Accepting the Mandate

by Ken Francis

(Based on Luke 4:14-21; Nehemiah 8)

In the last months and weeks leading up to the birth of our first child I realised that I’d better get serious about being a father.  I wanted to be a great father – the best ever – and I wanted to get it right, right?  So I did what most men do … no, actually, I did what most men won’t do: I got a manual.  I got a book, actually.  I can’t remember where, or why I chose this book, but its title was promising: it was called The Effective Father, by Gordon MacDonald.


It proved pretty effective, and, in fact, I referred to it often over the next twenty years.  It worked through a series of chapters using a series of insightful metaphors, and one which stood out, and stands out to this day – which is why I’m labouring through this lengthy intro – was about ‘accepting the mandate’.

Bit of an unpopular word, ‘mandate’, in these times!

But MacDonald suggested that, obvious though it seems, many fathers – and I guess mothers too – don’t consciously accept the mandate of parenthood.  They drift into it, become kind of accidental parents.  It’s easy to become a father, wrote MacDonald, but much harder to be a father, so we need to thoughtfully embrace the task.  Too many male parents, he wrote, and not enough effective fathers.  And he called this taking of the role seriously, and responsibly, ‘accepting the mandate’.

We have to accept the mandate in lots of other ways, too.  Everyone does, whether consciously or not.  Sometimes my wife asks me to do a task that I have just no interest in doing.  I inwardly groan and do my best to … not have heard her.  And weeks or months can go by.  Depending how much she hassles me.  To actually get that task done – whether my heart’s in it or not – I have to embrace it in my psyche.  Say, yep, I register that she wants me to do this.  Ok.  I’ll commit.  I will address myself to the task first thing tomorrow, and I’ll … Get it?  That’s accepting the mandate!

Epiphany … is a funny word.  Not commonly used nowadays.  I’ve only just been learning what it means.  I previously thought having an epiphany was like having a brainwave.  A ‘lightbulb’ moment.  But epiphany, I’ve learned this past month, means a ‘revealing’ or a ‘manifestation’.  A ‘coming out’, you might say, in modern parlance.  The epiphany of Jesus the Christ had him revealed, first of all, as a baby, when the wise men visited him; then, at his baptism; then (as per last week) at the wedding of Cana; and today we’re looking at another ‘coming out’, when Jesus reveals himself as Messiah in his home town, Nazareth.  Another epiphany.

I wondered why a person, particularly a Messiah, needs so many epiphanies.  Shouldn’t one be enough?  And then I saw the naivety of that.  In a sense, Jesus was revealing, manifesting himself to a new group every time he spoke to a new group.  To the Magi he was being revealed to the world, as it were.  At his baptism he was being revealed as “my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”.  In the Nazareth synagogue he reveals himself to his family and friends and townsfolk, and announces, “You can’t think of me as just the carpenter’s son any more.  I’m actually the guy that these Scriptures in Isaiah – and all the other Prophets – are referring to.”  His society was not best pleased, but he had to get it out there.  These people hadn’t been at the Jordan, where he’d been baptised; or at Cana, at the wedding.

The timing is a bit problematic.  Did this event happen before or after the wedding at Cana?  Or even before or after his baptism?  [The wedding at Cana is only related in the Gospel of John; this morning’s event only in Luke.  The baptism comes to us in all Gospels, but in different sequences.] The question of timing is interesting though, because Jesus was conscious of timing – remember his comment to Mary at Cana, that “my hour has not yet come”?  Quite often in the Gospels we hear Jesus saying his hour had not yet come (John 7:30, for example), and a couple of times he even announces “the hour has come” (notably in John 17).

What Dr Luke does tell us is, Jesus was baptised in the Jordan, north of Jerusalem, as a thirty-year-old; he immediately went into the wilderness, probably south of Jerusalem, to fast for forty days and to face various temptations; then immediately, at least in Luke’s telling, he turns up in the old home town, a long way north west of Jerusalem.  Jesus was on a schedule, and he was very aware of what it was and where he was in it, and today, in Nazareth, he very much knows what he’s doing.  He is coming out to his home town.

