Mark 1:40-45 "The Big Secret" Scott Hoezee

It was a scant eight months after I graduated from seminary--and just three months after becoming ordained--when I was whisked off to sunny southern California to attend a church leadership conference at the Crystal Cathedral. It was exciting--fresh out of school and already I was getting to travel to exotic places to listen to famous preachers. Within a week, however, I found myself feeling more cynical than I had ever felt before even as a healthy dose of disgust was curdling in my soul.

Because at this conference we listened to speeches from probably a dozen megachurch pastors. As usual at a conference, someone always introduced the featured speaker. But in more cases than not, following the personal introduction, the lights dimmed and a 5-10 minute promotional videotape was played on the cathedral's giant Jumbotron screen. These promos were slickly produced, Hollywood-like advertisements that trumpeted loudly the success of the pastor about to give a speech. The Academy Awards had nothing on the ability of these pastors to be self-congratulatory and self-promoting.

Apparently, Jesus failed to secure a media consultant. Because as the gospel of Mark presents the story, Jesus not only failed to toot his own horn, he actually did everything in his power to prevent promotional materials from circulating. Earlier in Mark 1 when a demon-possessed man cried out that Jesus was the Holy One of God, Jesus hushed him immediately. Last week we read that Jesus prevented the demons from identifying him. And now today we encounter something that will become a clear pattern all through Mark: Jesus performs a great wonder but then orders the recipient of the miracle to tell not a single soul. Over and over again this will happen. At the climactic midpoint of Mark's gospel, in chapter 8, Jesus will directly ask the disciples the most vital of all questions, "Who do men say that I am? But who do you say that I am?" Ultimately Peter gives the right answer: Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus approves of what Peter says but then orders the disciples to share this insider information with precisely no one.

Although you can find this in all the gospels, Mark in particular presents what has become known as "the Messianic Secret." Jesus conceals, keeps secret the fact of his being the Christ of God. But why? This is one of the greatest mysteries of the gospel. Jesus' ministry was, after all, a public set of events. Jesus was not some desert-dwelling ascetic who cloistered himself in a monastery. He was usually in plain view when he did his teachings and healings. He works in public yet wants to keep the public in the dark.

Again, why? Secrecy as to who he is and what he has come to accomplish seems to be at variance with that very work. If you are going to save the world, wouldn't it be to your advantage to have the world know who you are and what you are up to? Isn't our task now the exact opposite of keeping quiet? Aren't we now charged with proclaiming to the whole world the truth of Jesus? So why the secrecy in Mark?

Let's try an analogy. Suppose you were a skilled plumber: you could fix any leak, unclog any drain, and even design very complex plumbing systems for high-rise buildings and the like. That is a wonderful set of abilities to possess but it won't do you any good in terms of generating income if you refuse to take out an ad in the Yellow Pages, refuse to print up business cards, refuse to buy an answering machine to take messages from potential customers. Suppose one day you went into City Hall and were successful in solving a highly complicated plumbing problem that had stumped a number of other professionals. The mayor would perhaps be highly grateful and would maybe promise to do all in his power to throw still more business your way. But what sense would it make if you then replied to the mayor, "Oh no, please don't do that. Don't tell anyone that I am a plumber, much less a really good one. Let's keep that between us, OK?"

Clearly, that would be a mistake. But it should be equally clear to us that Jesus was not making a mistake. There must have been a very deep and good reason for his own secrecy. What in the world might such a reason be? Let's spend some time pondering this and then try to apply whatever insights we discover to our contemporary situation.

A partial answer begins to emerge when we see what resulted in Mark 1:45 when the healed leper did not as a matter of fact keep his mouth shut. You can hardly blame the fellow! Still, his proclamation of what had happened brought about such a clamor for Jesus that he was practically mobbed. Jesus did end up having to withdraw, which meant he could not proclaim that central message we thought so much about last week, "The kingdom of God is at hand!" In last week's passage, Jesus made clear that although his healings and exorcisms generated a lot of press, it was the less exciting and quieter task of preaching that was at the top of his own ministry agenda. But he knew that the preaching would be swamped if miracles were all anyone could think about or want from Jesus.

