Mark 4:10-12

11/02/11                       Mark 4:10-12                   GUMC Youth

       It is possible to take what I am about to say and completely misunderstand it.  It is possible that you might hear this first thing I have to say and interpret it to mean that I have a low view of the Bible.  That is not the case.  I do, however, want to point out something that you may have already noticed, or may one day notice all on your own.

       Even though there is a tremendous amount of similarity between the four gospels, especially between the first three, Matthew, Mark and Luke, they are not identical.  This is a good thing because, if they were identical, we wouldn't need all of them.  The different gospels do not all tell the same stories.  Sometimes, when they tell the same stories, they put them in a different order.  What is interesting is that there are times when two different gospel writers will have differences between their accounts of the same story.  This passage is a wonderful example of this.  In it, we have Jesus quoting the prophet Isaiah, but the quotation is a little different depending on which gospel we read it in.

       In Matthew, for example, we read this.  "You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive.  For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn - and I would heal them."  Mark's account, that we just heard, reads a little differently.  "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables," and now comes the quote, "in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven."

       Do you see the difference between the two?  In Matthew, we get the sense that the problem is that the people are just being stubborn, that they are shutting their eyes and ears and hardening their hearts so they can never hear what God is saying to them.  It is a lamentable situation that breaks Jesus' heart.  In Mark, however, we get the idea that the telling of parables and the hardening of hearts are related.  We get the impression that Jesus tells the parables precisely in order to harden people's hearts.

       If we look at these two accounts side by side, we can see that Mark's account is just a bit harsher, isn't it?  In Matthew, the parables just happen to be met with stubbornness; in Mark, the stubbornness is caused by the parables, that Jesus tells the parables in order to provoke the stubbornness.  Because of this, you almost never hear anyone preach on Mark's version of this.  In fact, even when someone does set out to explain Mark's version, it almost always works itself out that they say that we should understand Mark's version to be saying what Matthew's version says, and not the other way around.  We don't want to think about it.  We don't want to deal with the boldness of Mark's account so we hide in Matthew's account.

       But why would they be so different?  Here's a thought.  The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, but it was translated into Greek about four hundred years before Jesus was born.  By the time the New Testament was being written, far more people were reading the Greek version than the Hebrew version of the Old Testament.  As it turns out, the difference between Matthew and Mark's version of this quotation is the same as the difference between the Greek and the Hebrew version of Isaiah.  You see, the Greek version is exactly like Matthew's account and the Hebrew version is exactly like Mark's.  Even though the Hebrew version is the "original," we cannot pretend that people would not have had both versions in their head.  This is why they are both important and why we must take them both seriously.  But what it means is that, even though they are both important, the fact remains that we are considering Mark's account of this event and not Matthew's, so we need to deal with what Mark has to say in all its harshness.

       But, because Jesus is quoting Isaiah, in order to really understand what Jesus is saying, we need to take a moment and go back to the book of Isaiah and understand what he is saying.  This is what we read.  "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple.  Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings:  with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.  And one called to another and said:  'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.'  The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.  And I said, 'Woe is me!  I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!'  Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.  The seraph touched my mouth with it and said:  'Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.'  Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?'  And I said, 'Here am I; send me!'  And he said, 'Go and say to this people:  "Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand."  Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.'  Then I said, 'How long, O Lord?'  And he said, 'Until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.  Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled.'  The holy seed is its stump."

       You see, the first verses of that passage are famous and well beloved in the church because it is a wonderful account of being called by God and the response of a faithful person.  But once we get beyond those first verses and get closer to the end of the chapter, things get more than a little uncomfortable.  Isaiah lived in a time when all of Israel thought that Jerusalem, their capital, was the home of God and God would never, could never, allow Jerusalem to fall into enemy hands.  One of the big points that God's command to Isaiah is that this is simply not true.  God not only can allow Jerusalem to fall, but would indeed do so.

       Part of what we learn from this passage in Isaiah is that God is not concerned about the things we are concerned about.  For the people at the time, the idea that God might allow the capital of Israel to fall was unthinkable.  If that were to happen, it seemed, everything would be lost.  If it happened, it would mean, they thought, that God was defeated.  Isaiah's difficult message is that the fall of Jerusalem, when it happened, would be so far from being a defeat of God that it actually would be at God's hand.  Whatever else this passage might mean, and I think it has lots of levels of meaning, it shows us that God is not limited by the things that limit us, that the most stable things in the world might be taken away from us to remind us to trust in God and in God alone.  The success of God is not and can not be tied to the success of any human project.

       I think that this helps us to understand what Jesus is getting at in our passage from Mark.  It is a tearing down of everything that we think needs to be the case for God to be successful.  Just like the invasion and defeat of Jerusalem does not carry with it the defeat of God, the attack on and even crucifixion of Jesus does not mean that God has been defeated.  Instead, we need to remember, at every step of the way, that God was so aware of what was happening, that he walked right into it, knowing that even death could not stop him.

