A Hero: But Who is He Really?

We are thinking about Mark's gospel from the perspective of a story. Everyone loves stories. There is something about a good story that grips us, that arrests us, that lodges itself in our brains and touches our hearts in a way that is unique. It's the knowledge that comes to us by this particular vehicle of a story that does something to us that other information perhaps doesn't do. Stories are vehicles for empathy. They provide us with a way to make sense of the world and they help us to understand who we are.

There was an American children's television host—he was on television over many decades in the United States—a person whose name is Mr. Rogers. And he always carried in his wallet a quote that said, "There isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story". Maybe. What's your story? How would you tell your story? What would be the defining moments? What would be the themes and the motifs of your story? Who are the heroes of your story and who are the villains? Do you write your characters as black and white or are they various shades of gray?

The American author John Steinbeck, writing in 1959 towards the end of his career, wrote this very short story entitled Why the Good Guys Wear White Hats and Why the Bad Guys Wear Black Hats. In it, he was unpacking the whole genre of the American Western. It's a short read and it's a very good read, but his thesis was essentially that the heroes are a little bit more multi-dimensional than just the genre of black hats and white hats.

In Mark's gospel, Mark is not the hero. He's not the hero of the story that bears his name. In fact, he doesn't even get a mention at all because his sole focus is on Jesus. Jesus is the protagonist of His story. Jesus is the hero. And you recall over the last couple of weeks, it's made clear from the very opening line—if you happen to have it there open on page 990 and 991—you can see there in Mark chapter 1 verse one: "The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God". In other words, the hero of Mark's story is not Mark but Jesus. And we know this from the very beginning. But the other characters in the story are playing catchup. So we know—the readers, the listeners—we know where this is going, but the other characters are still trying to work it out.

And when you do encounter Jesus, He's not some cheap caricature. He's very real. The version of Jesus that you get in Mark is very, very real, the real version, and it's hard not to be impressed by Him. Nick Cave is a famous Australian singer-songwriter. You might have known of his name, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. They played in the domain just a couple of weeks ago. They were very big in the 80s and, as is the case, bands that were very big in the 80s are big again because the people in the 80s have now got lots of money to go to the concerts. So there was a big crowd to hear Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play a couple of weeks ago.

Nick Cave grew up and was a chorister in an Anglican church. He went to an Anglican school, but then he met an Anglican minister who suggested that he read Mark's gospel. He did and was shocked to find the Jesus that Mark described was radically different to the one he'd grown up hearing about. Listen to what Nick Cave says:

"The Christ I remembered from my choir boy days was a wet, all-loving, etiolated —I don't know what that word means but it doesn't sound good— etiolated individual that the church proselytised. I spent my pre-teen years singing in the Wangaratta Cathedral choir and even at that age I recall thinking what a wishy-washy affair the whole thing was. But the Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of His life, had a ringing intensity about Him that I could not resist. Christ spoke to me through His isolation, through the burden of His death, through His rage at the mundane, through His sorrow. The gospel according to Mark has continued to inform my life as the root source of my spirituality, my religiousness. The Christ that the church offers us—the bloodless, placid savior, the man smiling benignly at a group of children or serenely hanging from the cross—denies Christ His potent creative sorrow or His boiling anger that confronts us so forcibly in Mark. Thus the church denies Christ His humanity, offering up a figure that we can perhaps praise but never relate to. The essential humanness of Mark's Christ provides us with a blueprint for our own lives so that we have something we can aspire to rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy".

Now, there's much that you may disagree with in Nick Cave's words, and there may be much I disagree with as well. And it's true that sometimes the church can be a very easy target for people to make fun of and put down. However, grasp the thrust of what Nick Cave was facing. He said, "Whatever I thought about Jesus, the person I came face to face with was really a Jesus I never knew". And Mark's gospel brought that back to me. Mark's gospel brought to me a Jesus who was more powerful, more emotional, more human than any Jesus he'd ever encountered before.

And what about you? What about you today this morning? This morning, quite quickly I want to take you through four very sharp and short vignettes. They are the ones that were read to us and I want to unpack them very briefly and then I want us to see what it's going to tell us about this character Jesus, the hero.

Vignette One: Authority and Exorcism

The first incident there is in chapter 1 verse 21. Jesus goes into the synagogue and when He's in the synagogue He starts teaching and they note that He teaches with authority. And you might ask yourself what is it about His teaching that gives Him such authority? Well, you might have known from last week, He calls people and they follow Him. So there's a degree of authority there. So hard today, isn't it, to get a leader who people will follow? And yet Jesus just seems to speak a word and they do. Is it that He tells them that the Old Testament is about Him? Is that what's going on? Do they recognize in Him God speaking or perhaps it's just the spirit of God comes down on them while He is speaking?

