Nielsen’s Nook

Mark 5:24-34 (ESV)

²⁴ … And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. ²⁵ And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, ²⁶ and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. ²⁷ She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. ²⁸ For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” ²⁹ And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. ³⁰ And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” ³¹ And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” ³² And he looked around to see who had done it. ³³ But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. ³⁴ And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Meditation

Jesus is on his way to heal the daughter of Jarius, a ruler of the synagogue. Embeded in the account of the healing of Jarius’ daughter is this account of the woman with the discharge of blood.

What struck me this morning was the question Jesus asked, “Who touched my garments?” The apostles give the obvious answer reflecting that all sorts of people would have been touching him given that a great crowd thronged about him as they walked.

The difference between the great thronging crowd and the woman with the discharge revolves around faith, hope and love. She had touched Jesus with purpose that is only spawned out of hope and that hope had produced faith and had come to find the healing powers of love. For Jesus does not turn as one perturbed by the power that had gone out from him; rather, he approaches our hope and faith in him as our Good Shepherd, the Caretaker of our Souls. He wants to personally know and comfort those whose hope and faith drives them to him. He heals not from a distance but as a Physician who deeply loves the infirmed. The woman was already healed, but Jesus wanted to stop and bless her face to face.

O Lord, our God, would you so stir us to hope that our faith would be expanded, our hearts dilated, that we might have greater capacity to receive and relish your love for us in Christ Jesus our Lord, who loves together with you and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Commentary

[a] Βλέπετε literally “to look” ; however, in this context we get the connotation of looking out for something, to beware of something (BAGD, 143).

[b] ἀποστῆναι is from where we have the English cognate apostasy or apostatize. It resonates with the passage quoted from Psalm 97. Those who fall away will never enter God’s rest.

[c] καθʼ ἑκάστην ἡμέραν literally, “according to every day.” In colloquial English we would conceptually just say “daily” or “every day.”

[d] ἄχρις is Hellenistic Greek in form (BAGD, 128).

[e] μὴ σκληρυνθῇ τις ἐξ ὑμῶν literally “not be hardened some from among you”.

[f] τοῦ Χριστοῦ γεγόναμεν in the NA27 reads γεγόναμεν τοῦ χριστοῦ in the Byzantine text.

[g] ὑποστάσεως (ὑπόστασις) is translated realization here (c.f., BAGD, 847 and the use in Hebrews 11:1).  Jesus is the realization of both utter condemnation and the reconciliation of all who have participated in the great rebellion. We must hold fast to Christ as he is manifest to us now, the beginning of realization of the Cosmic Salvation of the World, that we may persevere to the final restoration of all things when Jesus returns in glory and splendor.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. [1]

These lines of Eliot give me pause to ponder. Many changes have come in life and many that I have longed for have eluded me. A hardened unbelieving retirement age man told me one time that he did not have any regrets towards the end of his life. What sort of devil can so numb our souls that we become indifferent to the sense of loss and regret that grows up around us, great weeds in our aging garden?

I watch my little girl play in the sprinklers, make mud volcanoes, and sprinkle music power on me. Flashes of the once-before short like a fused bulb across my weathered memory. Ah, when time was free and naivety had thrown its blissful cloak across the mud puddle.

There was something tranquil about the moment. It wasn’t important that we were in our back yard. It wasn’t important that we were together on a Saturday or otherwise. The warming peace that comes, even now while writing, is that of simple communion, just being together. Contentment, I think, is the obscene key to unlocking love.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. [2]

I’m 34 and I’ve got regrets. Places I should have gone. Things I should have studied. Holes that I can’t seem to circumscribe. And yet, if I understand Eliot here, the exploration is not sailing away from our regrets, but moving through them.

For me, I am sure that I will never mature past the Cross, where in Jesus’ perfect sacrifice, God passes over and forgives all for which I have regret. The Eucharist is a cross-shaped celebration of life in Jesus, where all the holes are circumscribed. It is a time when I confess my sins, taste the goodness of God, and hear the Gospel of grace proclaimed over me in thought, word, and deed. In the stillness there is a reposed reminder that I am aboard a Great Ship that continues moving Christward as it has for millennia. In dying I am raised, indeed my end is my beginning.

[1] Eliot, T.S. East Coker, V.190-201.

[2] Eliot, T.S. East Coker, V.202-209.

Thirsty ones come to the waters! The Lord sees our want; he knows our deepest needs. With this intimate knowledge of us he does not exploit us; but, he seeks to fulfill us. The human situation is not simply that we “still haven’t found what we’re looking for;” but, that we are looking for all the wrong things. Why do you spend money, the prophet asks, on what you do not need? Why do you work so hard for that which does not satisfy? Before and after these questions, the Lord has wrapped us up in his mercy: you who are poor, come and eat what is good, delight yourselves in rich food, so that you may live.

This passage in Isaiah seems to be at least one of Jesus’ sermon texts in his Sermon on the Mount, namely in his introduction we commonly call the Beatitudes. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied (Matthew 5:6, author’s translation).

If the questions posed by Isaiah 55 affect you; if they thud off the emptiness that I believe we all have when we consider the lusts of our own flesh; then, I believe Jesus’ words have a most merciful weight for us.

Most of us don’t strive after the unsatisfying because we really enjoy being unsatisfied. Sometimes we do not realize just how unsatisfied we really are. Other times we know that we’re unsatisfied, but don’t feel we have any better options. In even other situations, we cannot imagine how any of this matters because we’re operating in an economy of the world that uses completely different currency than the economy of life. It is as if we have fistfuls of cash we just printed out on our home computer, funny-money, and we cannot imagine why it buys us nothing.

It is not the rich that buy what Jesus offers. In fact what Jesus offers cannot be bought at all; it is received as a gift. We see that in Isaiah 55: Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. In the language of the Beatitudes, it is the poor who paradoxically trade in Christ’s economy, for theirs and theirs only is the kingdom of heaven. These are not the blissful poor, the ignorant poor. No, they are painfully aware of their poverty, such that they mourn it.

My wife and I have a really nice set of living room furniture that we could never have afforded to buy.  If you knew my wage, you would wonder how this furniture happens to be in my home at all. It is furniture that was given to us by a most gracious friend when we bought our home. So when people pay compliment to it when they visit our home, I am quick to mention that it was a fantastic gift. I cannot boast in myself or my provision, but in what the Lord has given us benevolently.

Ultimately the couch is going to disintegrate; but it is a figure of the way God’s gifts work in the divine economy. He gives us the greatest riches in such away that we may not point to it as a result of our own labor or merit or wealth; however, what God gives us is really ours to care for and walk in.  This gives the Christian the impetus for meekness.

Isaiah has asked us why we hunger and thirst for that which does not satisfy. Jesus proclaims that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied. We of ourselves will chase after all sorts of things, all the wrong things. Christ comes to us that our affections may be recalibrated and our appetites whet for what is glorious and truly wealthy.

Righteousness is a character trait of the Lord. God is not righteous because he does certain things. Rather he is simply righteous, in and of himself. We are created as the image of this righteous God and yet we have chosen a path that is most unlike him. We live in a way that is disharmonious with our status as image and this disjunction is the root of our dissatisfaction.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:10-11 that we are blessed when we are persecuted for righteousness sake, when we suffer on his account. In these two verses the grammatical parallelism identifies righteousness as Jesus himself.

And so we come full circle. God sees us buying everything but what will truly satisfy and grow us. He is not content to placate our “bentness,” to multiply our fists full of funny-money or nice furniture. Rather, he enters our economy with his own currency, himself. It is an infinite currency that has only one bill. In God’s economy there is Christ: Christ incarnate, Christ crucified, Christ risen and exalted, Christ the Lord. He alone is the righteousness of God. He alone is the one human being who has lived as the image of God also in his likeness. As such, fellowship with God has been restored for humanity (Colossians 1:15-20).

When we see what God offers all humanity in Jesus, how foolish are we to not seek the Lord while he may be found. He calls us to lay down the fistfuls of funny-money that we have printed off for ourselves and lay hold of Christ. Why, scripture asks, do you spend your money for that which is not bread.  Jesus will later ask why do you labor for bread that perishes, “for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (John 6:33)

Every Sunday this truth is proclaimed, reenacted, and received by faith. The Word of God is spoken, inviting all who thirst to the living waters. Every Sunday we celebrate the Word of God broken in which the bread of life is given to the eater that in mind and body, the whole person may be gratified with Christ, who alone satisfies. For it is Jesus who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor 4:6).

