The Narrow Path

  Saturday, December 31, 2022 Psalm 83 Isaiah 31 John 2:13-25 Observance: John Wyclif, teacher and reformer (d. 1384) But Jesus on His part would not entrust Himself to them, because He knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for He knew what was in everyone. There is a very great difference between the God of the Bible and any other god. Whether we are talking about another religion, or a spirituality, or even no opinion on the matter at all, everyone worships some god. Spiritualities without a god worship the god of self: they are each and every one a never ending labyrinth trod in an ultimately vain effort for self-enlightenment, or self-improvement. Other religions worship a god invented by men: any religion that does not worship the God of the Bible is either overly mystic, where the spiritual myths are taught with the intention to convey human philosophical and moral principles; or they enforce blind faith in an invisible entity th...

  Friday, December 30, 2022 Psalms 148; 149 Isaiah 30:29-31:9 John 2:1-12 Observance: Josephine Butler, social reformer (d. 1905) The LORD takes pleasure in His people. Often we will come across parts of scripture that seem confusing. Often that will be something that Jesus has said. Often that will be because it seems like He is speaking in a different conversation to everyone else. Today’s response to His mother Mary is one of those moments. Some interpreters have tried to smooth over Jesus’ tone, by suggesting that the word we have translated as “woman” is a term of endearment, that only seems rough because we have not translated it well. This is not actually the case; the word is not an ancient synonym for “mummy dearest”: Jesus is being short with Mary. So, Jesus seems to want Mary (and our author wants us) to understand that the next words out of His mouth are going to be important: we need to understand what is going through His mind. Look at ...

  Thursday, December 29, 2022 Psalm 145 Isaiah 30:15-28 John 1:35-51 And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it”. One of the advantages of being an Anglican is that we are allowed to try out all different ways of being a Christian. We sift through the wheat for the grains. We take the meat and leave the bones. We dig through the Christmas pudding of global and historical expressions of Christianity for the silver florin. While this type of spirituality is of course not restricted to Anglicanism, we particularly are encouraged to do this. Just look at our lectionary: we will observe a special day for Julian of Norwich, the medieval mystic par excellence , and then turn to a pioneer of Puritan Reformed theology such as John Bunyan. If we were to start with medieval mysticism, we would find an expression of Christianity very focused on the interior. There is a sen...

  Wednesday, December 28, 2022 Psalms 143; 146 Isaiah 30:1-14 John 1:19-34 Observance: Holy Innocents “ Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” This entire proclamation made by John the Baptist might as well be our memory verse. So much of the beauty of the Lord Jesus is packed into just a few sentences. Let’s sit with this just the first line this morning. Our author already got our heads into thinking about Moses and the Exodus; there was a lamb there, too. But while that first Passover lamb served as protection from God’s wrath, John the Baptist’s Lamb does more: it also takes away sin. We have a reference here to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. If this chapter is not embedded into your memory yet, then do take the time to let it marinade. The Suffering Servant is an explicit prophesy about Jesus’ Passion; that moment of atonement He made on the cross, where God’s wrath and judgement was bore upon His shoulders in our ste...

  Tuesday, December 27, 2022 Psalm 140 Isaiah 29:13-24 John 1:1-18 Observance: John, apostle and evangelist And the Word became flesh, and pitched His tent amongst us. Yesterday, we heard deacon Stephen interpret the Old Testament Christologically. Today, we read a passage which is explicitly Christological: one of the greatest Christological passages of the Bible, in fact. John, an eyewitness who beheld the glory of Christ, spent a lot of time and effort putting these words together for us, and the result is some of the most beautiful koine Greek ever committed to papyrus. John begins his Gospel with the loaded phrase “in the beginning”. Just as Stephen showed us how Christ is revealed in the Old Testament, so too does John. He uses the Greek word “logos”, which translates literally to “word”, because it means so much to the ancient Greek world. A “logos” is a word, and it is also the act of speaking that word, and it is also a total knowledge and underst...

  Monday, December 26, 2022 Psalms 2; 110 Isaiah 29:1-12 Acts 6:1-7; 7:1-49 Observance: Stephen, deacon and first martyr Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? We all have a series of biases we take to any media we consume, that influence our opinions and understandings of that media. There is no such thing as a neutral position. What we should be doing is deciding where we will place our biases, or, through what “lens” will we view the world, and recognise this when we read scripture and ask the Holy Spirit to explain it to us. We begin our Christmastide on a strong footing: Stephen, the first martyr, and listed as a member of the first cohort ordained to the ministry of service, had a very encouraging understanding of how the Old Testament worked. Stephen viewed the Old Testament through a certain lens, and he was unashamed of that. In fact, he gladly...

