute in the face of her suffering ...

Silent before his sacrifice (53.4-9)

The servant suffers so terribly to undergo the punishment that our faults deserve.

As we prepared for Easter this week, I asked my daughters: can you think of anyone who was at the bottom, who suffered, before being at the top?

One of them replied: Aladdin!

Aladdin begins in the street and ends in the palace.

There is something in the parallel with Jesus, but in Aladdin, his suffering accomplishes nothing except to underline his elevation.

According to Isaiah, these excruciating sufferings of the servant accomplish something.

He highlights three points.

First the servant suffers ... in ...

Our place

Isaiah 53 verse 4

4 Yet "it was our sufferings that he bore,

it is our pain that he has taken upon himself.

It's the school holidays, but normally we meet up with our children when they leave school at 4.15pm, and an exchange takes place. We give them their snack, and they give us their schoolbag to carry, their sports bag, and sometimes their friends give us their schoolbag and their sports bag to carry too, and then they run ahead and we try to keep up by carrying all this load for them.

When God's servant suffers, it's because he too is carrying a burden for us, not just a few school bags, but our sufferings.

His pain on the cross was not his. It was ours.

To see Jesus overwhelmed by weakness is to see him overwhelmed by our weaknesses.

To see it bleed is to see it bleed ... in our place.

There's a logic of substitution, like when a player comes onto the pitch to sweat it out and give his all in place of another.

Jesus suffered in our place.

Isaiah explains why. It's because he doesn't just take our place. He takes ...

Our punishment

Verse 5

5 But he was wounded because of our transgressions,

broken because of our faults:

the punishment that gives us peace has fallen on him,

and *we are healed by his wounds.

6 We were all like sheep going astray:

everyone went their own way,

and the Lord has laid on him the iniquities of us all."

The Israelites had a ritual that they performed every year.

One day a year, a day called the great day of atonement, the high priest would take a goat, lay his hands on it and confess over it all the sins of the Israelites, as if he were transferring those sins from the Israelites to the goat. Then the goat was driven into the desert to die.

Symbolically, this animal underwent the punishment that the Israelites had to undergo in order to be forgiven.

This is where we get the expression "scapegoat" - someone who is condemned in the place of another.

What happens symbolically with the goat happens literally with Jesus. Some people have already seen me use this illustration. Imagine that my right hand is me.

And this book lists all my faults. Every impure thought, every hurtful word, every selfish act. Every single thing.

Spot - the burning fire of God's holiness and righteous anger at the evil I have done.

Now imagine that my left hand represents Jesus, innocent and perfect.

At the cross, God does this ...

My faults become Jesus' faults ... my punishment becomes Jesus' punishment, and the Father pours out his wrath for all the evil I have done ... on him.

He is wounded because of our transgressions,

broken because of our faults

the punishment that gives us peace has fallen on him,

If you're like me, you may be aware of things in your past or present life that you're ashamed to talk about.

If we have believed in Jesus, our guilt has been fully transferred to Jesus. I'm not talking about our feelings of guilt. Our real, objective guilt. He took it.

Our place, our punishment ...

And all this is ...

His choice

Verse 7

He was mistreated, he humiliated himself

and didn't open his mouth.

*Like a lamb being led to the slaughter,

to a sheep mute before those who shear it,

he didn't open his mouth.

The comparison with the lamb and the sheep does not mean that Jesus was unaware of what was happening to him.

It's the other way round.

In other words, he couldn't resist.

He did not protest. When accused, he did not defend himself.

Suffering this way is her choice

He moves towards death fully aware of what is happening to him ... without flinching.

The word that comes to mind to describe his attitude is heroic.

We all remember Arnaud Beltrame, the gendarme who chose to take the place of a hostage during a terrorist attack in the south of France.

Fully aware of what's at stake.

God's servant voluntarily chooses to sacrifice himself by suffering in our place for our sins.

It's heroic.

This sacrifice is breathtaking.

***

Let's take a step back.

How is it that of all the problems God could have targeted, he chose this one?

He is God. He could have sent his servant to solve any problem on the planet.

We may have some very specific ideas about who we think should be given priority.

He decided to send him to die for our sins. But why?

The Bible says that all other problems have their origin, more or less directly, in sin - rebellion against God.

If you're suffering and you tell yourself that it's not normal, then it is not normal.

Suffering exists because our world is at odds with its creator.

Adam and Eve in the garden, and everyone with them, said to God 'we don't want you', and God says 'ok' ... but know that it will mean you live in a broken world.

Sin is the root of everything.

You only have to read the news for two minutes to see the hold that sin has on our world. We can't get rid of it.

No matter how sophisticated or cultured a person or society is, you can't get rid of it.

History shows that we are incapable of doing this.

By targeting sin, God targets the source of all other problems.

It attacks the root.

He puts an end to the rupture that separates us from him and his goodness.

What should really leave us dumbfounded is that it doesn't solve this problem ... 'remotely'.

It's not as if he presses a button from the sky and the problem is solved.

He comes himself, the holy God, he who is offended by sin, in the person of the servant, to suffer for our sin, to carry out his plan of salvation.

It's a gesture of love that defies comprehension.

I know that there are people in this room who are suffering.

God has not stood idly by in the face of our suffering.

He is not insensitive to our suffering.

This servant, ignored, rejected and killed, is God himself, who took the form of a servant.

He experienced loneliness, shame and pain in his own flesh and soul. He did not sit idly by.

But it's not just that God sympathises with our suffering, because he has experienced our suffering.

No. He proposes a plan to resolve our suffering.

Since he solved the problem of sin, we know that one day all the other problems - misfortune, sickness, death - will also be solved.

Which brings us to the last point...

Mute in front of his sacrifice ...

Stunned by his Victory (53.10-12)

Isaiah 53:10

The Lord wanted to break him through suffering.

If you make his life a sacrifice of guilt,

he will have descendants and live a long life,

and the will of the Lord will be done through him.

11 After so much trouble, he will see the light and be content.

By his knowledge, my righteous servant will bring justice to many;

he will bear their faults.

What does a successful rescue plan for the world look like?

How do you know if the plan has worked?

I don't know if any of you are familiar with the business jargon of 'KPIs'.

Key performance indicators.

These are the signs we look for to know whether a project is achieving its objectives or not.

What are the KPIs of God's plan? How do you know if it has worked?

So far in this message we've been talking mainly about Good Friday, the day of Jesus' crucifixion, as Isaiah had anticipated it 700 years earlier.

And now it's Easter Sunday !😊

Because the first KPI is ... resurrection.

After his death, the servant ... will have descendants and will live a long life.

Isaiah announces Jesus' resurrection 7 centuries in advance.

He will come out of the tomb to confirm that everything we have just said about the meaning of his death ... was not just hot air.

We could ask ourselves this question. Other people were crucified on the same day as Jesus. How do we know that Jesus' death was not just another death?

How do we know that this story of sins borne for us on the cross is not just a fantasy?

Thanks to his resurrection.

Jesus will leave the tomb, look at what he has accomplished and Isaiah says he will be "satisfied" with his work.

That's it! Mission accomplished! The plan worked!

It is as if Isaiah were saying that the servant will come out of the tomb, look around and be filled with satisfaction when he sees every person saved.

'Look, there's them over there, they were a thousand light years away from God before, but now they're part of our family'.

Then you here, you were so far away, so desperate, but now you are brothers, sisters. How happy I am!'

Ah, but there's him there too. Who would have thought, but he's there too! What a joy!

Mission accomplished.

Let's get rid of the idea that Jesus saves reluctantly. OK, I'll save him ... but not ... very much. Her ... I'm still very hesitant.'

No, when Jesus comes out of the tomb, he sees ... descendants ... he looks at us as family ... and he's satisfied!

Resurrection.

There is another related KPI.

Justification

Verse 11

"my righteous servant will bring justice to many".

How do we know that despite Jesus' death for our sins, God isn't going to get a bit fed up with us and our nonsense and push us away again?

How do we know that when the time comes for us to leave this earth, we won't be turned away at the entrance to his kingdom?

It's because he gave us ... his own righteousness.

We can approach the gates of heaven with as much confidence as Jesus does.

God sees us ... as perfect.

Finally, the third KPI. The third sign that the plan has worked.

Glorification

Verse 12 - last quote.

Therefore I will give him his portion in the midst of many

and he will share the spoils with the powerful:

because he stripped himself to death

and that he *was counted among the criminals,

because he bore the sin of many men

and that he intervened on behalf of the guilty.

I don't know if there are any Paris Saint Germain supporters here.

If... they manage to win the Champions League this year (I say if - I know they look promising), you can just imagine the scenes when they return to Paris! The victory procession. The players on the bus, cheered on by the crowd, all happy to share the glory of having won the trophy.

Like after the football World Cup in 2018 ... or the rugby World Cup in ... not the rugby World Cup.

This is the image that Isaiah leaves us with.

The victorious servant of God is exalted, acclaimed, recognised as the greatest, recognised in fact as God, and he will share with his people the joy and glory of his triumph.

Not just a temporary triumph ... until next season.

But an eternal triumph ... in his kingdom.

A kingdom in which all the other problems we would like God to put an end to will no longer exist.

It will be the world as it should be. Glory forever. And we will have access to it ... but only through the death of the servant.

I wonder if you're sure you'll be taking part.

All you have to do is trust the servant. Trust Jesus and then stand in awe of his success.

This is what we celebrate at Easter.

Mission accomplished for God's rescue plan.

It may not be the rescue plan we thought it was.

But it was the rescue plan we needed.

It's so easy in this world to sink into pessimism or cynicism.

It's best not to get your hopes up. You're bound to be disappointed in the end. That kind of attitude.

Let's content ourselves with cultivating our own garden, like Candide.

If God hadn't sent his servant, I could sympathise with that attitude.

I read the headlines and ... I don't feel like reading the headlines any more.

Too depressing.

But the fact is that God came into this world to suffer himself, in the person of the servant, to solve our most fundamental problem - sin - and to give us the certainty of endless glory.

