The Hypocritical Christian

read Mark 9:14-29

A lot has transpired since Jesus spoke truth about the heart of man. He has performed an another miraculous feeding, this time 4000 people, received the profession of faith of Peter that he was the messiah, and revealed himself upon a mountaintop to be the chosen one of God. More about that in a future post.

If you have been reading this blog all along you know that Jesus is repeatedly demonstrating proof of his role as Messiah. This is Mark’s goal for his hearers.  “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.” is another way to read the opening statement in Mark 1.  Mark wants non-Jewish people to see that Jesus is the true Son of God, rather than Caesar.  Mark wants Jewish listeners to see that Jesus fits the definition of the Messiah (Christ in Greek) based on the actions he takes.  In Isaiah, the arrival of God amidst the people is linked to the blind, deaf, mute, and lame being restored.  Jesus has been doing these very things all along in this gospel not too mention walking on water, raising the dead, and feeding thousands with minimal resources.

Back to the current passage.  Jesus, Peter, James and John come down from the mountain where Jesus was revealed transfigured. They encounter a controversy broiling between the Jewish religious leaders and the other disciples.  It seems that the disciples have attempted to heal a young person who is tormented by an evil spirit to no avail.

A father brought his son to the disciples for exorcism (the disciples have been doing this since the Lord’s commission for some time c.f. Mark 6:13) but their efforts failed. Admittedly, the condition described by the father sounds to our modern ears a lot more like epilepsy than demonic possession. Regardless of the source of the torment, the young man has suffered since childhood with this affliction.

Jesus enters the conversation and asks some questions about the nature of the affliction. The father has reached a point of deep frustration. He feels desperate. He feels helpless.  He isn’t even sure that Jesus is willing or capable either saying: “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”

It is useful to read Jesus response to the father with the right inflection.  Note that earlier he expressed frustration that the disciples had failed in their efforts.  He is irritated that they are demonstrating a lack of faithfulness again and demands that the boy be brought to him.  So when Jesus replies to the father’s jeer “If you can do anything” it behooves us to hear the correct tone.

“IF you can?!? all things are possible to him who believes.”

In effect, Jesus is saying that the fault lies not in the capabilities of God to achieve the outcome but rather the fault lies with the faith of the disciples or the father or both. The boy’s father clearly picks up on Jesus meaning because he replies, “I believe, help me in my unbelief.”

The boy is healed.

It can seem dangerous or crazy to us to hear that the limiting factor for healing the boy was the faith.  It seems to some unreasonable or frightening to think that anything is possible through prayer to the one who believes. The seminary I attended worked hard at not letting any of its students get too far down such non scientific thinking.  Who knows they may have thought that we would all end up handling snakes and doing televised faith healings if they didn’t pump the brakes on our belief in the power of prayer. And yet, it is in the New Testament time and time again clear as daylight.  Jesus taught that just a little seed of faith can result in commanding mountains to move. The letter of James says “the effectual, fervent prayer of the righteous accomplishes much.

There are 4 separate types of prayer on display in this little episode in the life of Jesus. I think that they can help us to understand why prayer sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.  The first kind of prayer demonstrated I am going to call challenge prayer.  This is the sort of exasperated prayer that the boy’s father was offering up.  “If you can then prove it” is the nature of the challenge prayer. It is spoken by many a person on evenings feeling awful from drinking. “If you just get me through this then…”  It is also spoken by people seeking to bargain something from God “If you love me then let me win the lottery.” etc.

There are 2 problems with challenge prayers.  The first problem is that the person praying the challenge prayer is holding back on total belief.  At the core of all challenge prayers is either the desire for God to prove something (existence, power, love) or to reward the petitioner regardless of the depth of faith. The second problem is that they sometimes work!  God reserves the right to honor any prayer including the ones that are centered in negotiation.  If the petition requested lines up with God’s will then God may answer it.  Lottery ticket winnings are seldom gonna be on the divine agenda I suspect.  Sorry if that disappoints you.  If it helps, it is disappointing to me, too.

Lining up with God’s will is not enough though.  This is the second kind of prayer in our tale, the kind that the disciples must have been demonstrating in their own efforts to expel the demon from the boy.  This I am gonna call the champion prayers. A champion prayer is one where the assumption is that God will do whatever is asked because the request “must be” in God’s will.  This kind of prayer is often seen in religious leaders who feel so confident that God is on their side that whatever is asked God will champion.

There is a conversation that Jesus has with his disciples in a home after the boy is healed.  They ask why they failed to be able to expel the demon even though they had enjoyed previous success with exorcisms. Jesus tells them “that this kind cannot come out by anything but prayer.”

It is hard for me to fathom that they were not praying when they were setting about healing the sick, etc. ; but something was limiting them.  The disciples had been give the power to heal the sick and cast out demons and they began I suspect to forget that the power was not a static thing that they possessed and controlled but rather that they were capable of being a conduit through which God could act. I bet they began to become confident in their own capabilities they quit trusting in God to accomplish the work that surely He would endorse and champion. So when they encountered a truly pesky demon they failed. The fault was not the effort of the prayer but the wrong starting place in the heart.  We can see this more clearly by contrasting champion and challenge prayer with the 3rd kind of prayer.

The third kind is centered prayer.  The disciples no doubt had asked in God’s name for the demon to exit the boy.  When Jesus does the say the fight is engaged and naturally the demon loses.  What made Jesus better able to pray?  Of course you might say well he is God so its not really a fair comparison. Sure.  Keep in mind that one of the aims of Jesus is to model behavior for the future believer.  He teaches us how to pray, encourages times of rest and reflection, gets baptized as an example, etc.  So what made Jesus different in his effort than the disciples.  He was perfectly centered on God.

My good friend, Rev. Dr. Paul Burns has a program called soul-metrics.  People who wish to grow in their spiritual health can take an assessment and really see where they are at in their relationship with God, with self, and with others.  It is a wonderful tool and if Jesus were to answer the questions there can be no doubt that he would get excellent marks! When Paul is teaching about the processes and research behind the GPS survey he designed he invites his students to use the following image for what one aspect of spiritual health is: a spigot!

Don’t laugh.  You may recall that Jesus said that he is living water and that any one who drinks from him will never thirst. Dr. Burns uses the spigot image to suggest that the spiritually mature person has connected their hose to the spigot of God’s living water. It is connected and the flow is open to water the landscape of their lives and the lives of others.  Because as Jesus said it isn’t just that we are supposed to go to the well of the living water we are to become fountains of living water ourselves.  In other words we are meant to share the blessing.

Because Jesus is centered on God he is in alignment with God’s will. As such his prayer is effective.  Whereas the disciples represent those that think that the power of God is something to control for the causes that they championed, Jesus understood that the power of God is something that flows through a believer and accomplishes great things.  That is what he modeled.  Just to belabor the point, the disciples treated it more like bottled water rather than a connected hose.

The fourth and final prayer is the one uttered by the boy’s father.  This prayer is a model prayer.  In fact, I will go so far as to say that after the Lord’s Prayer it may be the best example of prayer that we have in all of the scriptures. Why?  Because the wording of this prayer communicates in a true and faithful way to God where the heart of the every person, believer or not, always lies — trapped in the tension between what is known and what is yet to be revealed.

“I believe! Help my unbelief!”

Amen

Read Mark 6:32-52

I think that most Christians experience the Bible in bits and pieces.  They listen to a sermon here they see a scripture verse on a t-shirt there. Its all very piecemeal.  Even if you go to Church every Sunday morning you wouldn’t experience the whole of scripture in a year.  Your church could be one that follows the Common Lectionary (a 3 year cycle) with every single reading done each week and you could read every single additional daily reading and after 3 years you still would not have seen every single verse in the Bible.

I mention this because getting our scripture as we do in bits and pieces we get our understanding in bits and pieces as well.  That’s partly why this blog is working through a single book systematically rather than jumping about.  My hope is to help all of us, myself included, read a book of the Bible straight through and get the feel for the whole rather than just a bit here and there.

Some things are richer in the sum of the parts. Some things are different.  Dark Side of The Moon, the Pink Floyd album, was released the year after I was born.  It was the #1 album in the United States for a bit but then simply remained on the charts for over 740 weeks (14 straight years!) after a brief drop it returned to the Billboard top 200 and for all intents and purposes has never left.   It has a couple of tunes that you probably know and some others that you would recognize if you heard them.  The most successful single is entitled Money.  My personal favorite is Time.  Both of those songs are great but listening to the entire album start to finish is a different experience.  When it was an actual vinyl album each side was one continuous piece of music drifting in and out of the songs until the needle reached the end.  The sum was different than the parts.

So it is with a book of the Bible, the sum is greater than the parts.  At the end of Chapter 6 we find two stories of Jesus that are usually encountered separately but have another meaning when brought together.  They are the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on water.

Speaking of hearing stories one after another, just encountering the feeding of the 5000 after the tale of John the Baptist’s death conjures up all sorts of comparisons and contrasts.  The opulence of Herod’s party versus the simplicity of the gathering in the wilderness. The death that ends that gathering versus the life sustaining element of the loaves and fishes.  The ruler who kills versus the ruler who provides.

And it is Jesus that provides.  A crowd has gathered to see these disciples who have been going out teaching, performing exorcisms, and healing the sick.  They naturally also want to see the one who has sent them out in the first place, Jesus.  By the way the size of the crowd is sort of mind boggling.  It is recorded as around 5000 men.  Archeologists estimate that a typical village or town in the region like Bethsaida or Capernaum numbered no more than 3000 people. If CNN had existed this gathering would have made the news!  It did make the oral tradition of the early church that culminated in 2 different strands, the synoptic gospels and John.  With crowds like that you can begin to see why everyone knew who Jesus was by the time he went to Jerusalem for the last time.

Mark writes that when they encountered the crowd that Jesus took pity on them and started to teach them because they were “like sheep without a shepherd.” This is a huge hint for how Mark intends for the story to be heard by us.

Moses towards the end of his life prays that the people will be given a new shepherd in the wilderness to lead them into the promised land.  God calls Joshua for this purpose.  Incidentally, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, Joshua is rendered as Jesus.  The prophet Ezekiel delivers an oracle where God speaks judgment against the priests and leaders of the people of Israel for failing to be good shepherds.  Instead of relying on them the LORD promises to gather the people himself and place over them a shepherd who is from the line of  David to care for them.

This is the background of what is happening next and what Mark wants us to be aware of when we encounter this feeding in the wilderness.  Of course, there are other allusions like God providing sustenance through quail and manna during Exodus.  There is the feeding and providing for Elisha and Elijah in the wilderness as well.

So it gets late.  The disciples are mindful that the crowd needs to go home because who wants 5000 HANGRY people on your hands?  No one does, obviously.  Ask Marie Antoinette, bad things happen.  So they gently suggest to Jesus that he needs to wrap it up so that the multitude might go into the neighboring towns and overwhelm the local restaurants.

Jesus suggests that the disciples should feed them.  He gets some sarcasm in return.  What are we supposed to spend 200 denari on bread?  Basically, where are we gonna get that kind of money? If you are curious the amount quoted was roughly the annual wages of a day laborer.  The argument was escalating quickly.

As you probably know, Jesus asks them what they have and they come up with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.  Jesus blessed the meal looking up to heaven and had them distribute and everybody ate until they were satisfied.  There was even left over bread and pieces of fish.  We don’t know specifically how it happened but that isn’t the point.

Now taken by itself this story has a lot to teach / remind the believer about the nature of God.  “The Earth is the Lord’s and all that it contains” the Psalmist writes.  So naturally God can multiply any resource to match the need.  A later Psalmist shares that “YOU open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.”  This is a story that urges us not to be afraid for our provision for our God provides.  It is a story that teaches believers that when they see a great need around them that encouraging the need to go away will only result in God saying “NO.  You feed them.” Whether individually or collectively it is a message that we all need to be reminded of from time to time.

Have you been afraid of how you might make ends meet lately?  How might it look if you gave that fear to God and trusted in gracious provision?

