The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Our homily today from retired English professor Dr. Deborah Wilson, who spoke about how powerful not only the word of God is, but how speech itself is so important to our faith.
Today’s gospel reading is, as we should expect by now, at the least ambiguous, and at the most paradoxical. As you should also expect by now, this sermon is going to be both. Last Sunday, Charles Tyrone preached from the previous chapter of Mark, in which Jesus went into a house in Tyre “and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice.” But a Gentile woman found him, begging him “to cast a demon out of her daughter.” His first response was not in accordance with our expectations: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She argues, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” It works. He says, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” And so the child was delivered.
What follows is another healing. This time people bring him a deaf man and, once again, beg him to heal the man. Once again, Jesus heals the supplicant brought to him, and then he, unexpectedly, orders all present to tell no one. “But the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.” He is trying to escape the crowds, and yet they find and follow him, begging him to heal their sick. In the next chapter of Mark, he famously feeds thousands from seven loaves of bread and a few small fish. Still trying to find solitude, he sends the crowd away, getting into a boat with his disciples, who immediately complain that there’s no bread. Not surprisingly, Jesus is amazed at their lack of faith, after having just witnessed such a miracle. His upbraiding ends with, “Do you not understand?” They do not.
Mark’s gospel is episodic, and the next episode is in Bethsaida, where, yet again, people bring him and beg him to heal a blind man. He leads the man out of the village, out of a public space, heals the man, and tells him, predictably at this point, “Do not even go into the village.” Another way of saying don’t tell anyone. Now we come to today’s gospel reading. Jesus and his disciples have moved once more, and on the way to Caesarea Philippi, he asks them about his public, perhaps one might say celebrity identity. Their response: some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, and others, one of the prophets. Then he shifts to the primary question for those closest to him, who know him better than anyone in an anonymous crowd, or anyone begging for healing: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter speaks as an individual, for himself: “You are the Messiah.” I assume that your judgment of Peter’s answer, like mine, is yes! He is the messiah! And yet, Jesus then “sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.”
That order baffles me. In a similar way, I am puzzled by his telling those he has healed to keep their healings a secret. The consensus in Biblical commentary seems to be that, first of all, Jesus was trying to avoid the delay of crowds because he had a timeline he was following in these last days leading up to his death. According to Merrill Tenney, Mark’s gospel uses the Greek word eutheos, translated “straightway, immediately, forthwith, and anon,” 42 times, more times than in all the rest of the New Testament, conveying “the impression that however varied and detailed Jesus’ ministry may have been, he was hurrying toward some unseen goal that he envisioned, but that was …only faintly perceived by the disciples” (168).
Peter’s identifying him as the Messiah is part of that faint perception. The implication of the title Messiah was that Jesus would be the leader of a revolution against the Romans and restore Israel as a nation. Jesus follows Peter’s declaration (and the order that they not tell
anyone) by teaching, openly, what is about to happen. Jesus will “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” This public statement triggers Peter calling Jesus aside, privately, to rebuke him. Clearly, Peter did not understand that, for Jesus, the definition of “messiah” was not what Peter had supposed. After this private moment, Jesus rebukes Peter in front of the rest of the disciples in an astonishing command: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” These words echo Jesus’
temptations by and confrontations with Satan in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry. Satan tempted him with the very things that Peter’s term “messiah” implies: all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, to which Jesus said, “Away with you, Satan!” (Matt.4: 9-10).
The remainder of today’s gospel is probably familiar to us, at least in its content, if not the exact words. To become my followers, deny yourselves, take up your cross, lose yourselves to save your lives, if you lose your lives for my sake and for the sake of the gospel. But it is worth going to the next chapter to pursue this thread of telling no one. He takes Peter, James, and John with him “apart” to a high mountain. Just the four of them. Private. The scene of what’s called the transfiguration. Elijah and Moses appear, talking with Jesus. A cloud overshadows them, from which God’s voice speaks the true identity of Jesus: “This is my Son, the Beloved.” The exact words spoken earlier from heaven at Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, the Beloved.” When the three disciples are again alone with Jesus, they descend the mountain, and he orders them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after he has risen from the dead.
There follows what is now a predictable sequence: a great crowd, one of whom has brought his son to be delivered, and Jesus makes it so. A retreat through Galilee, and the familiar refrain: he did not want anyone to know it. There isn’t time here this morning to follow this line forward to the passion of the Christ, the events he keeps telling them are
about to happen, and which they continue failing to comprehend. When the women find his body missing from the tomb, they encounter what seems to be an angel, who tells them, among other things, to go and tell his disciples and Peter. After all these commands not to tell anyone, the command is now reversed. Christ’s mission to give himself a ransom for us all is now fulfilled.
And yet, although that explanation makes sense, there are still ambiguities in this dichotomy of silence and speech. The power of speech, of the spoken word, is primary in our faith. The book of Genesis, which means origin, begins, clearly stated, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,” that creative act was spoken. “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” LET THERE BE. And it was so. I am not arguing creationism against science. I am saying that the spoken word signifies within our Christian faith, from the beginning. With apologies to Dr. Arwen Taylor, my dear friend and colleague, the founding text of our faith begins with a speech act; in the most reductive terms, that is an utterance that actually does something. Rather than merely describing reality, a speech act creates by speaking. There is no greater example than God’s “let there be,” and it was so.
But there are innumerable examples that, although not as dramatic, are nonetheless performative. Even if spoken by a representative of governmental rather than sacramental power: “I now pronounce you man and wife.” In the Episcopal rite of Baptism, moving far beyond the sphere of the primarily civic, the priest adds to the silent marking of the cross on the forehead these spoken words: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Whether one believes in transubstantiation or not, we accept that there is something spiritually transformative in the words as we partake of the eucharist: “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven. The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” We believe that, after this “spiritual food,” we are, in the words of our liturgy, “living members of the Body of [God’s] Son our Savior Jesus Christ.” We confess our faith, aloud, in the public space of this faith community.
All of today’s readings are linked by references to speech. In Proverbs, “Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks.” In Psalm 19, the heavens and the firmament tell, proclaim, pour forth speech in praise of God; and that psalm concludes with a prayer often offered before a sermon from this pulpit, “Let the words of my mouth” be acceptable to God. The reading from James, amid warnings about the possible damage from an unbridled tongue, nevertheless acknowledges the necessity for teachers to speak and the
power of their words. And after every reading from the Word of the Lord, every Sunday, this congregation says together, “Thanks be to God.” For the reading of the gospel, “Glory to you, Lord Christ.”
Part of our role as Christians is to spread the word, to tell people about the redemptive power of Christ. After his resurrection, before his ascension, Jesus tells his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations. He tells them to wait for the Holy Spirit to come (significantly a gift made manifest by speaking in tongues), which will make them witnesses to the ends of the earth. The primary purpose of the early church as well as today’s faith community is the opposite of “tell no one.” It is to go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere, that Jesus Christ is Lord.
We know that. We understand that. So what about the silence? The gospel of John begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. . . . He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him.” Although, as John says, “the Word became flesh and lived among us,” we did not recognize him. Some who lived close to that embodied Christ said Moses, some said Elijah, some said one of the prophets, some said the Messiah.
After the arrest in the garden, the high priest asks Jesus directly, “Are you the Messiah, the son of the blessed one?”, and he replies, “I am.” That is the I AM that answered Moses from the burning bush in response to the question, “Whom shall I say sent me?” When Pilate asks
him if he is king of the Jews, his answer is, at first, “you say so.” Then, when pressed further, Jesus offers no reply. He is silent. All has been said in the I AM. When the Jews insist that Jesus must die because he has claimed to be the Son of God, that is the truth. In John’s version of Jesus’ conversation with Pilate, the final words are from Pilate: “What is the truth?”—the ultimate ambiguity. But Mark’s gospel begins with this singular truth that is eternally redemptive: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
That is a revelation that comes to us individually, in silence and the privacy of our own souls, but may we say together, aloud in this sacred space:
THE WORD OF THE LORD
THANKS BE TO GOD
