Text: Mark 4:35-41 and 2 Corinthians 5:1-10
Beloved
in Christ, we love our little Jesus. We love our little Jesus who enters our
little world and solves our little problems. We are so happy for Him to come
and fix our boo-boos and heal our emotional owies. We see Him as a great
physician, more talented than an ordinary doctor, to be sure, but still like a
physician. He treats His patients one by one, as any doctor must. He sees our
physical and emotional ailments. He diagnoses what is wrong. He touches us and
He cures us. Because He handles each case individually, nobody else understands
what He is doing for each of us, just as we don’t know what He is doing for
them. Those around us may not appreciate what is happening, but we know the
change and the healing that He has brought to us.
Now
we know that Jesus is more than a healer of our bodies. He has come to restore
our souls no less than our bodies. And so we call Him the Great Physician and
acknowledge Him as the healer of both body and soul. But even as we acknowledge
this added dimension to Christ, we are still tempted to think of Him
exclusively in personal terms. We are quick to confess, as we ought, that “He
restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness,”
even “through the valley of the shadow of death” so that “I
will fear no evil.” We may acknowledge that He is doing similar things
to other individuals, but we don’t necessarily see His grand plan. We may not
even see His true divinity. After all, one doesn’t need to be divine in order
to be a good physician, even a spectacular healer. Plenty of prophets in the
Old Testament, such as Elijah and Elisha, healed people and even restored some
to life. And so we may be tempted to consider Jesus to be like one more holy
man with great powers to bring healing and life where disease and death
prevails. Indeed, many people who had encountered Jesus so far assumed that
that was all He was.
 |
| Joos de Momper the Younger, Storm at Sea (Der Seesturm) |
But
Jesus does something in today’s gospel that utterly amazes His disciples. He
calms a storm. Our Lord was no longer treating a human body that occupied a few
cubic feet. Instead, He was dealing with a whole weather system that governed
the Sea of Galilee. His power was clearly more extensive than people had
imagined. We can understand someone having power within them to touch another
person and bring them health. But how can you touch wind and wave? How you can
govern such unruly forces?
The
Israelites would have known that God alone can do that. They would have been
familiar with Psalm 107, which describes God’s deliverance from a variety of evils.
One of those evils described by the psalm is a storm that threatened to sink a
ship. The psalm describes how the sailors called out to God, who heard their
pleas and brought them safely to their harbor. For centuries the Israelites had
prayed that psalm and learned that God alone could bring them to safety when
they were in peril on the sea. But now Christ did something amazing, something
that only God could do. It was just as the psalm described. The disciples “cried
to the LORD in their trouble, and He delivered them from their distress. He
made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.”
Clearly, then, Jesus is to be identified with the LORD God.
This
incident forces us to go back and re-evaluate who Jesus is. Is there any hint
so far in Mark’s gospel that Jesus might be more than a healer or
miracle-worker? Indeed, there is. The demons acknowledge Jesus to be the Son of
God when they were cast out. Our Lord ordered them to keep quiet since it was
not quite time for that truth to be revealed. But it was stated nonetheless.
Then there is that curious phrase recorded in Mark 1, where we are told that
Jesus was driven into the wilderness where He was tempted. Mark tells us that
Christ “was with the wild animals.” Clearly, He had a bigger
purpose than merely being tempted so He could help individual believers. He was
out to restore all creation, to tame those ferocious beasts that had been made
wild by mankind’s sin.
When
we think of sin and its effects, we tend to have too narrow of a scope. We look
at sin as a personal problem. We have failed to live up to our potential. We
made a mistake that embarrassed us or caused us some grief. Since we sinned
personally and individually, then there are only personal and individual
consequences. But that is not the case at all. Our sin affects other people.
Think, for example, of how one man’s racist rage had devastating consequences
for nine other people this past week. His sin wasn’t just a matter between God
and him alone. Our sin may not be as heinous as his was, but it does harm and
scar other people. And so when Christ dealt with our sin on the cross, He had
to deal with the harm that we have caused others as well as the guilt we have
borne.
Today’s
gospel reminds us that sin has a cosmic influence. Winds and wave are unruly
because mankind is unruly. Our disorder has brought chaos into the physical
world around us. There were no storms in Eden, just as there were no weeds,
poisonous plants, vicious animals, and all the rest that we are familiar with.
Instead, all of those things have come about because we are under God’s
judgment for sin. The whole created world around us is not pleased with the way
things are now. The Scriptures tell us that “the creation was subjected
to futility…in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage
to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
Nowadays we are apt to debate how much of all the degradation of the created
world around us mankind is responsible for. The truth is that we are
responsible for all of it, for had we not turned away from God, there would
never have been animals going into extinction, droughts, floods, and all the
other so-called natural disasters. Each and every one of those events is a
microcosm of the disorder we fill ourselves and others with.
Our
Lord Jesus Christ has come to be our Savior in every dimension. He isn’t just
our Savior from the angst we naturally feel because of our guilt. No, He is our
Savior from all the harm we have caused others. And He is our Savior to rescue
us from the destruction we have brought into the created world. That is why
Mark would later record that “there was darkness over the whole land”
for three hours when Christ was on the cross. He had freed His disciples from a
storm that had threatened to engulf them, but He Himself would not be spared.
He allowed the darkness within creation to prevail over Him so that He could
restore it to wholeness.
When
Christ rose from the dead, He reversed the curse not just on humanity, but on
all creation. He has made us His new creation and now all “creation waits
with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” We are not
yet fully what we will be. And so part of what it means to be a Christian is
that we live as part of God’s restored, new creation amid the decaying, old
creation. We live with the tension between the two. Life often is difficult for
us precisely because we are not yet where we are going. Moreover, we see that
where we are going is grander than where we are; indeed, it is a far more
expansive and greater future than we can imagine at the present. And so the old
part of us is dying away and a new person is emerging. Now, the old part of us may
have been content with a little Jesus who leaves us as we were, except just a
tad better. But the new person in Christ that is inside of us understands a
greater vision: we are part of a new creation that will encompass the entire
universe one day.
That
is why the apostle Paul emphasizes in today’s epistle how he was willing to
serve the Corinthians “in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings,
imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger.” If he were
focused only on himself and his personal advancement, he would try to get out
of all those things. Instead he embraced all these things “by purity,
knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; by truthful
speech, and the power of God.” He and his fellow apostles could be
treated by others as “imposters,” “unknown,” and “marked
for death,” but he knew that he was the real deal, known to God, and
not only living but giving life to his hearers.
And
so, beloved in the Lord, do not underestimate Jesus Christ. He is more than
just an amazing healer. He is Lord of creation, and as Lord of all creation He
has entered into this world and into your life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment