Mark! 16:1-8
 
v1 Spices.
Mary Magdalene, James’ mother also named Mary, and Salome intended to anoint Jesus’ body with spices. It was an act of homage in belief that for their loved one death was a permanent condition. The women were performing an act of affection and respect and endeavoring to preserve a corpse for as long as possible. They had to do something immediately until their mood of mourning would gradually be transformed into manageable and cherished memory. Practical adjustments are necessary in order to cope with acute loss. Ceremony yields a small measure of comfort in bereavement. It is a token of farewell.
 
v2 On their way to the tomb.
The sorrowing party of devoted women were preoccupied with the pending problem that bothered them on their excursion to the tomb where Jesus lay. The grave hewn out of a rock face was sealed with a huge stone that could possibly be rolled along a runner, or shallow channel etched into the ground, if pushed with force and effort, a task too difficult for the small team off women approaching Jesus’ burial place. Their minds were agitated by a seemingly insoluble problem.
 
v4 The large stone had been rolled away.
Heaven had intervened. The women looked up and the stone had been moved aside. The tomb was open to the worried visitors. Then one of the angels within the tomb explained the absence of the body of the Lord. “He is not here.” The crucified one for whom the women were looking was no longer where he had been laid. The shelf carved out of the wall of the tomb where Jesus had been placed was no longer occupied by the dead. Only heavenly messengers of the resurrection were visible in the silent cave. They assured the stunned observers that there was no need for alarm. All was in accord with divine arrangement.
 
v7 Going ahead into Galilee.
Jesus would fulfill his pledge to his disciples and reunite with them in Galilee. The risen One had gone ahead to the appointed place of meeting. It was there that his beloved brethren would see him (Matthew 28:10). Jesu, Joy of man’s desiring, would grant his followers joy on familiar soil. The gospel of the resurrection has to be “earthed” and proclaimed where ordinary folk walk and work, sit and stand. It is the message of the new world bringing hope to the old world of sin and death. The place of former ministry receives new power.
 
Tell his disciples and Peter.
It is understood that Mark’s Gospel is the written record of Peter’s dictated memoir of Jesus and his ministry of speech, action, and sacrifice. The special mention of Peter is poignant to the apostle and to us. Peter is known for his differences with the Lord and his denials of the Lord. With bitter hindsight Peter recognized his sin and failure as a strong tendency in his character, and a regrettable trend in his discipleship. But Jesus’ love and loyalty to this unstable man were unbreakable. Peter was candid about his cowardice and profoundly moved by his Savior’s companionship and service of the kingdom.
 
“Tell Peter” was an affectionate message to a man of notable failure (as was Mark his fellow in human frailty: Mk 14:51-52, Acts 15:37-39). Peter and Mark collaborate to bring us the gospel of forgiveness and new beginnings (2 Tim 4:11, Colossians 4:10, Philemon v24). He has risen! is the confident apostolic message to the church. He is alive! is the church’s confident message to the world.


RJS

Mark 11:1 – 11

vv. 1 - 7   The tale of the triumphal entry is replete with enormous meaning. The preparation suggested by Jesus is an indicator of the great eminence of the rider on the donkey who rode into the city of Jerusalem, the place of such importance in the divine plan of salvation. Jesus had a plan of his own before he filled Zechariah’s prophecy (Zechariah 9: 9-12). Two of his disciples were assigned to go to a village to take charge of a colt that bear the Lord into the capital city of Judah. Jesus had already made arrangements for the donkey to be available. It was his donkey. He could say that no-one else had ever ridden it. Now he needs it in the carrying out of his great salvific assignment. It will be returned to its breeders in due course.
 
