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Mark 12:18-44
We love battles of wits don’t we?
A woman once said to Winston Churchill ‘Sir,
if you were my husband I’d poison your tea.’ Churchill replied, ‘Madam, if you were
my wife, I’d drink it.’
Here in chapters 11 and 12 we see some
brilliant comebacks from Jesus.
And this is an aspect of Jesus’ glory which
we don’t often consider. Jesus is
the Lord of Heaven, the Son of God come to earth and He walks around like
He owns the place. He is a little
oasis of paradise in the midst of our fallen world. And so when illnesses and death is
brought to Jesus – He handles it.
He transforms it, He makes it like paradise again. When the power of nature comes against
Jesus, like the storm in the boat, Jesus handles it. He brings the calm of heaven to the chaos
of earth. But what we see in these
chapters is confusion and ignorance being brought to Jesus, and Jesus
brings the clarity and the wisdom of heaven.
Here is something else we really want from
Jesus. Not just healing for our
bodies or nature, but healing for our minds and our thinking. Because we get ourselves tied up in all
sorts of knots. But Jesus can
answer all our questions. He can
answer the hardest questions of the deepest bible scholars as though they
are child’s play. He can answer
the most thorny questions from the harshest opponents. And no-one can ever outsmart Him. And when people try it’s like those
Godzilla movies where the army unloads its best weapons and they just
bounce off. Jesus actually turns
these verbal traps right around on His accusers.
In chapters 11 and 12 Jesus is involved in a
fascinating and deadly battle of wits.
Here’s what makes it so intriguing: the authorities are determined
to kill Jesus. And Jesus is
determined to get killed by the authorities.
Ever since chapter 8 Jesus has been telling
His disciples that He is off to Jerusalem where He will be handed over to
the authorities and killed. Jesus
says He MUST die because He MUST pay our ransom price from sin and hell. We are enslaved to sin and death and
the devil and the only thing that will release us is Jesus the LORD
paying in death and blood to free us.
And so He sets out resolutely for Jerusalem. And in chapter 11 He rides into town on
a donkey – He’s determined to get killed and the authorities are determined
to kill Him. But, here’s the
thing, the authorities need a reason
to kill Jesus, and Jesus is not going to give it to them. The authorities need to basically
convict Him of a crime. But Jesus
isn’t guilty of any crime – He’s entirely sinless. So they’re firing their guns at Jesus
and Jesus is rebounding their bullets back on the authorities to the
point where the authorities simply have to give up. They cannot legitimately arrest Him. He is unimpeachably clean. The authorities want to be the
righteous ones lawfully killing Jesus.
But Jesus will NOT die as a sinner. He will die as the Righteous One and
they will be guilty of killing Him.
So from chapter 11 it’s game on. And to really get in the face of the
authorities, Jesus has gone to the centre of the centre of the centre of
Jewish life and picked a fight.
He’s cleared the temple. So
verse 18 – the chief priests and the teachers of the law begin to look
for a way to kill Jesus.
So round one, chapter 11:27 – the chief
priests, the teachers of the law and the elders come and ask
28"By what authority are you
doing these things?"
Effectively they’re asking who do
you think you are?
But the bullets bounce off
Him. Jesus asks about John the
Baptist – who do they think he is?
Because if John’s a genuine prophet – and everyone thought he was
– then why didn’t they listen to John – John kept saying Jesus was the
Messiah. They wanted to trap
Jesus, Jesus traps them. They
refuse to answer, Jesus wins round one.
Round two: chapter 12:13
13Later they sent some of the
Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch Him in His words.
Here’s the issue of taxes. It was meant to be an unanswerable
dilemma. If Jesus said to pay
taxes the Jewish people would hate Him, if He said not to pay taxes the
Romans would arrest Him for stirring up dissent. But the bullets just bounce off Him.
Show me a coin He says – the coin has the image of Caesar. So (v17) give to Caesar what bears
Caesar’s image – the coin. Give to
God what bears God’s image – and as Mike reminded us last week, that’s
us. We bear God’s image. Give your little taxes to Caesar but
give yourself to God. Brilliant
comeback. The Pharisees and the
Herodians are silenced.
Round three brings us to our passage
tonight. Here in v18 the Saduccees
have a go. These are the real
jokers of the pack. The Saduccees
feel like they’re so clever. Actually
Jesus tears them to pieces. Mark
tells us immediately the hypocrisy of the Saduccees – they say there is
no resurrection. But nonetheless
they’ve got their ridiculous question about seven brothers for one
bride. A woman has seven different
hubbies and they all die childless.
Now the Sadducees don’t ask the obvious question, which is, what
was that woman doing to all those poor men? That’s what I want to know. Instead they ask their stupid question,
v23:
23At the resurrection[c] whose wife will she be, since the
seven were married to her?"
And you can hear them sniggering behind their
hankerchiefs as they ask. At the
resurrection (snigger, snigger – what a ridiculous idea), whose wife will
she be. It’s a question designed
to make the idea of resurrection look foolish.
Jesus gives the Saduccees short shrift.
24Jesus replied,
"Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the
power of God? 25When the dead y’ise, they will neither
marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 26Now
about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the
account of the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the
God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'[d]? 27He is not the
God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!"
Jesus deals with their foolishness with the
contempt it deserves. They quoted from Moses, but the very portion of
Scripture they quote would tell them that marriage only lasts for this
life. The very fact that the woman
can remarry shows that marriage
is ‘till death us do part’. Death
ends marriage. There won’t be little
marriages IN the new creation because the new creation IS marriage – it
is the ultimate marriage of Christ and His people. All our little marriages are little
distorted mirrors of the ultimate intimacy, the ultimate union, the
ultimate oneness, the ultimate relationship – the LORD and His
people. And the bible tells us the
entire atmosphere of our resurrection future will be marriage, an
unparalleled intimacy between us and the living God.
We’ll be like the angels in heaven and the
only other time Jesus uses that phrase ‘angels in heaven’ is in Matthew
18:10 where Jesus says the angels of God always gaze on the face of the
Father. That’s the intimacy they
enjoy – always gazing on the face of the Father. That’s the intimacy we will all enjoy
in the resurrection. We won’t have
particular privatized infatuations but we will all participate in true
marriage – true union with the Son, filling beyond measure with the
Spirit, gazing on the Father.
We’ll still know and love our spouses from this life in the
resurrection, and we’ll know them and enjoy them even greater than
before. The resurrection will not
be a disappointment, it won’t be less than now but far greater than
now. Which is why THE marriage
will be the blazing sunlight that outshines all the little candles of our
current marriages.
That’s the snapshot Jesus gives us of our
resurrection future. But the
Saduccees couldn’t grasp it.
Because the Saduccees took their little understanding of human
affairs as they are and thought that this controls or conditions what God
is capable of doing. According to
the Saduccees God can’t raise the dead, because then how would He deal
with the whole multiple marriage-partner issue. But this is backwards. They should have accepted from the
Scriptures that there is a resurrection and then credited God with the
power to accomplish something beyond our own puny understandings.
So often we come to the bible like the
Saduccees. We say ‘Well I know
that this is what’s real and
this is what’s possible. Oh
dear. The Bible seems to say
something different. Well the
Bible must be wrong. I will
re-interpret the Bible according to what I think is possible.’ But no.
We need a fresh conviction of the Word of God and the power of
God. The Bible will tell us many
things that we simply cannot understand according to our small notions of
what is possible. We should simply
say, God’s word says it, and God’s power makes it possible and real, even
when we don’t know how it’s going to work out.
Now, because the Saduccees raised the issue by
quoting Moses, Jesus quotes Moses back to them. V26: The God who encountered Moses
there claimed “I AM the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Not “I was the God of Abraham, I AM the God of Abraham.” Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were not dead
to God, they were alive to God.
Jesus is showing us that we should read our bibles carefully and
take seriously every word, even every tense of every verb, and to take it
all with the utmost seriousness.
So Jesus dismisses these Saduccees in four
sentences. Round four is over and
the Saduccees are on the canvas.
Round 5.
28One of the teachers of the law
came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good
answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most
important?"
Now here’s something a bit
different. This is not so much
phrased as a trap but as a genuine question. And Jesus notices in v34 that this
teacher of the law is not far from the kingdom. This is not a stupid question like the
Saduccees asked. This is a great
question. What’s the most
important command?
Traditionally the law of Moses
was divided up into 613 commands.
248 positive commands, 365 negative commands. The teachers of the law and even Jesus
Himself would typically divide them up again into the weightier matters
of the law and the lesser matters of the law. So in Matthew 23 Jesus says giving away
ten percent of your spices was a lesser matter. Justice, mercy and faithfulness was a
weightier matter. The teacher of
the law is asking – what’s the weightiest command? What’s the 300 kilotonne law? What does God want most of all?
And Jesus answers quick as a
flash: love.
Verse 30 and 31. It’s really, really simple. Love.
Love the LORD you God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your mind and with all your strength. And (v31) 'Love your
neighbor as yourself.’
That’s the LORD’s bottom
line. This is what He wants, this
is what’s He’s like, this is what He commands. Love.
Love the LORD. Love your
neighbour.
You know what this means? It means the most heinous crime in the
court of heaven is lovelessness.