That's the answer to pessimism! Good Friday. Easter Sunday.

Finally, I recently read the testimony of a certain Gilles who understood these things for the first time.

A friend explained to him the meaning of the cross and the love of Jesus, and invited him to pray with him for the first time.

Gilles remained silent, not knowing what to say, then after a long moment he simply said: "God, hats off. Hats off...hats off. God, really, hats off. Hats off, God"

Speechless before Jesus and his cross.

If we understand these things, can I suggest an activity?

It's not difficult.

We can try it out this afternoon or tomorrow - it's a bank holiday.

Just to remain silent ... to marvel ... at the cross .

Just keep your mouth closed in front of it.

Then, when we're ready, open our mouths again and tell someone about it.

Why not do it now? A few moments of silence. Then I'll lead us in prayer.

The All-Powerful Shepherd and the New Exodus (Mark 6.30-56)

When I became a Christian, I thought I already knew the Bible pretty well. I’d grown up in church, I knew all the stories, and had heard thousands of sermons over the course of my life. I’d grown up hearing that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit to speak the message of God to human beings—including those human beings who received this Word and wrote it down for us. I knew that, and I believed it and accepted it, as I still do.

The big surprise came when I actually started reading the Bible seriously, and realized that there was a lot more to it than I thought. Not just in terms of the details, which were far more fascinating and complex than I’d imagined, but also—especially—in terms of the biblical narrative as a whole.

The more I read and studied the Bible, the more I realized that the Bible is a lot more than just a book, or just a collection of books, or even a Holy-Spirit-inspired collection of books, but rather it is a Holy-Spirit-inspired, self-referential and self-fulfilling collection of books.

To put it another way, the Bible was probably the first meta series in literature.

This is astonishing, because the 66 books contained in the Bible were written over a span of over 1500 years, by multiple different authors from radically different walks of life, in radically different contexts. And yet, all of the biblical authors came together to write, not a series of books, but one coherent story.

You can see this all over the Bible if you pay attention, and you can see it quite particularly in today’s text. But in order to see it, you need to do a little work.

So I want to do something a little different today. I want to preach two mini-sermons on this text. In the first, we’ll look at the passage somewhat superficially: to see what happens in this passage, and what we might tend to take from it after a quick read. The reason I want to do this is because this is the way many of us typically read the Bible. We’ll eat the whipped cream, but we’ll leave the ice cream. We’ll sit down, we’ll read the text, we’ll even take notes…but we’ll forget to zoom out and consider the rest of the Bible. So the things we come away with may be true—I trust that everything I say today will be true—but we’ll come up just a little short.

In the second, I want us to notice something that Mark is doing in this passage—something subtle, but I believe quite intentional—that will help us to see the bigger point he’s actually trying to make by telling the story in this way.

So let’s start with Sermon I, which I’m calling “The All-Powerful Shepherd”.

Sermon I: The All-Powerful Shepherd

Essentially, this passage contains two very well-known miracles of Jesus: the feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus walking on water. Let’s start at the first, in v. 30.

1. Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand (v. 30-44)

Our passage begins with the apostles returning to Jesus. If you remember last week, Jesus sent them out two by two to be his delegates, in a sense, to the surrounding regions. They went out, they preached the gospel, and they performed miracles. Now they’ve returned, and they’re telling him about everything they did while they were gone.

Clearly, after a long trip and a lot of work, they’re exhausted, so Jesus takes them away to get some rest. They get in a boat, and they head out on the sea of Galilee toward “a desolate place”, away from the crowds. But lo and behold, when they come ashore, there’s the crowd that they left behind—they’ve come on foot, and they’re waiting.

This would be up there with the most annoying things they could do, for me. I came here to rest, please just give us some peace and quiet!

But that’s not what Jesus does. In v. 34, we read:

34 When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things.

So his reaction is neither irritation nor impatience—he doesn’t even make the very reasonable appeal that the apostles need their rest. Instead, he has compassion on the crowd, these “sheep without a shepherd”. And he begins to teach them.

Jesus’s capacity for understanding weak people is just astounding.

So he’s teaching, and it gets late. His disciples come and tap him on the shoulder, saying, “It’s getting late and everyone’s hungry. Let them go so they can get something to eat.”

Jesus is as provocative as ever in v 37:

37 But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” And they said to him, “Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give it to them to eat?” 38 And he said to them, “How many loaves do you have? Go and see.” And when they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” 39 Then he commanded them all to sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups, by hundreds and by fifties. 41 And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before the people. And he divided the two fish among them all. 42 And they all ate and were satisfied.

So if you’re new to the Bible and this isn’t really clear, Mark is describing a miraculous multiplication of food. Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish, and makes more bread and fish from the ones that he has, enough to feed five thousand men (so likely around twenty-thousand men, women and children).

How did Jesus do it? What did it look like? I have no idea—I would have loved to have seen it. All we know is that there were twelve baskets of food left over after these thousands of people have been fed.

Jesus shows us here that he doesn’t care only for the spiritual: after feeding the people with his Word, he also provides for their material needs.

And why does he do it? Because he is all-powerful—he is able to feed all these people. But most especially, he does it because he is the good shepherd. An ordinary shepherd will be vigilant to give his sheep everything they need. Jesus is an even better shepherd, because he doesn’t care for his people out of duty or obligation, but because he has compassion on them.

2. Jesus Walks on Water (v. 45-56)

After this, Jesus sends his disciples back into the boat to finally find some rest on the other side. Jesus goes to seek his own kind of rest—as it says in v. 46: After he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray.

Then Mark sets the scene for maximum suspense: later that evening, Jesus is on land, and he can see the boat out on the sea. Mark says (v. 48):

And he saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them.

That’s the picture he gives us: the disciples struggling in the boat, rowing against the wind, and Jesus watching, knowing that they’re having a hard time. It’s the middle of the night, somewhere between 3 and 6 a.m.

And then in the second half of v. 48, we read:

And about the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. He meant to pass by them, 49 but when they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost, and cried out, 50 for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.” 51 And he got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, 52 for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.

Jesus comes to them in the most unconventional way possible: by walking on the water. That is, he is literally walking on the surface of the water as if it were land. It’s an extraordinary display of his power.

Mark says that “he meant to pass by them” before they spotted him and started freaking out—which is odd. What was Jesus’s plan? Did he want to head to the other shore and be there waiting for them when they got there?

Mark doesn’t tell us, but we know that the disciples see Jesus, thinks he’s a ghost, and he comes to reassure them. He gets in the boat, and the wind stops—the sea is calm again. And, Mark says, “they were utterly astounded.” No surprise there—they’ve just seen one of the most incredible things anyone has ever seen. Once again, the good shepherd is at work: protecting his sheep from the storm.

Finally, Jesus gets back to business as usual. They had meant to go to Bethsaida, to the north of the sea, but the storm has pushed them further west, to Gennesaret. When they land there, people recognize him and come to him, and bring him their sick. Jesus’s power is so great that all people had to do was touch the fringe of his garment (like the woman with the discharge of blood in chapter 5). And (v. 56) “as many as touched it were made well.”

Conclusion

So here would be a typical conclusion to this sermon; it’s the exact conclusion I’ve heard in multiple sermons on this passage.

The big idea, according to this conclusion, is this: Jesus is the Good Shepherd who cares for his sheep, and he puts all of his incredible power to work in providing for their needs—their food, their healing, and their protection.

Now, that is absolutely true. That is exactly who Jesus is. And we can take incredible comfort in that, knowing that the power of God himself is constantly putting all of his power to work in providing for his people.

But that’s not all that’s going on here.

Mark gives us multiple, subtle hints that the main idea he has in mind is bigger than even that big idea we just pulled out. And it all has to do with the Exodus.

Sermon II. The New Exodus

So here is the second sermon—the sermon that hopefully goes a little deeper than the fairly superficial reading we did before.

Before we get started, I’d like to give a warning. It is possible to go too far when trying to dig deeper into a passage of Scripture, and make connections the author never intended to make. A classic example is the story of Rahab, the prostitute who protected the Hebrew spies in Jericho. Rahab asked for their protection when Israel came to take Jericho, and said she would hang a red cord out of her window so they could identify her. Some people will try to find meaning in the fact that the cord she hangs out the window is red—it must be a reference to sacrifice! It’s an allusion to the blood of Christ!

No, it’s actually just a red cord, chosen because the color red would be clearly visible against a stone wall. There is nothing in the story to suggest that this was an allusion to anything greater than that. We want so badly to find connections in the Bible that sometimes we make them up.

If you find yourself susceptible to this kind of thinking, that’s okay. Learning to read the Bible is like learning a language: you can learn the basics quickly, but becoming fluent takes time. Keep going. Read the Bible with others who know it better than you, to learn from them. Read, and pray, and be patient.

That being said, I don’t thing it’s a leap to make a number of connections in this passage; Mark makes multiple allusions to the Exodus. They are subtle, so you might not notice them if you’re reading quickly, but they’re also clear: once you see them you can’t unsee them.

1. The Savior Who Provides (v. 30-44)

Let’s go back to the feeding of the five thousand, in v. 30-44. Where are they when this miracle takes place? We’re not exactly sure, but we know that Jesus has intentionally brought his disciples across the sea to rest in “a desolate place” (v. 32)—a place where there is nothing, no commerce, no activity. And that’s where the people come to meet him.

Think back to the Exodus story. Israel lived under slavery for centuries, and when they cried out to God he heard their prayers and sent Moses to deliver them. Through a series of miraculous signs God performs, Israel is delivered from slavery and brought out of Egypt. But when they get where God is bringing them, they find themselves in a wilderness—with no idea how they’re going to eat or drink.

So God, providing for his people, sends them a bread-like substance they call manna, and quail—every day and every night. He provides water, gushing from a rock. (These stories appear in Exodus 16-17.) The whole time they are in the wilderness, the people of Israel have food to eat and water to drink. God provides for their need.