Commentary

[1] ἐπιλαμβάνομαι to take hold of, grasp, catch. When followed by a genitive, as is the case here, it can entail the idea of taking hold violently of something or someone, in order to make the object of the grasping one’s own (BAGD, 295). If Hebrews 2:16 is taken out of context it is somewhat vague; however, Hebrews 2:17 gives a context of the Incarnation that sheds light on how this verse should be understood. Hence, the KJV, “For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham.” From this writer’s vantage, verse 16 speaks to the nature of the Incarnation, which includes Crucifixion and Resurrection, not as something that Christ took on reluctantly; rather, he lay hold of it with even the vibrant tenacity that a husband has for his wife after having been separated for a lengthy time. This is reciprocated in St. Paul’s charge to Timothy, ἐπιλαβοῦ τῆς αἰωνίου ζωῆς! Take hold of Eternal Life! For the Christian, Eternal Life is not a status obtained but a Person pursued, loved and cherished. As Christ has laid hold of Timothy to make him His own, St. Paul exhorts him to the same with Christ Jesus to which he was called and had given good confession.

It occured to me this morning, while observing fellow parishoners receiving Holy Communion, that there seemed to be a distinct impression from the Reformation in the distribution of the elements. It is my understanding that in the period prior to the Reformation churches celebrated the Eucharist generally once a year and when it was celebrated laity received only the bread, never the wine.

One of the things the Reformation fought to recover in the Church Catholic was both the frequency and unity of the Eucharist that they perceived present in the Church Fathers. It is communion with the undivided Christ that is promised in the Eucharist. As such both kinds, bread and wine, which the Lord commissioned, should be used. Further, with such weighty thing as communion—communion with the Living and Incarnate Christ being offered—it made sense to incorporate the Eucharist back into the regular corporate worship of the Church.

I do not know at this point how this plays out in Roman or Eastern Orthodox churches (or for that matter churches outside of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Dallas); however, what I see at St. John’s is that it is the Lay Eucharistic Minister and the Sub-Deacon, both being laity, who serve the consecrated chalice to the parish during Holy Communion. Perhaps this is a visible reminder that the chalice has been returned to the people that they might celebrate their full and gracious bond to the undivided and perfect Christ.

For those who enjoy context, our scripture readings this morning at St. John’s were Acts 1:1-14; Psalm 47; 1 Peter 4:12-19; and John 17:1-11. ]

I walked away from worshiping the Resurrected and Ascended Christ this morning with a profound impression that I want to encapsulate here. The Gospel promises eternal life for all who believe in Jesus Christ. Many of us, for manifold reasons, have come to believe that eternal life is something we hope to participate in after we die. It’s out there somewhere beyond time. In a sense that’s true. Eternal Life is beyond time; however, that’s because eternal life is God himself, who is alone alive by no other cause than himself.

It is this God, revealed to us in Scripture, that has not been content to keep eternal life all to himself, to remain a hermit of divine proportions. Rather, God came down, stooping, as it were, to bind himself to us in the person of His Son, Jesus the Christ. This Christ is our life, our eternal life, for he has trampled down sin, death and hell for us by his own death. Now being raised from the dead, Christians celebrate this life now in their lives. It is not something that we will only one day have, but Christ gives himself fully to us now.

This is celebrated in the liturgy every Sunday. Eternal Life, himself, calls us to worship, speaks to us in His Scriptures, hears our confession, forgives us our sins, and bids us to eat his flesh and drink his blood - to partake of Him, who is alone the life of the world. Such is the bond of love that Christ has made to his people. The cold shackles of sin, death and hell have been burst opened by Life, who has said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11:29-30 ESV)

Such is the union we see as Life, himself, prays for his Church. We see his longing for unity with us as we demonstrate that bond in love to each other.

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HT: Fr. David Houk, Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, preached the sermon that spawned this meditation.

Listen now [14 min]:

²⁸After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” ²⁹A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. ³⁰When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (Jn 19:28-30 ESV)

I must first acknowledge that this is a meditation upon our Fr. David Houk’s homily last night at St. John’s (so perhaps this is a re-meditation on John 19:28-30). I woke up thinking about one central moment in the crucifixion of Jesus that has gripped me this Holy Triduum.

The God who made the world hung upon a Cross, the wood of which he brought into being and sustained in its existence. He hung there in the merciless Jerusalem heat having his torn and lacerated flesh sun-burned by the very sun that he had made and sustained.

I have access to this account through Scripture interpreted through the tradition handed down through the apostles and prophets. Even that scripture itself is a deep form of divine condescension:

For who is so devoid of intellect as not to understand that God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children? Such modes of expression, therefore, do not so much express what kind of a being God is, as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness. In doing so, he must, of course, stoop far below his proper height. ¹

John Calvin is speaking against those who had over-emphasized the references referring to God anthropomorphically (e.g., God’s right hand) and made the point that such language about God has nothing to do with body parts but is telling us much about the immeasurable degree of the divine condescension that began in the Garden, continued in revelation, and reached its apex in the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, Jesus the Christ.

If we back out of Calvin’s polemic, I believe the point can be made that divine condescension does, as a matter of fact, express quite precisely what kind of being God is.

He is a being that when reviled by those to whom he gave and sustained life, he did not revile in return but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant. And being led to the slaughter by those same revilers, by me and by you, he opened not his mouth, but said, “I thirst.” And when the soldiers gave him this last bitter drink, the last chalice of his Passover meal, he declared “It is finished,” and died, bearing the death of death upon his life that in him, and him only, we might have life that never ends.

Yes, indeed, God has stooped beyond what words are able to convey. He has humbled himself beyond what we can know in the person of Jesus. And in showing us these things, he has in fact expressed quite boldly what kind of being he is. God is mercy. Amen.

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¹ Jean Calvin and Henry Beveridge, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Translation of: Institutio Christianae religionis.; Reprint, with new introd. Originally published: Edinburgh : Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846.;Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), I, xiii, 1.

³ Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, ⁴ rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. ⁵ Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him. ⁶ He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, do you wash my feet?” ⁷ Jesus answered him, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” (Jn 13:3-7 ESV)

Last night we celebrated Maundy Thursday, a remembrance of the Last Supper, when Christ instituted the New Covenant. I could not help but weep as I watched the celebrant priest divest himself of his magnificient chasuble (Eucharistic outer-garment) and take up a basin and wash the feet of three representative laity.

There is a God. I struggle to know what it means to be godlike, but what is even more overwhelming is that God proclaims himself to be Jesus-like. Jesus of course had already divested himself in taking on humanity (Philippians 2:6-7). He left the splendor of heavenly glory to become one of us.

However, the Incarnation itself could have taken countless variations. The one we have is not that God became a king, like the ancient Egyptians taught in Ra, but that He became the son of a carpenter. He did not surround himself with twelve princes, but with fishermen, a tax collector and a traitor. The Incarnate God did not promote himself but demonstrated always love and mercy and humility. God washed Peter’s feet.

It is quite amazing to me that as the Church of the Risen and Exalted Lord continues on for some 20 centuries, the way he has chosen to visibly communicate himself to his people is in something as common as bread, the most common food on earth. It is one of the least expensive foods to buy no matter where you live. It is common, yet sustaining and nourishing.

Of all the other visible means he could have used to communicate himself (if any) to his Church throughout the centuries he chose wine. Wine is not so common. The poor do not have fine wine at their meals. It is not something you necessarily drink at every meal. Wine underscores the celebration, the banquet to which Christ has invited his Church to participate with him, His banquet. Humble bread and exalted wine circumscribes the wonder of Jesus. The exalted God became a humble man that humble we might participate in the very life of Jesus now exalted at the right hand of the Father Almighty.

17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

“That is,” writes Farley, “they are to manifest the Lord’s life on earth, as His Body.” ¹ I remember one of the extremely helpful and paradigmatic books I read in seminary by Benjamin B. Warfield. In this little booklet that he wrote to incoming students to Princeton Seminary, he encouraged us that there is never a time that we would turn from worshiping the Lord to our books or from the study of our books to the worship of the Lord (to paraphrase). ²

Warfield, Farley and St. Paul all resonate symphonically together here. The strange thing about truth is that it transcends all kinds of boundaries, traditions, cultures, and time. Colossians 3:17 underscores union with Christ the paradigmatic element of Christian theology and life. This union is in fact a participation in the divine energies (workings, ενεργη) and is most profoundly proclaimed at the Lord’s Table, where Christians by faith receive the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus—where God gives us himself and we give Him ourselves. And so we say during the consecration of the Bread and Wine:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him. ³

This is of course a continuation of the theme we find in John 15, where Christ makes plain his desire that we abide in Him and He in us, as He—the Second Person of the Trinity—abides in His Father. In this way Christians graciously participate in the divine life given to us in Christ Jesus. “[Our] life is His life. [Our] existence is to be one continuous outpouring of thanksgiving to God in His Name. The Christian calling is to be a eucharistic man.” ⁴

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 186.

² Warfield, Benjamin B. The Religious Life of Theological Students.

³ Book of Common Prayer, 336.

⁴ Farley, 187.