Do you realize that? If we were to pick the two most heinous
crimes we’d probably say murder and paedophilia or something like
that. Jesus says the very worst
things imaginable are not loving God with everything and not loving your
neighbour. Which means you might
never commit homicide or sexual abuse and yet be called the ultimate
sinner in the court of heaven.
Simply because you do not love.
That’s the real evil. Not
loving the LORD, not loving people – it’s wickedness.
We often live like Jesus’ answer
was different in verses 30-31. We
often live like Jesus said ‘The greatest command is don’t get drunk,
don’t swear, don’t sleep around, get an internet filter and keep going to
church.’ That’s kind of how we
naturally think of God’s bottom line.
A list of minimal actions that keep us roughly within Christian
boundary markers. Jesus does not
give us boundary markers to keep within – He gives us a way of love that
absolutely all embracing
Look at the standard of love we
are to show. Towards the LORD v30
says:
all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your mind and with all your strength.
And towards others (v31) we are
to love them even as much as we love ourselves. Wow!
Jesus assumes we love
ourselves. Notice He’s not
commanding us to love ourselves, he assumes we do and tells us that’s the
standard we should set for loving others.
You might say ‘I know someone who
self-harms, they don’t love themselves.’
Let me tell you we all self-harm and it’s not becuase we don’t
love ourselves, it’s because we do.
Next time you lose your keys and you’re late for a meeting just
notice the language you’re using about yourself. It is completely, devastatingly,
irrationally self-harming. But
it’s not because you don’t value yourself, it’s because you think your
own little story really is a matter of life and death.
Or you say ‘I hate myself, I’m
ugly.’ You don’t hate
yourself. If you really hated
yourself, you’d be glad you were ugly.
You would pray for boils to afflict your face because you hate
yourself just so much. No, it’s
because we love ourselves so much that we think we deserve to look better
than we do.
Our self-love is quite
staggering. Those holiday photos
come back from the developers or a friend posts them on facebook. Who’s face do you look for in the
photo? Your own! And then you have the nerve to say it’s
not a great picture because it doesn’t make you look like a supermodel.
We love ourselves an insanely
great deal. And so while we
recognize that these verses are absolutely right – we know that we should
love our Maker and love our neighbour, we also know how far short we fall
of this.
When Jesus sees that the teacher
of the law agrees about the law He says v34: you’re not far from the
kingdom.
To recognize the rightness of
love is to be close to the kingdom.
I remember when I was close to the kingdom it
really struck me how love was the greatest thing. I remember listening to the Blues
Brothers on a loop as they sang ‘Everybody needs somebody to love’ and
thinking ‘Yeah, everybody does need somebody to love. Deep man!’ And I was very struck that
love really must be the heart of all things. Love really must be what it’s all about. But of course, I wasn’t very
loving. I’m still not. I’ve got a problem. I saw that the way of Jesus – the way
of the LORD – was right, but I just wasn’t on it. I was close but not in.
Close but not in.
Last weekend in the golf, Tom
Watson was on the 18th green with an 8foot putt to win the
British Open. He left it 6 inches
short. He wasn’t far from
victory. But in the end he lost. A
miss is as good as a mile they say.
This teacher of the law was not
far but he wasn’t in either. What
did he need?
Well he needed round 6.
In v35, Jesus turns the tables on
everyone. He’s been reacting to
questions for the last 5 rounds.
Here He poses one question of His own. And it’s the ultimate question: What do
you make of the Christ? Who do you
think the Christ is? That is
the ultimate question.
Who’s wife will she be in the
resurrection is a stupid question.
(Probably your teacher at school told you there are no stupid
questions. There are stupid
questions. The Saduccees asked
them, and Jesus was gracious enough to actually answer it).
Secondly, ‘What’s the greatest
command?’ is a good question, but it won’t get you to heaven.
‘Who is the Christ?’ is the
ultimate question. It’s the question that actually gets you IN – not just
close to the kingdom, it leads you into the kingdom. Because the Christ IS the King. The word Christ effectively means King
– the King of God’s Kingdom.
To know the King is to be invited
into the Kingdom, so here is the vital question – who is the Christ?
As with all these questions – the
answers are in the bible. And so
from v35 Jesus takes the people to the Old Testament passage that is MOST
quoted by the New Testament, Psalm 110:
35While Jesus was teaching in the
temple courts, he asked, "How is it that the teachers of the law say
that the Christ[h] is the son of David? 36David
himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared:
" 'The Lord said to my Lord:
"Sit at my right hand
until I put your enemies
under your feet." '[i] 37David himself
calls him 'Lord.' How
then can he be his son?"
It’s interesting – the greatest
commandment was ‘Love the Lord’.
And Psalm 110 tells us there are two Persons who are called
‘Lord’. David says there is The
LORD and there is my Lord – David’s Lord.
