Torn...But In A Good Way

Torn... But In A Good Way--January 15, 2019

“And just as [Jesus] was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.” [Mark 1:10]

Most of the time, the phrase “torn apart” is not a positive expression.  At least, it is rarely good news for the thing that is getting torn apart.  And it’s not likely to be good news for anyone else involved. 

When there’s a paper jam in the copier, and my nice set of originals has to be tugged at to retrieve it from the jaws of the document feeder, they get "torn apart" and it’s bad news all around.  It’s bad for the documents, now torn into pieces, and it’s bad for me, who needed them kept in tact for making copies.  And when I am mowing the lawn and accidentally catch part of the drooping leaf of one of our tiger lilies, so that it gets torn apart and shredded in my wake, it’s bad for the flower and bad for me, who really likes those flowers in our yard.

Pick almost any other context, and you’ll see the same:  the phrase “torn apart” is so dramatic and almost inescapably violent that you can hardly imagine reading it with a smile.  The jacket that catches on the hook of the back door and tears as you are headed out for an important meeting.  The devastation in our country after the Civil War when the nation itself was “torn apart.”  The wreckage of a home left in the wake of a death or divorce and all the pain that led up to it.  These are the kinds of scenes we might expect to see “torn apart” used to describe, but none of them are very positive at all.

And then there’s the Gospel.  And when it comes to the news of Jesus, all bets are off about what can or cannot have good news come out of it.  Our God is a surpriser to say the least.

So here is how Mark the Gospel-writer describes what happens when Jesus is baptized by John:  the heavens themselves were “torn apart.”  And at first we are left scratching our heads and wondering, “Is this a good thing or a bad thing to hear?”  So often tearing something apart is a jolt of bad news.  But Mark reports it like it is something good, even something holy, and something divine going on.

Back up for a moment and remember that the scene is Jesus being baptized—and that Jesus is the One life in history who didn’t need to go through John the Baptizer’s ritual of repentance, because Jesus is the One person who doesn’t have anything to repent of.  So his very choice to be baptized is not about Jesus’ need to get his life cleaned up and turned around, but about our need for him to stand with us and identify with us.  It’s about Jesus standing up beside us and saying, “I am Spartacus,” for our protection—to take our place and stand in our spot. 

But Jesus is not just a religious teacher or wise spiritual guru.  Remember the opening line of Mark’s Gospel—he gives away the open secret that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1).  That means it’s not just one man standing alongside us there at the banks of the Jordan—it is no less than God coming close, wearing our skin, standing there at the shore to be one of us and saying, “I’m with them.”

In other words, in the baptism of Jesus, whatever boundaries there had been, whatever walls or barriers separated a holy God from a mess of a human race, God crossed those boundaries, from God's side by getting into the water with us.  And for anything that stood in the way that would have kept God from coming to be with us, God was willing to cut through it to get to us. Or, if you prefer, God was willing to tear it apart.  The boundary, the wall if you like, between heaven and earth, between human and divine, gets pulled down--bulldozed, really--from God's side, as Jesus takes the side of all humanity in the waters.

This is what’s going on in the scene there at Jesus’ baptism.  The heavens themselves—and along with them, the whole idea that God has to be kept at a distance from us sinful human beings in a holy bubble—are torn apart as God comes right into our midst.  Jesus is showing us by his very life—and Mark is telling us in the story—that God will not be bound in a hermetically sealed envelope of incense and angel feathers to keep from being contaminated by us earthy, messy people.  God is coming to be with us, and removing whatever other barriers would stand in the way—even tearing them apart if necessary.

So the heavens are “torn apart” at Jesus’ baptism, and what do you know, when Jesus dies on the cross at the end of Mark’s Gospel, the curtain in the temple will be “torn” in half (same Greek verb in both), shouting to us all that the wall separating God and humanity was being permanently opened, from God’s side to us. That’s our God—a God who is willing to be with us, and to pull down the barriers between us forever, no matter what stands in the way.

Lord Jesus, come to be with us, and let us trust that you have not only crossed every boundary, but torn them apart to stand with us.