"But Go and Learn What This Means"

What a conflict of expectations awaits the faithful every Sunday as families head to church. As a young boy, I surmised that the main things were wearing my "Sunday clothes," ensuring my tie was straight, combing my hair, and remaining quiet, if not silent throughout the service. Then began a series of prayers I did not understand. The only intelligible thing were the readings. This would be followed by more confusion, holy communion, and dismissal .... a relief for young people.

I say "I understood the readings." But really I did not understand them at all. For I thought the Bible was intended to be read as a patchwork of fragments, like a collage. After all, that is what the Church presented week after week: an unending series of brief, disconnected fragments.

I realize, of course, today that the Bible was never intended to be read this way. Each fragment is actually an invitation to something much greater, as a wedding invitation, so small and so brief, intended to lead to something much greater — the mystery of a marriage rite and then to a reception and dinner with music and dancing and revels going late into the night. That is, it turns out that the invitation card is the least of it. Yet, the card was all that I saw. No one said any different. And this is tragic. For a consensus among the Fathers, continues to shock us today out of our lethargy:

My heavens! To be ignorant of God! That was how St. Jerome (b. circa 374), to name one Father, put it. We might add a willful ignorance of Christ, for the Bible is the best-selling book of all time and available everywhere. Indeed, now there are free websites, such as Bible Gateway and the Online Greek Bible, that set up anyone to be a Bible scholar. It has never been easier to understand the Bible than it is today. Thank God!

Our Gospel fragment this morning is a case in point. It is not possible to understand this Gospel lesson as presented to us. First, it is isolated from its immediate context, robbing it of most of its meaning. Second, it is packed with different voices surfacing themes and historical events that are not explored at all. Finally, the passage that follows it cites Scripture that sheds a brilliant light over all three passages: our lesson and the passages immediately preceding and following it. Lacking these things, we are in total darkness.

Remember, the Evangelion, also called the Word, is understood to be a Presence of our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ. The Early Church treated this Book with utmost respect. And the Fathers offered thorough Scripture study as the being stuff of their homilies. This is Orthodoxy.

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But let us turn to our holy work. The opening words of our lesson are

The opening word so lets us know that we are already in the woods, that something is missing. So concludes from that which has preceded it. And that missing part is one of the most important scenes in all the Gospels. This Jesus tells us Himself, for just ahead (after our lesson), He issues a Divine Command:

The missing passage before brings all into focus: The Son of God has just returned from His visitation to the most lost sheep of all: the Tribe of Gad. Here the Lord of Life, bringing liberation and healing to a people who have chained themselves to darkness and death, is rejected. And they not only fail to fall down and worship before Him (as their demon-masters do), but they drive Him out of their land. This explains the opening words in to lesson: So He got into a boat and crossed over to the other side. What He finds there the one thing that had been lacking in Gad:

Do you see? A mirror-image is being presented to us: an icon of the pit of Hell, on one side of the sea, and the Kingdom of God, on the other.

Now, why should all this be presented in such high relief? St. Mark has taken great pains to present this as a drama. God has come. A response is required. Indeed, this is the main subject of the Gospels and the reason the Father has sent the Son into the world.

Of course, Mark at least expected these three passages to be read as a unity. He would have grieved to see it separated by artificial divisions or parts of it not read at all. Remember, chapters would not be inserted into the Bible for twelve centuries, and verses, not for sixteen centuries. And this morning we see that most of it is not being read at all.

This unity goes to the heart of the Incarnation itself — a fact stated directly and repeatedly in all four Gospels:

Belief, it turns out, is the sine qua non, the without-which-there-is-nothing in the New Testment And this word perish (Greek απολε̄ται. / apoletai ) is the same word Jesus used when He described the lost sheep of Israel in the passage we have just read. This particular lostness has to do with belief or lack of belief.

Jesus said to the Centurion (in a recent lesson), "You have believed" (Mt 8:13), and opens the Bosom of Abraham to him. It turns out, belief will open the Kingdom to us:

Of course, if we believe that Jesus is God, our next action must not be to ignore Him. For the element of God, the essential Divine property, is relationship. You cannot conceive of God — He is a Trinity of Three Persons — unless you understand relationship. And, of course, relationship is the primary thing He offers us: "I call you Friends."

He commands that we follow Him. And the end of that road is the culmination of relationship, which is unity with Him (Jn 17:21).

For example, let's say that I went steady with one girl in high school. The essence and promise of that relationship is marriage. And when we become married, we cease to be individuals. We are one. You see, this is what God is offering to each one of us: mutual interest, growing into mutual love, growing into the all-consuming One Thing of our lives, culminating into One-ness. We who follow Jesus, His disciples, will be One with Him as He and the Father are One (Jn 17:21). And this explains the timing of the Incarnation.

Why should He visit His people when He did? Why the timing of the Incarnation two thousand years ago? He did this because His people had utterly failed in their faithfulness. They had abandoned Him in their zeal for the cult of Babylon, had lost themselves in this false religion.

So imagine that I sent steady with one girl all through high school. But tragically I became distracted with other girls in college. And, to say the least, marriage with my high school girlfriend was not in the offing any more. And I would not marry the one God has intended for me.

The distraction of God's people in the cult of Babylon is a catastrophe. Relationship with God now will be impossible. And 100% of God's people not are headed towards perdition (apoletai). This is the condition of the lost sheep of Israel.

God makes His opinion known about this cult:

"Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you." Now, here is real relationship. Do you see how relationship with God is set in specific opposition to blood sacrifice?