And another small piece of background: it turns out that it was common – a weekly custom, actually – for certain Scriptures to be read out in synagogues at certain times of the year.  There was a Jewish calendar of readings, etc, just as we follow our lectionary in the Anglican Church – possibly initiated by that incident in the Book of Nehemiah, where the people of that day listened to the Scriptures read out and responded with such wild enthusiasm.  Jesus would have known this, and I suspect he chose this particular Sabbath in Nazareth on purpose, where he could use this passage from the book of Isaiah to leverage this particular epiphany!  Do you think?

I have another angle to bring to this reflection.  It occurred to me that in standing up like this to announce himself to Nazareth – and, previously, to the crowd on the banks of Jordan – he was accepting the mandate!  He realised he had an incredible cosmic responsibility, not unlike the of course less cosmic example of becoming a father or mother, that needed more than just a drift into it.  He needed to embrace the task ahead of him, consciously; commit to it … in the public hearing.  Not to do so might lead to half-heartedness; a being caught in two minds at key moments; a lack of commitment when it really mattered; and ultimate failure.  He had to grasp the nettle, as we say – or accept the mandate – for his own sake as well as for we who have been redeemed …
A commitment, by the way, that he had to sternly and determinedly re-embrace quite often, at other times in his ministry … most markedly in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his execution.

And, by the way, I think this partly answers another question that has been wondered from this pulpit from time to time: before he commenced his ministry, did Jesus really understand who he was?  If my thinking is correct, he probably did have an awareness of a special calling, but it was only at Jordan and then at Nazareth that he accepted the mandate, saying, “Yep!  I accept this role that has been given to me.  I consciously embrace it.  I am the Messiah, promised in the Prophets and born to ensure the success of my Father’s plan of redemption.  I now embrace it, and acknowledge it publicly.”

Does this strategic moment in the life and ministry of Jesus have anything to say to us here this morning in 2022?
Apart from it being a pretty fascinating story, I think it tells us a lot about Jesus’s calling, and hence ours, and it also shows us how he seized upon his task.  Have you accepted your mandate?  Do you have any inkling of the calling God has chosen you for?  Have you ever stood up (in your heart of hearts) and said, “Yes, I embrace what Jesus did for me on the cross, I accept it personally, and I will change my life in whatever way necessary to fulfil the calling God seems to have placed on my life.  I will serve him as best I can from now till death calls me home to him.”

Or do you need to accept the mandate again?  And again?  Because it’s not a once-for-all thing.

If you’ve never done this … today’s the day.  Seize the moment.



This could be a new day for you.
And tell someone.  Talk to someone in leadership here.

The Cana Wedding

by Barry Pollard

(Based on John 2:1-11; I Cor 12:1-11)

** Since this reflection was posted in January ’22, it has been accessed (read?) hundreds of times – a far greater access than any other posts on this website – from numerous countries all over the world. Even today, it gets one or two views almost every day. I’d very much like to know why. Are you real human readers? If so, what do you all have in common, and what is your particular interest in this article? Or is this some kind of electronic ‘bot’ phenomenon? What is the story?
If you are reading this, please respond in the ‘Leave a Comment’ box at the bottom of the page. I will be very grateful for your feedback, thank you. (Editor … St Francis Webguy)

I shall start with a confession: when I read John’s gospel for the first time, as I started my prep for this, I wasn’t amazed. I had heard it many times before, marvelled at it, and had filed it away as another “truth”. In fact, initially I was wondering what I could actually add by way of commentary. The story speaks for itself, doesn’t it? This is the “kick off” in the public ministry of Jesus. But like all good preparation, we shouldn’t be content with our first impressions. A few more readings had me focus on the statement Jesus makes to his mother Mary, when she tells him that the wedding wine had run out. “Dear woman, that’s not our problem,” Jesus replied. “My time has not yet come.”

What did he mean?
When we use the term describing something as “the right time”, we are really saying that the conditions are good and the right moment has been reached when we can proceed. This is our best chance of success.