It’s difficult to miss the similarity with what Jesus does here. These people have come to him because they are hungry to know him, so he feeds their hunger by teaching. Then when they become actually hungry, he provides actual food—he miraculously produces enough bread and fish to feed everyone present.

Mark wants us to see that just as God provided for Israel in the wilderness, Jesus is providing for his people in this desolate place.

In addition, when everyone has had their fill, there are twelve baskets of bread and fish left over. What does the number twelve remind you of? Of course, if you know the story of Exodus, it will remind you of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that on its own, that would be a bit of a stretch. But this not the only time Mark mentions something like this.

Later on, in chapter 8, Jesus will perform a similar miracle, in which he feeds four thousand people. And once again, there’s more than enough food—there are leftovers. In chapter 8, there are seven baskets of food left over.

Seven, in the Bible, is the number of completeness, of wholeness.

Twelve baskets here, seven baskets there. And there’s a reason: God knew exactly what he was doing when he planned out how much food there would be left over.

In the first miracle, in our text today, Jesus is in Jewish territory—he’s preaching to Jews, and he’s feeding Jews. Twelve baskets, twelve tribes of Israel.

In the second miracle in chapter 8, Jesus is in Gentile territory—he’s preaching to non-Jews, and he’s feeding non-Jews. And this time, seven baskets are left: completeness.

First he comes to Israel, and feeds his people. Then he goes out into the rest of the world, and feeds them. Jesus didn’t come just to save the Jews; he came to save all his people. People from all nations, all tribes and tongues.

Mark didn’t make this stuff up, but he’s drawing our attention to it in this passage because he wants us to see the commonalities between the God who rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and this carpenter who came to preach the kingdom of God. He wants us to see the commonalities between the God who provided for his people in the desert and this Jesus who provided for his people in this other desolate place.

Jesus is the figurehead of a new Exodus.

2. The Savior Who Is “I AM” (v. 45-56)

Next, Jesus sends the disciples to the other side of the sea while he goes up to the mountain to pray. The winds pick up, the disciples are having a very hard time rowing against it. Jesus sees this and comes, walking on the water, toward the boat. They’re afraid, he tells them not to be afraid because it’s him, gets into the boat, and calms the storm.

There is a fairly obvious reference to the Exodus story here: Jesus displays his supernatural power over a body of water. He displays it here by walking on it. In Exodus 14, God displayed his supernatural power over the water at the Red Sea by parting it, allowing the people of Israel to pass through the sea on dry land.

Already this would be a significant thing to note. But it’s not all; it’s not even the most important. The most important allusion to the Exodus here is rather found in two subtle moments in v. 48-50. Let’s read those verses again:

48 And he saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them. And about the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. He meant to pass by them, 49 but when they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost, and cried out, 50 for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.”

Here’s the first allusion: look at the end of v. 48: “He meant to pass by them…”

Remember, earlier on we asked why Jesus meant to pass by the disciples. What was his plan? Why would he walk out there just to “pass by” them?

We find the answer in the words themselves. (I’m sorry, this is a little technical, but it’s important.)

This book was written in Greek, which was the common language of the Roman Empire at the time. Mark tells us that Jesus meant to “pass by” the disciples. In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament, completed in the 1st century B.C.), the same verb is used in Exodus 33, when God puts Moses in the cleft of the rock and “passed by” him, giving him a glimpse of his glory.

Mark’s choice of words is not accidental; what God did for Moses is what Jesus is doing for the disciples. He’s not passing by the boat to get past the disciples; he’s passing by the boat to be seen by the disciples. That they might see his power and glory and believe in him.

He hammers this point home even harder when he sees that the disciples are terrified. What does he tell them? V. 50: “Take heart; IT IS I. Do not be afraid.”

One night when Jack was a newborn, Loanne had a nightmare that Jack was gone and she couldn’t find him (a common nightmare for new parents). It was a nightmare for me too, because in her sleep, Loanne was feeling all around in the bed for Jack, clawing at the covers and smacking my arms and my face. I woke up, shocked to find myself assaulted, and all I could think to say to calm her down was, “It’s okay! It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!”

That’s not what Jesus is doing here; he’s not just calming the disciples’ fears by identifying himself. He’s echoing God’s own words to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3, when he told Moses who he was: “I AM.”

Any one of these things, taken on its own, can seem a bit far-fetched, like we’re grasping for connections. And Mark is subtle with his allusions. It’s harder to dismiss, however, when they keep piling up like this, and Mark says one final thing that convinces me that he is indeed making reference to something greater than just a couple of pretty astounding miracles.

It comes when Mark describes the reaction of the disciples to Jesus after he calms the waves. V. 51:

51 And he got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, 52 for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.

Of course, if you know the story of Exodus, you’ll remember that the author speaks several times about the Pharaoh’s heart being hardened. I don’t think the disciples’ hearts were as hardened as the heart of the Pharaoh, who willfully refused to believe Moses despite everything he had seen. There’s no hint of malice in the disciples’ lack of comprehension.

But they were still not quite ready to fully believe; they didn’t understand yet. Not all who don’t understand have hard hearts; but in this case, the disciples’ hardness of heart caused them to not “understand about the loaves.”

So here’s the real question: what were they meant to understand about the loaves? When Jesus multiplied the bread and the fish, what were they meant to understand? When Jesus passed by them on the lake, walking on the water, what were they meant to understand?

It’s already fairly obvious from the context of the story, but it becomes even more obvious when you take all of Mark’s allusions to the Exodus into account. The disciples were meant to understand that Jesus is God.

• Who fed the people of Israel in the desert, when there was no food? God did.

• Who had power over the Red Sea? God did.

• Who passed by Moses in the rock, giving him a view of his glory? God did.

• Who provided atonement for the sins of the people, making them pure? God did.

And yet, the people of Israel consistently struggled to fully understand who God was, to fully believe in and trust him.

Now, look at today’s passage:

• Who fed the crowds in a desolate place, when there was no food? Jesus did.

• Who had power over the sea of Galilee? Jesus did.

• Who passed by the disciples in the boat, giving them a view of his glory? Jesus did.

• Who provided healing for the people in Gennesaret after they landed, purifying them of their physical ailments? Jesus did.

And yet, the disciples struggle to fully understand who Jesus is; they are afraid.

The point of all of this is that Jesus arrives on the scene in Israel, performing miracles and guiding through his teaching, and in so doing, he begins the process of bringing his people into a new Exodus.

The people of Israel were in bondage to slavery for centuries before God provided an exodus for them—a way of escape, of getting out of their slavery.

So if Jesus is ushering in a new Exodus, we have to ask: What are we getting out of? What are we escaping? What is Jesus setting us free from?

The Bible is the story of God bringing his people out of death and into life. He does it over and over: when he provides a means for Noah to escape the flood; when he brings Israel out of bondage in Egypt; when he rescues his people from foreign oppression; when he brings them out of exile in Babylon, back to Jerusalem.

All of these are hints of the greater Exodus to come: the exodus from what enslaves every man and every woman who ever lived. Jesus came to set his people free from sin and eternal death. Jesus came to bring us out of death and into life.

And there, we have the final connection. The Exodus wasn’t just an exodus, it was also an entrance: the people exited the slavery of Egypt, and ultimately entered into the promised land of Canaan. Jesus came to bring us out of death, and into life. He didn’t carry our sin on the cross only to let us escape eternal death. He was raised from the tomb to secure for us eternal life.

As wonderful as all the miracles of Christ were, they are merely signposts, pointing us to the greater miracle, the infinite miracle, of bringing people from every nation, tribe and tongue into eternal life, through his life, death and resurrection.

Conclusion

I can think of no better preparation for Easter week than this text. This passage tells us everything we should have in mind as we get ready to celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ.

And that’s really the call of this text—it’s giving us something to keep in mind. We always want to know how to respond to a text in the Bible, and there is always a response to what we read in the Bible. But sometimes, the proper response isn’t anything we do; it’s something we realize.

That is the case here. This text isn’t calling us to do anything; it’s calling us to understand what the disciples couldn’t. To see Jesus for the incredible, incomprehensible God that he is. To take rest and solace in the knowledge that the power Jesus has to feed five thousand men from a few loaves of bread and a few fish, the power he has to walk on water and calm a storm, is at work in his people to bring them closer to him.

So rather than springing into action after reading this text, our main response should be to pray. Pray that God would soften our hearts, so that we might understand who Jesus is. Pray that we might see his glory and believe. Pray that we might have eyes to see who Christ is, and be in awe of him.

If we see Jesus for who he is, we will be in constant wonder and worship of him. We will be transfixed not just by where we are, but by where we are going. We will be centered not on our circumstances but on his promises for our eternal life.

And at the same time, if we see Jesus for who he is, we’ll understand that he doesn’t just care about the big things; he cares about the small things as well. If you’re hungry, he will feed you. If you’re unsure of where to go, he will guide you. If you’re afraid, he will protect you. He won’t always give us everything we want to have; he won’t tell us everything we want to know; and he won’t always protect us from things that frighten us. But he will give us what we need to have; he will tell us what we need to know; and he will protect us from the things that will truly harm us.

We serve an incredible, gracious, awe-inspiring Savior, who has brought us into a new Exodus, guiding us out of death and into life, out of darkness and into light. Let us consider him, believe in him, trust him.

How Not to Repent, in three lessons (Mark 6.1-29)

When I arrived in France in 2003, I was strangely surprised by a lot of things. One of those things is something that frankly makes sense, but that I’d never seen in America. It was the messages on cigarette packs. A big white box, with writing in huge, black, block letters: “SMOKING INCREASES YOUR RISK OF CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE”, or “SMOKING CAUSES BIRTH DEFECTS”, or the wonderfully simple “SMOKING KILLS”.

Then in 2011, it got even more brutal. They started putting photographs on the sides of tobacco products, pictures that come straight out of a horror movie: deformed fetuses, cancerous open mouths, blackened lungs. Suddenly walking down the street and seeing someone with a pack of cigarettes in their hand was enough to turn your stomach.

