When I was in high school I remember having a fascinating conversation with a small group of friends that taught me something about life that I hadn’t known before. There were no more than 3 or 4 of us, a couple of guys and a couple of girls, as I recall. We were sitting in the gymnastics workout room at the end of the day, and somehow we got in a discussion of who we liked, romantically speaking. We promised not to tell anyone else what we said that day, and then we proceeded to identify the three members of the opposite sex whom we would perhaps like to have as our girlfriend or boyfriend. The topic was risky enough as it was, but I’ll never forget what Debbie said. She told us who she really liked, but then she said that it didn’t really matter much anyway, because she would never really be able to get serious about someone unless he were a Mormon.

One of the fundamental characteristics of human culture is that we tend to divide ourselves into an amazing array of groups, classes, categories, clubs, and cliques. A person’s inclusion or exclusion can depend on a huge variety of factors. Some of those factors are things under our direct control. If you want to be a member of the National Honor Society or Phi Beta Kappa, you have to earn a certain level of academic success. If you want to join an exclusive golf club, you have to pay a certain amount of money. Some other factors are outside our direct control. Sororities and fraternities must invite you to join and then you have to be approved by the folks who already are members. If you want to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, you have to prove that you are a descendent of some of the first citizens of America. And other factors have to do with the givens of your life: your race, your class, our gender all can be used to include you in or exclude you from certain groupings of people. In Debbie’s case, her family’s religious affiliation automatically erected certain barriers around key areas of her life.

There are certain questions that you and I ask, certain issues that we must face about ourselves and about the societies in which we live, because of this fact about human culture. And they are questions and issues that reach to the very core of who we are, how we feel about ourselves, and how we look at the world around us. Am I good enough to be included? Can I make the grade or do I sometimes fall short? Is it fair for me to be included when someone else is not, simply because of where I was born or what my name is or the color of my skin? Will I be invited to be a part of the action, or will I forever wish to be part of something that is forever outside my reach? There is no one who has not felt excluded, uninvited, left out, and not good enough. It is simply a part of human life. Perhaps the best we can hope to make of this reality is to adopt the attitude of the great theologian Groucho Marx, who famously said, “I wouldn’t belong to a country club that would have me as a member!”

It is this reality of human life and Jesus’ interaction with it that provides the backdrop for our study of the two passages of Mark’s gospel that we’ve just read. The first story from Mark is primarily a witness to Jesus’ amazing power to heal human infirmity, which in the ancient world was also associated with power over the forces of evil. One of the ways that Jesus made his mark early on in his ministry was to demonstrate his ability to deliver people from their illnesses and from their domination by evil. As the story is told, as Jesus is teaching the people about God in the synagogue one day, a man who is possessed by an unclean spirit comes into the synagogue, and this spirit recognizes who Jesus is. The spirit says, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” And then Jesus, who indeed is who the spirit said he is, commands the spirit to leave the man. As interesting as this story of deliverance is, the piece of the story that is most important for us today is that title for Jesus: The Holy One of God. In this Lenten season we are focused on the topic of meeting Jesus. We are trying to gain a sense of the full identity and meaning of the man from Nazareth. One of his more significant titles is the one confessed by the spirit.

What do we mean when we say Jesus is the Holy One of God? To know that we need to understand the various things we mean when we use the word “holy.” By definition, something that is holy is something that belongs to God or is derived from God. To be holy is to be worthy of special respect and even reverence. Holiness also has to do with how a person acts; it is characterized by living according to strict and high moral or religious standards. But there is another meaning of holiness. A thing or a person can be set apart for a special purpose and in that way is said to be holy, such as a sanctuary. So a thing can either be holy in and of itself or it can be made to be holy by virtue of its assigned role. And I think that Jesus is holy in both senses of that word. As the Son of God, Jesus is in and of himself holy. And as the Messiah, the messenger of God in the world, Jesus is set apart for a special purpose in the world.

I think holiness is a difficult concept for us to grasp adequately in today’s world. We tend to think of God as our best buddy around the corner who is there to make our lives a little brighter, and not as the Supreme Lord and Maker of all Existence whose power is such that with one tiny thought he could obliterate us from the face of the earth. We tend to look at the world with very jaded and skeptical eyes and when we see goodness and holiness represented in a person or in an institution, we don’t believe what we see, and we look instead for the underside. We say there is nothing sacred anymore, and by that we mean that nothing is respected, nothing is honored, nothing is immune from attack or ridicule or being treated as common. We look at everything in mechanistic and utilitarian terms, and we fail to see beauty and power and goodness when it does not serve our petty appetites. We have lost a sense of awe and wonder, a sense of our tiny little lives in the midst of the grand landscape of life itself, and instead we have begun to believe that we are the center of everything that is.

Holiness has to do with that which is totally different from the normal, that which is vastly superior, that which is infinitely better. Holiness is about something from another place than that place we normally inhabit, something that stands in judgment on everything else, something that is far more important, far more powerful, far more lasting. And we believe that Jesus was the Holiest of the Holy, because he came from God, he was God, and he had a role to play in the world and in history that only God could accomplish.

But there is another passage from Mark with which we have to contend if we are to have any understanding at all about the true nature of Jesus’ holiness. In a story not unlike the story we heard last week of Zacchaeus, when Jesus invites himself to be a guest in the despised tax collector’s house, Mark tells us about the time when Jesus recruits another disciple, Levi, son of Alphaeus, a tax collector. Again, Jesus is welcomed into the home of a person whose social and religious standing was nil. Again, Jesus surrounds himself with a slice of society that would never be mentioned in the same breath with or associated with words like respected, admired, or…holy. Jesus had a habit of associating with people who were not part of the religious scene in Palestine: not only tax collectors, but prostitutes, Samaritans, lepers, and even soldiers of the occupying army from Rome. And not only would he converse with these people, he would eat with them.

Eating a meal with someone was, in Jesus’ day and culture, a hugely significant act. You and I might sit at a table in a crowded airport restaurant and eat with a total stranger. But in Jesus’ day, and in Jewish culture especially, to spend time eating and conversing with someone in their home was a statement of deep importance. It meant that you welcomed and received each other as friends, that you offered your protection and provision for your guest, that you accepted each other as equals. And so when Jesus ate with Levi and Levi’s friends, there was a group of people who were highly offended: the religious people, the Pharisees.

The Pharisees believed that they represented and embodied the highest form of religious expression in the tradition of Judaism. They valiantly attempted to observe every law, to maintain every tradition, to honor every custom, of the people of God and of the law of God as given long ago through the great prophet Moses. They devoted vast sums of time and energy to pursuing perfection in the law. And they further believed that it was their God-given role in life, as it was for any person who truly sought after God, to separate themselves from anything in life that was not holy, especially, from unholy people. The Pharisees, you see, had made themselves into a highly selective, highly competitive, highly exclusive class of Jews. Few groups in human history have been as difficult to join as the Pharisees, with their insistence on extensive knowledge of the law and on adherence to a set of practices and regulations that bordered on obsessive. They believed, quite literally, that to associate with—much less to engage in the intimate business of eating with anyone—who was not of their standing before God, was to invite spiritual disaster. To them, holiness meant being totally separate from the normal ways of life and from the normal people of life. And here was Jesus, whom some believed was the Holy One of God, eating with tax collectors and other assorted sinners.

Here is the strange and unexpected report of Mark: that Jesus, the Holy One of God, entered directly into the unholiness of our lives. Jesus, God himself, the One who defines what holiness is, enters the world scene and goes immediately, goes often, goes happily, goes purposely, to those places in life that are completely unholy. He doesn’t go occasionally, or by accident, or only when compelled. He goes because he says that is where he is meant to go. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” When the Holy One of God came into the unholy places of life, he literally changed the definition of what it means to be holy and of what it means to be in a place where God normally does not go.

The Pharisees thought that God wanted them to escape the sin of the world by separating themselves from the world, especially the world full of troubled, confused, failing people. The Pharisees thought that the Kingdom of God meant fulfillment of certain practices and customs that would make them superior to everyone else. But God had a different idea. Jesus was the Holy One in who he was but also in what he did. And he showed us that true holiness is that which enters the broken world, broken people, to love them, to rescue them, to serve them, to show them a different way, the way of holiness itself. Jesus showed us that true holiness means there is no one outside of God’s group, no one unfit for inclusion in the club, no one from whom he will separate himself, no one who isn’t good enough, because, truth be told, none of us are good enough. Jesus demonstrated that the Kingdom of God is open to anyone who will receive it, not just to some select few who believe that by their own goodness and ability they have exclusive control over the membership registry in heaven. Jesus is the Holy One of God who crosses all barriers in order to come to us in the midst of our unholiness to call us into fellowship with him. And he calls us to do the same.

The Pharisees set a very high bar for membership requirements in the people of God. But Jesus ignored the bar and welcomed everyone who would welcome him. But that is not to say that Jesus thereby ignored the unholiness that was around him. Quite the contrary, Jesus took it so seriously that he went directly to its source so that he could deal with it there. The physician goes to the sick. The sick need help, and the physician does not pretend they are not sick! The sick need help, and the physician intends to make them better! And that is all very good news for you and me.

It seems like every week I meet someone who believes that they have done such terrible wrong in their lives that God cannot possibly love them or forgive them. They’re wrong. The Holy One of God came to the worst of the worst and welcomed them into his love. And I meet people who believe that God is very far from them because they have spent so little time or energy trying to be close to God. They’re wrong. The Holy One of God never lets us out of his sight or his care. He came a long way to be with us and he then went into a grave to rescue us and he will never let us go. I meet people who are convinced they can never recover from the sin in their lives, that they can never become better people, that they simply are stuck with who they are. They’re wrong. The Holy One of God believed that we could be healed, made whole again, delivered from the evil that infests us, and so he came to minister to us. Still other people believe that they don’t really need God, that they are doing quite well on their own, thank you very much. They’re wrong. The Holy One of God said that kind of pride is what prevents a person from entering the Kingdom of Heaven, from having a relationship with the living God, and it is only those who know their miserable state and know their need for God who will indeed welcome God into their lives.

Interestingly, the Holy One of God doesn’t just leave us where we are when he finds us. Part of our healing means that we join in doing his work. And that means joining him in stepping across the many barriers and boundaries and membership requirements that human society has erected so that we can welcome sinners into our lives just like he welcomed us into his. When you and I have truly met the true Jesus, the Holy One of God who entered sinners’ lives, then we want to become like Jesus ourselves. Every one of us has certain barriers to certain groups of people with whom we would rather not associate. And every one of us probably has particular people, who are not very holy in our eyes, from whom we stay away. But Jesus is calling us to step across those lines we’ve set for ourselves, to love those people, to have compassion for those people, to accept those people, not as they are in their sin, but as Jesus sees them and as he sees us, freed from our sin and made holy by his own holiness.

Jesus was holy in his being and he was sent to earth with a holy task. You and I are made holy in God’s eyes because Jesus died to take away the unholiness that is in us. And you and I have a holy task on earth, the sacred job of eliminating any barriers that stand between us and them, of welcoming all people, in our words and in our deeds, into our hearts and into the fellowship of Jesus Christ.

Amen.