  Saturday, December 24, 2022 Psalms 130; 131; 133 Isaiah 28:14-29 Galatians 3:23-4:7 Observance: Fourth Saturday in Advent But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul within me is like a weaned child. This world, which our good God made and blessed just for us, can be so dark at times. It can all get more than a little overwhelming. Usually, there is nothing we can do about it, either. The weather is too strong; illnesses actively outsmart our best efforts at a cure; there is always a darker place the human spirit can go. The Lord Jesus, the One who knows about all this from personal experience, teaches us that our attitude needs to be focused on the Father. God wants us to trust utterly in Him. God wants to take this trust and wield it as His instrument of blessing and healing in the world. Tomorrow we will celebrate the incarnation. Tomorrow is the day when we celebrate that day two thousand years ago, when ...

  Friday, December 23, 2022 Psalms 123; 130 Isaiah 28:1-13 Mark 13:14-47 Observance: Fourth Friday in Advent Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. While our Sunday readings take us onwards to the manger holding the baby incarnate God, our daily morning readings are taking us to the cross where that same incarnate God bore the sins of the world. But before we get to either the cross or the manger, we need to recognise one of the main sources that prove the claim that Jesus is who He says He is. This claim relies on fulfilled prophecy. The Old Testament is filled with prophecy predicting the coming of Christ, and Christ Himself makes many prophecies while walking this earth. As the letter to the Hebrews states explicitly, Jesus holds (amongst other titles) the office of prophet. This particular passage we have come across this morning was used by the first Christians to prove to the world that Jesus held this office of prop...

  Thursday, December 22, 2022 Psalm 118:1-18 Isaiah 27:1-13 Mark 12:41-13:13 Observance: Fourth Thursday in Advent With the LORD on my side I do not fear; what can mortals do to me? Mark’s gospel, the rocket trip from baptism to cross, has managed to pack so much in during this short ride. Jesus is now in His final week, travelling around Jerusalem, stirring things up with those who love themselves and their darkness. What can mere humans like you or I do against such dark power? Such rage, selfishness, and hatred of God, that infests the world from the corridors of power down to the fence we share with our neighbour? “ When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say, but say whatever is given to you at that time, for it is not you who speak but the Holy Spirit.” Jesus has spent our time out in the countryside teaching us to follow Him, to trust Him, to obey Him and love Him. Now He is emphasisi...

  Wednesday, December 21, 2022 Psalms 120; 121 Isaiah 26:1-19 Mark 12:28-40 Observance: Fourth Wednesday in Advent; Thomas, apostle and martyr “ When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, He said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” What does it mean to “love”? There are many things in our lives we could claim to love without really thinking about it, that we would answer by reflex. Do we love our mum? Our home? Our friends? Our car? This love reflex is not a bad thing. It means our hearts work. We are made in the image of God, which means the instinct to love is built into our very being. To love is who we are. What about a thoughtful love? The type of love that takes effort. The kind of effort we make when we want to build the love relationship into more than just a reflex. The fact that “marriage counsellor” is a full-time job would suggest that we humans also have the instinct to see love as something worth putting effort into. The gre...

  Tuesday, December 20, 2022 Psalms 114; 115 Isaiah 19:16-20:6 Mark 12:13-27 Observance: Fourth Tuesday in Advent “ Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Politics is a funny business. So many serious-looking men and women with serious looks on their faces making serious statements. Once every few years, a whole load of opinions come out of the woodwork and battle it out in an attempt to convince everyone that only one opinion is the correct one. It is a bit of fun to get swept up in the carnival, but like most things, too much can be bad for our health. Some people try to enforce their political opinion as it being God’s will: this is where the Pharisees were coming from. They wanted Jesus to affirm their politics, that the Roman Empire was bad for the people. The Herodians, on the other hand, wanted Jesus to affirm their position, that the Roman Empire was good for business. But we read that they are...

  Monday, December 19, 2022 Psalms 110, 111 Isaiah 19:1-18 Mark 11:27-12:12 Observance: Fourth Monday in Advent “ By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority to do them?” The word “authority” seems to have fallen out of fashion (although the concept itself is more popular than ever). We like to think of the concept of equality as a virtue; that a healthy society is one in which no one person has authority over another. But there is always that side of human nature that likes to get one up over someone else, and so we still have things like blasphemy laws (not the spiritual type; rather, the type that protect certain interest groups), the age old mechanism of social banishment and exclusion, and myriad other ways of making sure we are able to make someone else know their place. In the age of democracy and decolonisation, when the various Commonwealth dominions began to exercise self-determination (such as our own nation), we st...