I don’t know how efficient these things were—plenty of people still smoke today, because everyone is convinced it won’t happen to them—but the initiative was a good one: show people the risk, so that they might not take it.

Mark is doing something similar in today’s text. He’s going to give us several examples of the risk that we all run, and at some of the potential consequences.

But before we get into the text, there’s a bit of context that we need to help situate us. The first bit of context is historical, to help situate us in the story. Up until now, Jesus has ministered primarily in Galilee (the region in which he grew up). His ministry in Galilee comes to an end at the beginning of chapter 6 (today’s text), when he goes to his own hometown. After this, Jesus goes to other regions, and eventually even to Gentile—non-Jewish—regions.

The second bit of context is more thematic. We see three different preachers in our text (or rather three different groups of preachers): Jesus, the twelve apostles, and John the Baptist. These three groups did not preach three different messages. The meat of their message is the same across the board, and that is a message of repentance.

When John baptized people, his baptism was a baptism of repentance (we see in chapter 1, verse 4). Then we read a few verses later, in v. 14-15:

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

And then when the apostles are sent out, we read in today’s text (chapter 6, verse 12):

12 So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent.

The unifying call of all these messages is the call to repentance. But what is repentance?

The Bible tells us that for all of our variety and our distinctions, when it comes to people there are really only two categories that truly matter: those who are united to God, and those who are not united to God. Those who are united to God are defined by their union with him, and those who are not united to God are defined by their sin (which is rebellion against God).

Now in order for us to be united to God, God has to do a tremendous amount of work. He sends his Son Jesus, God the Son; Jesus gives us the perfect, sinless life he lived, and he takes our sin on himself and is punished in our place for that sin. He pursues us, he calls us from death to life, he gives us new eyes to see him and new hearts to desire him. We cannot understand, measure or overestimate the immensity of the work of Christ.

In comparison, our work is relatively small—but we do have something to do, and that is repentance. Repentance is how the Bible talks about the process by which we become united to God: we confess our sin—that is, we admit that we have sinned and deserve God’s wrath—and then we turn away from that sin to follow after God. Confess our sin, turn away from our sin—that’s repentance. And that repentance is an outworking of our faith—if we have faith in Christ, we will repent of our sin.

Here’s what we need to keep in mind as we work through this passage. We have three different episodes here, with three different preachers (or two preachers and one group of preachers). All three episodes highlight the message that Jesus has proclaimed since chapter 1: the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel.

But each of these episodes shows us how not to do this: what it looks like to not respond to the gospel, how not to repent.

Lesson 1: Unbelief (v. 1-6)

Let’s read again, at the beginning of chapter 6:

He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2 And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus comes to his hometown (Nazareth), and he starts teaching in the synagogue. We don’t know what he taught exactly, but it certainly left no one indifferent. The people who heard him were “astonished,” Mark says. They ask themselves where this man got all this incredible wisdom.

They’re also amazed because of what they’ve heard about Jesus: they know that everywhere Jesus goes, miracles happen. He heals the sick, he casts out demons—these aren’t things just anyone could do. And no matter how much Jesus warns people not to tell anyone what he’s done, practically no one listens to him—everyone is talking.

Now all of this makes their perplexity understandable: Jesus is doing incredible things. But that’s not even the main reason they are perplexed. They are perplexed because they know him. In v. 3, they say, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” Mark adds immediately after: “And they took offense at him.”

They don’t take offense at him because of what he’s doing or because of what he’s saying; they take offense at him because they know him. These people listening to him are likely people who have known Jesus his whole life. They knew him as a carpenter (which was his trade before going into ministry). They know his family. They’ve seen him in other contexts; they’ve seen him at meals and in conversation and in play. In other words, they’ve seen him as an ordinary person up to now—honorable, good, but ordinary.

But now Jesus has come along with this incredible teaching and this incredible ministry, and what they’re seeing doesn’t seem to match what they know about him. It seems too grandiose for a simple carpenter.

This isn’t hard to understand. My brother Jared is a great guy, a great dad, and he has a lot of talent. But he doesn’t have a musical bone in his body. He can’t sing, he can’t play an instrument. So if he sent me a message tomorrow saying he’s learned to play guitar, and then sent a video tomorrow of himself doing some amazing riff, no matter how real it might seem, my first instinct would be to not believe it. Because I know Jared. I’d know that can’t be him. He must have done some technical trickery to make this video; he’s got to be faking somehow.

That’s the dynamic at play here. All we know about Jesus’s life in Nazareth before he began his public ministry is that as he grew, he “increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (we see that in Luke’s gospel, chapter 2, verse 52). So he was well-liked, well-respected, and wise. But apparently he gave no one a hint of everything he was actually capable of doing.

So when he finally came, doing what he was born to do, everyone was impressed except the people who knew him. Jesus said (v. 4),

“A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”

Why? Because the relatives know the prophet, and they can’t square what they know about him with what they’re seeing.

The end result is horribly sad—v. 5:

5 And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. 6 And he marveled because of their unbelief.

Familiarity, if we’re not careful, breeds unbelief—which is the first reaction to Jesus’s message that we see here.

Lesson 2: Indifference (v. 7-13)

In our next episode, we see Jesus sending out the twelve disciples on a sort of missions trip. This is, in some ways, a test run for them, to prepare them for their lives and ministry after Jesus is gone. V. 7:

7 And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts— 9 but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. 10 And he said to them, “Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. 11 And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” 12 So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent. 13 And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.

So Jesus sends out the twelve, in pairs. He gives them “authority over the unclean spirits”—that is, in the same way that demons possessing people have to listen to and obey Jesus, they now have to listen to and obey the apostles as well. He also gives them power to heal, as we see in v. 13.

Before he sends them out, he prepares them for their journey. He tells them to bring almost nothing with them: no extra supplies, no extra clothes to stay warm, no food for the road. They are to rely entirely on God’s provision.

But Jesus does give them something for the road: expectations, and an order.

He tells them that as they go on their way, some people will take them in. We might think that he’s referring to the common practice in Jewish culture of letting travelers stay in your home for the night, but it seems that there’s more to it than that. Likely, Jesus is suggesting that the apostles should stay with those people who have repented upon hearing the apostles’ message.

Here’s why I say that: Jesus says in v. 11 that if there is any place that won’t receive the apostles, when they leave they are to shake the dust off their feet, as a testimony against them.

The image is simple. What do you do if you have to visit someone, and their home is absolutely filthy, crawling with fleas and dog hair? When you leave that house, you’ll want to shake yourself off, brush off everything that stuck to your clothes when you sat down.

Here, the shaking of the dust off their feet isn’t just a sign of cleansing (as it was common practice for Jews to do this when they would leave a Gentile region); it is also a sign of judgment against that place.

The only thing God ever judges in the Bible is unrepentant sin. Sin is rebellion against his commands. So if the apostles are pronouncing judgment on these areas, it is because the people living there have heard the apostles’ call to repentance, and not responded to it. So it’s not hostility; it’s not open vehemence. It’s more like what you do when a homeless person is asking for money and you don’t want to be bothered, so you shrug your shoulders, give an apologetic look, and move on quickly.

This is simple realism on the part of Jesus. Some people will listen to you, and others won’t. Some people will accept your call to repentance, and others won’t.

The reasons why people won’t accept God’s call to repentance will vary; but most often it’s just because people don’t want to. They hear the message, and they even understand the message…but they want other things more. The gospel goes out, and it falls on deaf ears. Notice that these people aren’t openly hostile toward the apostles; they’re not persecuting them. They’re just…not interested.

And against those who remain indifferent in this way, the apostles are called to perform a visible sign of judgment. Nothing else. No militancy, no brow-beating—rather, a simple sign for those who will not listen: I won’t be carrying the responsibility for your souls with me. Your indifference is between you and God.

Lesson 3: Violence (v. 14-29)

The next episode, the story of the death of John the Baptist, is a bit of an aside, but Mark doesn’t only include it for biographical or chronological reasons. He includes this story to tell us what else to expect: if some will respond to the message of repentance by indifference, and others by unbelief, still others will respond by violence.

King Herod—the tetrarch of Galilee, an administrator of the region under Rome—had put John in prison because John had called Herod on his depravity: Herod had married the former wife of his brother (who was still alive). The wife, Herodias, held a grudge against John, but couldn’t do anything about it because Herod was keeping him safe—he put him in prison to keep him from speaking openly, but he still kept him safe there. Herod feared John, Mark tells us, because John was a righteous and holy man, and although Herod understood little of what John said and accepted none of it, he still enjoyed listening to him.

But then comes this famous banquet for Herod’s birthday.  Herodias’s daughter (Herod’s stepdaughter) comes out and does a dance for the guests, and Herod is smitten: he makes a twisted and foolish promise that he’ll give the girl whatever she wants. Prompted by her mother, she says she wants John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Herod doesn’t want to do it, but he doesn’t want to lose face in front of his guests, so he does it: he has John decapitated, and his head brought to the girl on a platter. Imagine: killing someone just to keep the party going.

The message here is pretty simple: the call to repentance will meet with resistance, and sometimes that resistance will be fierce. A call to repentance is a call to abandon depravity, but some people, who love their sin, will respond by digging even deeper into that sin.

The question is, what is the consequence? In the first episode, the consequence was that Jesus couldn’t do anything in his hometown, and left. In the second episode, the consequence was that those who rejected the apostles’ message would receive a sign of judgment against them.

Mark doesn’t tell us what the consequence was for Herod—which is kind of the point. After this passage, Herod disappears from Mark’s gospel. We see him mentioned in the other gospels, and incidentally, when Luke writes the book of Acts he tells us that Herod dies a spectacularly gruesome death because of his pride. (If you’re interested, you’ll find that story in Acts chapter 12.)  But for Mark, after this point, Herod is gone. He could have been a powerful figure as an ally of John the Baptist—and, by extension, of Jesus—but instead, he is written out of the story.