During the century or so preceding God's appearance on earth, Judah, and increasingly all of the Levant, were held thrall by a grotesque and bloodthirsty religion. This is no side issue or historical footnote. This is what the Gospels are about: true worship of God and the religion He established on the earth with Abraham and the Patriarchs: conversation with God leading to Unity with God.

In today's lesson, Jesus says glibly to the men of the temple,

Now, certainly we might think of this in terms of the Psalm I just cited or other Psalms like it. But Jesus is quoting from a specific passage in Scripture, a minor prophet of the eighth century, Hosea. He speaks this oracle at the historical moment when the Northern Kingdom is falling into, (as the Southern Kingdom will later) idolatry, blood sacrifice, which will annihilate them:

Like the Southern Kingdom a century-and-a-half later, their idolatry is rooted in the pagan worship of Babylon, Marduk. Hosea's mention of blood refers to blood-sacrifice. And "evildoers" hints at the end of God's patience.

Jesus makes the same charge against the scribes and Pharisees of the Judah-ite cult: "Why do you think evil in your heart?"

We know these words. They are the most chilling words in all Scripture:

We know what happens next: the destruction of the world.

In Hosea, what happens next, following God's pronouncement of evil-doers, is the destruction of the Northern Kingdom. Jesus is using this same language now to admonish the temple authorities of the Southern Kingdom.

Seeing this utter poverty of belief and beholding this complete abandonment of faith, He will do what God does. He will destroy the world and will begin again. And seeing the evil of Judah — with its blood-sacrifice cult, with its charnel-house temple, with its worship after the fashion of Babylon, with its replacement of the word YHWH with LORD the custom of the Babylon cult (Marduk is to be called Bel → Baal → LORD). Seeing all this, He destroys the cult of Babylon; He destroys the Persian-built temple; He destroys all of Judah.

And sent His Son to show His people the Way to a new kind of temple, which He called "the Kingdom of Heaven." This demolition would be slated for 70 A.D., about five years before the Gospel of Mark started to be circulated. And Judah would be erased from the earth.

This tells a taut story, a story stretching over a region of Scripture. Which story could be more important. But our lesson fragment does not even hint at the real teaching here.

Jesus will elaborately contrast the Patriarchs' religion of virtue and mercy against the abomination of bellowing bulls and slaughtered goats in His Parable of the Good Samaritan, whose protagonist rejects the religion of sacrifice and exemplifies the religion of virtue and mercy.

Two thousand years later, nothing has changed. For our God is changeless and constant. He expects not rituals of blood or theologies built upon this concept of this-for-that sacrifice. He expects and requires our faithfulness. He numbers the hairs on our heads. He calls to us in the night. And He asks us the eternal question, "Who do you say that I AM?"

You see, one of the catastrophes of our time is having a false concept of Jesus. I you don't know what He is like, how could you follow Him? If you don't have an accurate picture of Jesus, you are lost.

I had an ongoing debate with a dear friend, a Roman Catholic priest with whom I served in Providence, Rhode Island. He told me, "Jesus is going to sweep everyone into Heaven on account of His famous mercy."

I replied, "Father, where is your evidence?"

But he had no evidence. But he cherished a picture of Jesus as a little, meek-and mild man Who just wants everyone to love each other. Or as C.S. Lewis famously said (Letters to Malcolm), "God is not a senile, old grandfather with a great white beard who just wants everyone to be happy."

But that is the Son and the Father which most people seem to imagine. But God is God. And He does not rely on our vain imaginings and daydreams for His Identity and Living Reality. And Who God is. is attested over and over again in the Gospels.

"Who are the two most severe prophets in the Bible?" I want to ask most self-identified Christians. And the answer is, "The Lord Jesus Christ and His Forerunner."

"Who do you say that I AM?" He asks. He positions this question as the central one in the Gospels. And we must reply. We must answer with our words and prayers and thoughts and conduct of life. That is, we must be like Him. How can we follow Him in our journey of theosis if we don't even know what He's like.

It will not do to point to His Crucifixion as a blood-sacrifice offered in atonement for our sins. What?! This Figure Who has destroyed the Judah-ite lifeworld because it fell into the delusion of blood-sacrifice ..... we now claim as being a blood-sacrifice for us?! What greater affront to Heaven could possibly be?! No, it is not adultery. No, it is not murder. This far surpasses both.

This idea would have to wait for a thousand years to be invented ..... by an Italian monk. Remember, the Fathers saw the Gospels as an exposition about the Incarnation, not the Crucifixion. It is Jesus' Divine Life that saves, not His disfiguring death. And He commands that we exemplify His Life of virtue and mercy. That is it. There need to be no mention of fire. There need to be no mention of annihilation. We must simply live His kind of life, a life of virtue and mercy.

Of course, a long and demanding road ahead. It will mean constant self-denial. For we don't have enough time and money to do everything. We will have do deny ourselves. It will mean a life committed to self-sacrifice as on the Jericho Road or wherever we find our neighbor in need. It will exhaust us, and no one will thank us for it .... sometimes, quite the opposite.

And it will cost us. It will cost us our upward mobility. It will cost us the leisure we had pictured in old age. It will cost us homes and cars and world travel. Finally, it will cost us our friends and family (Mt 10:37ff).

But in the place of all these things we shall discover Friendship with the Son of God (Jn 15:15) and adoption by His Father (Mt 19:28-29). There is no other way to enter into their midst or to receive their royal welcome. There is only way. And Jesus tells us that it is narrow way and hard to find (Mt 7:13-14). He tells that He is the Way, and that is hard way to go (Jn 14:6).

In the meantime, we who are confined to our lesson today, hear a Divine command, a Divine command issued by the Son of God: