“The Mystery Is Solved”

Romans 16:25-27

A young student minister is about to preach his first sermon. He has decided to preach it from memory. The appointed moment arrives. He stands up and proclaims, “Behold I come!” Then his mind goes completely blank.

Having been taught that repetition of a phrase can sometimes help in this kind of situation, he proclaimed once more, “Behold I come!” Still nothing. Having nothing to lose, he decides to say it more time, only this time with more volume and more emphatic body language.

So loudly and passionately he proclaims a third time, Behold I come!” At which point he falls completely out of the pulpit and lands in the lap of an older woman on the first row. Flustered and embarrassed, all he can do is apologize. The dear lady looks at him, smiles and says, “Don’t worry about it. You warned me three times you were coming.” That may not be the message he was proclaiming, but it was most definitely the message she heard - and the reality she experienced. His self-fulfilling prophecy had come true.

Little was mysterious about that young pastor's experience. He said it, and it happened. But not all mysteries are so easily solved. For fun I like to read murder mysteries. Occasionally I figure out “whodunit” before the book comes to an end. Most of the time the answer takes me by surprise. The clues are there, but rarely am I able to put two and two together. The mystery remains a mystery until the end.

So it was with the coming of Jesus. Prophet after prophet dropped clue after clue, but the coming of the Messiah still took the world by surprise. The truth is, that except for a small number of disciples and followers, nobody put two and two together. And even they often put two and two together and got five. The awesome reality of the Christ event didn’t set in until after the crucifixion and resurrection. Then it all made sense to those Spirit-led believers who had eyes to see and ears to hear.

The prophets didn’t come right out and say that a baby named Jesus would be born in Bethlehem somewhere around 4 BC, or that this baby would the very incarnation of God. But long before Jesus came the words of the prophets contained several flashes of intuition and foresight. The clues were there.

Some examples: From Isaiah 9, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light… for a child has been born to us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders.” Or Isaiah 11, “A shoot will come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him.”

Or from Isaiah 53, “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our infirmities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” And one more, this time from Jeremiah 31, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”

The signs were there. The clues were there. God was going to do something big. The hopes and dreams of all the years – the hopes and dreams of Israel and Judah, the hopes and dreams of all humanity - would be met in tiny Bethlehem on that first Christmas night. God did what God said he was going to do. As William Barclay so eloquently states it, “… eternity invaded time and God emerged on earth.”

Jesus is “the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages” mentioned by Paul in the concluding verses of his letter to the Romans. There within his benediction, Paul described the long-hidden mystery that is Jesus, a mystery hinted at but never fully revealed by the prophets.

Jesus is the mystery solved. Jesus is the Gospel. His birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection are what we believe. In the Gospel we find the hope, strength and courage required to live the Christian life. It’s all there: The Word made flesh in Jesus. His miraculous conception and birth. His baptism by John. His struggle with the Devil in the wilderness. The Sermon on the Mount. The healing of diseases and exorcism of demons. The faithful journey to what awaited him in Jerusalem. The Last Supper. His agony in the garden. His crucifixion, death, and burial. His resurrection on the third day. His ascension into heaven. This is the Gospel in a nutshell. The Gospel preached, taught, and lived by Paul. The Gospel as he conveyed it to the church in Rome. The Gospel that he summarized in the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth verses of chapter sixteen.

The Gospel message is the mystery solved. The Gospel message is the fruition of what the prophets intuited and foresaw. The Gospel is what we have heard and believed. It is God’s written revelation of his living revelation of himself in Jesus. It is through this revelation that the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin, causes us to confess and repent of it, and moves us to claim Jesus as the only Lord and Savior of our lives. The Gospel is God’s gift to us, the greatest Christmas present that can ever be.

It is also the greatest gift that we can share with the world. All around us this Advent Season there are people walking in darkness: people who are merely existing instead of living, people who are lost, hurting, and alone. Jesus Christ is their only hope. He is the light they are desperately seeking, the life for which they are so frantically searching. He is the Good Shepherd who will rescue them from the their lost state. He is the only one who can heal their broken and hurting hearts. It is Jesus and Jesus alone who can bring them into that relationship with God for which they hunger, the God in whom they can find the ultimate end to their loneliness.

In the tenth chapter of Romans Paul addressed these words to the Christians in Rome, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how are they to call upon one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?” So wrote Paul to the Romans. So says God’s Word to us.

We have received the gift of the Gospel. For us the mystery has been solved. But what about all those for whom Jesus is still nothing more than an ancient mystery? How can they call upon one in whom they have not believed? How are they to hear about Jesus without someone to proclaim him? How can they ever solve the mystery and know the Good News of salvation?

The answer is found in Paul’s final question from Romans 10:15: “And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?” This is a question very similar to the one asked by God of Isaiah, “Whom shall I send, and whom will go for [me]?” Who are those whom God would send? Who are those whom God is asking to proclaim the Gospel? Who are the ones who need to answer God’s call in the same way as did Isaiah, “Here I am, send me!”

Let’s think about that. Who has received the gift of the Gospel? Whom has God gifted with the spiritual gifts necessary to go and proclaim it? Who indeed? Us! We are the ones who know Jesus. We are the ones who have heard and believed the Gospel. We are the ones for whom the mystery has been solved. We are the ones entrusted by God to share his ultimate Christmas present with the world. We are the Lord’s Twenty First Century versions of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Peter, and Paul. We are his present day Marys and Marthas. Jesus is counting on us to share his message with the world.

Advent 2005 is almost over. It is drawing to a close. One of themes of Advent is the movement from silence to revelation. Ultimately this movement is God’s. He has walked among us as Jesus, the Living Word. He is still moving among us by the power of the Holy Spirit. We can no longer be silent, not about what God has done, not about what God is doing. His revelation in Jesus must be shared. Jesus has come. Jesus is coming. We need to let people know. Amen.