So, the wedding feast at Cana had a lot more to it than the couple on centre-stage! It is the backdrop to the start of the public ministry of Jesus. It is here that he performed his first miracle – an event that showed for the first time the power of Jesus. One might be forgiven for thinking, in John’s telling, that it was a simple and straightforward thing, because John’s version of the story lacks any close-up detail.
Jesus and his growing group of disciples had been invited to the wedding, probably because of Mary’s tie to the couple. One or other of the pair may have been a relative. You know – a bit like when your cousin is getting married and the whole extended whanau come together. John doesn’t name the couple so it is only a guess.

The fact that Jesus was there initially as an observer, rather than participant, I think is important. It was his mum who asked him to intercede when the hosts realised the wine was running out but he responded by telling her that it wasn’t any of his business, as his “time had not yet come”. 
And this is where my problems started. Without explanation, John then reports that Mary tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them, and Jesus tells them to fill the stone jars with water, setting the miracle in progress.
Perhaps it was the rush by John to get the miracle out there, that he reported that Jesus stepped up and turned the water into wine. But, what changed his mind? What took him from “I’m not ready” to “mission accomplished”? Was it that Mary had intervened? Did she know more about his readiness than Jesus did himself? Perhaps so: many parents see things their children don’t.

Whatever it was, the miracle performed had a dramatic impact on the master of ceremonies. The hosts were lauded as generous for providing a quality wine so late in the celebrations. But the audience Jesus really performed in front of was far more important. His mother, brothers and disciples witnessed this intervention and John says “they believed in him”!

And then, as he often did, Jesus leaves with this group for a few days’ break. [Remember the account of the bleeding woman touching the hem of Jesus’s robe, and “power leaving him”? These events took a toll, leading to the need for recovery.]

In my experience, the way in which we often deal with the Bible gives us a warped sense of timing of events. We often read it in small segments, as isolated events, and miss the continuity of the real-life pace of what was going on. Perhaps if we read the events told in the next five or six chapters we could get a better idea of the speed at which his public ministry accelerated.
I have mentioned in previous reflections a series we had been watching, called The Chosen. It is a dramatisation of the life of Jesus as he gathered and ministered with his disciples, and available on YouTube. Because it is such an enthralling production/story we were binge-watching, one episode after another, and the events flowed one to another, providing the real-time continuity to the Jesus story.  According to John’s Gospel, the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist takes place and two days later Jesus is at Cana for the wedding, but we don’t often appreciate that acceleration.

As we consider Jesus’s readiness for ministry, recall what we heard in last Sunday’s gospel reading from Luke: John the Baptist proclaimed that he was clearing the way for the Messiah. When Jesus appeared, to be baptised, and “aligned with humanity” as Sharon explained in her reflection, John knew, when the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove settled over Jesus, that this was truly the Messiah they had all been waiting for. He surely knew that Jesus’s time was very near.

Despite Jesus saying his time wasn’t yet here, we can assume his mother Mary knew it had arrived. And after the miracle of the changing of the water into wine, his disciples knew it had too! They all believed!

Mary, the mother of Jesus: she had miraculously given birth to Jesus, had raised him, and now accompanies him as he sets off into his public ministry. She surely knew him.
John the Baptist: the cousin of Jesus. He had grown up alongside Jesus, presumably had spent time with him, and he too could claim to know him. He certainly did, when the confirmation came from God that Jesus was the Messiah!
The disciples: they had been drawn to Jesus by the things he said, the things he knew. They were getting to know him.

And what about Jesus himself? Presumably he knew who he was his whole life. We have just celebrated his miraculous birth. We have heard the story of a twelve year old Jesus teaching in the temple. We heard about God’s acknowledgement of him at his baptism in the Jordan as he prayed, and now we have heard of his first miracle.

Are we getting to know him?

