Advent, Week 1: Holding Space for Hope

BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 27 NOVEMBER 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH

Welcome to the first week of Advent! As our candle lighters said at the beginning of today’s service, this is the week of HOPE. If this is your first experience with an Advent service, please let me take just a moment and explain what we’re up to. 

The term “Advent” is derived from the Latin word adventus, which means “coming” or “arrival.” It has been used by Christians for nearly two thousand years now to denote the four weeks leading up to the celebration of Jesus’s birth at Christmas. During this season, followers of Jesus have made a habit of meditating on two central events in the story of our faith: first, the historical (and unpredictable) arrival of Jesus on this earth all those years ago. And second, the Biblical promise of Jesus’s return to complete the work his arrival began, which is to make all things right. We believe that despite its current brokenness and injustice, this world God loves will one day be redeemed and restored. It must be… because God loves it. Now, like the prophets who once waited on Jesus’s birth–and like Mary, who carried the baby Jesus within her!–we do not know when this moment will come. But we know it is coming, and during Advent, we reflect on the challenges of waiting…and on the promises and character of God. 

That’s what Advent is. But how is Advent celebrated? The gatherings of the church during this season are marked by two traditions, one of which is common to us at Revolution, and one of which is not. The common tradition is focusing each week on the themes of Advent, which are: hope, love, joy, and peace. The uncommon tradition is teaching these themes through the lectionary, which is a tool the historic church has used to organize its patterns of teaching Scripture. Teaching from the lectionary is a much different task for me because it requires a different way of thinking about the Bible. Typically, here at Revolution, we teach either topically, meaning we take a subject and explore what the Bible says about it, or exegetically, meaning we begin with a text and try to work our way through it. But lectionary teaching asks that we do something different. Each week, the lectionary provides us with 3-4 separate passages from Scripture and asks us to find connections between them. You might think of it this way: if each book of the Bible is a puzzle, and each verse is one of the puzzle pieces, our usual method is laying the pieces out and then fitting them together to see what picture they make. But the lectionary points out that pieces from different puzzles, from different books, can still fit together… which changes the picture we’re looking at altogether. That’s the task for each of these weeks: to see the big picture that the little pictures make. And the hope, this week, is that hope is what we find. 

So, what are our puzzle pieces? There are three: a promise, a paradox, and a presence. Three “Ps” walk into a church… what does the “first P” say?

It’s a passage from the prophet Isaiah, who lived in the southern kingdom of Judah during the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, and it concerns a promise about God’s ultimate plans not just for Israel, but for all people:

In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!

Isaiah 2:2-5

Isaiah’s vision here is of something beyond a restored kingdom of Judah. God shows him a new house, His own house, and when it is established, Isaiah writes that all nations shall stream to it. Why? Because there is teaching there that leads to justice: God “shall judge between the nations,” “arbitrate for many peoples,” and because of the effectiveness of His justice, those people “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” God’s kingdom will be a place not of forced peace between people, but of inevitable peace between them, because there is no reason for war anymore. 

There’s a pretty beautiful idea here, which is that the cause of grief in the world isn’t some inherent meanness in people but an insecurity in people rooted in fear that they will not be treated fairly in the world. If that is resolved, Isaiah says, not only will fairness permeate Creation, but kindness will, too. No more conflict! No more need for violence, either in aggression or in defense! “O house of Jacob, come let us walk in the light of the LORD!” 

So, that’s the first “P,” the promise: the day is coming when God will raise up a Kingdom of fairness, of justice, and of peace. Oh, to wait for that day!

What’s the second puzzle piece? This one is a paradox, and it comes from Matthew’s gospel. In it, Jesus says to his disciples,

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. 

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Matthew 24:36-44

What is Jesus talking about here? Well, if we take this puzzle piece on its own, he’s talking to his disciples about himself. By this point in Matthew, Jesus has already identified himself as the Son of Man, and his disciples are following him because they are trusting that he’s going to deliver them from their oppressors and rise up as the king of Israel. 

But if we put this piece in conversation with our first piece this morning, we might also recognize that the disciples are familiar with Isaiah, and so they are doing a bit of interpretive work themselves: they are operating under the assumption that the Kingdom of God Isaiah is talking about is also this kingdom, and if Jesus really is the one who is going to usher in God’s plan, that must mean he’s going to topple Caesar. It makes sense for them to feel this way: Rome is the greatest power anyone at that time could imagine. But it’s still a belief that makes an important assumption about the Isaiah passage, which is that the biggest power you can think of must also be the biggest power God can think of. As it turns out, seeing Jesus as the new ruler of Rome is too small for what God has in mind… but the disciples don’t know that yet!