       On another level, we need to look at it in its context.  If you remember back to when we met last, two weeks ago, I said that this first part of chapter four is an example of Mark's so-called "Sandwich technique," where he takes one story, splits it in two, and includes something else in the middle.  One of the things I said was that both the story that gets split apart and the stuff that goes in the middle have something to say to each other, that we can't understand them correctly unless we think them through together.

       Jesus has just told a parable that explains why some people listen to him and other people do not.  The parable talked about people who are on the "inside" and those who are on the "outside."  There are some soils that can make a seed grow and others that cannot.  What is more, we cannot always tell right away which is which.  Sometimes, a plant will sprout right up but it has no roots and will ultimately not grow but die out.  One of the things that Jesus is saying by quoting that chapter from Isaiah is that we should not think for a moment that, when lots of people reject him, when people just don't get excited about following Jesus, that God has somehow failed.  Even when Jesus is betrayed and murdered, God is still working and overcomes death through resurrection.

       I promised that this would be a message that did justice to Mark's account of Jesus' reference to Isaiah and not just resolve it into Matthew's reading.  So far, the message has focused on things that are in common between the two, things that would need to be said, regardless of which version we were looking at.  However, we still have to deal with the fact that Mark's account seems to be quite harsh.  It certainly seems that Jesus is saying that he is intentionally causing people to stop up their ears, close their eyes, and harden their hearts, that it isn't just a coincidence that people aren't listening, but that he is, in a sense, causing them to reject him.  What are we to do with that?

       I have the tendency to give myself difficult preaching assignments, for one reason or another.  Once, for example, I preached once from every single book of the Bible.  One that I did last year for Advent was particularly interesting and challenging and I think it speaks to the troubles we have with this text.  Since Advent and Christmas celebrate the time when God himself came into our world of space and time and encountered us, I asked the question over three weeks, "What happens when God comes close?"  When we look at the Bible and take it seriously, we find that the answer to that question is very interesting indeed.

       The first week, we looked at a passage in Paul's letter to the Romans, where he talks about the law that was given to the ancient Israelites.  He says things like, "If it weren't for the law telling me not to covet," that is, to be jealous and want things you can't have, "I would have never known covetousness."  He says that, if God had not ever said, "Don't do this," he never would have wanted to do it.  In some fairly small way, when God took just one small step toward the Israelites, giving them a law that simply said, "These things are not allowed among the people of God," all of a sudden, the part deep inside of them that did not want God to tell them what to do woke up and said, "Well, I'm going to do them."

       The next week, we looked at this passage from Isaiah that we have been considering tonight.  We saw that, when even the great prophet of God came into God's presence, the impact was overwhelming.  This man who was called to speak the word of God to the people of God realized that he had unclean lips, that he was not, in himself, worthy of the message he had been given.  This feeling of inadequacy was so strong that he felt like he was going to die.

       The third week, we looked at a passage that almost nobody talks about, the slaying of the innocents.  Remember when Jesus is born and the wise men from the East come and Jesus' family has to get up in the middle of the night and run away to Egypt?  It was because Herod was going to come in and have all the children under two years old killed.  We read and rejoice that Jesus was saved from that, but there were lots of children who were not.  The very entrance of God into our world so offended the secular authorities that it had serious consequences.

       So what does this have to do with those tough words in Mark?  It has everything to do with them, because it seems to be the case that, if God comes close, it can be extremely uncomfortable.  We sometimes hear people talk about God coming close as if it was always a warm and happy time for everyone, but it simply isn't so.  It is true that, in telling the parables, Jesus was blinding the people and stopping up their ears and preventing them from really listening, but it isn't as though he was doing this because he was being mean, but rather because there was no other way.  Time and time again, we see that, when God moves among his people, we react badly.  This is not a weakness in God, but a weakness in us.  It just so happens that, when God demonstrates his love toward us, we freak out and don't want to receive it.

       When we see it this way, we can see that, however harsh Jesus' words seem to us at first, it is really unbelievably gracious, from beginning to end.  We see that God does not give up his good plan when he sees that we don't accept it right away.  If he was worried about what grace looked like at first, he would never do anything for us.  It is precisely because he cares about us more than what we think about it that he keeps going, he doesn't give up, but follows through with his good plan.

       Jesus' purpose in coming to us was not so that we could know a lot of interesting things, neither was it first and foremost that we should live a certain way, though it is definitely good if we learn things and live in a faithful way.  His purpose was to redeem us, to show us the Father, and to transform us from the inside out.  And in order to do that, he did not stop when we got offended, but kept going.  His perseverance pushed him to be killed for us, but that did not stop him.  He was raised from the dead, ascended to heaven and gave us his Spirit, that we might know what we could never understand before.  Our God has gone to tremendous lengths to renew us.  Let us give thanks and lean on him in all things.  Let us pray.

AMEN