But what they recognize in His teaching is authority. And then as soon as that happens, the demons start to shout at His preaching and He does an exorcism very, very simply. Now, what are we to make of this? Is this a bit of Harry Potter—you know, Harry Potter when he uses the Patronus charm on the dementors? Is that what we're looking at here?

If you are a person whose mentality and mindset is shaped by modernity—by that I mean the Enlightenment, by that I mean that movement three or four hundred years ago which really said it's all about the rational and the logical and science came out of the Enlightenment—if you're someone who's principally shaped by modernity, you're going to tend to soft pedal this. You're going to tend to look at this and say, "Well, it's hard to know what to make of this," and you're probably going to come up with some sort of natural explanation. But the point is the Bible and Christianity is supernatural. There is a God, and if there is a God it makes sense that there is potentially also supernatural forces of evil.

My natural predisposition is to soft pedal these sorts of things. But for a lot of people today, and maybe the majority of people in the world, they don't think the way I think. They don't have any trouble at all in believing and understanding that there are spiritual forces. And for many, when they read this, they would say to themselves, "Tell me more". These spiritual forces say, "We know who You are". Verse 24: "We know You're the holy one of God". And we know too, don't we, because we heard that in chapter 1 verse one? We know exactly who He is. And it stands to reason that if we're reading about Jesus Christ, the Son of God coming into the world, then there would be forces of evil against Him.

So what do we make of this? He's the king and now He's showing it. He says a few verses later earlier, He says, "Repent. There is a king. He expects you to drop your weapons. He'll pardon you when you do". And therefore now He's demonstrating His authority. He teaches with authority and casts out a spirit. Well, that's the first little vignette.

Vignette Two: Healing and Power over Nature

The next one comes straight after, 29-34 is the next one. And a little subtitle there in the red Bibles is "Jesus heals many". He goes to Simon's mother-in-law's house and she has a fever. This could be a lot worse than the flu. The word there that's used in the original is for an inflammation. And if we were to think back into the world of pre-antibiotics and pre-vaccines, this could be quite serious that she was facing. And He goes to her and He helps her up. Literally the words are helping her up. He literally raises her, which is an inkling about something that might happen later. And she begins to wait on them.

Well, news travels fast in that little town. Perhaps someone mentioned something over the back fence and someone else mentioned something. And pretty soon that evening everybody is coming to the house of Simon and Andrew for Jesus to heal people, all the sick and the demon-possessed in that town. People pile into the house and Jesus is making them well and sending them on their way.

And can you imagine what it would have been like on that first night? I mean, can you imagine what that would be like to have been there and see it all happen? Can you imagine today what it would be like? Can you imagine today if Jesus went to Royal North Shore Hospital and just started emptying the hospital? Goes up to intensive care and says to the people there, "You can all go". Doctors and nursing staff just disconnect people and they can leave. Goes down to the orthopedic ward: "You can all go now. Just leave the crutches at the door". Goes down to the Mater hospital and He empties that. He goes across the bridge to RPA. He goes to the Chris O'Brien Lifehouse and goes to the cancer patients and says, "You're all okay now. You can all go".

And you can imagine, can't you, that it'd be quite a news event? And you can imagine the helicopters flying around and the Channel 7 helicopter would come out and the Channel 9 helicopter would come out and they'd be filming all these people leaving the hospitals. And what does John Chapman say? A few days after, the ABC helicopter would work out what was going on and they would go—and He's not just demonstrated His power over the supernatural, but He's also demonstrated His power and authority over the natural world.

Vignette Three: Prayer and the Mission to Preach

Next, verses 35 to 39, vignette number three. He goes away to pray very early in the morning while it was still dark. Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place where He prayed. He thinks this is important. And Simon and his companions went to look for Him. And when they found Him they exclaimed, "Everyone is looking for You".

You can imagine the situation. Imagine He's under pressure. You know what it's like sometimes when You're giving out all the time. You just feel drained. It would be very stressful if people just wanted a piece of You all the time. And they say, as Simon says, everybody's looking for You. And so He goes to pray and I can imagine there was a lot of tension there for Him to deal with, a lot of stress.

Do You think He liked healing people? I think He probably did. Here is God in His world. Do You think He likes healing people? Do You think He likes putting people back together again when He sees the terrible things that people need to deal with? Do You think He would not want to be making them well again? And can You imagine Him wrestling in prayer, going to God and saying, "Is this what You want Me to do? I like doing this. Is this really what My mission is?"

But He comes back down from where He was, comes back from out of this solitary place and He says (verse 38), "Let us go somewhere else to the nearby villages so I can preach there also, because that's where I've come. I've come to preach". And most people would think, "Well, that's the worst thing I've heard ever. We would much prefer You heal people. We don't want just more talk". But Jesus says, "No, we're not going back. We're going forward. We must go forward to preach because that is why I've come".

Vignette Four: Compassion and the Outcast

Finally, just when He's made this decision and He said, "This is what we're going to do," and You think He's going to be very inflexible and very hardline about this, all of a sudden He's met with a leper—a man with a skin disease. Not only is He ill, but He's an outcast. And the man comes to Him and begs Jesus on his knees, "If You are willing, You can make me clean". And it's like, "Jesus, if I was willing? What makes You think I wouldn't be willing?"

And it says there He's moved with compassion. Verse 41: "filled with compassion". The word here has the sense of being moved in Your guts. And moved to compassion, He says, "I am willing. Be clean". And immediately leprosy left Him and He was cured. And He says to the man, "Don't tell anyone, but go show Yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for the cleansing as a testimony to them".

But the man went out and began to talk freely spreading the news. And as a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but He stayed outside in lonely places. And yet the people still came to Him from everywhere.

Final Conclusions: The Priority of the Word

See, He's very powerful. He has great authority. He's very good. But He's also very real, isn't He? And what should Your conclusion be this morning? I want to suggest to You that Your conclusion should be that He is the most powerful and the kindest king You could ever imagine and I will trust Him. And we're just in chapter one. There is a lot more to know. But just even in chapter one, it's to trust Him. That's what's being held out to You.

Finally, let me say two more things to conclude. Can we think for a moment as we look through these four little scenes in Jesus' life, little vignettes? Can we think for a moment about His word? It's worth tracing quite briefly what happens with His word because it's the word that Jesus preaches right at the beginning (verse 21) that causes the backlash, the demonic backlash. The demonic backlash is to the teaching. When He teaches with authority, the people are amazed.

In fact, it says in Mark's gospel about 35 times Jesus taught people. I'm going to tell you next week that a great story's got lots of action. And I'm going to show you next week the way Mark shows the action, but He's the teacher as well here in this gospel—35 times. And then right at the end He says, "I've come to preach." Verse 38. So teaching is very much the key thing as far as Jesus is concerned. Despite all these amazing things He's doing, it's the teaching.

And I want to say to you today, there's so much pressure on us today to do so many other things as a church, but the speaking things, the teaching things, the preaching things, they need to be the priority. It's important for us to help when we see a need. Who would not want to help when you see a need? Who would not be moved to compassion? Who wouldn't want to do that? But keep in mind, it's the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

We had a funeral a couple of days ago here for a lady who had died in her 90s and there was much said about her and all of it was very lovely. But at the end of it all, a man stood up right here and prayed. And at the end of the prayer he said, "I know this isn't in the script, but she was a wonderful person and she taught me Sunday school". And I would love that to have been said about me at my funeral. Whatever said about me, please say that: "He taught me. He taught me about Jesus. He taught me about the gospel. He taught me about God. She taught me Sunday school". What a lovely thing to say. Nothing better. We got to remember that that is crucial.

But lastly, who is He? Who is this hero? Remember, right at the beginning we know. And then here we know, and the demons know and He says, "Shh, don't tell anyone". And the man with leprosy, he knows something special has happened and Jesus says don't tell. And why do you think that is? Why do you think Jesus keeps saying that and why do you think Mark makes such a big deal about Jesus, not people not being told—keep it quiet, keep the message quiet? There are many reasons and you're going to see that unfold over the next few weeks. There are many reasons, but you might want to reflect on why that is.

And at least part of it is that in a funny way Mark is kind of asking us the question. He's kind of asking us, "Who do you say I am?" Who is He? What category will you put Him in? He's got incredible love, hasn't He? Love and compassion for people. He's patient. He's kind. He does all the right things. That's true. He's a teacher. That's true. He's a miracle man. That's true. He has authority. That is true.

But you know, none of those categories are quite big enough to hold Him. He's far bigger than any of those categories. This is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Therefore, that being who He is, what should our response be to Him? Everything else bows to His authority.

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