We can imagine Jesus acquainting himself with this beast of burden so that on the day he calls for it and sits upon it the ass will be familiar with Messiah and not buck or shy away. Tender, kindly hands will control and guide the animal along the appointed way of its historic journey. The carers of the colt knew the code word for its release to the disciples. “The Lord needs it.” They were sympathetic friends of Jesus. No essential detail in Jesus’ plan was overlooked. On delivery the disciples threw their cloaks over the back of the donkey for the Lord’s comfort and stability as Jesus rode astride the creature on this significant occasion.
 
vv. 8 - 11     As Jesus made his progress to the city limits crowds of onlookers formed and many spread their cloaks and branches fresh from the fields before Jesus as he wended his way forward. A swell of enthusiasm greeted him, and the people shouted, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!” Hosanna is the plea “to save now”. The people on the roadside had witnessed and heard of the great deeds performed by Jesus. Many had apprehended the prophetic importance of Jesus, and some had confessed him in the highest terms: Lord! Inaugurator of the coming kingdom foreshadowed in David’s dynasty. Hosanna in the highest! Before us is the bearer, the great undertaker, of God’s covenant saving purpose for his people.
 
These folk could hardly have been so fickle and treacherous as to call for Christ’s crucifixion a few days later. Like all communities there are persons of different type and divisions occur among them. The folk who bayed for Jesus’ death were motivated differently to the citizens and visitors to Jerusalem piously dedicated to the observance of Passover. Enemies of the Lord were able to stir up their supporters. Jesus knew the leading suspects and surveyed the temple. He knew the authorities were dangerously biased against him. He was pondering his destiny soon to be manifested in the very near violent and unjust future.
 
RJS

John 8:46-59
 
The claims of Jesus are colossal.  A moment’s reflection will prove them stunning.  Those whom Jesus called children of the devil were so theologically and spiritually blind that they alleged that Jesus was in league with Satan oblivious to the fact that they were themselves the devil’s captives.  How twisted can human perception become? 
 
Nominal devotees of Abraham and the prophets totally misconstrued the Scriptures of which they were supposedly dedicated scholars and masters.  Their connection with Abraham was totally ethnic, their ties to the prophets purely national in nature.  In fact the level of their religious thought and duty was entirely natural.  They had no concept or awareness of the evangelist’s teaching in his prologue to the gospel that “to all who received him (Messiah), to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:12-13).  Ancestry did not determine as to who were the real children of Abraham but rather birth from above. 
 
Only the truly regenerate can receive spiritual truth and recognize Jesus for who he is.  “He who belongs to God hears what God says.  The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God” (John 8:47).  That is straight and shocking talking to the leaders of Jerusalem.  All Jesus’ allusions to his deity scandalized the religious guides of Judaism.  They were not qualified to benefit the souls of their people.  They thought in temporal terms and human chronology.  Jesus was not yet fifty so how could he claim to possess and donate life that will never see death?  The Jews were acutely sensible of the meaning of Christ’s words and utterly incredulous and outraged. 
 
The fact that Jesus implied his deity by stating that Abraham saw his day from history afar and was glad in it was an insinuation that many modern scholars ignore as inconsequential but it incensed the members of Israel’s elite.  “Are you greater than our father Abraham?”  They got Jesus’ message and rejected it.  It was too bold and technically blasphemous. 
 
But for we who love and trust Jesus the claim is true and his due entitlement.  It reveals his dignity and lofty status delighting us in his excellence and worth and the fact of his divinity brings us much consolation and security.  For Jesus rises to the acme of self-disclosure that takes our breath away but sets our heart pulsating with extreme joy and adoration. 
 
Makes the grandest claim possible to the fuming enemies that will plot even more avidly to kill him.  “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am!” (8:58).  He takes the divine name revealed to the patriarchs, including Abraham, upon himself.  That is why he is greater.  We can only respond with lowly worship. 
 
RJS

By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org

The huge danger in Christian experience and discourse is over-familiarity with the sublime truths of our revealed faith. Beautiful concepts are reduced to banality, towering truth tumbles down to triviality, statements become stereotypical, and prayer becomes platitudinous. Our language becomes hasty, hackneyed and tedious. We communicate in almost casual commonplace style, not bothering to wield words of weight and genuine worth in our speech of God, our commendation of Christ, and what we say about him to the desperate souls of men. 

We have a store of stock phrases evincing the fact that much of our thinking and speaking is instinctive, unexamined and superficial, amounting to automatic and programmed response (especially in personal encounters where we are so often reluctant to listen, launching instead a volley of texts that we have probably not fully digested ourselves, and which we expect to work by virtue of mere repetition - the Evangelical equivalent of “ex opere operato”). Glorious Scriptural truth is conveyed cheaply, bandied about in thoughtless blather betraying shallow comprehension and the absence of sound apprehension incapable of any original grasp or possession of authentic conviction. The profundity of our faith is denied by slipshod grammar. 

The gospel becomes a series of slogans that slip off the tongue so glibly and easily, and so-called extempore prayer is set in a dull, inferior and habitual "personally contrived liturgy", in the sense of an unvarying form that has none of the quality of a well-composed collect or written petition for our corporate and individual approach to God. Sound liturgy, by the way, lends itself to well-constructed personal prayer, otherwise God gets the scraps of our cerebral offering and cold-hearted attention that is not animated by fresh desire, warm devotion and consciousness of who he is. Much prayer life is meagre in its expression of awed reverence before the Lord and simplistic in its appeals to heaven: “O Lord, we just . . . and for your glory. Amen”. Do we truly ponder that for which we ask in the interest of the kingdom? Are our prayers cursorily composed wish lists? Do we have a genuine glimmer of the divine glory and understand its implications in terms of the divine sovereignty and the appropriate response to be rendered to our requests? 

We do not work at our witness, nor try to be appealing in our testimony (especially in humble demeanor) - both to head and to heart. It is enough, seemingly, to be tiresomely formulaic and not to strive for fresh perspectives that address different persons and diverse situations in a way that is winsome and respectful, and aptly specific to the recipient we are befriending at that moment. Our medium of contact, so often, both to God and man, is monotone, predictable, inflexible, devoid of imagination that should be stimulated by all of the God-given phenomena that we encounter in creation, providence, and revelation. Deep meditation and evaluation is the missing ingredient. We are too dependent on prescribed methods and “how to” texts by famous soul-winners (buzz words from the Bible), eager for success as witnesses and debaters, rather than invested in the worth and actual wellbeing of the victim of our evangelistic technique. May the Spirit of God adapt us to any moment of personal contact. 

The poetry in each human soul should come to the fore when we address the living God, and the art of depicting him to others can be enriched by the picture language and dramatic vitality of the descriptive Word. Instead of warbling along in the same old way we ought to wrestle with God for access to his vivid presence and convey the liveliness in knowing him in our daily gait. It is not easy always to avoid the “cult of vain repetition” in our religious expression, or the tendency to cloak Jesus Christ in cliché-ridden terms. We need to request grace from God to relate the thoughts of the Dear One of our souls from the depth of our holy evaluation of him, and in order to fulfill the solemn but joyful onus of the vocation to which he has appointed us. 

Witness, worship, and “wording” to God, are costly. Some fund of deliberation stored in the mind should furnish all these holy activities even when we are called upon in an instant. Arrow prayers are always possible. But only the action of the sovereign Spirit of God is effectual. Without him all human effort is useless. The confession has to be made that he is rarely in our thoughts to the degree that he ought to be. We can be tense and off-putting in our self-reliance or dread-filled sense of duty to placate those who have, and perhaps enforce, a certain type of evangelism as necessary to divine approval. 

Richard S. Storr in his mammoth study of Bernard of Clairvaux opines severally:
His whole theological system, as I have said, implied preaching as the great instrument of grace, the means, under God, of quickening and nurturing in human hearts the desires, affections, high contemplations, the knowledge of the Word, and the intimate powerful bent of the soul toward God, the result of which should be in holy fellowship with Divine Persons and heavenly things, and at last in the Beatific Vision [page 379]. We are all preachers in some fashion called to fashion worthy representation of our Lord. 
​
Intensity of conviction was the force which moulded and pushed into utterance every sermon; and if ten thousand should be against him their numbers would only make it more needful that they be answered and overborne. According to his assured conviction, he stood on rock in his belief, and not on any precarious scaffold which man had builded; and the preachers of a later time, perhaps of our own time, whose principal creed has sometimes seemed to be the uncertainty of all things, - whose controlling conviction the impropriety of conviction, - might learn true wisdom from his example [page 381]. Many statements from Christian voices may have a veneer of orthodoxy but lack the essence of strong conviction. Uncertainty is now touted as the ultimate Christian attitude toward the dying verities of the faith (Bishop Butler, formerly of the Diocese of Southwark and BBC’s Thought For The Day). Conviction is cultivated in the pastures of the Word and in receiving the choicest feed from the hand of the Shepherd. 

Bernard's aim was "to make Divine thoughts clearer to men, and more profoundly impressive upon them, that they may be readier for the coming Tribunal, and for the supreme and ineffable Presence" [page 389]. 

By reason of (this) intimate and incessant conviction on the part of Bernard, his sermons, however deliberate or discursive in their general movement, are always instinct with moral earnestness. We may not perhaps be impressed by this at first, reading them in the atmosphere of a different century, and in a tongue not wholly familiar. But more and more we come to perceive it; while to those to whom, as to himself, the mystical theology was the supreme truth, who shared his spirit, and over whom brooded, as over himself, the nearing shadows of the tremendous Hereafter, each sentence was freighted with spiritual meaning and was alive with emotional force [page 392]. 

It is important to observe also the tender and loyal affectionateness of spirit by which his discourses are distinguished, and the free exhibition of personal experience which adds to their charm, and which gives them a strange modernist of tone. . . One always feels him to be a sympathetic brother-man, who has gone through the deeps in which others are struggling, and has climbed the hills on whose difficult steeps they are still stumbling, till he now has sight, from the delectable mountains, of the City of God; and who is ready to put all that he has gained at the service of his hearers. . . . But all is governed by a paramount purpose to reach and help others, setting them forward on their way, or guarding them against apprehended dangers; and to do this, if need be, by revealing his own spiritual feeling, the secrets and joys of his Christian life [page 408]. 

His early and brief studies in the schools, which had failed to deeply engage his heart and had soon been interrupted, could not in the nature of the case have contributed largely to the fascinating eloquence afterward shown in him. It was by incessant exercise and self-discipline, in the actual performance of public service, that he came to be what he finally was; and the comparison of his earlier sermons with his later makes this apparent. His instructor in preaching, as in the entire conduct of his life, was simply the Love, toward God and man, which urged him to speak of the Lord's redemption, in the way most moving and most impressive. Enthusiasm gave him both the impulse and training . . . . The concentrated purpose detected and defined the appropriate methods [pages 382-3]. 
(Bernard of Clairvaux: The Times, the Man and His Work, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1892). 

The example of St. Bernard, and so many others, means that the Academy can provide valuable resources, but it cannot make the heart of a true theologian: 'It is living, dying, and even being condemned which makes a theologian - not reading, speculating and understanding, states Martin Luther.' "To be a real theologian is to wrestle with none other than the living God - not with ideas about God, but with God himself. And how can a sinner ever hope to deal adequately with this God. If you want to be a real theologian, Luther insists, you must have experienced a sense of condemnation. You must have had a moment of insight, in which your realize just how sinful you really are, and how much you merit the condemnation of God" (The Renewal of Anglicanism, Alister McGrath, SPCK, London, 1993, page 87). 

The example of Bernard illustrates that sermon classes are not crucially essential to those called to preach. Their danger is artificiality, over-directive influences and formation in the image of the tutor, and, additionally, overmuch, even overweening, attention to performance and oneself. Attention to acceptable preaching and increasing pulpit experience will be the principal proof of the validity of the divine call. In so many things Christian in our era, priority is given to technique rather than the marvelous enduements of the Holy Spirit, and nauseating celebrity-ism is the dangerous fruit. 

Our sole reliance as faithful believers is solely upon our gracious God who strengthens our conviction and courage through Scripture, Sacrament, and Spirit, impressing his reality and reliability upon us thereby as we consider his revelation reflectively. And so we pray,

​Blessed Lord, you who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our instruction: Help us so to hear them, to read, note, learn, and inwardly digest them that, by patience and comfort of your holy Word, we may embrace and forever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent.