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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Imagine the following “scene”. On the day associated with God’s provision of mercy, you and your family and friends come into your usual place of corporate worship, where there is a guest rabbi, or preacher. And immediately there is a man with an unclean spirit, or demon, who cries out, saying who the preacher is and why he has come. The guest preacher rebukes him, and the unclean spirit, after convulsing the man and crying out with a loud voice, comes out. What would be your reaction? That “scene” is precisely what today’s Gospel Reading says happened one Sabbath in Capernaum, when Jesus, Andrew and Simon, and James and John entered a synagogue and Jesus was teaching. By divine inspiration, St. Mark reports the reaction: first, in verse 22, he says, “they were astonished at his teaching” with authority, and, second, in verse 27, he says, “they were all amazed” and questioned among themselves about His teaching with authority. And, St. Mark adds, “At once His fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region.” They were astonished and amazed at His teaching then, and so our theme this morning is “Astonishing and Amazing Teaching”.
A moment ago I asked what your reaction would have been to such a “scene”. Maybe you and I would have been astonished and amazed, or maybe you and I would not have been astonished and amazed. If not, what would it have taken to astonish and amaze us? If we would have needed something more dramatic to astonish and amaze us, then what is your and my reaction to what happens here, on a regular basis? On the day associated with God’s provision of mercy, you and I, with family and friends, come into our usual place of corporate worship, and a preacher with authority from that same guest rabbi does something that is, in a sense, no less astonishing and amazing than what Jesus did. But, are we astonished and amazed, even for a moment? If we are astonished and amazed for a moment, do the astonishment and amazement make a lasting impact on us? Do we then spread Jesus’s fame everywhere throughout all the surrounding region? The “scene” of the Gospel Reading this day is very much our “scene”, but, instead of finding ourselves among those who are astonished and amazed, we must find ourselves to be unclean, like the spirit who possessed the man. For, we are by nature sinful and unclean, and our sinfulness and uncleanness mean that we, like the spirit in the Gospel Reading, face destruction in the presence of the Holy God.
We do not know if the unclean spirit’s referring to himself and other spirits meant that there was more than one unclean spirit in that particular man, or if he was just speaking about the other unclean spirits in general, but we do know that the unclean spirit was right about both Who Jesus is and why He had come. The unclean spirit essentially tells Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy One of God, to leave them alone, since the unclean spirit knew that Jesus had come to destroy them. Jesus’s coming, His presence and His word, brings judgment not just to the unclean spirits but to all who are unclean. The prospect of that judgment should lead us all to turn in sorrow from all of our sins and in that sense prepare us for the Gospel’s creating in us faith to trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake. To be sure, the forgiveness of sins is at the center of Jesus’s “Astonishing and Amazing Teaching”.
While our Gospel Reading tells us that people were astonished and amazed at Jesus’s teaching, St. Mark actually tells us very little, at least in this passage, about what Jesus taught. Still, we know from the verses just before today’s Reading, which we heard last week, that Jesus was proclaiming the Gospel of God, saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel.” Today’s Gospel Reading gives an example of what the teaching of the Kingdom of God that Jesus brought meant in practice. Jesus’s wise words of teaching and His powerful deeds of practice are not fundamentally different, but they are, as it were, two sides of the same coin (just as our doctrine and practice should be).
One thing that set Jesus’s authority apart from that of the scribes and other Jewish teachers of the day was that He did not have to quote others, but, as The Prophet promised in today’s Old Testament Reading, Jesus spoke of His own right as God and on His own authority as the Incarnate Son of God. At a time when people widely recognized that there were no prophetic voices, Jesus’s authoritative words and deeds were all the more astonishing and amazing. And that amazement made the Jewish leaders fear Jesus and want to destroy Jesus—Jesus, Who had Himself come, as the unclean spirit knew, to destroy the devil’s work. The Jewish leaders, of course, succeeded in having Jesus put to death on the cross, but what they failed to realize was that their plotting served God’s purpose of rescuing you and me—rescuing us from our sin, from the death we deserve, and from the power of the devil. Jesus’s perfect life and all that He experienced for us are the righteousness that God, out of His great love for us, freely gives to us by grace through faith in Him. We know the unclean spirit in the Gospel Reading knew Who Jesus is and why He had come, but his knowledge was not faith. Similarly, the people in that Capernaum synagogue may not have really believed. But, we, who are sorry for our sins and do believe in Jesus, know for sure that God forgives all of our sins, whatever our sins might be.
Earlier I asked what our reaction is to what happens here on a regular basis. Here, on the day associated with God’s provision of mercy, you and I, with family and friends, come into our usual place of corporate worship, and a preacher with authority from Our Lord Jesus Christ forgives our sins through pure preaching of the Gospel and through the right administration of the Sacraments—Sacraments that are the words of the Gospel connected by God’s command with things that we can feel, hear, and taste—with water in Holy Baptism, with the lips of a sinful man in Holy Absolution, and in the Lord’s Supper, with bread and wine that is Christ’s body and blood, given and shed for you and for me for the forgiveness of our sins, for life, and for salvation. One writer puts it this way:
What Jesus did by exorcism, the church still does in every phase of its ministry,
but especially in Baptism … [where] Jesus continues to show His mercy on those
who have fallen under Satan’s power and reestablishes God’s kingdom in territory
over which Satan illegally rules …
Are we astonished and amazed by what takes place here? If not, why not? What would it take for us to be astonished and amazed, and should we expect anything other than this? Our Lord’s “Astonishing and Amazing Teaching” with authority in the Gospel Reading is also said there to be “new”, with the sense of “remarkable” and “marvelous”, and we today have ministers of the “new” testament in His blood who act in His place and by His command. We do not need anything else, nor do the ministers—in some sense they do not need “standing in the congregation” or “standing in the community”, for Jesus’s authority is what sets them apart. Again we come face to face with the contrast between the theology of glory and the theology of the cross, under which God works through means, or masks, far less glorious and even less obvious than that day in the Capernaum synagogue, where the astonishment and amazement occur because the people getting glimpses of the divine nature of the man Jesus realize they are in the presence of God. Perhaps God’s working in less-glorious and less-obvious ways makes it harder for what we experience here to have a lasting impact.
Back in 19-98 I got a free sample of some new songs by a contemporary Christian vocal quartet called “4Him”. I ended up buying the complete C-D being promoted, and I still like a lot of things about the songs, though not all the theology is quite right. One song that has some theological issues at least, at its beginning, may resonate with what you and I might feel. The group sings:
Here in this moment in time / We search for wonders for miracles and signs
Something to satisfy the hunger in us all / A human rage from deep within the soul
Like a machine in pursuit / On the horizon like a raging fire we move
Driven by questions in an endless search for truth …
Even we who have encountered Jesus’s “Astonishing and Amazing Teaching” and believe in its truth can probably still add items to the quartet’s list. We can add items such as difficulties in our relationships with people we love; short-term or long-term physical afflictions; emotional struggles and spiritual doubts that might take us to the very depths of despair. Things may seem to be overwhelming, but God knows. We confessed in today’s Collect that God knows “we live in the midst of so many dangers that in our frailty we cannot stand upright”. Things can seem to be overwhelming, but God knows, and He promises to get us through them, and so we turn to Him. Again in the Collect, we asked Him to “Grant strength and protection to support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations.” And, God hears and answers that prayer and every prayer like it. He grants us strength and protection as we live each day with repentance and faith and return here each week to receive His forgiveness in humble water, words, and bread and wine. And, whether or not we are always or even often astonished or amazed, we pray that God would comfort us, transform us, and ultimately use us to spread His fame everywhere throughout all of the region surrounding us here.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +