In 2014, South Park released an episode. A sermon is starting well when it’s the gospel according to South Park. South Park released an episode about a pandemic of gluten, of course, and it’s a major problem. As the climax comes, Cartman gets a dream of the answer. The answer is he calls up the health guys, and you get this scene where they’re standing there and he says, “The secret is in the pyramid.” He says, “No, the pyramid is ancient. You’re dealing with ancient things.” And he says, “No, it’s the food pyramid. The secret’s in the food pyramid; it’s upside down.”
They say, “We can’t do this. It’s not FDA approved.” They do it. They turn it upside down. And they say, “Quick, it’s becoming mealtime on the East Coast. You must act now.” So they turn the food pyramid upside down. He reports back, “Nutrition is stabilizing, sir.” And then as it all settles, he says, “Oh my goodness, tell the president he can have some steak with his butter tonight.” And the problem is solved. It’s a classic, fun way of dealing with some contemporary issues.
Of course, some of you know where I might be going with this. This year, RFK Jr., who’s heading up health in the United States, got up fairly recently and he presented his new food pyramid to the world, of which he said the food pyramid is upside down. If only he had known South Park had the answer 10 years earlier to American nutrition. Of course, the problem is much more nuanced than just being upside down. One of the challenges here is that there’s lots of politics wrapped up in it. I think one of the challenges is we have had a major problem with the structure of the food pyramid. Many of us know there are complexities in that. It’s not as simple as what it was first presented. In fact, much of our education system has still used parts of the food pyramid. But we know it’s more complex than that.
We know that the idea that you should eat lots of grains was an oversimplification of sugars and carbohydrates. We know that the conversation around fats was an oversimplification of different kinds of fats. What happened was we built this really simple system that was more complex than we thought. It’s become an issue where we have believed something that we thought to be true, and because of this oversimplification, much of it wasn’t as true as we thought. The reality is this happens in our world and our lives all the time.
I saw a video of a nutritionist time traveler who goes back in time and tells this guy, “We just found out you can’t eat eggs. Don’t eat any eggs.” It’s going to cause heart disease. Get rid of the eggs. Just as he is about to get rid of eggs, they come back and say, “Oh, change of plan. It’s just the egg yolk you can’t eat.” So they put the egg white back in front of him. As he’s about to eat it, they jump in and go, “Nope, nope, eggs are off the table again.” They jump back in a little while later and say, “Oh, we figured it out. It’s back.” Then the last time they jump in, he replaces it with a steak, and they jump back in and go, “Nope, none of that. It’s changed again.”
We have these ideas that come and go, and some of you have experienced that. Some of you will remember the days where it was said that eggs were unhealthy for you. We have this space where there are little bits of information we have that are truth and there are other bits that we are unsure of, and we make conclusions and then we refine our conclusions. It becomes complex and it becomes a complete undermining of things that we feel like we grew up to be true.
This is true throughout the history of faith, of belief in God. It’s true as we look through the whole Old Testament and God progressively reveals himself to his people. There’s a plan of revelation that unpacks more and more of the discovery of who God is by God’s own design. As that happens, we see more grasping of this bigger picture of who God is. The reality is we live in a world where we have grown up hearing things of faith that some of them are true and some of them are not completely the big picture, or they’ve been communicated poorly, or they’ve been understood poorly. Sometimes we get to a place where we think we know things about our faith that maybe we don’t know or we’ve come to misunderstand.
The reality is that we’re in a time in history where a significant part of the world has called itself Christian and has grown up in a Christian space hearing about Jesus. We feel like there are many people who have heard about Jesus but have never really understood who Jesus really is, who have called themselves Christian but not really ever recognized the Christ. We live in that space. In fact, they talk about the movement of deconstructionism, particularly in the United States but around the world, of people who grew up with a faith and now are deconstructing that faith and really ending up often in a place of rejecting the faith entirely because they’re saying these things don’t make sense. I think the challenge here is people are rejecting a Jesus who they think they know and maybe not the Jesus who he really is. Yet at the same time, we see in the Bible the stories of people who met Jesus face to face and still rejected him.
I want to talk this morning about the theme of unbelief, the monster that is unbelief. Because as we read the story in Mark 6, that’s exactly what happens. We get this story that we just read about Jesus going to his own hometown. People who thought they knew who he was. People who thought they knew who his family was. He showed up. What’s amazing in this story is he shows who he truly is in an obvious way, with undeniable evidence. He reveals who he is. That’s what we’re told. This is what we read in Mark chapter 6. He shows up in this whole town, he’s preaching, and we’re told many who heard him were amazed. They asked, “Where did he get all this wisdom and the power to perform such miracles?” The first thing we’re told in this story is that he shows up with undeniable evidence. This is not just people who have heard things down the track. They’re experiencing and witnessing it firsthand.
The familiarity that they think they have is the very thing that blinds them to who he really is.
The Monster of Unbelief
The Familiar Blinds Us
They stumble over the Jesus they think they know rather than seeing the Jesus that is before them. The familiarity that they think they have is the very thing that blinds them to who he really is. This is what it said in verse three. They just scoffed. “He’s just a carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon.” Those guys don’t get a mention very often. “And his sisters live right here amongst us.” The Jesus they think they know is the very thing that causes them to stumble over it. It’s interesting, isn’t it? This idea that a partial glimpse into who Jesus is or a vague understanding can be problematic.
We feel like sometimes at least if someone has started to grasp understanding, it gives us a doorway to explain more. But a misunderstanding of who Jesus is can be the very thing that challenges us to comprehend him totally. I was online on an account where someone had labeled themselves “Christian atheist.” That was their title for themself. Rightfully, someone said, “Explain your tag for me.” They were saying, “Look, I grew up in the church and I have a lot of love for the faith that I grew up in, and I think Jesus was a great guy and his teaching is phenomenal. I just don’t think he is God. So I’m an atheist. I don’t think there is a God, but I’m a Christian atheist because I like the teachings of Christianity.”
I’m sure you can see the challenge there. The challenge is if you think you love Jesus’ teaching, but he’s not who he says he is, you’ve misunderstood his teaching. In the story of the feeding of the 5,000, after Jesus feeds them, they come and find him again. He says, “You’re coming to find me not because you believe and you want me. You’re coming to find me because you want more of the thing I gave you, the food.” That’s not what it’s about. I’m not here to feed your stomachs. I want you to hunger after me, after who I truly am. Seeing half a glimpse of the human Jesus is to miss the point of who he truly is.
Often what’s a struggle for us are the other things that we’ve come to believe. If we’re going to say we don’t want to rely on that anymore, the question becomes what are the things that we are relying on? Part of the challenge has been that over time, we’ve felt like the things that seemed like they were inexplicable evidence from Jesus, things that we couldn’t explain, science has started to try to help us explain some of those things. What has happened over time, I think, is a feeling like if we can explain some of those things, like how the world works and that sort of picture, then we no longer need to believe in the fairy tale. I’m sure you’ve heard it. The classic line is the fairy in the sky or the imaginary father god that’s up there, the sky daddy. That kind of idea. We don’t need that because we have something else to rest our assurance on.
I think what we find time and time again is that the foundation that we think is a foundation without God is far more shaky than we’ve been led to believe. John Lennox, a mathematician, is one of the best. I love his teaching. He’s one of the best guys that wrestles with some of these kinds of issues. Frank Lee from our church is in the UK right now filming John Lennox, which is very exciting. John Lennox says there’s a media bias that has happened in our world around the picture of science. The media bias is that the media has proclaimed that science has won the day, that there are no more unanswered questions. Not that science doesn’t have more to discover. Everyone knows that. But there are no more unanswered questions. We’ve figured out where the world comes from. That’s solved. We don’t need a god anymore. There was an empty gap that people put the magic god into, and we don’t need that anymore. That’s a complete fallacy.
Science hasn’t won the day. Science and Christianity aren’t in competition with each other. The two fit comfortably together. There are far more leaps of faith happening in science than we have been led to believe. I heard recently about the DNA of apes and how the studies with the DNA of apes were compared with humans and showed significant similarities, something like a 3% difference between the DNA of humans and apes. It’s come out recently that the full genome of apes wasn’t studied back then. A chunk of the genome of apes was studied, but where there were missing gaps, they took the human genome and plunked it in there to create a bigger picture for the sake of a scientific study. The end result was, if you’re going to grab a chunk of human genomes and map it out alongside the gaps, of course, you’re going to have a higher percentage of similarities. But that hasn’t been communicated. What’s been communicated by guys like Richard Dawkins, who is enough of a scientist that he should have known better, is this has been solved. This is the answer. Look at this. Science has come back around in a circle and said, “Oh, wait. There’s more work to be done here, and this isn’t solved, and this isn’t the answer, and there’s more going on here.”
I think we live in a space where the familiar has started to cause us to undermine some things. It may be time for some of us, as we live in that space of doubt and confusion and working it out, to come for a fresh look at who Jesus is. The reality is that God has chosen to reveal himself through humanity, and he invites people, humans, to be his primary agents of communicating his grace in this world. The reality is that often we don’t get things right. You may be in a place of disbelief, of unbelief, because the church itself has failed you. And we have many times. We know the horrors that have happened in the name of Jesus that have been declared the work of him that have not been the work of him and have not been in his name truly. Sometimes what we think we know has undermined the real truth, and the familiar blinds us.
The Humble Offends Us
Or maybe it’s that the humble offends us. Something we see in this story is this reference to, “Isn’t he just the carpenter?” I don’t want to have a big go at tradies, but it gets that kind of vibe, doesn’t it? “You went to TAFE, not uni. He can’t be the guy that he says he is.” But there’s a bigger issue going on here with humility, and that is the way we would have to humble ourselves to acknowledge Jesus is who he says he is. That in itself becomes a great challenge. The God who became a human for the sake of humanity is a wrestle for us to grasp hold of. There are many who might be in that wrestle journey from backgrounds of other faiths that will find a direct wrestle with that.
My son Jet was talking to a friend of his who said he can’t believe in Jesus because a god can’t be born. Jesus was born, and therefore he can’t be God. There are those kinds of ideas that come, that the very idea of the humility of Jesus is a challenge for us. The humble might be the very thing that offends us. But what we see time and time again is God wears the mask of human weakness as he communicates his grace. There’s a picture of humility and sacrifice of a god who became human for the sake of humanity. That in itself is the very power of the kingdom. Constantly we see the kingdom turned on its head.
One of the things we see really clearly in this story is the monster of unbelief. It really truly is a monster in this picture. A monster with tentacles that seem to wrap itself into every nook and cranny. You know that idea of a plant that grows in a rock, and as the roots grow, even the biggest rocks can slowly be forced apart. We truly see the monster of unbelief in this story. I think it’s important for us to draw some distinctions there. This picture we see here is not a picture of doubt. Yet doubt might be the start of a place of unbelief. Doubt might be a question of, “I’m not sure. I can’t see the answer here.” This picture of unbelief is something where these people say, “I refuse even when I see.” When these roots get deep into the biggest rocks, they will start to pull them apart. That’s what we see happening in this story. This monster of unbelief. It’s deep and it’s powerful.
We see in verse six, “They were deeply offended and refused to believe in him.” You hear what’s going on there? There is a hardness of heart that has taken place that despite what they see, they are not willing to open their eyes. We get this idea that this is such a phenomenal thing, such a powerful thing that even Jesus himself marveled at their unbelief. There are only two times we’re told that Jesus marvels like that. One of them is at the centurion, a man of power, of leadership, and not a Jew, who has faith in Jesus. We’re told Jesus marvels at his faith. And here, this unbelief, which is to say the power and miracle of belief we see in the centurion is an incredible wonder, but so is the power and monster of unbelief. Charles Spurgeon calls it the sad wonder, the incredible power of it. We witness that, we experience that as the monster of unbelief.
The foundation that we think is a foundation without God is far more shaky than we’ve been led to believe.
The Ministry of Belief
But this story doesn’t leave us just in that monster of unbelief, because we continued on to the next story that Mark follows through, and he moves on from the monster of unbelief to the ministry of belief. We actually see as we look at these two stories this great contrast with them. There’s a contrast with the unbelief of Nazareth and the journey of the disciples as they work out who this Jesus is. We watched that clip from The Chosen. I mentioned it in a sermon recently. I just love the way they portray that journey of the disciples going out on ministry. We don’t see it in, we don’t know exactly what that was like for them. We don’t get that kind of description in the Bible. Maybe they were much more confident and felt like they knew what they were doing as God’s spirit sent them out. But we know as we follow the journey of the disciples, they really still haven’t at this point figured out what the heck is going on.
So it makes sense that at some level they’ve gone out with this incredible power. God’s using them in an incredible way. It feels like The Chosen portrays it well that while their mouths utter gospel truths, their eyes say, “I can’t believe what is happening in front of me.” If that’s true, there’s this huge contrast between unbelief and just this disbelief in what God is doing, just incredible before them.
Reliance Is The Foundation Of Belief
What we do see in them is God tells them that they need to rely on him. The foundation for belief is a humility to recognize we need something more than ourselves. As he sends his disciples out for a ministry of belief, he says to them, he told them, “Take no money for their journey. Take nothing except a walking stick, no food, no traveler’s bag, no money.” They are told to rely on him. In fact, it’s quite extreme reliance in this story for this journey. Once again, The Chosen brings that out where they’re like, “What? Not even a change of clothes?” We get this picture of extreme reliance. We get a picture of being a traveler, that they’re not at home in this world and that they’re asked to move from place to place. We get this other picture that when they show up to a town and they’re welcomed, they should stay in that one house. So we don’t just get a picture of a traveler. We also get a picture of people who are deeply rooted in community, deeply rooted in loving the people who they’re connected to. Their foundation they’re given is that they rely on God while they live in this world in community loving people. Those two things are happening at the same time, and reliance becomes the foundation of belief.