For all of his pride, Herod becomes a non-character in the story of Jesus—truly unimportant.

Which is how it goes most of the time. Throughout history, the gospel has always met with violent opposition. And yet the violence committed against some Christians only serves to anchor the faith of those who witness it. Rather than frightening Christians into renouncing their faith, historically speaking, Christianity has flourished under persecution. We see the faith of the men and women who have died for their faith throughout history, and while it is frightening, it is also fuel for our faith, because it helps us remember that the gospel is worth dying for.

And that is what we remember from the martyrs of the faith. We remember much about John the Baptist, but very little about Herod; Herod becomes totally inconsequential, while we still feel the impact of John’s ministry today. That’s how it almost always goes. We generally remember the martyrs, not the murderers.

There’s no real resolution to this passage, which sort of leaves us hanging. Of course that’s the way things often work in real life, so it’s not a surprise: we read what happens in this passage and we can easily think about it as a story. But nothing about the three episodes of this story we’ve seen is truly past. Everything we see here is always current, because people will always respond to Jesus, either with unbelief, or indifference, or violence—and really, they all come down to the same thing.

No matter how you reject the gospel, you’re still rejecting the gospel. It is simply impossible to “sort of” accept Christ. It’s all or nothing.

Lesson 4: Repentance (v. 12)

But there is a fourth way of responding to Jesus. We don’t see anyone really respond this way in this passage, but we definitely hear it called for. When the apostles go out, what do they do? V. 12:

They went out and proclaimed that people should repent.

This is the call of Jesus’s teaching, of John’s teaching, and the apostles’ teaching. It is the opposite of the responses we saw illustrated in our text. It is the first goal of all gospel proclamation: the kingdom of God is at hand; so repent, and believe the gospel.

Earlier we talked about what repentance is: it is confessing our sin and turning away from it in faith to follow after God.

The question is, how is it possible?

This is a more important question than we may realize, because we can understand the people in Nazareth who can’t get past what they knew about Jesus. We can understand the people listening to the apostles, who simply can’t buy what they’re teaching. And if we’re honest, we can even understand Herod, who wants what he wants and goes after what he wants and will do anything to keep it; we may not go as far as he did (thank God), but I think we can all identify with the temptation to save face and to pursue pleasure at all costs.

But it’s not just about what these people did or didn’t do—that’s not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that on our own, we can’t just “turn away” from our sin, because sin isn’t just what we do; it’s what we are. It is the nature that has been handed down to us ever since the garden of Eden; every cell in our bodies is infected with this cancer.

You can’t dress it up, and you can’t hide it, not from God. If a piece of meat has gone bad, it doesn’t matter how you marinade it to hide the flavor—it still will taste off, and it will still make you sick.

So if we can’t dress sin up to make it look better than it is, if we can’t hide it from God, what can we do?

John’s baptism was wonderful, but it wasn’t complete. It was a picture of purification and of renewal, but that purification and renewal is impossible unless God intervenes.

And that is the answer to our question. What can we do? Nothing. But Jesus can. He is the only one who can make repentance possible.

Jesus didn’t die as a symbol. He didn’t die as a way to throw some makeup on sin and pretend it was gone. He didn’t die so we could buy a cross on a chain that we wear around our necks to make us feel like we’re better than we really are.

Jesus died to kill our sin. He died to remove the sickness, to remove the cancer. To excise the tumor. He took our sin on himself and he was punished for that sin in our place. When he died, so did our sin. When he was buried in the tomb, so was our sin. And when he was raised, he left our sin there in the tomb. All of our sin, past, present and future, is dead if we are in Christ. The record has been canceled, the debt has been paid.

Which means that if we have faith in Christ, we are able to repent. We are truly able to turn away from sin.

Just imagine what it would be like to try to repent without Jesus! In fact, we don’t have to imagine it, not really. People try it all the time. And it’s miserable.

It’s a constant fight to pretend we’re something we’re not, to convince God that we’re better than we really are. It’s endless list-keeping: these are the things I did wrong, so let’s keep track of all the things I did right, because if the “wrong” list is longer than the “right” list, then I’m still not holy enough. And we’re always scared, because what if we forgot something? What if we think we’re doing pretty well, but when we come and stand before God, he’ll say, “Yeah, all that was good…but you forgot about this, didn’t you? Sorry—that’s a deal-breaker.”

Trying to repent without Jesus is endless vanity, endless fear, endless failure, because we can never be good enough to make up for our sin.

But now, in Christ, we’re free from all that! Think about it: how freeing must it be, to have no one whose approval I have to win? To have nothing to prove, even to God himself? In Christ, we don’t have to pretend we’re not sinners—in fact, our being sinners is exactly why we can come to God with confidence, because the one who repents in faith proves nothing to God except that he is good. We’re not saved by our own goodness, but by his.

So we can confess. We can come to God, warts and all, and say, “Yes, I am a sinner—but your Son has covered my sin. Thank you for sending him—I place all my trust in him alone.”

That is the first step of repentance, and it is gloriously simple.

And if we grasp that first part of the good news, the second part makes complete sense. What is the only logical and natural response to the realization that we have nothing to prove to God except that God is good?

It is to turn away from sin, and to follow after God.

We don’t do it to earn God’s approval, because in Christ, we already have it. We turn away from sin because faced with God’s incredible goodness to save us, our sin becomes distasteful. Why would I want to wallow in that for which I’ve been forgiven? Why would I want to find pleasure in the sin for which Jesus died?

I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but if I said, “Raise your hands if that question made you feel guilty,” I’m guessing most of us would. Because all of us have a tendency to do just that. God shows us immeasurable grace, and we thank him for it—and then some time later, we find ourselves having returned to the same tired sin again, and we wonder, “How did that happen?”

The answer is that we forget. We forget that God is good, and we forget that we’re forgiven. It is so easy for our old taste for sin to come crawling back. And this is why repentance isn’t a one-time thing: it is a habit of every minute of every day.

Every day, we put ourselves before God’s Word and we tell ourselves, once again, what he has done. Every day, we confess our sin to God in prayer. And every day, we remember the immensity of his grace, to remember why our sin is worth casting aside and putting to death, why Jesus really is worth following.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: if we are not repenting of our sin, we are rejecting Jesus. But that rejection won’t always come in the way we expect.

Sometimes, it will be violent, yes, even if that violence isn’t always physical. Some people—perhaps even some people here today—will want nothing to do with Christ, and will reject him with much vehemence, slinging bitterness and insults.

But it won’t always be violent. Sometimes rejection of Christ will just look like indifference. We hear the message of the gospel, and it does nothing to us. We don’t see ourselves as sinners, so we feel we have nothing to confess, and you could talk to us until you’re blue in the face, it won’t change our minds on the matter. You don’t have to hate the Christian faith to reject Christ—you just have to…not accept him.

And some of you—especially if you’re in the church, and especially if you’ve been in the church for a long while—may fall into the trap of rejecting Christ without thinking you’re rejecting him.  You’ve spent most of your life hearing these stories, singing these songs… And what happens, far too often? You get bored. You get used to Jesus. And before you know it, without even realizing it’s happening, you’re just play-acting—and you do it well, because you know what being a Christian looks like. You’re doing a reasonably good job at pretending to be a good Christian, but your heart is cold; you’re unimpressed, because it’s all so familiar. If we’re not careful, we can become so familiar with the gospel that we just don’t fully believe anymore, not in any way that has any real bearing on our lives.

We should note well that in this passage, Mark never says that the people who heard Jesus’s message or John’s message or the apostles’ message didn’t understand their call to repent. Mark never tells us that it all went over their heads—it did to some people, sure. But in this particular passage, the people’s theological comprehension wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they didn’t accept the message—it doesn’t matter why, because the end result is the same: they didn’t fall on their knees before a holy God and repent of their sin.

This happens all the time. It happens to people who have spent their entire lives in church. It happens to pastors. It happens to theology professors. You can know everything you need to know, and still not know God.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Losing our love for God, falling into unbelief, or rejecting Christ—these are not foregone conclusions. There is another option, and that is repentance by faith in Christ. That is the call of this text: Don’t be like these people who rejected Christ. Listen to John’s message, and the apostles’ message, and Jesus’s message. REPENT. And follow him.

Don’t repent merely to escape judgment. Repent because repentance is better. Repent because we don’t have to do it alone. Repent because you can: because Christ opened that possibility to you.

It will be costly, for sure. Everyone in this passage who rejects the gospel thinks they are preserving something precious for themselves by saying no to Christ: their own idea of what makes someone important, the status quo of their daily lives, or their reputation with others.

But whoever loses his life for Jesus’s sake will find it.

Repentance is costly, absolutely—but it is better. And it is always possible.

The Kingdom of God: Promise and Process (Mark 4.26-34)

Christianity is a faith that has its eyes fixed firmly on the future, while keeping its feet firmly in the present.

That’s not an easy line to walk. Ask anyone who’s going to get married soon, or waiting for a baby to come, or preparing for a move to a new country… It’s a lot harder to pay attention to all the minute and mundane details of ordinary life when you have something massive on the horizon.

A lot of Christians have a hard time walking that line. They’ve got solid doctrine—they have a firm confidence in what God promises to do for us in the future. But at the same time, a lot of the time they struggle to make sense of the present. They really believe in what God says about the future, but they struggle with discouragement, when they look at the state of Christianity in our country today, the state of their own faith, the state of their own church.

We have these great promises from God… But man, the process of getting to those promises is a lot harder than we thought it would be.

We have these two poles of thought: the promise on one hand, and the process on the other. Both are essential, and both are illustrated in today’s passage.

