Mark 14:12-51 "Naked in the Night" Scott Hoezee

Naked and ashamed. Ever since Eden those words have gone together. Naked and ashamed. At most any given moment we are only about thirty seconds from nudity--it does not take long to go from fully dressed to fully undressed. All through history stripping people has been a key way to control, shame, and humiliate. The Nazis did it to the Jews, regularly forcing men and women to parade naked in front of the leering eyes of Hitler's thugs. Most of us have also heard the story of the Jewish rabbi who, for the amusement of his Nazi captors, was stripped, forced to stand on top of a table, and then deliver the sermon he had prepared for the coming Sabbath--a sermon, as it turned out, on the image of God.

Neal Plantinga once pointed out that stripping always carries with it the idea of making something vulnerable. Strip a tree of its bark and its protection is gone--disease and parasites have easy access. Strip an enemy of his weapons and you have put him at your mercy--you've taken his defenses away. Strip an animal of its hide and you take its very life. Indeed, one of the first tragedies of humanity's fall into sin was the fact that God covered Adam and Eve's naked shame with animal skins. But that means that somewhere an animal was stripped of its hide--something died so that humanity could cover its now-threadbare existence; something else was stripped so that we could be clad.

In another garden called Gethsemane a man named Jesus was betrayed by one friend and abandoned by all others. In the dead of night Jesus was left standing alone, put into the custody of people who would soon strip him to be crucified in the nude. But before that happens we read a strange verse: Mark 14:51. In the midst of the chaos surrounding Jesus' clandestine arrest a phantom young man appears from out of nowhere, is seized by a soldier, and then flees naked in the night, leaving his garment behind.

Not surprisingly this odd verse has yielded a welter of theories. Some have speculated that this was the gardener of Gethsemane who had been roused out of his sleep by the noise of Jesus' arrest. Others think it is an angel, maybe the same "young man" who would later appear at the tomb on Easter morning. Still others think that this may be Mark himself.

The truth is we don't know who this young man was. But perhaps the anonymity of this person is intentional on Mark's part: perhaps we are supposed to see that this young man represents each of us. Like the disciples we would have all fled, too. We, too, would have left Jesus all alone, stripping him of our presence and so leaving him vulnerable. Like Adam and Eve in another garden, so with this young man in Gethsemane: there is a naked flight away from God. "I heard you coming but I hid because I was naked" Adam told God in Eden. Now God's Son stands in this garden and someone flees naked from him, too.

Like Adam and Eve quivering beneath their fig leaves, so here and so in all of life: the shame we feel over our nakedness is really just a symbol of our inner embarrassment over sin and weakness. In the security of our homes we may feel comfortable walking from the laundry room to the bathroom without our clothes on. But if, as we stroll past the dining room window, we suddenly see the UPS man standing on the porch, we blush and dash for cover! No one likes being caught that way.

Something similar can happen spiritually. Mostly we dress ourselves up as decent sorts of folks, but then we make a mistake, we sin, and sometimes we even get caught. Someone does the spiritual equivalent of peering into the window only to catch us naked--and we're ashamed. No one likes getting caught spiritually naked like that. So we spend our lives either dashing for cover or just hiding. We find ourselves again and again fleeing naked in the dark night of our own sinfulness, desperately afraid someone will see us for who and what we really are. We flee from our own selves, we flee and hide from others, we flee and hide above all from God.

That's who we are and so it is no surprise to find that as part of what it meant for Jesus to take our place, he, too, was stripped and exposed. But unlike the first Adam no one covers Jesus, the second Adam. Not even God. God even leaves him, strips Jesus of the divine presence, rendering Jesus hellishly naked in every sense: physical, spiritual, mental.

In the beginning God clothed his trembling children with the skins of animals. And while that was effective in covering up the outer nakedness, wearing the hide of an animal also blocked something else: the fact that we are not animals but bear the image of God. But ever since God first had to throw a leopard's skin around Adam and Eve we have often not looked like God. We keep hiding. We don't let people know what we say about them behind their backs and we don't want to know what people say about us when we're not around. But the more we have to hedge in our personal relationships; the more we have to conceal our thoughts of pride or our lusty fantasies; the more we have to cover up a past deed, knowing we'd just die of embarrassment if anyone knew about it--the more we do all of this, the less we look like God.

We even end up describing each other in animal terms. "He's a brute! What a beast! She can be so catty. He's as wily as a fox! She's a cow. He's stubborn as a mule. What a turkey! She's so mousy. He's a rat. What a pig! She's a barracuda. He's a pit bull." Maybe it goes back to being clothed in animal skins, but whenever we describe each other in such ways we are describing behaviors that most decidedly do not remind us of God.

So the Son of God gets stripped of all he had. He dies of embarrassment. He dies of shame. He dies of sin. But it was our embarrassment, our shame, our sin. Adam and Eve in Eden, a young man in Gethsemane all fled naked away from God. The way to new life, however, is to reverse this course.

We need to emerge from the dark night of sin and, in repentance and honesty, stand naked before our God at his table this holy night. We shiver a little. But we dare to stand before our God because now we see in Jesus that Someone else has willingly taken on and taken over our naked shame. And so we come to God just as we are because then, and only then, can we return to the joy which God had in mind when one day so very, very long ago Father, Son, and Holy Spirit said to one another, "Let us make humankind and let's make them in our own image and likeness." Being naked is not the reason to flee God but to come to him. Because God has just the outfit we need and it is Christ Jesus, the Lord--the one who died to cover us; the one who was stripped so that we could be clad with nothing less than his very self as we put on Christ, clothing ourselves with his compassion, and so once more bearing to one another the image of God! Amen.