The Sending Empowers Belief
It’s the sending of their ministry that is the power of their belief. This story contrasts “take nothing,” and yet Jesus has given them everything. He’s given them everything they need. One, he’s been telling them the gospel truth that they can then go out and tell others. You can imagine that most of what they’re doing is just repeating as best they can some of the parables that they’ve heard him say. It’s quite a phenomenon as you hear the journey through the Bible of them trying to understand the parables that here they are out teaching, and they’re still wrestling with it themselves. But that’s true for us, isn’t it? We often feel that challenge that if we’re to answer questions about our faith, what if we don’t get it right? What if I’m still learning things myself? Yet God empowers his people. He uses his people. He invites his people. That sending is part of what empowers belief. It’s part of what grows us in him and our trust in him.
Jesus didn’t send them out with nothing. In fact, in this story, we’re given quite explicitly, he’s given them authority over evil spirits. In that clip we watched from The Chosen, we edited it down a little for the sake of time, but the disciples come back to it. They say, “Tell us again what you were saying about healing and casting out spirits?” Jesus tells them to take nothing, but he sends them with everything they need: his authority, his calling. The sending empowers them. But they are encouraged that on the back of Jesus’ story of being rejected by his hometown, that unbelief is so powerful that we will meet unbelief. Like the great modern philosopher Taylor Swift says, Jesus says, “Shake it off.” He says, “Shake the dust off your shoes.” If they say you’ve got nothing in your brain, you shake it off. Jesus said it first.
There will be times where people will meet unbelief. Even in Jesus’ own ministry, I’m always marveling at this story and how Jesus has done incredible things right in front of people. Jesus is right there, and yet people don’t believe. In fact, the quirky thing in this story says he could do nothing in that town except heal a few people. You think, if you showed up in any town and healed a few people, you wouldn’t say, “I did nothing.” That’s a pretty successful ministry trip for most people. But the limitation that happens on his ministry is not because he doesn’t have the power to do it, but because the opportunity for him to work has not been presented. There’s a limitation on ministry that happens when we come to unbelief. There’s a place for us to take courage in that in our own belief. I think one of the thoughts that people have around evidence of the gospel is the fact that there are other religions and there are people who don’t believe. I’ve heard people say that’s evidence that if God was real, everyone would just believe. But the Bible makes it clear that there is a rebellion in human hearts that rejects even the obvious.
The very word means turn around. And so the disciples’ message is anchored in this invitation. The kingdom of God is near. Turn back.
Repentance Is The Foundation For Belief
The story ends here, bringing us back to a heart issue. It says the disciples went out, verse 12, “telling everyone they met to repent of their sins and turn to God.” I find the word repentance difficult in a contemporary space. I think we have that picture of the homeless man with an A-frame that says, “Repent, the end is near.” Those are the very words we hear in the Bible, except it’s become this picture of a heartless, emotionless, disconnected message. That isn’t the message of “Repent, the end is near.” It’s not a message of saying you’re out and it’s done. It’s a message of turning back. It’s a message of invitation, which is the true message of repentance. The very word means “turn around.” The disciples’ message is anchored in this invitation. The kingdom of God is near. Turn back.
We see through so many people the miracle of belief that God works in people to defeat that monster of unbelief and call them back to him. I think there’s a challenge for us as we think about that heart issue. There is a call when we are in a place of rebellion and turning away from God. There is a call for that radical 180-degree turn, to turn our eyes from living for ourselves to turning back to him. The picture of reliance is to turn our eyes off relying on ourselves and turn them to our Savior. That’s something that maybe you’re in a place that that’s what God is calling you to. A place of saying, “I need to turn around. I need to turn to him.”
There’s also a journey for us all as we live out the life of following Jesus. There’s a constant turning back to him, that we constantly let our eyes drift from him and we turn to other things. The Bible tells us things like, “Confess your sins to one another.” One of the ways we do that as a church is through the community we have in our church together and also in our small groups. I asked myself the question years ago, what does confessing your sins look like to each other? It feels like when you hear that, you need to write down a list of things and hand them to each other and say, “Here’s the things that I’ve done wrong this week.”
I think in reality what it looks like much more day-to-day with us in communion together is sharing with each other the things that we wrestle with. As we do our connect groups, this often happens. It’s talking about, “This is what the Bible is calling us to,” and someone will say, “I really struggle with that. I find that difficult.” I think that is a true confessing of our wrestle in our sin. I don’t think it needs to be, “Here’s the five sins I did on Tuesday, and let’s turn back to them.” Yet on a daily basis, we are called to constantly recognize our failures and constantly be turning our eyes back to God, because repentance is the foundation for belief. It is the foundation for recognizing we need him and we can’t do it on our own. His name is Jesus. His name is Jesus. His name is Jesus.