What, then, does Jesus tell them? Well, here’s where we get to that paradox: Jesus tells them something that doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. First, he says that when the new Kingdom comes into being, nobody will see it coming. The angels don’t know; even he doesn’t know. Then, he tells them a story about Noah, which reminds them that all the people who ended up below the waters of the flood also didn’t know what was about to happen to them: it caught them entirely off guard. Then, he tells them a series of stories about people in the future, who will be just as surprised as the people in the past were. 

I grew up in the ‘90s in an evangelical church. Does anyone else here remember the song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”? It was written in 1969 by Larry Norman, but it resurfaced in my childhood as a cover by the band dcTalk. That song dramatized these moments here by connecting them to the belief in the Rapture, or this moment when some Christians believe the faithful will disappear in an instant prior to the coming of Jesus’s Kingdom: “two men walking up a hill / one disappears, and one’s left standing still / I wish we’d all been ready.” I’m not here to comment on that eschatology, but I do want to stay with Jesus’s point, which seems to be that the truth is no one is ready for what’s coming: it will come like a thief in the night. 

Which, of course, gets us to the problem here: Jesus says plainly to his disciples, “Keep awake!” But in the very next breath, he tells a story where the owner of a house doesn’t keep awake… because a thief comes just like Jesus says this Kingdom will come. If he’d known, he would have been ready… but he didn’t know, and neither will you! So, what is Jesus talking about? Is it possible to be ready if you are also going to be caught off guard? Which is it? What can we do? 

The paradox of our second puzzle piece is that we need to be ready, but the truth is that we won’t know when what we’re supposed to be ready for will happen. So, what can we do? Perhaps our third puzzle piece can offer an answer. It’s from Paul’s letter to the Romans:

Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Romans 13:11-14

What does Paul say in answer to our riddle? He says that whenever the Kingdom will come, now is the time to wake up. Now is the time to be watchful for it… by beginning now to live in it. 

The trouble with Jesus’s paradox is that the Kingdom is framed as something to catch in the act, like a thief. This trouble is, in my view, made worse by imagining things exclusively in the way that song imagines them, as an instantaneous event we can never actually anticipate or be ready for. But what Paul says is that if instead of imagining the Kingdom as a thief in the night, we imagine the Kingdom as the light of the day, we come closer to knowing how to actually live. “The night is far gone,” he says, and “the day is near… Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably, as in the day.” How do we prepare for God’s Kingdom? Not by trying to put on our best act when God shows up to judge us! By simply choosing to live all the time in the light of His promises. 

This is what is so meaningful about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. As we talked about in our series on Mark, if death can’t hold God down, there is nothing left on this earth to fear. And fear, as we saw in the Isaiah passage, is actually what causes all the meanness and brokenness in the world! 

If we put our puzzle pieces together, this is what we find: in light of Jesus’s life, the Kingdom that is still coming can get started now. We can live in it, in anticipation of its full arrival sometime in the future. What it requires from us–to tie all these threads together–is hope. Hope is what rises up in us when we hold the mystery of God up against the faithfulness of God in our story. It’s what we feel when we say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen today, but I still know the ending.” Our God is always bigger than our theories or our plans or our predictions. The prophets know that! But He is also nearer than we could ever expect Him to be: that’s the heart of what Jesus’s life means. 

When we talk about hope during the Advent season, we are giving ourselves a chance to sit down, listen, and remember that it’s going to be okay. The worries and troubles of this life are real, and the truth is that they weigh us down. We become burdened by just the fact of living in a world where we experience injustice and grief and hardship. But that’s not the only world we are living in: at the same time, we have also been given this window into a new world, one which is even now beginning to rumble and stir beneath our feet. The beginning of that world was Jesus’s birth, his incarnation, when God came intimately and personally to dwell among us. And when that happened, the thief stole into the kingdom: although Fear and Death seem to reign here, as they slept in their beds of arrogance and confidence and power, a lowly husband and wife in the small town of Bethlehem took up humble residence for the night and to them, a Savior was born. To us, a Savior was born. And the erosion of this world of Fear and Death began underneath their feet. 

For two thousand years now, we have tried to live in the light of this miracle. We’ve seen it beginning to work its wonders. Certainly, despite the best efforts of Fear and Death, they could do nothing to stop the life of Jesus himself. And in the lives of his followers, they have been just as impotent: even when we have every apparent reason to despair, we have pushed on. When we suffer and grieve, when we experience pain and loss, we can feel our feelings boldly and fully, knowing they cannot destroy us forever. When we gather together, as we are doing today, we are choosing to give up the currency of their world–which is our seemingly-limited time here–in order to feel again the stirring of light and life among us. The nights may seem to be getting darker, but that cannot stop dawn from breaking. 

