(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Recognizing Jesus”, originally shared on July 15, 2021. It was the 131st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
If you saw Jesus walking the street of your town as himself, would you recognize
him?
Probably. But how would you? Today we’re going to find out.
Have you ever shared a life-changing experience with a large crowd of
people and then found the days that followed to be kind of a let-down? Maybe
the Sunday after Easter (some denominations actually call that “Low Sunday”),
or the day after your sports team wins a national championship, or the day
after a wedding, or completing a marathon or going to a concert? How do you
follow that?
This passage from Mark, the 6th chapter, tells us what
happened after the feeding of the 5,000.
If that event wasn’t extraordinary enough, Jesus sends the disciples out
to sea in their boat ahead of him that evening and he stays behind. He sees the
disciples straining against an adverse wind and early in the morning he walks
on the water to catch up with them. That would be a life-changing day, one that
would be hard to top. But then, Jesus and the disciples arrive on the other
side of the Sea of Galilee, the Gentile side, on the eastern shore, to a place
they would visit more than once.
We see what happens next in Mark 6:53-55
53 When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored
the boat. 54 When they got out of the boat, people
at once recognized him, 55 and rushed about that
whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he
was.
Those words, “people at once recognized him”, go by pretty fast, but I
wonder how many people have paused to consider how that was possible.
It’s not like they had seen him on TV or recognized Jesus from a
magazine profile or saw him in a movie. He was becoming the first century
Israel equivalent of a celebrity, I suppose. His reputation was growing. But
how could they possibly know what he looked like?
The Bible does not mention that Jesus had any distinguishing features. His
dress is described as typical, maybe even a little sub-standard. We can only
guess that his appearance was average for the people of his area at the time.
If so, he was probably about 5’5” tall, with brown eyes, black hair and brown olive
colored skin, based on archeological records of the time. His hair and beard
were probably short, and he cut them with a knife. As one who had been a
skilled laborer and who now lived as an itinerant, he probably did not always
have enough to eat, and he was probably muscular and thin. I saw a facial
reconstruction, like on the CSI shows, of a human skull found in Israel from
about the time of Jesus that showed a face pretty much like this.
So, what would set Jesus apart from other men in such a way that people
recognized him, relatively far from Jesus’ home, in a media-free environment?
I don’t think that they recognized Jesus from what he looked like. I
think that they recognized Jesus because of who Jesus was.
They say that love is like a beard. If you let it grow, it becomes the
first thing people notice about you.
Jesus had had compassion on the crowd and so the very first thing he did
for them was to teach them. Some of whom
had been up front may have burned his face into their memories. He did heal and
he did feed them, but the very first thing he had done was to teach them. Why?
He had compassion on them. They were like sheep without a shepherd. They had no
one to being them the truth, to take them to places where they might be fed
with the truth, protected from the evil one, and cared for when they were
broken.
Jesus did all of this as one who is fully God and fully human being. I
think that that quality was noticeable among a mainly illiterate people who had
to rely upon their memories, their cultures, and their emotional and spiritual
intelligence than we do in our Post-enlightenment, Post-modern, and our present
mass media dominated world.
They saw God in Jesus. They recognized that when they saw him again.
And how did they show their recognition? How did they respond? They “rushed
about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they
heard he was.”
Well, wouldn’t you?
And what happened next?
This passage concludes with Mark
6:56:
56 And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the
sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe
of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.
What about this makes sense in our materialistic, science-infused world?
Well, there was something about Jesus that crowds of people could
recognize. And Jesus was in physical contact with his clothes, and his clothes
were in contact with Jesus.
So was that it? Did his clothes have divine power?
One chapter earlier in Mark we
saw this event take place, in Mark 5:25-34:
25 Now there was a
woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. 26 She
had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she
was no better, but rather grew worse. 27 She had
heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his
cloak, 28 for she said, “If I but touch his
clothes, I will be made well.” 29 Immediately her
hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her
disease. 30 Immediately aware that power had gone
forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my
clothes?” 31 And his disciples said to him, “You
see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” 32 He
looked all around to see who had done it. 33 But
the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell
down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34 He
said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be
healed of your disease.”
Jesus could tell that “power had gone forth from him” right away. But
was it that power that had healed the woman instantly? Not according to Jesus. Jesus said to the woman, “Daughter, your faith
has made you well.”
