Mark 9:2-10 CEB Six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and brought them to the top of a very high mountain where they were alone. He was transformed in front of them, and his clothes were amazingly bright, brighter than if they had been bleached white. Elijah and Moses appeared and were talking with Jesus. Peter reacted to all of this by saying to Jesus, “Rabbi, it’s good that we’re here. Let’s make three shrines—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He said this because he didn’t know how to respond, for the three of them were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice spoke from the cloud, “This is my Son, whom I dearly love. Listen to him!” Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them not to tell anyone what they had seen until after the Human One had risen from the dead. So they kept it to themselves, wondering, “What’s this ‘rising from the dead’? Have you ever missed anything that was right under your nose? Something that's plain in hindsight but not obvious at the moment. Like after you spot Waldo in a Where's Waldo book, after noticing him on the page, it's hard to imagine how you could ever have missed the bespectacled red and white striped globetrotter. In Mark's gospel, Jesus is also hidden in plain sight. For us, almost two thousand years after the fact, the truth that he is the Christ and God’s Son seems as obvious and plain as the nose on our faces. Matthew and Luke both agree with us, putting this huge revelation right there in their birth narratives, but in turning to Mark, we find a Jesus who shushes people whenever they try to reveal this truth! Instead of being overly obvious, Mark forces us to search for Christ and insists that we need to be looking to see Jesus. When we stop looking, thinking that we already know where to find him, we miss where Christ shows up in our lives today.
The “messianic secret” in Mark’s gospel continues to baffle believers and scholars alike. Unlike in the other three gospels, Jesus silences any suggestion from disciples and demons alike that he is the Christ. In other words, he keeps the fact that he is the messiah a secret. Meanwhile, in Matthew, the Magi announce that Jesus is the Messiah while he is still toddling around in diapers, and in Luke, the angels appear to announce Jesus as the Christ while he is still a newborn in the manger. In John, Jesus is the logos, the Word of God, from before there ever was a world as the Son has always existed with the Father. Why all the secrecy in Mark? After all, Jesus only stops people from naming him as the messiah, but it doesn’t keep him from acting like the messiah. He heals people, casts out demons, and in our scripture from this morning, God shows up to tell Peter, James, and John that Jesus is the Son and that they should listen to him. For anyone who knows what to look for, it seems pretty obvious that Jesus is the Messiah. Except, maybe he isn’t quite what folks are expecting, and maybe that’s the point, for the Jewish people of the time expected a “great king or cosmic warrior” with “earthly grandeur and power.”[1] In keeping this secret, Jesus prevents those around him from putting their false expectations on him by denying this title until he has shown them what it means to be Christ. For Mark, to call Jesus messiah is to recognize that he “is the Son of God, who has to suffer and die.”[2] He comes in an unexpected way and tries to show people the unexpected truth of not only the Messiah but the kingdom of God. Now, Jesus has always taught in parables, and this is no less true in Mark. In these parables, Jesus says a lot about the kingdom and how the Messiah will show up. Mark 4:26-29 tells the Parable of the Growing Seed that shares how someone scatters seed and while they are sleeping, these seeds “grow and bear fruit in unseen and mysterious ways.”[3] The kingdom of God will not grow like other kingdoms, through visible power and might, but rather will grow and bear its fruit while staying hidden. To make the point even clearer, Jesus tells how the kingdom of God will be like someone sowing mustard seed (Mark 4:30-32), in other words, planting a weed. It is a weed that will grow unexpectedly large. In this, Jesus tells a joke to his listeners! No one would purposefully plant a weed, as we spend our time rooting out and getting rid of weeds to help more impressive and desirable flowers and trees grow. However, here a weed is a sign of God’s activity. No one expects much from a thistle, so imagine one growing to be larger than a California redwood! Instead of recognizing Jesus by sight, through power and grandeur, Jesus has to be recognized in Mark by what Jesus does. In the gospel, Jesus is the Christ because of how he acts not simply because of who he is. As Rev. Tracy Daub puts it in Holy Disruption, “Over and over again, Jesus reveals himself through his acts of compassion and love.”[4] Many in our world have sought to claim the title of “Son of God” since Christ first appeared unexpectedly in the Galilean countryside a couple of millennia ago. David Koresh, Jim Jones, and many others sought to make themselves into Christ figures, but Mark’s gospel warns us “against those who appear bent on ‘selling themselves’ as servants of God.”[5] Jesus never sold himself with titles and expectations, as the people who recognized Christ in him did so because of what he did in their lives. Take Mark 1:40-44, where Jesus heals a man with leprosy and Jesus then tells him not to breathe a word about what he did. Again in Mark (5:21-43), Jesus brings the daughter of Jarius back from the dead, and again, he tells them not to say a word about it to anyone. Anyone who is really looking can see who Jesus is, but he escapes notice because he does not look as they expect. For many of us today, Messiah and Son of God don’t mean very much, and in fact, these titles may “not convey any expectations at all”[6] in our day-to-day lives. Maybe we think Jesus has already done the job he set out to do so long ago, and so now we need to just get busy getting ourselves saved and others too. We don’t need a Messiah to deliver us from much, and we aren’t expecting a Son of God to show up in our lives to do anything surprising. And yet, this “messianic secret,” this divine hidden in plain sight applies just as much to us today as it did in the days of Christ. The kingdom of God continues to grow all around us, planted by Christ and the disciples, it has sprung up in between the cracks in our lives. It has grown around the edges of our days. It is there, working its way through our habits, our lowered expectations, and our desire for a complacent status quo. God still wants to surprise us today, not through empty titles thrown in our faces, not by giving us a Jesus that looks like the latest slick politician or the newest social media celebrity, but through unexpected acts of compassion and love. If we never quite know where the kingdom is going to spring up and if we’re never quite certain when Jesus will appear, we are forced to keep looking for Christ today. I love in Mark that the gospel keeps the mystery rolling. In the original gospel of Mark, the whole thing wraps up with the women at the tomb being told by an angel that Jesus is risen (Mark 16:1-8). We never see the risen Christ in Mark’s gospel. The implication is that the risen Christ is out in the world waiting to surprise us, waiting to be found. Like those parables, we don’t know where God has planted seeds that will sprout and grow fruit when we aren’t looking. Like Jesus in the gospels, we don’t know where Christ is moving secretly, only known by those same acts of love and compassion. The thing is, Jesus is moving and acting right under our noses, God is always there in plain sight, and we may just not be ready to see the divine. That’s the thing about those Where’s Waldo books. It can be tough to find Waldo, but when you do, it can be even harder when someone else is looking at the same page but cannot seem to find what is now so obvious to us! At the same time, the impact of someone else discovering what is hidden there, just out of sight, oh the weight that carries! I know we have many former teachers here this morning, and I know they will understand these words from Tracy Daub, “Sometimes the insights that have the most lasting impact upon us are those we discover for ourselves.”[7] When we find Jesus in another person and when we learn the surprising way the kingdom of God has borne fruit in our lives, we come to understand God more powerfully than ever before. There’s a mystery to God, one that invites us to keep journeying and to keep looking, never quite sure where the divine will show up. Amen. [1] Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 112. [2] Ibid. [3] Tracy S. Daub, Holy Disruption: Discovering Advent in the Gospel of Mark (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2022), 99. [4] Ibid., 102. [5] Pheme Perkins, “Mark 8:27-30, Jesus Is the Messiah” in The New Interpreter's Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, vol. VIII, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 622-623. [6] Ibid. [7] Daub 2022, 107.
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