And David’s Lord shares the throne of heaven with THE LORD. David’s Lord – the Christ – sits down
at the right hand of THE LORD and THE LORD makes sure David’s Lord is
victorious over every enemy.
This is the clear teaching of
Psalm 110. And in your own time
you can read the Psalm and you’ll see that the Christ is not only called
Lord, He’s also the ultimate Priest, He’s also the ultimate King, He’s
also the ultimate Judge.
So you can understand why Jesus
turns on the teachers of the law and say: How can you reduce the Christ
in your thinking until He is merely a descendent of David. Now obviously Jesus is descended from
King David according to His human nature but before Christ was ever
descended FROM David He was David’s Lord.
He is not just great king David’s greater son, He is great king
David’s eternal Lord! But somehow
the teachers of the law had not properly read their own law. And they said that the Christ was an
important religious figure, an excellent teacher, a good man, but not
Lord. It’s the same problem with
millions today. Millions today
believe Jesus was a great bloke but not the Lord. And Jesus says ‘You’ve obviously never
read the bible. In the bible it’s
clear – Christ is the Lord! He is
the great High Priest. He’s the King.
He is the Judge. And if
you’re His enemy – watch out.
What is your view of Jesus? Does it stand up to the evidence? Does it stand up to what the bible
actually says about Jesus?
I was preaching in the open air at the
seafront yesterday and my verse was Jesus’ words from John 12:32: I, when I am lifted up from the earth,
will draw all people to myself. Extraordinary
words for a person to say. 33
years old, a penniless preacher says He will draw all people to
Himself...
What is your view of Jesus? Because if He is the Lord – then v30
tells you, He demands all your love – your heart, soul, mind and strength. But if you confess Him as your Lord
then He will become to you your priest.
He will actually stand in the gap and fulfil God’s law for
you. He is the ultimate one who
loves God with heart, soul, mind and strength. He is the ultimate one who loves His
neighbour as Himself. If you call
Him you Lord, He will call Himself your priest. He will stand up for you and clothe you
in His perfect loving law keeping.
Then you won’t be outside the kingdom, you won’t just be close to
the kingdom, you’ll be in. Brought
in by the King Himself.
If you don’t see Jesus as the
Lord – if your view of Christ is low, your view of self will be
high. That’s what verses 38-40 are
all about. Low views of Christ
will breed high views of self.
38As he taught, Jesus said, "Watch
out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing
robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, 39and have
the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at
banquets. 40They devour widows' houses and for a show
make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely."
We’re supposed to love God and
neighbour – Here’s what the teachers of the law love: power dressing,
popularity, places of honour, pretentious prayers. And in among all this – they devour
widows houses. In among these sins
that are so recognizable in us in one form or another, there’s this gross
abuse of power. But it all stems
from a low view of the Christ.
On the other hand the widow is
the opposite. She is unnoticed – except by Jesus! And that’s the key. The teachers of the law are greeted in
the marketplace. No-one sees this
widow. Except Jesus. But she gives everything she has. She demonstrates incredible faith in
the LORD to give away all her money.
Little did she know that the LORD was there in the flesh watching
her, but even though she didn’t know that, she holds nothing back.
Isn’t that interesting about what Jesus
notices? Jesus doesn’t notice what
people give, He notices what they hold back. He doesn’t see the money in the collection
plate, He sees the money in their pockets when they walk away.
I remember staying with some millionaires in America. Christian millionaires. Massive house, huge swimming pool, they
had their own lake on the property to fish in – they called it a pond, it
was a lake. And I said to my
friend who was staying with me in their house ‘Imagine if they really
gave away their money to kingdom work, how much could be done.’ And my friend was wiser –he said ‘yeah,
the kingdom might benefit if they gave more away, but the people who’d
benefit most would be the rich couple themselves. Jesus looks not so much at what we give. He’s not worried that there won’t be
enough resources to build His kingdom.
He’s worried for our sakes about what we withhold.
Well Jesus more than survives 5 rounds of
questioning freom the authorities.
He turns the tables in the 6th and delivers a
devastating knock-out blow. Even
from v34 onwards, Mark says that no-one dared ask Him any more questions.
Jesus can handle all our questions. He does
it by going back to the Scriptures, by reading them very closely, by
trusting the power of God to be able to accomplish what His word says and
He makes sure we focus on the real issue.
Who is the Christ? Do we
know Him as Lord? If we do, we’ll
put self last and abandon ourselves to His kingdom like the widow. If we don’t, our love will not be for
the LORD it will be for power and prestige. May we all determine to see the
Lordship of Christ in the Scriptures, to love Him, to love our neighbours
for His sake and to abandon ourselves and even our money to His service.
Amen
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