Building a Kingdom

If you remember, Jesus is teaching the crowds by the sea, and he’s teaching them in parables. A parable, as we’ve seen the past couple of weeks, is a story meant to illustrate a greater point. But those points—those stories—aren’t necessarily meant to be easily understood. We see at the end of today’s passage, in v. 33:

33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. 34 He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

So the people listening to Jesus’s parables didn’t necessarily understand them, and his disciples didn’t either; they needed Jesus to explain the parables to them. Joe told us a couple of weeks ago why that is: Jesus isn’t just teaching. He’s using his parables to separate those who hear the Word from those who pursue the Word, those who have faith from those who not.

He’s not just teaching, he’s building. He’s gathering raw materials, and he’s working to build a kingdom.

In today’s passage, we see the first time Jesus begins a parable by saying, “The kingdom of God is like ______.” It won’t be the last. Jesus will do this over and over again over the course of the gospels, and in each of these parables he explains a different facet of the kingdom of God, by comparing it to a situation or a picture. In today’s text we see him doing that for the first time in this gospel.

But before we look at what Jesus says the kingdom of God is like, we need to take a second to ask what it is.

What is the kingdom of God?

“The kingdom of God” is exactly what it sounds like. It is a kingdom—composed of many different people, with a King reigning over them, united with a common culture and a common purpose. But while it’s just like most other kingdoms in many respects, there are a few major differences.

This kingdom’s purpose is the glory of God, not the glory of man. It’s not values or culture or political power—it is God’s glory.

This kingdom is eternal, not temporal. Every kingdom will have an end except this one.

This kingdom isn’t limited by geography—it’s not limited to a specific place. The kingdom of God is a global, universal kingdom.

And lastly, this kingdom is centered around one central figure: Jesus Christ, God the Son, who is in fact the King. When Jesus tells the people about the kingdom of God, he’s telling them about his kingdom.

But here’s the trouble with the kingdom of God—or, rather, with our understanding of it. God’s kingdom is a kingdom that already exists—Christ is already the King, and he already reigns over it. But at the same time, this kingdom isn’t finished yet: God is still building it. This work is still going on…and it’s really difficult to see what that work looks like.

Which is kind of the point of this passage: God is building his kingdom. If you were to ask ten different people what they think that might look like—for God to build a kingdom—you’d likely get ten different answers. But this isn’t a subject that we want to be vague about. The kingdom of God, if it is coming, is the most important kingdom that has ever or will ever be established. And if that’s true—and it is—we need to know what it looks like, so we can recognize it; we need to know how it’s coming.

So that’s what Jesus is going to tell us. He’s going to tell us exactly what the kingdom of God is like: how it comes, and especially, how it grows.

To explain this, Jesus tells two parables: they both speak of a seed growing into something bigger, but they both hit on different aspects of that growth. Earlier I mentioned the mystery and the promise of our faith. The first parable we see here—the parable of the seed growing—speaks of that mystery; and the second—the parable of the mustard seed—speaks of that promise.

Process: The parable of the seed growing (v. 26-29)

So let’s look at the first parable.

V. 26:

26 And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. 27 He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. 28 The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Even to people who aren’t familiar with farming, this picture isn’t difficult to understand. We all planted beans in a glass jar when we were in grade school. We saw how the bean would sprout, and then grow. And even though we were technically learning how it worked in school, there was still a kind of magic to it, watching it grow. (And if you’re like me, you’ve probably forgotten everything you learned in school about how exactly plants grow.) The point is, if a plant gets big enough, it will produce fruit, and when the fruit is ripe, you’ll come along and pick the fruit, or take the sickle to the grain.

The picture isn’t hard to understand. What’s a little more challenging is to see how the kingdom of God is like this plant.

And it would have been even more difficult at the time Jesus is telling this parable, because most people in first-century Judaism thought that that when God’s kingdom came, it would happen explosively, all at once, through the coming of this powerful warrior called the Messiah.

But here, Jesus describes something that happens slowly, progressively, in a way that’s almost imperceptible. He also describes something that happens in a mysterious way. The farmer sows the seed and watches the plant grow, but he doesn’t know how it happens. The earth does it all by itself: the plant grows and grows until it’s time for the harvest.

Right at the beginning of this gospel, Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1.15). The kingdom is here, because Jesus is here. The kingdom is starting.

But it’s not finished yet. And we know that because the harvest hasn’t come. The “sickle” and the “harvest” are typically metaphors for the final judgment—for the day when Christ returns, and judges the living and the dead, and banishes sin and its effects from the world.

That hasn’t happened yet. So right now, we’re in the middle. We’re like the farmer, watching it all happen, not knowing how it’s happening.

I spoke earlier of mystery—this is it. The kingdom is growing, but we don’t know how, and sometimes we can’t even see it clearly, because we’re in it. What happens if you sit in front of a pot and watch a plant? Nothing. You can’t see it grow. But if you come back to it the next day, and the next, and the next, you’ll see it grow over time.

The picture here is one of trust in mystery: the farmer plants the seed and watches it grow; he doesn’t know how it happens, he just knows that the earth does its job well, and he can trust that if he comes back tomorrow, the plant will be bigger, until it’s time for the harvest.

This is how the kingdom of God grows. We don’t know how God is doing it, and sometimes we can’t even see it happening. But it is growing. And a day will soon come when it is time for the harvest: one day, it will be abundantly clear what God has been doing this whole time: we’ll see the fruit of his labor.

Promise: The parable of the mustard seed (v. 30-32)

The second parable is similar, but looks at the question from a slightly different angle. If the last parable spoke of the mystery of the kingdom of God, this parable speaks of the promise of the kingdom of God. V. 30:

30 And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? 31 It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, 32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

The picture presented in this parable isn’t hard to grasp either. The mustard seed is tiny, he says, and even so, it grows into a very big tree.

The kingdom of God is like that. And once again, what Jesus says goes against what most people thought the kingdom of God would be like when it came. It wouldn’t be sudden, like they thought; it wouldn’t be spectacular, like they thought.

The kingdom of God starts very small—almost imperceptibly. The kingdom starts in a manger in Bethlehem; it starts in a baby, who would need time to grow; it starts in a small group of men called to follow a carpenter-turned-teacher; it starts with strange stories that aren’t very clear, but that make some people sit up and say, “What exactly is this teacher saying?” and want to know more.

The kingdom of God doesn’t explode on the scene in a way that is undeniable; it starts very small.

And that’s the way it started for most of us. One day, someone shared the gospel with us. Someone told us that we had rebelled against a holy God, and so deserved his judgment; but that because God loved us, he sent his Son to bear our punishment in our place and give us his perfect life in return; and that because of what Christ has done, God declares us righteous. Someone shared the gospel with us…and it just started working on us. For some of us, it happened fairly quickly, and for others it took a long time. But it started with that simple message of good news, and it grew in us, and kept growing until we came to the point where we couldn’t deny it anymore. It filled up all of our vision—even if we didn’t understand everything, we could no longer say we don’t see this big tree on the horizon, bigger than all the garden plants, that puts out large branches for the birds. Where we didn’t see it before, we see it now. So we came to faith in Christ, and God’s kingdom in us has been growing and growing ever since.

This is also the way it happened with the church on the whole. It started with one man teaching to a group of people, and it grew and grew—thousands of people in Jerusalem, and then in the surrounding areas, and then all over the world, to the point where we still have access to this good news today. God has made sure the kingdom grows over time.

Our God is an expert in taking things that have small beginnings, and causing them to grow for his glory. This is why we planted Connexion, and that’s why we’re investing in the church plant in the 11th. A small group of people, in a small space, coming together to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in a specific part of our city. It’s a small beginning. But this is what God does. He starts small, and he causes growth for his glory.

One day, after Christ’s return, the growth of the kingdom of God will be complete—so huge that we will be unable to see anything else. This is the beautiful promise of this parable.

The Promise and the Process

But this growth isn’t finished yet—and that is why these parables are so important.

In the second parable, the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus gives us the promise of the future, by saying God’s kingdom starts small, but it is growing, and it will continue to grow until it is all-encompassing. That’s the future.

In the first parable, we see the process of that growth. It doesn’t happen all at once, but slowly, and there’s a lot of mystery involving how that growth actually takes place. We don’t know exactly how it all works out, all the minute details of God’s plan.

It’s really important not to get stuck in one parable or the other; both are important. It’s easy to get stuck in the future, to be so focused on the future promises of God that our faith can feel detached from our lives today; and it’s really easy to get stuck in the process, to be so focused on how long it’s taking, and how little we understand, and to despair that it’s really going anywhere.

But both things need to be taken into account: the process and the future, the mystery and the promise.

And the reason we need both things is because we live in a real world, which has been corrupted by sin. That means that we’ll have painful experiences, experiences that do not seem to match up with the promises we see in the Bible, and we’ll need to know what to do with those experiences.

For example, maybe you read the parable of the mustard seed, and you’re encouraged by its beautiful promise. Then you go online and you read the news. You go about your life and you interact with your colleagues, and it’s likely you’re the only Christian in your company. You may be the only Christian in your family. None of your neighbors know Christ, and they’re not terribly receptive when you talk about him. So you get discouraged. You look around at the state of Christianity in the world, and you think, Where’s the mustard tree? Where’s this massive growth? I’m not seeing it.

Or maybe we get discouraged when we look at our own Christian lives, our own growth in maturity and faith. We come into the faith with joy and enthusiasm, and we mistake that enthusiasm for maturity. And then, when we’re faced with suffering, or when we fall into sin, we’re face to face with our faith as it really is, and we’re crushed: “I thought I was more mature than this.” And we think, Where’s the plant? Is it even growing? Where’s the fruit? I don’t see it.

Or let’s take a more large-scale example—look at the church in Ephesus. In Acts 19, the apostle Paul comes to Ephesus, a city that was a center of idol worship and occult practices, and he plants a church there. But it doesn’t happen all at once. Paul has to stay there for two years—a particularly long time for him to stay in any one place—before the church is stable enough for him to leave. After Paul’s departure, Timothy takes over, and it’s not an easy go for him: Paul writes two separate letters to Timothy, encouraging him to persevere.

The last time we see the church in Ephesus is in Revelation 2, in which Jesus gives the church a stark warning, telling them,

I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. 5 Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.