I’m drifting into poetry again. What I want to say is this: hope isn’t something we’re waiting for, hope is here. Hope is living in the light of God’s power instead of the darkness of fear. Hope is choosing community instead of isolation. Hope is living generously instead of living fearfully. Hope is declaring our allegiance to the Kingdom that is breaking into the world. With the lighting of the first candle this week, we are taking our stand as people of hope in this city. And in a few moments, when you all head back out of here and return to your daily lives, you have the choice to take this spirit of hope, this spirit of possibility and wonder and trust, with you. That doesn’t mean pretending things are okay when they aren’t. It doesn’t mean being happy all the time, even when you feel sad. What it means is holding space within you for the miracle of God’s love, even if you feel confused by it, and trusting that God is still who He has always claimed to be. 

One last bit of poetry: this makes all of us a kind of “Mary,” doesn’t it? Holding space within us for the miracle of God’s love, even when we are confused by it, and trusting that God is still who He has always claimed to be. We may not know when His Kingdom will be “born”…but the world is pregnant with it even now, and the church’s job is to “nest”; to usher in God’s Kingdom by living in anticipation of it. By living in hope. 

Mark 16: Wonder Wins

BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 13 NOVEMBER 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH

This week, we are wrapping up our series on the Gospel of Mark, and I’m excited! Here’s why: like most Christian churches, we tend to teach the ends of gospel stories–which is to say, the parts of the gospel stories dealing with Jesus’s death and resurrection–in the spring around Easter. This makes sense: it’s the right time for them. But because we tend to look at these texts during that season, we often choose to see them in a specific “Easter light.” As we noted last week, in our haste to get to the miracle of the resurrection on Sunday, we rarely dwell for long on Jesus’s death on Friday, and this can shortchange our appreciation for how the end of Jesus’s life offers guidance for how we can face suffering ourselves. And similarly, in our haste to get to the Great Commission–which is this moment some 40 days after Jesus rises from the dead, when he gives a mission to the Church–we rarely spend much time on the fear and confusion of those first moments after Jesus’s resurrection is discovered. This, I want to contend, shortchanges our appreciation for two other things, namely: 

1. The awe of the Resurrection event itself
2. The adaptability of the gospel stories 

Today, because we’re reading Mark outside the Easter season, we can spend some time on these things. I’ll warn you: it’s a bit disjointed this morning! But I think if you come along with me, there will be some things that matter here.

So, let’s start with the first one: the awe of the Resurrection event itself. The last chapter of the Gospel of Mark ends strangely. If you have a phone with you this morning with a Bible app on it, I actually want you to look it up–the reasons why will be more clear in a few minutes, but this will still help us to get started. Here’s what we have in verses 1-8:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Mark 16:1-8

Alright, stop there for a moment. I mean it! Don’t peek at what’s next!

So, what do we see? There are a few things to note. First, the story picks up after the Sabbath, which means the early morning hours of the Sunday following the Friday of Jesus’s crucifixion. As we saw last week, Jesus died at noon, after which his body was taken down and placed in a nearby tomb belonging to a rich man named Joseph of Arimathea. When this happened, his body was not properly prepared for Jewish burial, and this was a source of offense for his remaining followers (all of whom, we should note, were women). But Sabbath customs would strictly prohibit doing anything about this on Saturday, so it would seem a plan was made for honoring Jesus’s body as soon as possible, which was Sunday morning. 

Now, as this passage makes clear, no one is expecting Jesus’s body to be missing. This means that these women are planning to anoint the body of a man who has been dead for no less than 42 hours, and in the Judean climate, Jesus’s body would already be in a state of significant decomposition. I bring this up because we need to see these actions as part of a deep love and respect for Jesus. They do not have to do this! But they are doing it anyway. 

Nonetheless, when they arrive, not only is the stone gone, but there is no body. In and of itself, this doesn’t mean anything miraculous: anyone’s assumption would be that the body was stolen. But this assumption is countered in the text by the announcement of this figure in white, who says the body isn’t gone but alive: Jesus “has been raised,” he says, and he has now gone on to Galilee where he is waiting for you.

