The Foundations of Trust

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on January 7, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Mark 1: 4-11

One thing that always amazed me when I studied languages at school was that the language teacher still remembered all the vocabulary and grammar after the holidays. For me the holidays had been an utter departure from all intellectual pursuits, and I used to begin my first French class of the new term thinking, ‘I have absolutely no memory of any French word or sentence construction.’ But the teacher breezed in as if all was normal. It was a thing of wonder.

I’m guessing for those who sit in a pew or join online on the first Sunday of the year, it may feel a bit like that. What was this Christianity thing all about again? It may feel like your guilty secret – that you aren’t 100% sure and there’s lots of things you have reservations about, and some people make you feel very ignorant about the rest. After all it’s been 2000 since the first Christmas, and humankind is a late arrival in evolutionary terms, and it feels irrelevant to modern life, and what about suffering and other faiths and and and. All the things the podcaster Alastair Campbell calls whataboutery. Once you’ve set aside the one-up-person-ship that goes on in faith as much as anywhere else, it comes down to this: who is Jesus; and why should I trust him?

Well believe it or not, ‘Who is Jesus?’ and ‘Why should I trust him?’ are exactly the two questions that preoccupy the beginning of the first gospel, the gospel of Mark. Mark answers them in precisely 60 words, as follows. ‘In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”’

In Mark’s gospel there are always three stories going on. The first story is about the Son of God. It says, here is the Son of God, the full manifestation of God’s identity and authority among us, witnessed by words and deeds. The second story is about the suffering servant. It says, this fully human, fully divine person suffers: his agonising death doesn’t undermine his identity and authority as God’s son, but is their definitive expression. The third story is about the end of the world. It says, Jesus’ death and resurrection will usher in a new age, final and complete, in which the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

Now the first thing to notice – the thing that indicates why Jesus’ baptism is so significant – is that all three stories converge at this precise moment. Story One, the Son of God, is most obviously there: a voice from heaven says, ‘This is my beloved Son.’ You can’t miss that. Story Two, the suffering servant, is there in a subtler way. The word ‘beloved’ comes straight out of Isaiah chapter 42, which is the first of the four songs of the suffering servant, in which the Jews in exile in Babylon began to perceive God as the one who suffered with them rather than the one who acted for them. Story Three, the end of the world, is there in the baptism in the drastic portrayal of the heavens being torn apart. So all this is saying, just nine verses into the gospel, that the whole gospel story is here in miniature. You can’t exaggerate the importance of this brief account for revealing who Jesus is and why we should trust him. It’s like when the teacher at school says, ‘If you remember one thing from everything we’ve covered this term, then make it this one,’ and you respond by underlining the title three times in your exercise book.

So we’ve established that Jesus is God’s beloved son, that his life is going to include profound suffering, and that his life is going to inaugurate a new age. I want now to focus more directly on what I identified as the two key questions that we begin the new year needing to answer: who is Jesus; and why should I trust him? Let’s take a more personal angle on this and consider a question. On what grounds do you generally trust someone? I want to reflect on three answers.

The first grounds is, you know them. This is how the world has changed over the last couple of generations. For most of history, people didn’t travel much and would spend most of their lives with those they knew. There weren’t a lot of secrets; but there was plenty of trust. In Jesus’ time the Holy Land was a village – everyone was a cousin’s cousin away from family. Today, if you want to set up an account for online banking, you’d better clear a week in your diary and make a secret note of the third letter of your memorable word and distinguish between your pin number and your memorable date. Of course, there’s lots of benefits of spending most of your life with strangers; but trust isn’t one of them. It’s also true that you can come to question a great deal about someone you thought you knew: it’s a commonplace of hero action movies when the love interest of the guy with extraordinary powers looks into his eyes and says, mystified, ‘Who are you?’ But for the most part, we say in relationships, don’t rush into things till you get to know one another. That’s how trust gets built. At Jesus’ baptism, a voice from heaven says, ‘He’s my son.’ It’s the ultimate endorsement. ‘I’ve known him since before eternity began’: that’s quite a character reference.

Let’s turn to a second way we come to trust someone. It’s a deceptively persuasive word: love. We all know love spurs us to do the very best things – but can also drive us to do some very unwise things. There’s a romantic dimension to love, where we build up a story of who this other person is in our lives, how they’re perfect in every way, and how together we can experience joy, discover dreams, and conquer the world. But there’s a more sustainable kind of love, which is based on respect more than affection, dignity more than desire, gentleness more than glory, truth more than fantasy. Love is always vulnerable to betrayal, because love by definition makes up the territory where knowledge falls short, and paints a generous, warm and accepting picture in regions where it would be possible to be suspicious and sceptical.

Love and knowledge aren’t alternatives: love is a different kind of knowledge, perhaps not as dispassionate, but significantly more dynamic and alive. Our perpetual fear, lying behind all our deception, lies in this sentence: ‘If you truly knew me, you wouldn’t love me.’ We have the same fear about God. So we can have knowledge without love: this is what we fear God has for us. And we can have love without knowledge: this is the fragility of romantic passion. But there’s something beyond both. The most amazing feeling in the world is to discover that someone does know us, even the worst about us – and yet still deeply loves us. The significance of the love of the Trinity is that what the Father knows about the Son identically corresponds to what the Father feels about the Son. Knowledge and love are in God the same. That’s the unique power of the voice from heaven in this story saying, ‘This is my Beloved.’ It’s not simply about trusting him because you know him deeply; it’s about believing in him because you love him utterly. That’s the eternal life we’re being invited into.

Now for the third dimension of trust. It’s the moment when you discover something about another person you thought you knew that makes you admire them with a kind of awe beyond what you ever had before. I recall a couple who loved each other and were engaged to be married while living in different cities. She had only one sadness: that she loved to dance salsa, but he was all knees and elbows, and wasn’t a deft partner for her on the dance floor. Deep down, in a way neither could say out loud, it made each of them wonder if they were truly suited. So it was with trepidation at the wedding reception that she took the floor for her first dance with her clumsy husband. Imagine her surprise and wonder as he whirled and swirled her like a perfect salsa dancer. As they spun and the guests gasped in wonder, he whispered to her the astonishing explanation: ‘I’ve spent the last nine months going to salsa classes twice a week.’ She looked at him with a love like never before, realising his silence had cost as much as the time the classes had taken him. That’s something about the authenticity of character and the genuineness of love. His love for her wasn’t a fleeting passion: he was prepared to make sacrifices for months to learn to meet her where she felt must joy. He wasn’t making a gesture for her; he was going to enormous lengths truly to be with her. Jesus’ suffering doesn’t change the way we trust him: it deepens it. The Father’s words ‘well pleased’ don’t do justice to what’s really being said: it’s about an even deeper respect, awe, and trust. Both we and the Father see Jesus’ suffering and are even more overwhelmed by the integrity, validity and unswerving loyalty of this beloved child. Jesus’ authenticity ties him intimately to the author of all things: in that lies his authenticity.

I suggest these are the three dimensions of trust: knowledge, love, and authenticity. On a practical level, if you’re a leader of an organisation, a teacher of a class, or a stranger trying to make yourself a blessing to a new community, these are three tests people are going to put to you: do we know you, can we love you, are you authentic?

But Jesus’ baptism isn’t just on a practical level. This is a pivotal moment in history, when, in Jesus, humanity comes before God, and God comes before humanity. This is the moment when we, face to face with God, ask three questions: ‘Do we know you? Can we love you? Are you authentic?’ But this is also the moment when God, face to face with humankind, asks, three more questions: ‘Do I know you? Can I love you? Are you authentic?’ Six questions in all. And the good news of Christianity, revealed at the baptism of Christ, is simply this: in Jesus, the answer to all six of those questions is, ‘Yes.’