The Ephesian Christians arguably received more solid Bible teaching than any single church in history (four hours a day in the school of Tyrannus, for more than two years). And even so, despite all their progress, despite all their teaching, Jesus says they lost their first love.

If I were Timothy, pastor of this church, or Paul, who started this church, I’d be tempted to look at the trajectory of this particular assembly and be profoundly discouraged, because after all that effort, where is the fruit? Where is the tree? God, you say you’re building your kingdom, and it really seemed like you were here for a while, but…where did it go?

Time and again, this will be our experience: in the world, in our churches, in our lives. We’ll have a firm idea of how things should go, what the will of God must be for this situation…and it won’t happen.

We’ll have experiences that are deeply painful, and have no apparent explanation. No rhyme or reason. We know why this is the case—because we live in a world that’s been corrupted by sin—but still, when we’re in the moment, that’s not a lot of help. We want answers, but the answers the Bible gives aren’t necessarily the answers we want in those moments. We don’t want to know why “the world” is hard in general—we want to know why this thing has happened. And we don’t know.

When we take a step back at the whole of the biblical narrative, when we look at it on the “macro” level, we know what God is doing (even if our minds can barely grasp it). We know where he’s bringing us: we know the destination. He’s building his kingdom.

But on the micro level, on the level of what exactly God is doing in my life today, or in the church today, we don’t have that perspective. When we look at individual experiences or periods of our lives, most of the time we don’t know what God is doing, or why.

And that’s normal—we can’t yet see what God is doing because the harvest hasn’t come yet. We’re in the middle, watching the plant grow. We know what the end result will be, but we don’t know everything that needs to happen to get to that end result. We don’t know what God needs to prune, what he needs to let alone, and what he needs to feed. We know the promise, but we don’t yet know every step of the process.

Honestly, that’s why I love this passage: it accounts for that mystery. It accounts for the unknown. It gives us a great promise, clothed in a great mystery. Jesus tells us we don’t know every nuanced detail of how God is building this kingdom. But we know that he is building it.

Jesus teaches us these parables because he wants to instill in us a patient confidence in his power and his will.

In the book of James, we find almost a companion piece to these parables. James was Jesus’s brother, one of his disciples, who was almost surely present when Jesus taught these parables, and so likely had his brother’s words in mind as he wrote.

James 5.7-8:

7 Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. 8 You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.

Jesus wants us to have confidence in our God. He wants us to trust that God knows what he is doing, just as he wanted Timothy to be patient and trust what he was doing in Ephesus—that despite how things might seem, God made no mistakes with that church. He is the good God, the great Sower, the Master Builder. He is building his kingdom, and his kingdom is our ultimate home and our ultimate good. It started small, and it may still seem small at times—but it is growing. We should be supremely confident in our God.

But at the same time, he wants our confidence to be patient, and humble. We live in a world that has lost the knack for waiting. We want everything at the push of a button, and if we have to wait, we want to know why. But God doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t give us all the information we want right away, and he doesn’t always tell us why he makes us wait.

And we don’t need to know, because he is the builder, not us. It is his kingdom, and we are his subjects. We can trust, with absolute confidence, that he is a good God, a good builder, and he is faithfully building his kingdom. And we can trust that because he knows every micro-step of the plan, we don’t need to know.

We can wait for him.

We can sleep and rise night and day, and watch as God causes his kingdom to grow.

We can continue to sow seed, proclaiming the good news of the gospel around us, trusting that God will bring growth.

We can plant churches, and pursue holiness, and serve one another, even when it doesn’t seem entirely worthwhile.

We can trust our God, that his kingdom is growing, and his kingdom is good.

The Unforgivable Sin (Mark 3.7-35)

When I was a kid, about six years old, one day at school I decided to cut my own hair. I don’t know why I made this decision, why I thought it was a good idea. But I did. I took my little scissors, got a big chunk of hair right up above my forehead, and cut it off.

This was the day before school pictures were to be taken.

My mom did her best to try to fix it, but there was no fixing it: the mess I had made was unsalvageable. (The photo was horrendous, of course.)

There is a lingering fear in the minds of a lot of Christians, and that is they are, for some reason or another, unsalvageable. They remember their past rebellion against God so vividly, or they consider the sin they still struggle with after believing in Christ, to the point that there’s always this thought in their minds that maybe, despite what they’ve always heard in church, when they die they’ll stand before God and he’ll show them their past sin and say, “Yeah, I can’t have this in my kingdom.”

So is it true?

Is it possible to do something that in the end makes us“unsaveable”?

Our passage today tells us that there is, in fact, a sin like this. That’s scary. But the rest of the passage tells us what that sin is, and in the end it’s really good news.

So let’s get into it.

We’ve just come out of a turning point for Jesus. In the passage we saw last week, Jesus is repeatedly opposed by the religious leaders in Israel, to the point where he has to take strong positions on questions that were important to them, like the Sabbath. We see the result in v. 6—for the first time, the religious leaders start plotting to have him killed.

In today’s passage, we see a different kind of turning point—we don’t see Jesus taking strong positions on different issues, but rather different groups of people taking strong positions on Jesus. And the interchange between Jesus, people’s response to him, and his response to them, is incredible.

A New People: Delegation (v. 7-19)

In v. 7, we see a basic continuation of what we’ve seen before—crowds are following Jesus to be healed by him and to see what he’ll do. But it’s as if someone turned the volume knob up three or four notches: the fervor of the crowd is becoming far more intense.

V. 7:

7 Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed, from Galilee and Judea 8 and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon. When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him. 9 And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him, 10 for he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him. 11 And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, “You are the Son of God.” 12 And he strictly ordered them not to make him known.

Mark explains why the crowd is gaining such intensity: he’s been healing many people, and the sick are coming to him in droves, to the point where his safety is in jeopardy. Jesus has to get into a boat and cast himself out into the sea, so that they don’t crush him.

So it’s like what we’ve already seen in the gospel, but brought to a fever pitch. Jesus healing people, people coming to him to be healed, and even people possessed by “unclean spirits” (i.e. demons). And here’s the crazy thing: before Jesus casts them out, these demons recognize Jesus for who he is—as they say in v. 11, “You are the Son of God.” But Jesus tells them to be quiet.

So all this is happening, and finally, at some point, he manages to get away—we read in v. 13:

13 And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him.

So this isn’t a general call he makes to the crowd; Jesus calls out specific people. V. 14:

14 And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach 15 and have authority to cast out demons.

Essentially, Jesus is delegating. He can’t be everywhere at the same time, so he establishes these twelve men as “apostles” (the word “apostle” means “sent). These are people he is sending out kind of like ambassadors, but bigger: he gives them not only his authority, but also some of his power. He gives them the ability to preach the gospel and to cast out demons.

And the fact that Jesus names twelve of these men is no accident. There’s a good deal of mirroring here, which you’ll recognize right away if you remember the book of Exodus.

When God called the people of Israel out of Egypt and made his covenant with them, he brought them to a mountain to make that covenant. The people of Israel was comprised of twelve tribes, named after the twelve sons of Jacob. God took these twelve tribes, these descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and made them his people.

These people would be God’s people—they would be his representatives on earth, his ambassadors, the means by which he would make his glory known to the surrounding nations.

And that’s exactly what Jesus is doing here. Just like with the people of Israel, Jesus goes up on to a mountain, and when he does, just like with the twelve tribes of Israel, he calls twelve men to follow him.

When God brought his people to the mountain, he established them as the people of God. So now, when Jesus calls the twelve up to the mountain, he’s doing the same thing: he’s establishing a new people of God. These are the men—with one exception—who will represent him where he can’t go, and who will carry on his work after he is gone. Jesus’s people would be, in a much realer sense, God’s people, representing him in the world.

The Old People: Opposition (v. 20-35)

Immediately after this, we see a pretty stark contrast. V. 20:

20 Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. 21 And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”

When Mark says, “his family”, he means Jesus’s literal family: his mother and his brothers. They’re looking at all the fuss Jesus is stirring up, and their response is, “He’s lost his mind.”

I can’t say that I blame them. People often say, “But surely his mother Mary knew better; she was visited by an angel before Jesus’s birth, who told her who Jesus is.” True…but even the angel didn’t give her every detail of what his ministry would look like. And we sometimes forget that at this point, she had an entire life of a parent behind her. For her, Jesus wasn’t just the Messiah—he was her boy. She had changed his diapers. She’d taken care of him when he was sick. She’d taught him to walk and talk. And his brothers had grown up with him too—they didn’t see him as a figure, but as their brother.

And now, he’s making himself really visible: he’s upsetting the religious establishment, and in so doing, he’s putting himself in a very risky situation. He must be crazy to go against the religious leaders.

So it’s understandable, but even so, the fact that they are saying, “He is out of his mind” shows that they don’t quite understand what it is he’s doing.

And a little later, at the end of the chapter, we see Jesus’s very blunt response to them. Go down to v. 31:

31 And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. 32 And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.” 33 And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

We saw before that Jesus is establishing a new people. What we didn’t see is how deep that bond goes. Jesus is establishing a people that supersedes even his own blood relations: Here are my mother and brothers, he says!

Clearly his actual mother and brothers are missing something.

And they’re not the only ones. In v. 22, we see a group of scribes, religious leaders from Jerusalem, who have come down to see what Jesus is doing.

22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.”

Essentially, the religious leaders think Jesus is duping everyone. They think he’s using some kind of dark sorcery to cast out these demons, and that he’s claiming to be doing God’s work.

So in response to what they’re saying, Jesus calls them over to poke holes in their logic. Or at least that’s how it seems at first. V. 23:

23 And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. 27 But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.

It’s important to see that Jesus’s parables aren’t just attacking the religious leaders’ logic. They’re getting to the heart of what he’s actually doing.When Jesus says that “if a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom will not stand,” he’s not just saying that it would be stupid of Satan to use such tactics. He’s saying that that’s not what’s going on. Satan isn’t divided against himself. Satan is waging a concerted war against God’s kingdom. Satan is trying to stand…but he’s going to lose.