So, the women have come to the tomb out of deep love for Jesus, they have found him gone, and they are now told to share that news. Thus far, we’re familiar with the story! But then we get to verse 8, which creates a mystery: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” 

And that’s it: that’s the end of Mark’s gospel. That’s the end of what Mark wanted to say to the Christians in Rome facing imminent threats to their lives. That’s the end of his witness about what is important in the Jesus story to remember: the women flee, “for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” 

We have no choice but to wonder: what is Mark doing? 

Last week, we spent considerable time trying to remind ourselves about Mark’s audience. Let’s do that again: Mark’s readers are already Christians, which means they already believe in Jesus’s resurrection. They don’t need to be convinced! They’re currently staking their lives on it. They are also afraid–in their situation, who wouldn’t be? There is a natural parallel, then, to the experiences of these first witnesses to Jesus’s miracle: there is always encouragement to be found in remembering that even those who were there, who knew Jesus, experienced confusion and fear. 

In any tradition, it can be tempting to lionize and “hero-ify” our founders. But the gospels aggressively combat this tendency. The key thing to remember seems to be that the people there at the beginning were just people. Which is to say, they were just like you. The reason this matters in Christianity is because we’re not building a faith to worship ourselves as we grow, we’re building a church set on following after him, even at great cost. There’s just one hero… and the truth is that we don’t always understand him. Even more than that, Mark 16:8 reminds us that his actions sometimes terrify us. 

I said at the outset that one of the things we don’t spend enough time on when we look at the resurrection story is the awe that story is meant to inspire. That’s what this verse gets at: what Jesus has done is awe-full, in the most literal sense of that word. “Awe” does not mean “to be amazed,” it means “to be filled with a mix of fear and reverence.” It is to see simultaneously the smallness of ourselves over and against the grandeur of something else. The churning ocean is “awful.” The vastness of space is “awful.” And the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is “awful,” because it is evidence of a Power not only greater than the power of death (which is the power we most supremely fear), but a Power capable of undoing the power of death. Of making a mockery of death’s power. 

The Jewish women at the empty tomb–which is also to say, we should pause to note, people with the least power in the Roman world–are confronted with the most power ever seen on earth. The gap between them is incomprehensible! Their terror is understandable. But, crucially, it is also relatable to Mark’s readers (many of whom were also women), because they, too, knew what it was to feel small against the might and strength of a greater power. To be afraid. And so, in that context, what a wonder and an encouragement it would be to be reminded of the drama of what Jesus has done! After all, the most power Nero can wield over anyone is the power of death. But as frightening as that power may be, how much less awful is it than the power of resurrection? To our ears, the end of Mark’s gospel is a mystery: why would he want to close by telling us Jesus’s resurrection is scary? But to Mark’s readers, it is an ending focused on the supremacy of the Savior upon whom they depended. 

There is one more wonder to behold before we move on, and yet again, it asks that we keep those early Christians in view. It’s best framed by a question: is verse 8 true? “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” 

As written, it can’t be, because every person huddled in that Roman catacomb listening to this gospel being read aloud knows this story already. The women could not have “said nothing to anyone,” or else the story would have ended with them. Which means, then, that even their fear was eventually no match for the wonder of what they had seen. The wonder won. The miracle could not be kept quiet. 

One of the strange motifs in Mark (to use a word we introduced a few weeks ago!) is that Jesus often instructs those who are the recipients of miracles to keep quiet about what has happened and who he is. Some critics refer to this as the “Messianic Secret” in their studies of this gospel. But of course the point is not that Jesus is being shy about who he is: the point is that wonder keeps winning! Over and over he tells people to keep quiet, but they can’t do it! What has happened to them is just too amazing! It is a short line between that motif in the stories and what Mark wants his readers to understand: a real miracle can’t be contained. You won’t be able to help yourself. I’m stretching a bit into conjecture, but I can’t help but think this is a message that resonates with a person soon to be interrogated over their faith who might be wondering, “will I stay strong? Will I deny my Savior?” The people who met Jesus were never able to stay quiet about it. Won’t that be true of you, too? 

The ending of Mark’s gospel is a mystery its context helps to solve. Even more than that, the ending of Mark’s gospel calls us to wonder, calls us to awe, in response to the Resurrection event. Nothing like this has ever been done, and if we can find the courage to follow after the risen Jesus, Mark tells us that we will find him. In fact, he is waiting for us.

So, that’s the first thing we can find new appreciation for this morning: the gospel teaches us to feel an awe that can trivialize the hardships we face by reminding us of the wonder of our God. We miss that, when we rush on to the mission of the church in Easter sermons! But it’s so, so important: simply on its face, the resurrection radically transforms who and what we fear in the world. There is hope for us in that this morning. In the words of the man in the tomb, “Do not be alarmed”–not today, and not ever.

