Sermon — January 31, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” (Mark 1:24)
This question has been haunting me all week. “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” Isn’t that the question we all have to answer, and the question we all have to ask? Just days after he’s begun his ministry, Jesus travels from Nazareth to Capernaum, just a few miles down the road, and already people are asking: “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” This isn’t your city. Stay in your lane. And now, two thousand years after his death, five thousand miles from Galilee, all of us who claim to follow Jesus are forced to ask that same question, and to answer it. What does this man from so long ago and so far away have to do with us? What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
And then, more frighteningly: “Have you come to destroy us?”
It may be an odd question, but it’s not a surprising one. It’s one of a few possible answers to this person’s question. Perhaps Jesus has come to do what the unclean spirit says through this man. Perhaps Jesus has come to rid the world of evil, to give people commands with such powerful authority that even the demons must obey.
Or perhaps Jesus has come to do something a little different. Perhaps he is, as Deuteronomy promised, a new prophet, a “prophet like Moses,” one in whose mouth God will put God’s words, someone who will speak to the people everything that God commands. (Deut. 18:15-20) The congregation gathered in the synagogue certainly seem to think so; they recognize him as a teacher with a new and powerful authority, and his fame as a preacher and healer begins to grow.
Or perhaps Jesus has come to help us know God, a tangible human form of an abstract and inscrutable God. It’s ironic, of course, that the faithful are amazed and baffled, and keep asking each other, “What is this?” (Mark 1:27) The unclean spirit’s just told them! “I know who you are!” it cries out. “The Holy One of God!” (Mark 1:25) And of course it’s right. We, the readers of the gospel, know who Jesus is. The demons and (it will turn out) the Roman soldiers know who he is. But his own family, his own people, even his own disciples, haven’t got a clue.
Now, each of these ideas has something to it. Jesus spends plenty of his time casting out demons and ridding the world of evil, and we have to imagine he stands with us against evil in our world. Jesus certainly is a prophet with tremendous authority, through whom God speaks and who establishes a new law of love for us much like the law of Moses. Without a doubt Jesus comes to us to make it easier for us to know God.
But that’s not the whole story. The man with the unclean spirit asks Jesus, “What have you to do with us? Have you come to destroy us?” But no, it’s something worse. Not to destroy us, but to know us.
“Knowledge puffs up,” Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “but love builds up. Those who think they know something don’t yet know what they ought; but anyone who loves God is known by God.” (1 Corinthians 8:1–3) In other words: If you think you truly know God, all you’ve shown is that you don’t even know yourself. But if you think you love God, it’s certain that God knows you.
So what does Jesus have to do with us? He heals us, yes; he teaches us, yes; we know God through him, yes; but even more so, through him God knows us. “I know you,” says the man with the unclean spirit. “Well, I know you.” Jesus seems to reply.
For me, this is a terrifying thing.
I don’t mean this in a fire-and-brimstone kind of way, in which God is tallying up all your secret misdeeds and preparing to hold you to account. This is the theology most succinctly expressed in the song “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”: “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake; He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake!”
What’s frightening is not so much that God knows my misdeeds, which are many but minor; it’s that God knows me, really knows me, in the deepest and most hidden parts of myself. God knows the things I’ve never said out loud to anyone, even my spouse; God knows the things I say when I know my spouse isn’t listening. God knows me, really knows me, as I am. And who really wants to be known? Who really wants to be seen for who they are?
Not any human being I know. For thousands of years we human beings have been trying to hide from one another who we really are. We carefully curate our social media feeds, sharing only our most fun adventures on Facebook and deleting Instagram posts that don’t get enough likes. Or at least we did, when there was anything worth posting about—now we dig around in Zoom settings to try to look as good as possible. We ask each other as a matter of course the question, “How are you?” and our answers range from “I’m fine” to “pretty good,” as though anything more honest would be a faux pas. The phenomenon of feeling as though everyone else around us knows what they’re doing in a way that we don’t, that everyone else belongs here and I don’t, is so common among so many professions and areas of life, that it has its own name: “Impostor Syndrome.” To put it simply: it’s very hard for us to be vulnerable with own another, and so—from the moment Adam and Eve first sewed leaves together to cover themselves from God from God’s sight—we hide.
But still, God knows us, in our deepest moments of shame. How embarrassing.
And what a relief.
Because if God knows our deepest secrets, the things of which we are most ashamed, then there’s nothing to be ashamed of anymore. Our secrets are no secret. God sees us, and knows us, and loves us, loves us so much as to lay down his own life for us, just as we are. And God’s love builds us up.
“What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” we ask. “Have you come to destroy us?” In a sense, he has. Not to destroy us, per se, but a part of us; that part of us that hides us from ourselves, and from the ones we love. That part of us that keeps us locked in shame, for fear of being found out. That part of us that keeps us from being genuinely vulnerable with one another, from honestly recognizing where we’ve fallen down and making it right.
Last week, I found a photocopy of a letter from the Rev. Wolcott Cutler, long-time rector of St. John’s, to the priest who arrived here after him. It was in a box of St. John’s memorabilia that Marie Hubbard had had in her apartment, and that her daughter gave to St. John’s after Marie’s death. Attached to the photocopy was a note from Brian Murdoch, another past rector of St. John’s, to Marie, saying he’d found this letter and thought she might appreciate a copy of it.
Rev. Cutler was a complicated man, and his letter shows remarkable humility and self-knowledge. “Dear Mr. Kelley,” it begins, “I hope that you can persuade Archdeacon Burgess of Boston to tell you some of the things that this parish in Charlestown has lacked during my ministry here… It seems to me that some of the work wherein I have been weak requires not so much time as grace for its performance; and that is where a different personality…can provide leadership that will be greatly needed and, we trust, deeply appreciated.” For three pages Rev. Cutler outlines the joys and regrets of his four decades of ministry here, before concluding: “Each of us, being human, has many blind spots, and leaves certain important aspects of his ministry uncultivated. I pray that our parishioners are now at long last, to be treated to a religious emphasis and an evangelical warmth and a personal concern that they have failed to receive from me. And if they do, I believe that our habitually desultory attendance at the Sunday services will receive an impetus and show a growth that my inarticulate parochial calling has never accomplished.”
It’s rare to find someone so willing to be honest about his own limitations—especially among the clergy. But what Rev. Cutler says of his ministry is true of all of us as human beings. “Each of us, being human, has many blind spots, and leaves certain important aspects uncultivated.”
So what does Jesus have to do with us? He teaches us the way of love, yes, like an authoritative prophet. He heals and comforts us and stands with us against the evils of the world; yes. But more than anything, perhaps, he knows us as we are; he sees us as we are; he frees us from the shame of simply being who we are. For “anyone who loves God is known by him.” (1 Cor. 8:3) Amen.