After all, whether you are talking about children or adults, what happens to a person's attention span the moment you dangle some freebie in front of them? If you go to Festival downtown next June and set up a booth by the Calder that says "Free $100 Bills!" you will quickly draw a big line of people. But if you are waving a C-note in the air even as you try to say something meaningful to each greedy person who comes up, what you will find is impatience. "Just give me my free money, will ya!" Who cares what you have to say compared to what you have offered to give away?! Last June when I was in Arizona, I heard about a church that advertised its Sunday morning service this way: "Come to our worship service and receive two free tickets to the new 'Scooby Doo' movie now in theaters!" I think that the theologically technical way to assess that tactic is to say, "Ruh-Roh!" But I also suspect that a free giveaway is not likely the best way to generate attentive listeners.

Jesus wanted his message to be central, but it was a sufficiently new message, a sufficiently amazing message, that not only did a person need to listen, he or she needed to listen carefully. But that kind of thoughtful listening could not happen if people were hopping up and down impatiently awaiting the next bit of razzle-dazzle from Jesus.

A bit less obivous, however, is the fact that the word "Messiah" or "Christ" carried a lot of baggage with it for the people back then. They had some preconceived notions as to what the Christ would do. After nearly 500 years of political occupation, a chief desire of people was very naturally liberation. For half-a-millennium the Jews had chafed under first the Babylonians and then the Persians and then Alexander the Great and lately now the Romans. They yearned to be free, to have a king like David back on the throne.

So although there had been prophetic hints about a suffering servant, about the one who would have no outward comeliness to attract people, nevertheless the dominant thing that had become associated with the Messiah was that he would be a dashing military-like hero who could lead the charge against Herod, Pilate, and even the Caesar himself. They wanted a Christ who would have nothing subtle about him. They wanted MacArthur, not Gandhi; Donald Rumsfeld, not Mother Teresa. They wanted strength in life, not weakness in death; a land of their own with borders they could defend, not a kingdom that grows in your heart the way yeast silently leavens dough. They wanted a leader who could wield a sword, not a teacher who said confusing and odd things like "I am the bread of life."

Jesus' notions of who the Messiah needed to be, what he needed to do, and how he needed to get it done were rather different. But to comprehend the whys and wherefores of all that would take time. When something shakes up your view of the world, it takes a very long time to sift through a welter of emotions and thoughts before you can get re-oriented to an entirely new way of thinking and living. Jesus knew that would be true given his unique definition of what it means to be the Christ. Just focusing on the powerful, miraculous side of his ministry could easily cause people to fly off in the wrong direction.

And so all through Mark Jesus keeps things quiet long enough for us really to pay attention. Mark knows that we must not run ahead of Jesus. We cannot make Jesus fit into any preconceived notions we have but let him teach us. In fact, Mark knows that it is only after we have been to the cross that everything will gel. Only then will we see the Messiah as the suffering servant he has been all along. Only then will we appreciate the depth of human sin and evil. It is wonderful that Jesus was able to cast out demons and heal diseases just by uttering a word or brushing his hand over some diseased tissue. But salvation is not about some magic touch. In the end even Jesus has no magic wand to wave to make everything better. Even he had to be sacrificed in a horrible way.

Maybe that is why in the entire run of Mark's gospel, there is only one place where someone says in public that Jesus is the Son of God, and no one tells that person to keep quiet: it is the soldier who spoke those words at the cross after Jesus was dead. Only then, when it looked like the end of everything, could that be spoken aloud. Only then, when Jesus looked like a failure doomed to be no more than an historical footnote, could his true identity be revealed. Because if--at the nadir of death and sacrifice, crisis and loss--you could still say that Jesus was the Son of God, then that was something that flesh and blood did not reveal to you but only the gift of faith that comes by grace.

In the entire course of Jesus' life, there was no single moment when it was more difficult to believe that he was God's Son than when he hung buck naked and dead as a bloody doornail on that spit of wood at Skull Hill. But if you can follow Jesus that far, then you demonstrate that you get it. All those words about humility and love and compassion; all that talk about the kingdom of God being real and yet operating on the mustard seed principle; Jesus' insistence that forgiving sins was more dramatic than fixing lame legs--it all started to make its own kind of sense at the cross. What's more, it has a lot to teach us what it means to be a disciple who molds his or her life on the example of this person.