But what about the second thing here? I want us to turn to the adaptability of the gospel stories.

Get your Bible apps back out! If you can, adjust your translation to the New Revised Standard Version, which helps to make this more clear. Got it? Okay, so what happens after verse 8? 

That’s right, it’s “problem time”! You should be staring at a strange bracketed bit of text labeled “The Shorter Ending of Mark.” It has no verse identification, but it reads like this:

And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.

Mark 16:X

Weird, right? What you’re looking at is an addition to Mark’s gospel which does not seem to begin appearing in manuscripts until the second century. Even at first glance, you can tell it’s odd: so, the women “don’t tell anybody”…and then “tell Peter briefly”? Which is it? If you’re not very satisfied by this, it would seem that you’re not alone: what comes next?

Right! Something labeled “The Longer Ending of Mark”! I won’t read the whole thing here, but if you give it a glance, you’ll see it includes the following: Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, then to two disciples on the road, then to the disciples at a table where he gives them the Great Commission, and then Jesus ascends. 

So, what’s going on here? Which is the real ending? What are we supposed to believe happened?

Let’s get scholarly first: the overwhelming consensus is that the earliest copies of Mark’s gospel end with verse 8. “Verse X” starts to show up some time later, presumably because verse 8 leaves how the resurrection story gets out unclear. And then the longer ending is added after that in an attempt to better harmonize Mark with the other gospels. 

Now, all of this can feel really troubling for us as modern readers… but I want to push back on our fears by remembering a few important things:

First, as we have discussed, the original point of the early gospels wasn’t evangelism, it was reassurance: they were written to specific communities to help answer specific questions about Jesus and to offer specific comforts. This is because those communities already knew and believed the Jesus story! At least a decade before Mark is written, Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians, 

For I handed on to you [what I] had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 

1 Corinthians 15:3-7

The resurrection story was already a core part of the early church’s beliefs, and the additions in the longer ending aren’t “creating” something new. Rather, they are documenting a story that was already trusted.

Second, there were multiple gospels, and very few early Christians had access to more than one of them. When later copyists made additions to a gospel like Mark’s, their point wasn’t to cause trouble, it was to provide a reader who may never hear another gospel with a more complete accounting of significant events. 

And third, the gospels were not considered Scripture for at least another hundred years. This doesn’t mean they weren’t considered important! Their existence, from copy to copy, meant they were treasured. But it wouldn’t have been thought improper to do what has happened here with the Longer Ending, because the focus of the text is on offering living Christians clarity and reassurance.

“Okay,” you might be thinking, “but this is a strange way to end a sermon!” Perhaps! But hear me out: 

I’m bringing this up because I want us to understand something incredibly important about Mark: just because Mark was written to a particular audience doesn’t mean it’s not written to us, too. What’s amazing about these gospels is that they have proved to be adaptable witnesses to Jesus, speaking in different ways to different people. I’ve really enjoyed digging more deeply into the context of the Roman church, and this work has led me to appreciate the gospel so much more deeply. But Mark’s gospel isn’t just a history lesson or a literature lesson: it’s a God lesson, and one of the most amazing things about God in the gospels is that He comes to us. Mark writes to his readers not because they don’t know Jesus’s story, but because he wants them to see how Jesus’s story prepares them for the crisis they are in. Similarly, the early church worked to get the Jesus story out to people in all the ways it could: this is what the revisions at the end of Mark reveal. The Church’s hope in that work was the same as Mark’s hope: that, by some Divine miracle, the story of Jesus might bring life to people who are dying. That Jesus would do that work. 

I didn’t want to skip over this part of our conversation about Mark because I want to seize this opportunity to remind you that the Bible is worth engaging deeply. Too often, we react to it the same way the women in Mark’s original ending react to the empty tomb: what we don’t understand, we fear. But we also know that Mark’s ending isn’t their ending. Those women overcome that fear and do as they were instructed: they tell the disciples what they’ve seen, and even though they weren’t “authorities” in their culture, something about the depth of their personal witness and experience won people over. If that was not so, we would not know the tomb is empty! 

So, we can be similarly bold. Our God is still speaking to us, the stories of Jesus are still moving among his people, and there is living hope in them for us. They are awe-full, in the strict sense of that word! Overwhelming wonder is their point…and the source of our hope. The Jesus story is an ongoing miracle, both because he is alive, and because the texts keep living, too. 

We can be a church of people who are seeking amazement. Who are actively on the lookout for it, as our God keeps working. And you can be a person with a similar imagination and eager curiosity, too. What does a living Jesus mean for the way you see the world? What does it mean for your fears? What does it mean for your ability to be generous, or to be patient, or to be forgiving? If Jesus is alive, what changes for you? What is possible in our world?

Our purpose, I think, is to try and find out. 

Mark 14-15: Facing Defeat

BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 6 NOVEMBER 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH

This morning, we are in the next-to-last week of our series on the second half of the Gospel of Mark. That means, of course, that we’re just about at the end… and I gotta tell you, I’m pretty worried. Here’s the thing about teaching through books of the Bible: it’s all fun and games until the last chapter. Before you get there, you can slow down where you please and pick out this interesting thing and that interesting thing, and everybody is happy. But there’s no dodging the endings, and that is particularly true with the Gospel of Mark. Why? Well, for starters, there are at least two of them–which is something we’ll get to next week! But also, there’s the passion problem, which is a way of talking about the difficulties that arise in both Mark’s gospel and the other gospels when it comes to the slow and steady walk to the cross. 

It might sound weird to say it, but we Christians have a lot of trouble with the cross. We don’t like to look at it–at least not while it’s occupied! This is particularly true of us Protestants. A funny story: a few years ago, when my son Graham was 5 or 6, we drove by a Catholic church with a crucifix on the sign and Graham asked us, “who’s that guy up there on that cross?” This is a preacher’s kid! He’s spent his whole life in church! But he was also right: in our tradition, the cross is almost always empty. 

That’s not a very gospel-centered way of thinking. The gospels are unified in their interest in showing us the event of the crucifixion, in all its injustice and horror. Each one is careful to walk us through Jesus’s last days, his last supper with his disciples, his betrayal, his arrest, his trial, his torture, and his murder…and take its time doing it! But with the exception of the gospel of John, the resurrected Jesus is only lightly mentioned. It’s okay for that to seem odd to you: it is odd! After all, isn’t it the resurrection that is the very anchor of our hope and joy? Is this not what Christian hope is all about? 

Perhaps not! In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes, 

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 

1 Corinthians 1:21-24

“We preach Christ crucified.” Not “Christ resurrected.” 

The hypothesis of this sermon is that when we minimize the occupied cross, we miss something of deep importance to the very first Christians, and it is worth investigating what that might be. So, how can we find that out? We’re going to organize our investigation this morning around 3 “leads,” each of which requires that we remember something distinct about the audience of Mark’s gospel, and as we investigate, the hope is that we might recover a deeper sense of why the cross is so essential. I should say at the start that although we’re going to quote from chapters 14 and 15 at several points, I’m not going to “walk through” them in the same way we typically do. This is primarily because it would take all day to do that! But, with even more emphasis than usual, I want to encourage you to take time this week to read through these chapters on your own. If part of our point this morning is to push back on our tendency to look away from the cross, this is a perfect action step for us: read boldly!

So, what is that first “lead”? Lead #1 is a reminder that the original audience of Mark’s gospel is a community facing persecution. We’ve covered this a few times, but it bears repeating: as far as we can discern, the Jesus story is written down for the first time here so it can be sent via scroll to specific people in the underground churches in Rome. Those churches are underground because the Emperor, Nero, is burning Christians alive in his pleasure gardens and crucifying them along the roads of the city. But the fact that these churches exist to receive this scroll means the point of the gospel can’t be conversion: the Jesus story is already known there, and even more than that, it is already so deeply believed that Roman followers of Jesus are willing to risk their lives to worship him. 

So, if there’s already a lively oral tradition about Jesus, and it’s already generating deep faith, what’s the point of this new document? The answer must be that Mark sends this scroll because there are parts of Jesus’s journey to the cross that can be a specific encouragement to a community facing persecution. What might that be?

There’s a curious quirk in Mark that distinguishes it from the other gospel narratives. That quirk is that, with only one exception, Mark focuses on public testimony: he writes down the things people heard Jesus say and saw Jesus do specifically. This is why we don’t get the Advent stories in Mark (who is sharing them?), or the details about Jesus’s time in the wilderness (who else was there?). But what about that exception? It comes in chapter 14, right after the Last Supper. Here’s what he writes:

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.”

Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Simon,” he said to Peter, “are you asleep? Couldn’t you keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Mark 14:32-38

Did you catch the moment without a witness? Who is listening to Jesus’s prayer? 