God has provided us with lessons in all passages of the Bible if we but look for them. The story of what happened at Cana is not just about Jesus. It tells us something that applies to our lives too.
Although scant on the details, the passage is dealing with when Jesus reached the right time to begin his public ministry, for him to step past his previous achievements. After thirty years the preparations were complete. His direction was changing. The life of Jesus was about to intersect with the lives of all around him.

When I reflect on my life, I can see when direction changes were needed and made. I’m probably a slow learner and, for example, I admit that at thirty I wouldn’t have been much of a Principal – inexperienced, self-absorbed, and so on – but at forty I was ready. By then my preparations were pretty well advanced. In that instance my time was right. (I could also give you quite a few more examples of when my time was totally not right!)
Now, I am contemplating the other end of my life. I am thinking about my readiness, my preparations and ability to cope with stopping work and selling our business.

On our faith journey we learn that everything we do should bring God glory. We are not expected to do this on our own. We have been given the model of Jesus to follow. We have been equipped through the Holy Spirit. Spiritual gifts: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophesy, discernment, speaking in tongues, and interpreting tongues, as explained in the Corinthians reading today. Fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, as explained in Galatians. We are encouraged to be discerning and active. Our ‘Collect’ today called us to use this [Cana] story to help us gain, and maintain, momentum to change, “so that we may, more and more, reveal [God’s] glory”.

As I wrap up, I’d like to remind us that when the time is right, great things happen. A down-home Tairua example of this is when our sister Pat spoke out at the conclusion of a service recently, quoting the exhortation from 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, and pray and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from Heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” Pat had discerned that this was a call from God that could be heard and attended to. It led to a week of daily prayer in this church, aimed at overcoming the grip of Covid on our nation.
And I reckon those prayers were answered. Our land has experienced healing, with significant drops in numbers of Covid infections and hospitalisations. The pandemic is not over, of course, and more prayer is required!

But it took real courage for Pat to speak out as she did. I am heartened that we responded to her request. I am heartened to hear her respond again to the Holy Spirit and petition us to pray again (this time for water tanks in Fiji). Bless you, Pat.

If everything we do brings God glory, it will be happening in the small and mundane, as much as it was at the Cana wedding. I still don’t know what exactly tipped Jesus from his claim that his “time was not yet” in one breath, to producing the finest vintage wine with his next. Perhaps we just need to focus on the preparations we need to make, minute by minute, every day, to help bring about those positive changes in our lives, those changes that bring glory to God.

Good Medicine

My oldest son had a fish pond on his property which he converted to a sandpit for his kids.  He sent us a photo on the WhatsApp family group of the finished masterpiece – a big circular sandpit packed with sand.  To which my second son dryly commented, “I hope you removed the fish.”

Subtle, unexpected humour is like a treasure found in a junk yard.  Like a ten cent coin on the footpath. Like a lolly in an old coat pocket.  (Wrapped.)  Or other foolish similes.
One is surprised by joy (misusing CS Lewis).

People with that dry gift are diamonds in their own right.  Some find a career in it – comedians or script writers.  The Airport, Naked Gun and Hotshot movies were saturated with the whole gag suite: the subtle and the obvious; the unexpected and the twisted; the background and the stage-centre … so saturated that some gags are happening simultaneously, and you miss them; you have to rewatch several times.

In a Naked Gun sequence, cops are ransacking someone’s office; one searcher opens a drawer and shouts, “Bingo!”  The others all look up and the guy raises a Bingo card he’s found.
In an Airplane movie, the key character tells his sad back-story whenever he can, usually to strangers, and they always end up trying to top themselves in various ways.  In the beginning of one such, on a plane, agitated, he sits next to an elderly woman.  Concerned, she says, “Are you nervous?”  He nods, looking very nervous.  “First time?” she asks.  “No,” he says, straight-faced.  “I’ve been nervous before.”
Or the scene on the aircraft carrier (in Hotshots) where a wounded sailor needs an urgent blood transfusion and a fellow sailor is roped in, to lie beside him.  They’re hooked up and, while the injured man perks up, the other one’s body deflates and caves in.  (A so-called ‘sight gag’.)

