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Mark 1:9-15

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Mark 1:9-15

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By The Rev. Charles Hoffacker

Early in the Old Testament
God’s people experience
a series of three events.

• First,
they are set free from slavery in Egypt
and pass through the waters of the sea
on dry ground.

• Then
they spend a generation
traveling through the desert,
falling prey to various temptations.

• Finally
they enter the promised land.

This three-part story is a long one,
and its occupies many chapters
throughout several books of the Bible.

Early in Mark’s Gospel,
the same story is told,
but in a new way.
Here the subject is not God’s people,
but the one who represents them: Jesus.

• Just as Israel had their Red Sea baptism,
so Jesus is baptized
in the waters of the Jordan.

• Just as the people spent forty years in the desert,
so Jesus is driven to remain in the wilderness forty days,
struggling with temptation.

• Just as the people enter the promised land,
so Jesus announces that God’s kingdom has come near,
and he invites his listeners to enter it
through repentance and belief.

The original story
is the history of a generation
that occupies many chapters
in several books of the Bible.
The Jesus version comes later
and recounts the experience of one person.
It is told with breathtaking brevity
in only a few verses of Mark’s Gospel.

But these verses do more
than tell the Exodus story in a new way.
They also call up and transform
stories of an even earlier time,
several sagas found in Genesis.

Consider!
When Jesus is baptized,
a voice from heaven addresses him
as “My Son, the Beloved.”
This connects him with a series
of beloved sons in Genesis.
What happens to these earlier sons
will also happen to Jesus,
although in ways
that are new and surprising.

• In Genesis we first meet Isaac,
the beloved son of his mother Sarah.
What happens to him?
His father takes him on a journey
to a mountaintop
where he is to be offered in sacrifice.
Isaac looks death in the face.
He survives, but he is different.
He returns to his people
to be for them a servant of God.

• Then comes Jacob,
the beloved son of his mother Rebecca.
Remember what happens to him?
His life is in danger, he seeks safety in exile,
then later returns to make peace
with his estranged brother
and becomes the father of a great nation.
He wrestles with God’s angel
and receives a new name.
No longer Jacob, now he is Israel.

• Finally, we meet Joseph
the beloved son of his mother Rachel.
His father’s favorite,
he is thrown into a pit by his brothers,
sold into slavery,
consigned to a dungeon,
and believed by his family to be dead.
Yet he rises to become viceroy of Egypt
and an agent of deliverance for his family
when they are in distress.

These three old stories
become alive in a new way
when Jesus hears the heavenly voice
naming him as the beloved Son.
In him these stories
find unexpected fulfillment.

We might choose to stop here,
content with noting a comparison and connection
between several Old Testament adventures
and the life of Jesus.
But the Bible’s momentum
takes us further.
For what we have considered up to now
is not simply about Old Testament figures
and Jesus;
it is also about us.
The patterns that appear in their stories
wait to be discovered in our own lives.
For their stories indicate,
not only what God did in times past,
but ways that God is at work today.

• Thus Jesus is the new Isaac.
Taken to his appointment with the cross,
he does more than look into the face of death.
He tastes death,
drains its bitter cup to the bottom,
and yet returns from the far side of death
as God’s servant to his people,
the embodiment of an indestructible hope.

• Jesus is also the new Jacob.
In the Garden of Agony, he wrestles with God.
At ultimate risk to himself,
he reaches out
to those who are estranged
and restores their broken relationships.
From him come forth
progeny past counting, a great nation.

• Jesus is the new Joseph as well.
Rejected and mistreated by his own,
he descends to the lowest place,
the grave, the abode of departed spirits,
yet rises to a glory unexpected
and past imagining
to become the source of eternal salvation
for all who put their trust in him.

Somehow Jesus fulfills these ancient stories,
and we are the beneficiaries.
He brings us hope
because of his acceptance of death.
He restores our broken relationships
and counts us among his children.
He promises us a resurrection like his own
and a share in his glory.

Isaac and Jacob and Joseph–
they know what it is to suffer,
and their suffering finds its redemption
in Jesus.
We too know what it is to suffer.
We come close to death of one kind or another,
we experience alienation and exile,
we too are cast down,
and we find that in Christ
our redemption appears,
that seats await us
next to Isaac and Jacob and Joseph
as the welcome guests of Jesus–
not hereafter only, but even now.

The ancient journey of Israel
is ours as well:
up from bondage in Egypt,
across the wilderness with its manifold hardships,
and rejoicing to enter the land of promise.

Israel’s performance on the Exodus
is decidedly mixed.
They answer God’s compassion
by their repeated rebellion.
Of the generation that left Egypt,
only two–Joshua and Caleb–
survive to enter the promised land.
All the others who do so
have been born during the wilderness wanderings.

But somehow this infidelity and stubbornness
is redeemed
when Jesus is baptized,
when he enters the wilderness,
when he struggles with temptation successfully,
when he announces his own promised land,
the kingdom of heaven within us and among us.
So there is hope for us as well.

• Like ancient Israel,
we have gone through the Red Sea water,
like Jesus we have been plunged
into Jordan’s muddy stream.
This is what it means for us to be baptized.

• We too pass through our wilderness time,
and though we prove disloyal like ancient Israel,
Christ’s wilderness obedience
somehow redeems us as well as them.
Christ is able to make sense of our lives;
we are not shut out of the kingdom.
Our struggle to live as Christians
in this world, in this wilderness,
does not prove to be in vain.

• And like ancient Israel, we also
enter the land of promise–
at our death certainly,
when we pass over the final Jordan,
but now as well,
whenever we hear the Good News,
and recognize the nearness of the kingdom,
and the divine Word finds lodging
in our hearts and our community.

So there is hope for us as well.
There is hope.

Sooner or later,
people decide that their lives
are part of some great story,
some glorious adventure,
or
they decide that their lives
are small, sad, and lacking in connection
with anything large and purposeful.

Sooner or later,
each of us decides
whether we will die by inches,
or whether, regardless of circumstances,
we will stand in witness to something
larger than ourselves.

The Old Testament, the New Testament,
the Christian community, the sacraments,
the church year, the lives of saints–
all these things
and the entire apparatus of the Christian religion
are there to remind us
that our personal stories are not small,
but find their significance
safe within the vast sweep
of the story of God and his people,
a story that shines with brightest clarity
in the Gospel of Christ.

So Lent is simply this:
a part of that story which every year reminds us
that we are not wanderers in a wasteland,
but instead we trek through the wilderness
as people God has claimed as his own.

Through the wilderness we go,
singing songs of repentance and triumph,
in company with patriarchs and matriarchs,
prophets and apostles and martyrs,
for we travel with Jesus on his journey
to the cross at Jerusalem and beyond.

We are on our way to the Promised Land,
that place where milk and honey flow,
the kingdom of God,
which is our home already.