Why does Mark include this curious moment? I think the answer is because, if we remember who Mark is talking to, we can see that this is precisely the message his readers needed to hear. In this passage, Jesus is staring down his own false arrest, torture, and murder. Mark’s witness builds on the oral narrative by emphasizing a scene that works as a precursor of his readers’ own fears, as well as a template for their prayers. If Jesus can say, “Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will,” then perhaps you can possess similar trust. 

From our vantage point, this moment might seem like dramatic tension-building at best or morbid curiosity at worst: we tend to feel uncomfortable with this moment where Jesus seems to not want to do the thing we know he’s going to do. It can make it seem like he’s trapped. But for a community facing persecution, it would have been a great comfort to see in their own ordeal an echo of Jesus’s experience, especially one connected to a model for how to face their fate with confidence in God’s faithfulness. 

So, what does lead #1 reveal about why Mark emphasizes Jesus’s suffering? It reveals that Jesus’s suffering connects the Christians of Rome to him. 

Now, what about lead #2? Lead #2 reminds us that this story is written to a community losing its leaders. As we’ve discussed, the Great Fire of Rome takes place in the year 64, Nero’s persecutions begin shortly after that, and at some point between 64 and the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, we most likely get Mark’s gospel. But here’s a missing piece we haven’t covered: among the first martyrs during this wave of persecution are the apostles Paul and Peter, as Church tradition holds that both are killed by Nero in or around the year 65. Those are the two biggest guys! Can you imagine the impact of this on the early church? 

If you want a Sixth Sense-style twist to your reading experience with Mark’s gospel, go back and read it again paying special attention to Peter. Here’s what you’ll find: at every moment when the disciples of Jesus get Jesus wrong, Peter is the one who puts his foot in his mouth… and this happens in a letter written to Peter’s friends, in Peter’s church, right after Peter died! It’s all pretty wild: Jesus tells Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” in chapter 8! In chapter 9, Peter tries to build tents for ghosts! Mark does not show Peter in a very positive light. And what happens in these last few chapters? Well, it’s the worst of the worst:

“You will all fall away,” Jesus told them, “for it is written:

“‘I will strike the shepherd,

    and the sheep will be scattered.’

But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”

Peter declared, “Even if all fall away, I will not.”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “today—yes, tonight—before the rooster crows twice you yourself will disown me three times.”

But Peter insisted emphatically, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And all the others said the same.

Mark 14:27-31

Jesus’s prediction, of course, comes true: after Jesus is arrested, Peter follows the guards to the Temple courts, and while Jesus is being tried and tortured inside, passersby think they recognize him as a disciple… and he denies it. After the third denial, he hears a rooster crow, and verse 72 says “he broke down and wept.” 

It’s hard not to wonder, why does Mark emphasize how the hero of the Romans church got things so wrong? 

The point of the passion narrative (as we’re discovering) is to actually look at the hard things. To see Christ on the cross. To hear Jesus’s fear in the garden. And even to sympathize with Peter’s cowardice at the Temple. For a community that has lost its leaders, the danger is dissolution: will people lose their nerve? Will anyone apostatize or flee? Although it might seem like Mark is hammering Peter’s failures, when we remember his audience–when we chase this lead–we are reminded that these same people reading about his weakness also just witnessed his strength when we went willingly to a cross of his own. Being reminded that Peter wasn’t always strong helps them to see that courage isn’t innate or natural to a person: it is gifted, as a fruit of discipleship. Everybody has moments of weakness! But God is patient, and He works within us to reveal His own strength. 

As Mark’s readers await their own trials, he wants them to take comfort in knowing Jesus experienced what they’re experiencing. He also wants them to know that even their hero, Peter, wasn’t perfect. The lesson is that the Jesus story isn’t about avoiding, or even overcoming, danger! It’s about facing danger in all its fearsomeness with trust in the ultimate authority of a loving and faithful God, who can and will give you strength beyond yourself.

This gets us to lead #3: Mark’s gospel is written to a community called to radical surrender. I think this is actually the hardest part for us, as well as the ultimate reason the occupied cross is so uncomfortable in the American church tradition: we want to “yada yada yada” over the apparent defeats so we can hurry and get to the final victories. But Mark’s emphasis on Jesus’s suffering doesn’t permit us to look away from hard things… unless we’re willing to look away from Jesus, too. He ties them together. But why does he do that?

The short answer is because the fullness of Jesus’s submission to humiliation anticipates the extent of what is asked of us. Mark’s readers are meeting in catacombs, the places underneath the city streets where the dead are buried, when they read and listen to this gospel. The stark reality of their situation would have been unmissable. Can you imagine listening to this story in a graveyard? In a morgue? When Jesus’s body is abused, your mind wouldn’t be able to avoid thinking of the bodies at that very moment lying all around you. When he breathes his last breath on the cross, you would anticipate the placement of his dead body in a place something like the one in which you are standing. And all the while, you wouldn’t be able to forget that the reason you’re down in these crypts in the first place is because someone wants you dead, too. Your entire life–your very existence–are at stake in your proclamation of Christian faith. 

But the gospel stories, in all their violence, are vivid reminders that there is nowhere Rome can take you that Jesus wasn’t first to go. He went entirely and completely to the end of the road. His death wasn’t a feint or an illusion or an abstraction: it happened. There was no rescue at the eleventh hour. Which means, of course, there may not be a rescue at the eleventh hour for you. 

This is where our relative comfort and isolation, not just in America but in the 21st century!, makes things harder for us. Our heroes don’t have to go that far; if they did, they wouldn’t be heroes. Our books and movies and Netflix queues are filled with moments where the good guy is down, but never out. The cavalry comes; the superhero’s true powers are revealed. But the gospels don’t work that way. Jesus doesn’t get rescued. Jesus dies. His broken body is taken down. His disciples (including Peter!) have fled. His remains are wrapped up and stashed in a tomb… not unlike the ones surrounding these first listeners. The eleventh hour comes and goes. Midnight strikes. 

And it is exactly this reality that creates the space for not just a miracle, but the miracle:  our God is as much God at 12:01 as He is at 11:59. The extremity of Jesus’s suffering demonstrates the scope of God’s power. More than that: it demonstrates the scope of God’s empathy, of His compassion, of His love. 

Mark’s readers were facing death, and there would be no last-minute deliverance. But that doesn’t mean deliverance won’t come. When we look at the occupied cross, we see the full extent of the kind of Kingdom Jesus is bringing into the world. It doesn’t end at death; it doesn’t end anywhere. It is comprehensive. It is not just over Rome, it is over all. 

If the Gospel of Mark is written to Roman Christians, it is written as an encouragement to feel seen in their fear, to feel company in their doubts, and to find hope, even in the moment when those who are persecuting them feel the greatest confidence in their victory. Just look at how Mark actually records Jesus’s death. Take a look with me at the cross, even in its awfulness, and see: 

With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”

Mark 15:37-41

The very first person in all of Mark’s gospel to actually articulate the claim the entire book sets out to prove is the Roman centurion at the cross. This man doesn’t know Jesus’s origin story. He didn’t see the miracles in Galilee. He didn’t hear the brilliant responses to the Pharisees in the Temple. He didn’t even dine with the disciples at the Last Supper. He sees only the death of Jesus on the cross, and he understands: this is God’s Son. 

How? The text says the testimony was in “how he died.” What does that mean? It must mean his willing surrender, despite his clear innocence, to the worst things the people he created could do to him. His absorption of all this wrongness, like a parent absorbing the angry blows and hateful words of a child in tantrum. That’s what the cross is: God taking our evil upon Himself.. and in so doing, exposing the impotence of our rebellion. Why did the Pharisees want Jesus gone? He threatened their legalistic control of God’s Temple. What happens when Jesus dies? The curtain, separating the Holy of Holies from the world, is ripped in two. Why does Rome want Jesus gone? He threatens the authority of Caesar. What happens when Jesus dies? A soldier of the Empire proclaims he was the Son of God. What will happen if Nero burns every Christian in Rome? Can his rage really destroy Jesus’s Kingdom? Or does all of his fury end, proverbially, at midnight? And Who has authority after that? 

When we really look at the cross, we have a chance to see the real and final limits of our own power: this is the absolute worst thing we can do. And it’s not enough to dethrone God. Nothing is. And in that moment, we can allow ourselves to break in the same way that Jesus’s radical surrender once broke Rome: who do we think we are fighting? Who are we trying to resist? The God of the Universe will never stop loving us. He will never stop chasing us down. He will never abandon us to our brokenness. He will always reach out his arms–note the beauty and poetry of Jesus’s position on the cross!–and embrace us. 

Our whole calling flows from surrendering to his incredible love for us. Allowing him to reach us. When we do that, we experience a kind of death–of our rebellion, of our willfulness–but on the other side of it, at 12:01, we believe that new life begins. Our challenge when we read this gospel is the same as the challenge facing those first listeners: can we find courage not to fight this kind of total surrender, but to face it? Are we willing to lose? 

And if we are, what does Jesus promise we will gain?