And it is precisely here that we begin to apply the Messianic Secret to our own lives. Because the message of the gospel always comes to us in a certain context. Last Sunday we took an offering for the Gideon's. Along with the folks at Wycliff, their speciality is translating the Bible into hundreds of different languages. When I was young, we used to get those pocket-sized Gideon New Testaments, and I loved paging through the first part of that because they always printed John 3:16 in dozens of different languages, including really exotic-looking ones like Tamil, Arabic, and Russian. If such translation work is done carefully, it really is the same verse, the same set of words, in each and every tongue.

The content is always the same, but the context in which that content is received is always different. How a person hears the gospel will depend tremendously on where he or she lives. The gospel will not sound the same to someone who lives in the Outback of Australia as it does to an American living in the Midwest. And that's OK. The gospel must confront us in this cultural setting and it inevitably will do that differently here than in the Outback. There are entrenched cultural customs here that the gospel needs to address that don't exist in other places. Most of us are Americans and we were born into this nation and culture. That means a welter of things, more than anyone probably could fully list.

But one of the things it means is that we love success. Nothing succeeds in America like success, they say. We like winners and brush aside losers. Let me throw out some names for you: Alfred Landon, James Cox, John Davis, Charles Hughes, Alton Parker. Sound familiar? Probably not. Yet every one of them was so important and well thought of that at some point in the twentieth century each was a nominee for President of the United States. Millions voted for them, for a while their names were plastered all over the place. But then each one lost, of course, and in America, that's that.

We reserve our esteem for the people who succeed, especially for those who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. We even assume that if someone built a successful corporation, then that person must be so savvy in every conceivable field that we will buy their books when they start to make pronouncements on also philosophy, religion, ethics. Donald Trump or Bill Gates goes on "Larry King Live" and Larry asks, "What do you think we should do in regard to Iraq?" Well, who cares what they think? What do they know?

But we are a people in love with power and success, and this surely is one area among many that the gospel needs to address in our particular cultural context. Not unlike the people in Jesus' own day, we are swift to seize on anything that looks powerful and dazzling. The bigger the congregation, the more faithful we assume. We equate success, as the world defines it, with the work of the Holy Spirit because we can scarcely wrap our minds around the possibility that there could ever be an outwardly "successful" church that might actually work against the fundamentals of the gospel. "They must be doing something right," we say to each other about successful restaurants, enterprising entrepreneurs, and also church leaders who sell millions of books and draw large throngs of people.

And sometimes they are doing something right in the best sense. There are lots of people who are both faithful to Christ and who are successful in generating enthusiasm for the gospel through books that sell well, congregations that attract many members, and so on. Still, Jesus' desire to keep things quiet until the cross reminds us that whether or not we prove to be wildly popular, it is always a quiet and careful and humble apprehension of the gospel that is key. Jesus' own example of humble servanthood comes as a critique of our own overweaning tendency to be enamored with all that is glitzy and eye-popping. We should be wary if the Jesus we worship fits too snugly into any cultural context on this earth.

Some while back I related to you what was once said by a popular American preacher in an interview. This person said Jesus wants us to "sail, not fail," and how Jesus just generally was your classic (American) success story. The interviewer, however, was sharp enough to sense a problem. "But didn't Jesus die a terrible death as the way to complete his work?" "Oh," the preacher replied, "like all successful people, Jesus had his setbacks. But eventually he overcame that and put the cross behind him." That, my friends, is heresy. At last month's January Series at Calvin College, Stanley Hauerwas ruffled some feathers when he declared heretical a popular megachurch that had removed the cross from its worship space out of cultural sensitivity to those who found the cross offensive. But Hauerwas was right. If we cannot make room for the cross--indeed, if we cannot proclaim the centrality of the cross as the single most important place where the true nature of Jesus as the Messiah was disclosed--then we have lost the true gospel and the Christ of the gospel as well.

We could better be a little less successful, a little more quiet and "secretive" if that's what it takes to draw people down that long road of discipleship that eventually encounters a terrible cross. The apostle Paul eventually delighted to declare, "I have been crucified with Christ!" So it must be for us all. We need to be crucified with Christ. We must die to self, die to our desires for worldly success, die to our American identity, die to ego and pride, die to anything that hinders Jesus from instructing us in the full truth of his gospel. "I am the way," Jesus once said. "Nothing succeeds like success," we often say. In each of our lives, we must choose which of those sayings we want to adopt as our own. Amen.