A Meditation on Mark 1:4-11

In hindsight, Jesus’ willingness to associate with sinners in John’s baptism (Mk. 1:9-11) should not shock us. The cross, after all, reveals how far he was willing to go in this association. He did not simply join the group and let himself be categorized with them; he actually took their sins upon his shoulders, bearing the weight of shame and guilt, and gave himself as the offering for sin. Paul goes so far as to say, “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (II Corinthians 5:21).

We desperately need this message of grace. We need it for ourselves, because only when we realize that Christ stands fully beside us, even in our sin, will we have hope that we have been received by God. Because of Christ’s willingness to identify with us and shoulder the blame for our worst deeds, we stand secure. We also need this message of grace to train us to look at others rightly. Like Jesus, we are called to stand close to sinners (even those we dislike!), not pointing our fingers in accusation, but instead identifying with them, not ashamed to be associated with them. In doing this, we hope to draw them to the only one strong enough to bear their guilt and shame—Christ.

But Christ also will judge the sins of the world. This profound grace—Christ associating with sinners—is not a license to continue in sin or to justify sin. He calls us away from our sin and gives us the Holy Spirit to transform us into his own character. This transformation may be slower than we hope (and we need forgiveness every day in the process!), but we are still called to holiness and equipped in the Spirit to keep walking towards the Sun of Righteousness.

Some churches spend all their time talking about the call to holiness and rebuking sin where they see it, so much so that it is difficult to hear that God is patient and gracious, that Christ stands beside us in the river with compassion, and that we are truly forgiven. Others, erring in the opposite direction, so distort the message of grace that things that are actually sin are called good. We could call these two tendencies the errors of fundamentalism and the errors of liberalism (a theological, not political, use of the term!). In Martin Luther’s metaphor, we can fall off one side of the horse or the other.

The church should say “yes” to grace while still saying “yes” to holiness, because this is what Christ does. This “double yes” helps us view others rightly (Do we view our enemies as recipients of grace? Do we view our friends as called to holiness?), but it must first begin in our own lives and families. This means we must seek holiness with every fiber of our being. Yet it also means that we need not fear our failures, because Christ is more gracious than we have ever dreamed. Our hope is in Christ’s holiness, not our own (thus we rejoice that he gives us his own standing before the Father without us earning it), but we are stilled called to imitate him! In our struggle to obey God, Jesus meets us, neither excusing our sin nor rejecting our plea for mercy. Instead, he says to us in that moment, “I stand beside you in these waters, and I offer you my perfect life for your own.”

Steven+