Seeing Jesus, glimpsing heaven
Sermon on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
Proverbs 22:1–2, 8–9, 22–23; Psalm 125; James 2:1–10, 11–13, 14–17; Mark 7:24–37
When did you last see Jesus? When did you last glimpse heaven?
+In nomine…
One of the reasons I’m in church today is, because, eighteen years ago, on a train journey between Glasgow and Oban, I decided, for some reason, to read the whole of the book of the Gospel according to St Mark. I still remember misty Loch Lomond out of the window amid pines and hills, and, in my hands, this short, elemental, blunt story about anger and suffering, about yearning and sacrifice, about healing and justice and righteousness. And, as it’s done for countless others over century upon century, that experience, that story, that encounter ended up changing my life.
You don’t need to be stuck on a train, of course. As autumn descends, and the leaves turn and the nights draw in, it strikes me that it’s the ideal time of year to sit down in an armchair of an evening, an empty glass and a bottle of wine next to you, a Bible in your lap, and to read one of the Gospels from cover to cover, so to speak. Indeed, between now and the end of the year, one could manage a Gospel a month — four evenings, four bottles of wine — and it might just change your life.
Of course, one of the interesting things about our faith is that when we want to read about Jesus, its cornerstone, we turn not to one but to four stories about his ministry written in four Gospel books. And the Jesus we encounter in the four Gospel books is far from uniform.
If you’ve been coming to church during August, you’ll know that the Gospel readings on Sundays dwelt on the lengthy discourses from chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, where Jesus teaches his disciples and followers about bread and wine and body and blood. He does so at length, because the Jesus we meet in John’s Gospel is a Jesus that wants to take you aside, to sit with you under the fig tree, to explain things to you, to get you to understand this wonderful, awesome thing that’s happening, that God is doing.
The Jesus we meet in Mark’s Gospel this morning presents quite differently. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is impatiently always on the move. This morning he has just arrived in Tyre, and he meets a woman whose daughter is unwell, but she’s not a Jew, not one of God’s chosen people, as Jews like Jesus would have understood it.
And so he says to her, when she asks for his help, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” “You with your sick daughter — wait your turn — you’re not part of God’s chosen people. I might get you, but not now. Go away.” Jesus isn’t nice and meek and mild here. He’s offensive; and to our ears, he isn’t even just. The mother stands her ground — “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs,” she says. And you can almost hear God’s mercy and justice breaking through in the gaze that these two must have shared at that moment. “For saying that, you may go,” says Jesus. “You daughter has been healed.”
And then immediately Jesus is back from Tyre and in Decapolis. And there’s a deaf and mute man who’s brought to him. And straight away, with no words, Jesus bundles him to one side, and spits on his finger, and touches the mute man’s tongue and his ears. And the man hears and speaks. And, again, in the space of a few rushed verses, there’s that noise of God’s mercy and justice bursting to the open, making a difference.
That’s the tempo of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. He is impatient, and impassioned, gripped by a task and mission that he sometimes doesn’t even seem to understand himself.
It’s our task to get to know these Jesuses. It’s easy to make assumptions about who Jesus is and what he’s like; but we need to keep knowing him differently; we need to keep getting to know him from different angles. For how will you spot him if you don’t know what to look for?
When did you last see Jesus? When did you last glimpse heaven?
Medieval art often depicts heaven as a clean, golden, ordered place, in contast to the filth and chaos of hell below. In the Book of Revelation, at the very end of the Bible, we find heaven depicted as the perfect city, the City of God, where life seems to be one big eternal church service — heaven help us, you might say.
But one of the most frequent images we get of heaven — of the kingdom of God — in the Gospels is of a feast, a banquet, a shared meal, with God as generous host and God as sustenance.
And so when there are Gospel stories about food — who gets to share, what the experience is like — we do well to pay particular attention.
That picture of heaven as generous, welcoming banquet is at the heart of the Gospel story of the miraculous feeding of the 5,000, where, in Jesus’s hands, the few loaves and fish feed a multitude. That story, rather oddly, is told twice in the Gospel of Mark — just before the passage we heard today, and just after it. The first time, the crowd is made up only of Jews, of God’s chosen people, of people like Jesus. The second time, Jesus feeds a crowd that’s made up of a host of different people — like the mother and her daughter we heard about in today’s passage. “You with your sick daughter,” Jesus told her “– wait your turn — you’re not part of God’s chosen people.” “Go away,” he told her. And then God’s mercy and justice break through, and the promise — the reality — of food, of feast, of heaven, is suddenly there for thousands, for everyone, for you and me.
When did you last see Jesus? When did you last glimpse heaven?
A great temptation for us as Christians is to see Jesus as someone who lived back then, and to see heaven as something way in the distance over there. And we’re in this rather mundane middle space, between cosmic Glasgow and cosmic Oban, no miracles, no angels, no feast.
The wonder of our faith, of course, is that we are Resurrection people, here and now. Here and now, in us, Jesus and heaven meet. As we will say shortly, we, though many, are one Body, the Body of Christ; and we will take the Body of Christ in bread and wine into ours at a feast, a banquet, a meal, with God as generous host and God as sustenance.
Where God’s mercy and justice breaks through, where we help God’s mercy and justice break through, there Jesus is, and there also is the life of heaven.
The miracle of Christian life is that here and now and every day we are the Body of Christ, and here and now and every day we are to see heaven.
When did you last see Jesus? When will you next glimpse heaven?