That’s the reason the crowds recognized Jesus. It is the same way we
recognize Jesus.
How do we recognize Jesus? It is in faith. It’s in the living
relationship with the one true living God. It is the work of the Holy Spirit
for we who live on this side of the Day of Pentecost. It’s in the transformational
power of the Holy Spirit to make of us a new creation in faith and Baptism. It’s
in the real presence of Jesus Christ in Holy Communion. It’s from the time we
spend reading the Bible, the only book ever written in which the author is
always present. It’s by worshiping in a Christian community where Jesus promised
that wherever two or three of us are gathered in his name, he is there in the
midst of us. Yes. It is all of these things and more.
We would recognize Jesus as we do recognize Jesus: by being familiar
with him, by fellowship, and exposure, by the faith that is itself a gift from
God. We would recognize Jesus as those at Gennesaret did, by the relationship
with God that has been given to us by the presence of the Holy Spirit, God’s
ongoing personal presence for good in the world.
Living by faith was not something that was just introduced at the time
of Jesus. The Bible describes the faith of Abraham as the basis for his
righteousness, hundreds of years before Moses and the Law.
That is why the people in the region around Gennesaret were healed.
But let’s not make the mistake that so many do when they treat faith
superstitiously. Faith does not heal. God heals. God heals.
Have you ever prayed for a miracle, and it didn’t come? Have you ever
asked God to heal you or a loved one, prayed really hard with all the sincerity
you could muster, and it didn’t happen?
Why others and not you?
When our healing doesn’t come, is it because our faith was not strong
enough? No. Let me say it again, faith doesn’t heal God heals.
Miracles are not about the suspension of the laws of nature. Miracles
are acts of God that point back to the world as it was intended by God to be,
and forward to the new heaven and the new earth that is to come by the hand of
God.
The world is not the way it’s supposed to be. God created human beings
with an option for them to reject God. A “yes” doesn’t mean anything without
the option to say “no”. People said “no” to God and the living relationship
with the one true living God that human beings were created for was broken, and
evil, and its consequences, entered the world.
Jesus comes to heal that broken relationship by taking its consequences
upon himself, fully God and fully human being, at the cross. His message: the
reign of God is at hand, repent and believe in the good news. It’s the already
but not yet reign of God. It’s not fully here yet. Our miracle is the cross.
Miracles point to what was and what is to come. Most people we know
reject our miracle and continue to reject it and the relationship with God to
which it points. Even we are not perfect in our faith, and our rejection is how
evil enters the world. But God’s grace is greater than our falterings.
Look at how the world has responded to the COVID-19 vaccines. The
vaccines are our best line of defense, and yet one third of the adults in LA
County have refused them, and so the disease continues to enter our world, and
now in even more lethal variants.
But evil never has the last word.
Leo Durocher, coach of the Brooklyn Dodgers,
before they became the Los Angeles Dodgers, once said, “Nice guys finish last.”
He meant it.
Garry Shandling the comedian, in one of my
favorite sports quotes, said, “Nice guys finish first. If you don't know that,
then you don't know where the finish line is.”
This life is not all there is. There is
Judgement and a life that is to come.
Our creeds, our core belief statements,
declare that Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead, that there will
be the resurrection of the body, a new heaven and a new earth, and the life
everlasting.
That’s the finish line. That is the scale by
which we measure a genuine life.
It’s a life lived in response to God’s
grace, God’s unearned love for us and for our welfare.
There were many people who sought healing and were not healed in Jesus’
day. And 100% of them, healed or not, died. Then what? All who believed and
were baptized were saved by faith in Jesus Christ because of God’s sacrifice on
the cross.
All of us, all of us who die in Christ will not be judged according to
what we have done or left undone, but by what God in Christ has done for us.
All of us who die in Christ will receive healing eventually, and our wholeness
will last forever.
We recognize Jesus in response to what God has shown to us in the work
of Jesus Christ on the cross revealed in the power of the Holy Spirit. The work
of salvation is finished. All we need to “do” is to open our hearts and receive
it. That is our miracle.
We stay focused on sharing the mission and message of Jesus Christ in
his death on the cross. We serve one another and the people of this world
because of the cross.
And we act in compassion for those suffering in any need in response to
God’s love for us, until the already here but not yet perfect reign of God
comes.
We would recognize Jesus as himself because Jesus defines us in our
relationship with Him.
Come, Lord Jesus.
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