Listen To Him
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Introduction
Introduction
When the ACNA liturgical calendar is followed properly, the first Sunday of Epiphany is a celebration of the Baptism of Jesus, and the last Sunday of Epiphany is the Transfiguration. I say “properly” because we moved the Feast of Epiphany to the first Sunday of Epiphany this year, but in doing so we passed over the baptism of Jesus. This Sunday I intend to right this wrong.
We will not be skipping over the Transfiguration, but rather properly connecting the Transfiguration with Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River. Here is how the two events are connected. These are the only two places in the Gospel of Mark where a voice from Heaven speaks, and in both places, Jesus is referred to as “my beloved Son.” This is not coincidental.
I’ve spoken previously about how baptism is the sacrament of death and resurrection. Paul says this explicitly.
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
In the full symbolism of baptism, which happens only with immersion, we are baptized into Christ’s death when we go into the water, and when we come back up alive as a sign of his resurrection. This symbolism makes sense biblically because the people of God are known for their salvation-from-water events.
The big one, of course, is the Red Sea when God divides the water and make dry land appear for the people to walk safely, and this event recapitulates itself when Israel stands in front of the Jordan River, again the water is stopped, and the people cross safely on dry land. And both of these events are, of course, recapitulations of that grand moment of creation when God separated the waters above from the waters below and made dry land appear.
And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.
God has been saving his people from water since the beginning of the story of the people of God, but now, salvation is through, not from.
Salvation is Through, not From
Salvation is Through, not From
And it’s here, as Jesus symbolically acts out what this whole story is going to be about, his dying and rising again, his deliverance through death, not from death, that just as the prophet had begged, God rends the heavens and comes down. The voice from heaven combines to Old Testament ideas into one. The first is from Ps 2:7.
I will tell of the decree: The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.
Sonship here has the idea of kingship. “Today” is coronation today. The second is from Isa 42:1.
Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.
Here you have the Holy Spirit resting upon the servant, just as it does as Jesus’s baptism, along with the the Servant being the one in whom God’s soul delights. Put them together, and you get:
And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
Just like Mark does with the opening quotation from “Isaiah,” he conflates to OT ideas/texts to let them interpret each other. Jesus is the Son of David long promised, but he is also the servant with whom God is well pleased, and that’s the hint. That along with baptism are the biggest hint of where this story is going to go. Jesus is going to go into the water and let it crush him. He is the beloved Son and well-pleasing Servant, but he is well pleasing because he is also the Suffering Servant, the servant we hear about in passage like Isa 53 and others.
This son/servant goes about preaching the Gospel and proclaiming the Kingdom of God, and then we come to Chapter 8 and the beginning of the Way-section in Mark’s Gospel. The way section is bookended by Jesus’s healing of blind men because we all need our blindness healed if we are to see his crucifixion as the salvation of the whole world. After that healing, the Way section begins with Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, which leads directly to the first time Jesus has tells them unequivocally that he is going to suffer, die, and rise again. And then…. the Transfiguration and the voice from heaven.
You see the same motifs that were on display as Jesus went into the water and came back out alive mixed with the voice from heaven hinting that Jesus is the Son but also the Servant are now coming to fruition. He is on his way to Jerusalem. He is telling them that …
And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.
But what happens in that moment? Peter does hear him. Peter doesn’t listen.
And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
Peter doesn’t listen. He rebukes him. Is it any wonder what the voice from heaven says up on the mountain?
And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”
Listen to Him
Listen to Him
In our culture today, we don’t listen, or at least we don’t listen the way that we should. We listen to respond. We listen to react. We don’t listen to hear. We don’t listen to understand. To put this another way, we have eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, and hearts that do not understand. That’s a problem unto itself.
But even more problematic is the nonsense we choose to listen to instead of Jesus. One of the reasons I like sports is because the alternative for me is turning on the news where all I hear are bad arguments, half-truths, and false narratives, and if you immediately thought, “Oh, he’s talking about that other news network. Not the one I listen to.” No, I’m talking about all of them.
And that’s just one example of the things we listen to. We listen to podcasts, the radio, and music, not to mention what we hear on tv and in the movies. And don’t get me started on youtube. It takes about 30 seconds of listening to someone to realize they’re just parroting whatever clickbait nonsense they watched on YouTube rather than actually thinking through anything themselves.
And I’m not the person standing here telling you, “You’ve got to turn everything off and listen only to Jesus,” although that might work or even be necessary for some of you.
What I am saying, however, is that above and before listening to all the other competing voices vying for your attention and your money in this world, you need to be listening to Jesus. How do you do that? Primarily through Prayer and the Study of God’s Word. Let me repeat that.
The primary ways in which we listen to Jesus are prayer and reading/studying God’s Word.
We are on the doorstep of Lent. There are some who want to say that this vision of Christ’s glory is meant to sustain us through Lent just as it was meant to sustain Jesus and his disciples as he made his way to the cross. I don’t have any idea how that’s supposed to work, and the concept seems quite at odds with Jesus’ command not to tell anyone what they saw. But here is where this text does connect to Lent.
In the next few days, we will all be thinking about what we can give up for Jesus this Lent. Maybe thinking about giving up some of those other things that we listen to. But also, we should be thinking about not only what we “take off” for Lent but also what we put on, and what many of us need to put on is listening to Jesus.
I won’t ask for a show of hands because I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but how many of you can say that you pray daily and that you read God’s Word daily? Think about that question for a moment, and then think about Lent. What if you stopped giving up chocolate or coffee or whatever else, and instead you just said, “Jesus is God’s beloved Son. The Lent, I’m going to practice the habit of listening to him. I’m going to pray every day. I’m going to read my Bible every day. I’m going to listen to Jesus every day.”
Do you know what that would do for you personally? Do you know what that would do for your family? For this church? For the other communities you’re a part of?
I want that to be our goal this Lent. I was us to commit ourselves to listening to Jesus, but I can’t make you do that. I get 15 minutes a week to preach God’s Word to you and hopefully to say something worth your time. Essentially, the rest of the week is yours, and you get to choose who you listen to with the time you have. Jesus’s death and resurrection, which are symbolized in his baptism and prefigured in his transfiguration, define reality. Jesus’ death and resurrection define reality. Not the news. Not podcasts. Not YouTube videos. Not Instagram. Not Facebook. Nothing but the blood of Jesus. So, listen to him. This Lent, I am asking you to make it a habit to listen to Jesus everyday. That will change your life far more than giving up chocolates ever will.
Amen.