  Saturday, December 17, 2022 Psalm 86 Isaiah 17:1-11 Mark 10:46-11:11 Observance: Third Saturday in Advent “ Take heart; get up, He is calling you.” One of the (many) wonderful things about God is that God gets to decide what happens. The Psalms sing about God controlling the weather and the planets; our readings through the prophet Isaiah reveal how God gets to decide which empire is on top at any given point in history. In previous readings through Mark, we have heard Jesus talk explicitly about what He is going to go through when He gets to Jerusalem. This control Jesus wields over His own destiny is revealed in greater detail in John’s account of the trial and crucifixion. Jesus is God; God is in control; God gets to exercise His will however and whenever He pleases. Just as God decides on whether the sun will rise or not, who will win the next election, or whether the fridge will keep our milk cold tonight, God also gets to decide who is drawn into H...

  Friday, December 16, 2022 Psalms 11; 14 Isaiah 47:5-15 Mark 10:32-45 Observance: Third Friday in Advent Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. On balance, life is pretty good. There are friends and family around, plenty of feasting, and the kingdom is growing everywhere we look. Sure, there are enemies around, people who are jealous at our joy, and who celebrate over our mourning. But overall, things are looking up. Then, Jesus turns towards Jerusalem. All His critics, His enemies, those who would do Him harm, the deadly lines of human greed and selfish power, all centred on the holy city. This is where Jesus wants to go. Of course there was amazement and fear: at the risk, the danger of what could be. But this is the mission for which Jesus came to fulfil. He must go there. He must expose the love humans have for darkness and death by contrasting it with His glorious light and life. And He must...

  Thursday, December 15, 2022 Psalm 9 Isaiah 15 Mark 10:17-31 Observance: Third Thursday in Advent Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Here we are, about the half-way point of Advent, well and truly into our spiritual detox routine. Hopefully we have all discovered more places where God is shining into our lives, and that some of the dirt and muck that has been picked up under our feet during this pilgrimage has been wiped away. This pursuit towards holiness is a beautiful journey, difficult but rewarding, and commended all throughout scripture as the highest calling open to human beings. But let’s not be dismayed by the difficulties that can hide the beauty and reward. Relying on our own effort to get back to God is the story of failure, told in two parts. One part is the fact that self-reliance can become pride. Are we at risk of becoming confused at the source of our success, and patting ourselves on the back and ...

  Wednesday, December 14, 2022 Psalms 108; 109:20-30 Isaiah 14:3-23 Mark 10:1-16 Observances: Third Wednesday in Advent; John of the Cross, mystic and teacher (d. 1591) And He took them up in His arms, laid His hands on them, and blessed them. What a series of contrasts we have been shown over the past few days in regards to faith. Jesus’ statement, standing on the water, to be not just not afraid, but bold and courageous, for He is God; His teaching on the kingdom as beginning from just a little seed and growing into the biggest of trees; of a faith that, gotten through prayer, can defeat all the forces of darkness. Now He is asking us to have the faith of little children. Little children who, by the way, are taken up in His arms and blessed. His instruction about the faith of a child is directly related to the teaching on divorce. Not as regards the specifics of marriage, however. Instead, we see He is as much concerned about the what as He is the how. H...

  Tuesday, December 13, 2022 Psalms 101; 102:1-11 Isaiah 13:1-13 Mark 9:33-50 Observance: Third Tuesday in Advent; Lucy, martyr and virgin (d. 304) Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another. Today contains another one of those moments where Jesus’ teachings show Him to be much more than a two-dollar self-help guru. If we only read this passage lightly, we might miss what separates Him from human teachers. Jesus teaches us to remove those things in our lives which are obstacles to holiness. He also warns us against placing obstacles in front of others. Certainly, this is something everyone can agree on. But He then takes it further: if parts of your body cause you to sin, chop them off. And if someone places an obstacle in front of someone else, then the mobsters execution (attached to concrete and dropped in the ocean) would be getting off easy. This is why Jesus’ teaching is elevated; why it could only come from the mouth of Go...

  Monday, December 12, 2022 Psalms 99; 100 Isaiah 10:33 – 11:9 Mark 9:2 – 32 Observance: Third Monday in Advent “ I believe; help my unbelief” What do we mean when we talk about “belief”? Or “faith”? Is it a gut feeling? Or maybe a strong sense of intellectual assent? Maybe it is a strong inclination towards one over the other. When times are good, the gut feeling can be quite pleasant, like a warm bath on a cold night, or a cold drink on a hot day. When times are not so good, we can find ourselves clinging on the edge of the cliff by the fingertips of our minds. Some people seem to have a very deep, strong faith. They can be an encouragement; to know that there are people out there that really believe in all this stuff. They can also sometimes be confronting and threatening: this is usually the result from us comparing ourselves in our mind to others. Being with someone who has greater faith than ourselves can make us feel like we must be missing o...