And that’s what he means by the second parable, when he says, “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man.” Satan is strong—no doubt about it.

But Jesus is the plunderer.

Jesus describes himself as a sort of invader, sneaking in behind enemy lines to take them apart piece by piece. In claiming that Jesus is acting in Satan’s power, the religious leaders are showing their deep and fundamental misunderstanding of who Jesus is.

So after throwing out these parables (which no doubt went a bit over the religious leaders’ heads), Jesus gives them a very striking warning. V. 28:

28 “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”— 30 for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”

I know this is the verse most of you have been waiting for, so let’s talk about it.

First, very quickly, why does Jesus bring up the Holy Spirit in the first place? No one was talking about the Holy Spirit—even Mark hasn’t mentioned the Holy Spirit since Jesus’s baptism and temptation in the wilderness in chapter 1.

But Jesus Christ is the Son of God; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God. The Spirit and the Son are inseparable—you don’t get one without the other.

So Jesus is taking advantage of what these religious leaders are saying about him—“He has an unclean spirit”—in order to teach them something much bigger about the Spirit who actually animates him, the Holy Spirit.

But there’s still a big question remaining, and it’s the question we’ll be spending most of our remaining time on: What exactly does Jesus mean when he says, whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness?

I myself grew up hearing that “blaspheming against the Holy Spirit” means to attribute the work of the Holy Spirit to the devil, as the religious leaders do here. I also heard it means to say something negative against the Holy Spirit, as if you can say something bad about God the Father or God the Son, and that’s okay, but you’d better not say anything negative about God the Holy Spirit, or else you’re not getting into heaven.

Lots of Christians have grown up hearing things like this, so we grow up with this nagging fear: Have I blasphemed against the Holy Spirit? Did I at some point say something about the Spirit, in a way that makes me guilty of this sin? Is there a chance I’ve already said or done something that has ruined my chances of getting into heaven?

And clearly there is a sin that is unforgivable, that keeps us out of heaven. So what is it? What does it mean to “blaspheme against the Holy Spirit”?

This text tells us what it means, but in order to see it, we need to take a step back.

Different Groups, Different Responses

What is really happening in this passage? What do we see? We see various groups of people responding to Jesus, and Jesus responding to them.

First, we see the sick, in v. 7-10. They come to him to be healed, they come to him for what he can do for them, with little regard for who he is (they almost crush him in their haste to get close to him). Jesus does what he can for them, but eventually has to retreat.

Next, we see the unclean spirits, in v. 11-12. They see him, and cry out, “You are the Son of God.” So they recognize Jesus for who he is, and they’re right. But they don’t accept him. They don’t love him. And Jesus responds to them by telling them to keep quiet—so clearly there is no unity between them.

We also see Jesus’s family, in v. 20-21 and 31-35. What do they say about him? They say, “He’s out of his mind.” Even if it’s understandable, they clearly don’t get what’s going on. So Jesus responds to them by saying, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”—in other words, these people sitting around me are my real family. Pretty harsh.

And lastly we have the scribes in v. 22-30, who say, “He casts out demons by the prince of demons.” So not only they don’t recognize him for who he is, but they say he’s doing Satan’s work. Jesus tells them parables to defy their logic and show what he’s actually doing, and he says, “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness.”

The sick, the unclean spirits, Jesus’s family, and the scribes. What do they all have in common?

They don’t accept Jesus for who he is. They see what he’s doing, and they either misunderstand or outright refuse to accept what the evidence is telling them about what he came to do.

So that’s one side of the coin.

On the other side, we see his disciples in v. 13-19. How do they respond to him? When he calls them, they come. They follow him. And in return, Jesus appoints them as apostles and delegates his work to them, with his authority.

We also see the crowd gathered around him in v. 31-35. Jesus looks at them and says, “Here are my mother and brothers!” Why? Because they’re doing the will of God. Of course he’s speaking broadly here—there are surely people in the crowd who aren’t following him—but he’s making his point clear, in any case: it takes something more than blood relations to make you a part of my family.

So what makes these people different from all those other examples we see?

They are doing the will of God. They’re not just coming to him to be healed, or to see him do a magic trick, or even to hear some new and interesting teaching. They recognize Jesus for who he is, they accept him for who he is, and they follow him.

Who Is Jesus?

So the real question of this text isn’t, What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, but rather, Who is this man?! That is the deep question Mark is driving us to ask in this text. The disciples and the crowd sitting around Jesus recognize Jesus for who he is, and accept Jesus for who he is. So who is he?

Jesus is the Son of God. Yes. Absolutely—we saw that in the very first verses of this book. But there’s more.

Jesus is the One who establishes a new people for God. He’s fundamentally changing what it means to belong to “the people of God.”

Jesus is the One who has all authority over every element in this world and the spiritual world—even the demons recognize that he has authority over them.

Jesus is the One who is plundering Satan’s house—the titanic Warrior-King who has arrived to set right everything that sin has made wrong.

Jesus is the One who is empowered by the Holy Spirit to forgive sin. All sins will be forgiven the children of man, he said. It’s easy to look at v. 29 and see the one sin that can’t be forgiven, and miss the incredible openness of v. 28: all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter.

Remember what we saw a couple weeks ago? Who are the people flocking to Jesus, not for healing, but to listen to him? Who are the ones who are actually listening? Not those who are well, but those who are sick.

Not the righteous, but sinners—people who know they are sinners.

These are the ones he came for. These are the ones to whom he points and says, “These are my mother and my brothers!”

Do we see how astounding this is? It would have been so easy and obvious for Jesus to point to his apostles—these men to whom he gave the authority and power to preach and to cast out demons—and say, “These guys here are my people.” That would make sense—they’re the ones who are going out and doing extraordinary things.

But that’s not what Jesus does. He points to perfectly ordinary—and even “unsavory”—people, and says, “These are my people.” Not because they are doing extraordinary things—they’re not!—but because they have come to the extraordinary Savior, who forgives their sin.

So in the context of this passage, what can we deduce is the meaning of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”? What is the only sin which God will not forgive?

We see clearly in this passage that it’s much more than a matter of words. Usually “blasphemy” refers to an act of contempt against God, either by insulting his name or falsely claiming his authority. But everything in this passage points us to people who do more than just speak—they adopt a position that dictates the course of their lives. That position is expressed in their words, perhaps, but it’s not the words themselves that are the problem.

The problem, with each of these groups—with the demons, with the scribes, with Jesus’s own family—is their refusal to accept Jesus for who he is. And Jesus calls this “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” because there is no greater act of contempt against God than to reject the Savior he sent, whom the Holy Spirit empowered, to save sinners.

Only One Choice

When you get right down to it, even though we see a myriad of different responses to Jesus in this text, there really is only one choice: either we accept Jesus for who he is, or we blaspheme against the Holy Spirit of God.

Whether we realize it or not, and however we may try to turn the problem in our hands to see it from a different angle, that is the choice before each of us: either we accept Jesus for who he is, or we blaspheme against the Holy Spirit of God.

Realizing this truth is incredibly freeing, because it does away with a lot of the fears we may have in coming to Christ.

What we see here shows us that no sin is “too bad” for Jesus to forgive. If we recognize Jesus for who he is, and accept him for who he is, his arms are wide open. Among those who are clearly shown to be forgiven in the Bible are tax collectors (commonly known to be traitors to their own people), prostitutes, a persecutor of Christians, murderers, adulterers, and many other people who have done far worse things than most of us. No one is too far gone, no one is “too bad” to be forgiven.

What we see here also shows us that it’s never too late. If you’re still alive, you still have time. We saw the harsh answer Jesus gave to his family when they were looking for him. But even they eventually accept Jesus for who he is. His mother later realizes and accepts what he’s doing, and follows him as well. And we know of at least one of his half-brothers, James, who does the same. (He’s the one who later wrote the book of James, which we find towards the end of the Bible.)

At this point in their story, they are not accepting Christ for who he is. But that can change. As long as you’re alive, there’s still time.

Conclusion

So what do we do?

First we see ourselves for who we are: very imperfect people who are in need of a perfect forgiveness.

We see Christ for who he is: the sinless Son of God who lived a perfect life in our place, who took our sin on himself, and who was punished in our place in order that we might be forgiven. The powerful Warrior-King who came to defeat Satan and sin and all of its effects. The loving Savior who came to the most miserable among us, and who said, “Here are my brothers and sisters.”

And finally, we accept Christ for who he is. This is not a one-time decision. It’s a decision for every minute of every day. If we find ourselves constantly returning to the same sins over and over again, and committing them with no hesitation and little regret, it’s worth asking ourselves if we’ve really accepted Christ at all. Because accepting Christ means not only accepting what he did for us, but who we are in him.

Those who accept Christ are really and truly the people of God. And the people of God are people who are growing to be like Christ.

I know that can be scary, because all of us can look at ourselves and see all the reasons why we’re not changing like we’d hope, as quickly as we’d hope. But remember Jesus’s mother and brothers: it’s never too late.

Maybe you’ve been claiming to be a Christian for years, and you’re only just realizing that you haven’t ever really followed him.

Maybe you’ve never accepted Christ and are only just realizing you should.

Or maybe you have accepted Christ, but you’re worried about what’s coming around the bend tomorrow, what might test your faith.

In every case, it’s the same choice before us: the choice to admit that we are sinners in need of a Savior, to see Christ for the Savior he is, to accept him, and to follow him. That is the Christian life: day after day after day. That is what it means to “do the will of God.”

Do you see how freeing that is? That Jesus doesn’t ask us to pass a morality test to belong to him? That all he asks of us is that we accept what he has done, and that we walk hand-in-hand with him until he brings us home?

Whatever weight you feel like you’re carrying, you can put it down. There is only one unforgivable sin, and as long as you are still alive, you haven’t committed it. If you’re alive, it’s not too late.

See him. Accept him. Follow him.