As a school teacher I tried to use humour quite a lot.  It always failed, but in a sort of good way.  I’d be jeered, and became known for my ‘dad jokes’, but it was worth it.  It kind of invited the students in, to a real – if clumsy and awkward – human being.  I doubt it ever contributed to good exam results, but it seemed a hospitable way of teaching, and it stupefied the students into thinking learning could be fun!

So, if there’s a point to this blog at all, it’s: don’t be afraid to give humour a go.  It’s worth it.  You can’t fail!  Doesn’t matter how cheesy you are.  Humour is a human thing.  In a way, it’s what makes us human, and separates us from the actual animals (along with – yeah? – self-awareness, altruism, and a capacity for critical thinking and deeper feelings).  So, I say, be ever ready with a pun or a one-liner or a humorous self-deprecating story.  (We must be able to laugh at ourselves.  Maybe that’s most important of all.)

Some humour, I must add, is not appropriate, let’s be clear.  Smutty and toilet humour, humour that depends on profanity or sexual innuendo, hurtful sarcasm or the sort of ‘joke’ that ends up making someone feel awful.  (Annoyingly, the above-mentioned movies had too much of these.)
No.  Constructive, optimistic, illuminating and joyous humour is what I’m championing.  Stuff unexpected, that makes pleasant company lift and live.  Try.  It’s worth it.  Don’t demur and fear adverse reaction.  Suck it up!

Suggestion: learn a couple of really good jokes, and share them.

A merry heart doeth good, like a medicine.   (Proverbs 17:22)

There was a blind contestant on a recent episode of The Chase.  Bradley asked him some obscure question.  The guy looked blank for a few seconds, shook his head slightly and said, “Bradley, you might just as well ask me the colour of your shirt.”  I cracked up.
That’s real humour.

Ken F

Footnote:  Mobilising my best intentions, I’ve started a new page on this website entitled Left Field, where various jokes and quotes and ridiculousness are going to appear from time to time.  Check out the first entry there now.

Epiphany

by Sharon Marr

(Based on Luke 3:15-17, 21-22)

After being daunted seeing there were over a million sermons and commentaries on the wonderful www to peruse this story of John’s baptism, I reached gratefully to the Journey with Jesus website and brother Chris Ison’s writings for encouragement, and Sister Joan who says simply, “It’s all about love”.  

On this first Sunday after the Epiphany (the revelation of the Christ child to the ‘wise men from the east’), we find ourselves at the edge of the River Jordan with Jesus and his cousin, John.  It wasn’t that long ago we as a church family gathered at the edge of our river for the baptism of Archer, Lincoln and Kiki, just “the other day” for many of us.  It is a day we will remember, misty rain, dripping umbrellas, when Sister Joan reminded the three, their baptism joined them to Christ and to his whole Church, in every part of the world, in the past and in the future, on earth and in heaven. She continued saying, “Even before today, God began his work in you, but it will take the whole of your life to complete that work, with God’s help. There will be moments when the journey ahead is a delight and there will be times when it is hard, but you will never be alone.”
Can you too remember the joy, tinged with excitement, as they joined into the family of Christ?

Today we hear of Jesus being baptized by a reluctant John. [“I am not worthy to untie your sandals.”] But Jesus insists, receives John’s baptism of repentance, and experiences a moment of divine revelation as he comes up out of the water and “saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ ”
The word “epiphany” comes from Greek, meaning “appearing” or “revealing”.  However, not all baptism immersions bring about such divine revelations.  At a wedding, a couple of years ago now, our then four year old granddaughter accidentally ended up in the frog pond in her new frock and shoes, but rather than becoming a revealing moment, it became a story which she firmly said, “we had no need to discuss any further”. So we won’t. At least, not with her present.
But discuss the baptism of Jesus, the early church certainly did; in fact, the story is found in all four Gospels.  And the church, we see, continued discussing and exploring this extraordinary event throughout the New Testament. And we still do today.    