Has your Church been arguing about the financial wisdom of taking on a new mission or ministry? How might it look if they stepped out in faith with their 5 loaves and prayed for God to provide for the need they see?

This is not the only message that is present in this story though.  The unspoken question is who is this person in the middle who prays and bread and fish become inexhaustible?  Mark in alluding to the “sheep without a shepherd” begs us to ask ourselves this question.  Who is Jesus?

Very quickly after the baskets of left-overs are collected, Jesus sends the disciples off in the boat while he also departs to go pray.  The nature of this miracle is that the disciples dispersing the food would have realized what was going on long before the crowd figured it out.  Jesus wants everyone to get going before he has to deal with 5000 people who are now satiated and would expect more miracles from him.

Over night a storm whips up on the waters as the disciples are making their way to the other side.  Imagine how tired they had to have been.  Spent the day dealing with crowd control, arguing with Jesus, distributing and collecting the food, and now having to row against the wind and waves of a storm.  The storm and their exhaustion must have been awful because when they see Jesus walking toward them at 3AM they are convinced that they are seeing some sort of ghost.

Jesus tells them to not be afraid (the first thing that the messenger of God always says) and reveals himself to them.  He gets in the boat and the storm settled and they were amazed. That in itself is pretty amazing as they have already experienced Jesus waking up in the boat and commanding a storm to stop.

Psalm 107 reads “He caused the storm to be still so that the waves of the sea were hushed” and Job says to his friends regarding God, “who alone stretches out the heavens and tramples down the waves of the sea”.

Jesus is for the second time in Mark 6 disappointed in people.  In Nazareth he marvelled at the disbelief of the people there and now in the boat his own disciples “had not gained any insight from the incident of the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.”  That last turn of phrase is Bible speak for being spiritually blind.

When Jesus gets into the boat he says in Greek “Ego Emi” and this little phrase is so perplexing.  On the one hand it means simply “I am” or in this case “it is I”; just what anyone might say about themselves at any time.  On the other hand it is also the Greek translation of the name of God that Moses received at his encounter with a bush that burned but was not consumed.  The name of God, YHWH, or  “I AM”.  Is it possible that when Jesus was getting into the boat (having been tramping down the waves as Job describes) what he actually said to the disciples was “Fear Not for I AM”?

The two stories together certainly lead to a conclusion that it had been the intention of Jesus to reveal to his disciples through the loaves incident and the calming of the water that he was the One that had been promised long ago.  For Mark, who intends for us to read his book as the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God it becomes another piece of evidence about who Jesus is ultimately.  That it comes in a chapter that starts with the troubling disbelief of the people in Nazareth and ends with the disciples also not understanding it begs the question to each of us– do you get it?  Do you understand who this is before you?

No matter where you are in life right now,  perhaps you are unemployed because of the Coronavirus or are simply feeling the long term effects of social isolation.  Maybe you are struggling financially or dealing with depression or addiction.  You might have cancer or some other chronic illness.  You may be estranged from your children or flailing in an unhappy marriage.  There is no end to the struggles and trials that we can face in this life, but remember who it is in whom you believe, Jesus Christ.

Your God is the one who graciously provides for every living thing from his own hand.  Are not you more important than the animals, the insects and the plants?

Your God is the one who walks upon the waves and calms the storm with a word.  Can God not counter that which you fear most?

Your God is the one who conquered death through resurrection and promises that all who trust in Him need never fear death again.  What do you have to lose by trusting in Him?

Whatever it is, whatever the circumstance, whatever the fear, wherever you are in your heart on the question of who Jesus really is give it to God.  Begin to pray, ask God to open the eyes of your heart to see the work that He does in secret all around you and learn to trust Him deeper and deeper.  Do not be like the people in Nazareth who never took the first step in belief.  Do not be like the disciples who walked along with him and struggled to realize the truth.

It starts simple, just open yourself to the possibility that Jesus is who he says he is.  Follow that thought and listen to what the Lord shows you.  Go where he leads you literally and spiritually.

Follow the one who “opens his hand and provides for every need.”