  Saturday, December 10, 2022 Psalms 92; 93 Isaiah 10:12-32 Mark 8:27-9:1 Observance: Second Saturday in Advent But who do you say that I am? Everyone has some sort of spiritual need. Not the selfish type, as if we could go to a store that sold spiritual goods, and we could pick off the shelf that which we think we need. Rather, a spiritual need deep within, that universal yearning for the God Who Loves Us that is inside every human being. Some need the Jesus who is the Perfect Man. A human being, just like us, who went through the same suffering, the same existential crisis, the same temptations, yet responded to them all perfectly. The Person that we would like to be. Others need the Jesus who is God. The King of Kings, the One who made everything and upholds everything by the word of His power. The Supreme Being who is perfectly good. Jesus is both at once, which is the marvel and miracle of the incarnation, and the reason why Christmas is s...

  Friday, December 9, 2022 Psalms 11; 14 Isaiah 9:18-10:11 Mark 8:14-26 Observance: Second Friday in Advent “ Watch out – beware the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.” There is a funny little mini-phenomena that happens to school leavers once they finish high school. No matter what the size of the place in which they finish school, they want to move somewhere bigger. Kids in Rockhampton want to move to Brisbane. Kids in Brisbane want to move to Melbourne. Kids in Melbourne want to move to Brisbane – after a successful career overseas. Jesus is warning us of the allure of the bright lights and the big city, and He was certainly in the position for His opinion on this topic to be respected. Here He was, a carpenter, a skilled artisan. He could be as upwardly mobile as He liked. But He preferred to stay out in the boonies, travelling between the villages dotted around the Sea of Galilee. We know He was financially comfortable: at His crucifixion,...

  Thursday, December 8, 2022 Psalm 9 Isaiah 9:2-17 Mark 8:1-13 Observances: Second Thursday in Advent; The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Richard Baxter, pastor and spiritual writer (d. 1691) And He sighed deeply in His spirit and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.” There was a great teacher of Reformed theology, now with the Lord, who was once asked if he was one of those people who took the Bible literally. “Do I take the Bible literally?” he responded, “Well of course I take the Bible literally, because it is literature.” He was the type of man who liked to pull words, phrases and thoughts apart to really dig into their meaning. But while it may be a throwaway line used to begin a public address with some levity, there has been a temptation in Christianity to over-spiritualise our faith. Perhaps not so much during the primeval church, when there were still eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ...

  Wednesday, December 7, 2022 Psalm 90 Isaiah 8:5-9:1 Mark 7:24-37 Observances: Second Wednesday in Advent; Ambrose of Milan, bishop and teacher (d. 397) He has done everything well. If you wanted a job that would make you a lot of money without having to work very hard for it, being a self-help guide would have to be up there as one of the top contenders. One of Australia’s top-selling books is about investing money. Heathen forms of spirituality, like Buddhism and other hodge-podge mixes from the subcontinent are on the rise here as well. The materialist counterparts of secular atheism and statism are all about trying to make people “good” by changing the society itself. We all know how to be good people. That is not the problem. All these seekers are looking in the wrong place, because the problem is that we don’t want to be good people. All the intellectual information in the world cannot compete with a heart that really wants to have the last piece of...

  Tuesday, December 6, 2022 Psalm 86 Isaiah 7:18-8:4 Mark 7:1-23 Observance: Second Tuesday in Advent; Nicholas of Myra, bishop and philanthropist (d. c. 342) There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. When Jesus spoke these words and declared all foods clean, He was abrogating the need to follow ancient Jewish dietary laws, not common sense. Those leftover nachos that have been sitting in the back of the fridge for a week are certainly not “clean”, ritually or otherwise, despite how much you turn over these words of our Lord. In another place, Jesus teaches us that the mouth speaks what the heart is full of (Luke 6:45). There is a relationship between what we consume and how our soul is affected. But it is not the mechanical relationship imagined by Jesus’ critics. For example, consuming distasteful media does not render us automatically incapable of approaching the throne of God in prayer....

  Monday, December 5, 2022 Psalms 82; 84 Isaiah 7:1-17 Mark 6:30-56 Observance: Second Monday in Advent But immediately He spoke to them and said, “Be courageous, I AM, do not fear.” You may find that the sentence for this morning reads differently to your Bible. That is because this is a personal translation of the original Greek. When Jesus calls out to the disciples and identifies Himself, He uses the Greek term ego eimi : I Am. It is the same term that John records Him using in that Gospel, which is exactly the same way God referred to Himself when Moses met Him at the Burning Bush: “I Am who I Am.” The fact that the disciples did not understand about the miracle of the loaves is coupled with the fact that Jesus self-identifies as God. That is, there is something about the miracle of the loaves that reveals something about who God is like as a Person. Perhaps we can understand quite easily the first half of the miracle of the loaves. Jesus had just lo...