During this brief liturgical season between Christmas and Lent, we’re invited to leave miraculous births and angel choirs behind, and seek the love, majesty, and power of God in seemingly mundane things.  Rivers. Voices.  Doves.  Clouds.  Holy hands covering ours, lowering us into the water of repentance and new life.  
In the Gospel stories we read during this season, God parts the curtain for brief, shimmering moments, allowing us to look beneath and beyond the ordinary surfaces of our lives, and catch glimpses of the extraordinary.  Which is perhaps another way of describing the sacrament of baptism – one of the thin places where the ‘extraordinary’ of God’s grace blesses the ‘ordinary’ water we are baptized with.

In receiving baptism, Jesus doesn’t set himself apart from us; he aligns himself with us.  Now that is a truly breathtaking statement.  Jesus identifies himself with all of humanity.  Baptism in Luke’s Gospel story is about solidarity.  About joining.  

According to Christian historian John Dominic Crossan, Jesus’s baptism story was an “acute embarrassment” for the early Church, precisely because of this joining in.  Why would God’s Messiah place himself under the tutelage of a rabble-rouser like John the Baptist?  Why would God’s incarnate Son receive a baptism of repentance?  Repentance for what?  Wasn’t he perfect? Why on earth would he wade into the murky waters of the Jordan, aligning himself with the great unwashed who teemed into the wilderness, reeking of sin?  Worse, why did God the Father choose that sordid moment to part the clouds and call his Son beloved?  A moment well before all the miracles, the healings, the exorcisms, the resurrections?  A moment long before Jesus accomplished a thing worth praising?

Why, indeed?  And yet this is the baffling, humbling, awe-inspiring story we’ve inherited as Christ’s followers. Unbelievable though it may seem, Jesus’s first public act was an act of joining into his humanity in the fullest, most embodied way.  “Let it be so,” he told John, echoing the radical consent of his mother, Mary, who raised him in the faith.   Let it be so at the hands of another, he decided, as he submitted to John the Baptiser, because what Jesus did and still does with power is freely surrender it, share it, give it away. Let it be so here, he said, in the Jordan River, rich with sacred history.  In other words, in this one moment, in this one act, Jesus joined into the whole story of God’s work on earth, and allowed that story to resonate, deepen, and find completion.          

So.  What part of this story is hardest for you to take in?  That God appears by means so unimpressive, so familiar, we often miss him?  That Jesus enters joyfully into the full messiness of the human family?  That our baptisms bind us to all of humanity — not in theory, but in the flesh — such that you and I are kin, responsible for each other in ways we fail too often to honour?  That as Christians we are called into radical solidarity, not radical separateness?  That we are always and already God’s Beloved — not because we’ve done anything to earn it, but because God’s very nature, inclination and desire is to love?  

To embrace Christ’s baptism story is to embrace the core truth that we are united, interdependent, connected, one.  It is to sit with the staggering reality that we are deeply, deeply loved.  Can we bear to embrace these mind-bending truths without flinching away in self-consciousness, cynicism, suspicion or shame? 

Baptism is all about joining in, all about surrender, all about finding the holy in the course of our ordinary, mundane lives within the family of God.  Which means we must choose Epiphany.  Choose it, and then practise it.  The challenge is always before all of us to look again. Look harder.  See freshly.  Stand in the place that looks utterly ordinary, and regardless of how afraid or jaded you feel, to cling to the possibility of a surprise that is God.  Listen to the ordinary, and know that it is infused with divine mystery.  Epiphany is deep water — you can’t dip your toes in.  You must take a deep breath and plunge, so hold onto Jesus. He’s the one who opens the barrier, and shows us the God we long for.  He’s the one who stands in line with us at the water’s edge, willing to immerse himself in shame, scandal, repentance, and pain — all so that we might hear the only Voice that will tell us who we are and whose we are in this sacred season. There will be moments when the journey ahead is a delight and there will be times when it is hard, but we will never be alone.

Listen.  We are God’s chosen.  God’s children.  God’s own.
In these very uncertain times we are in, even in the deepest, darkest water, perhaps even a frog pond, let us remember we are the Beloved.

Amen.