mark 8

sermon preached at Twynholm august 31st 2008.

audio available here

Introduction: blindness, when we don’t know we are blind…
 Do you enjoy those films where there is a revelation at the end that transforms the way you understand the whole film;
 and then you don’t just understand how the film worked out I the end. You suddenly understand the whole film in a completely different light.
 In fact, it could be said, that you had only misunderstood what was going on up until that point. You had missed the point until the final revelation. And when you look back , you see that you should have been able to work it out. All the evidence was there. You’d be trusting the wrong person in the story, and you shouldn’t have done.
 Sixth sense; the prestige; momento; unbreakable;
What if you got to the end of your life and you realised the same could be said about your life? That you hadn’t seen clearly what the purpose of your life had been; that with a moment of hideous recognition when it was all too late, you realise that you had missed the point of it all, and therefore had misspent your life?
What have you invested you life in. I don’t just mean your money. But your energy, your time, your words, your love.
What has been your goal in life? Have you misplaced it, or have you spent it well? How would you know?
There are various things that we don’t know about our future lives. Perhaps things have happened in your life for good or for ill, that you wouldn’t have imagined even a couple of years ago. Before about a year ago I don’t think I’d ever even heard of Twynholm Baptist Church. I had know idea that the Lord would be bringing us here, I trust for good.
But what about the very end of our lives – can we see the end from the beginning? Can we therefore even tell what we should be living for today?
They say that hindsight is always 20/20. But then, of course it is too late. How can we know well enough today what that last day will bring, so that we can be sure that we spend today, and tomorrow and the rest of our lives well?
Well, in our studies in Mark’s gospel, we have been encountering Mark’s claim to have discovered the answer to that very question. Mark’s gospel is the report of “Good news” that is what the word “gospel” means. The good news about Jesus Christ, the son of God.
And we have hit today the turning point in the book. For up to this point we as the reader, have already known the identity of Jesus; God has declared it; demons have shrieked it out; but the penny hasn’t fully dropped with the disciples.
You may remember that as we began I said that Mark’s gospel is a book of two half: the first half answers the question “who is Jesus?” and then the second half talks about what he has come to do. It is here at the end of chapter 8 that we reach that transition.
And once we see clearly these two things: who is Jesus, and what he has come to do; we can see everything else clearly too, including the very purpose of our lives.
Turn with me then to Mark 8:22-9:1
Here we will see for things that about clear sight:
And they came(A) to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man and begged him to touch him. And(B) he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when(C) he had(D) spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, "Do you see anything?" And he looked up and said, "I see men, but they look like trees, walking." 25Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26And he sent him to his home, saying, (E) "Do not even enter the village."

Clear sight depends upon Jesus’ initiative 22-26
The account begins with a man who is not only unable to see, he is even unable to come to the person who might give him sight.
In v 22 we read that some people have to bring him. And it is they, not he, who begs Jesus for mercy.
And Jesus does heal him, but it is a unique story. The first time it doesn’t seem to work quite right! Now, this is late enough on in the gospel of Mark for us to know that it isn’t because Jesus is not able to do what he wants in this healing...
He’s not like some magician – a first year at Hogwarts who’s powers are rather unrefined.
The whole point of the first 8 chapters of Mark’s gospel has been to show us that Jesus is all-powerful. With a word he had already been able to perform far greater miracles: raising a dead girl to life back in chapter 5. Feeding thousands of people from little food, twice.
No, Jesus is doing this in two stages intentionally.
Why? Well, look at the question he asks in verse 23:
“23And(AA) he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when(AB) he had(AC) spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, "Do you see anything?"
This was a very similar question to what he had asked his disciples back in v.17.
17And(T) Jesus, aware of this, said to them, "Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread?(U) Do you not yet perceive(V) or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18(W) Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember?
21And he said to them, "Do you not yet understand?"
The reason Mark includes the little story of another healing here, is that it illustrates physically what was going on spiritually with the disciples. They saw, but they didn’t see...
Like the man who was healed they saw jesus, but didn’t see him clearly.
24And he looked up and said, "I see men, but they look like trees, walking."
But Jesus doesn’t leave him with partial sight...
25Then Jesus[c] laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26And he sent him to his home, saying, (AD) "Do not even enter the village."
The words “saw everything clearly” show that he has 20/20

And so too, Jesus will not leave his disciples with partial sight of him. When he is revealing himself, he may do it in stages, for we might be too immature to grasp the harder truths about Jesus straight away. But if he has set his mind on making himself known, he will do so.
I remember the first time I had a pair of glasses – I must have been 13/14. Because my eyes aren’t very bad nobody had ever realised that they weren’t perfect. And then there was that day when I had them for the first time. I stood on the top floor of a building in my school - and for the first time ever I could recognise people’s faces 400 yards away. Wow! This is how people with perfect eyesight see, is it!
But Jesus isn’t just healing the man’s eyes perfectly: he is showing what he can do to the eyes of the heart.
When Jesus opens our eyes to who he is, it is that kind of a realisation. Everything begins to be clear. What we are created for: to live under Jesus’ rule. Why the world is in such a mess: because we have rejected Jesus as king, and incurred his righteous anger. What hope there is for a world in the hands of an angry God: he so loves his enemies that he sent his son into the world to bear his anger, that we do not need to. What it is worth spending my life on; Living in a way that honours king Jesus, and making him known to the world.
With a correct understanding of who Jesus is, everything makes sense; without it, nothing makes sense.
But it;s not just that our vision must have him at the centre: he is the one who can give us that vision. He can open the eyes of the blind and reveal himself.
It’s popular to think that the whole world is desperately looking for God, but that he is very elusive and hard to find. That is not the bible’s picture. The bible pictures us as hiding from the God who is so very obviously there. We all know that God made the world, but we suppress that truth, because we don’t like it. If he made it, he owns it: he owns us – and what we want more than anything else is independence from his rule.
Perhaps you are here and you are an atheist, and you’d really disagree with what I just said. I’m delighted you are here, and I’d love to talk with you about it afterwards. Come and find me at the door.
I’m not denying at all that people understand themselves to be atheists; the bible suggests though, that atheism is a deliberate choice rather than an unbiased conclusion.
The well known Atheist philosopher and novelist, Auldous Huxley, author of “Brave New World” admitted this for his own life at least in a rare moment of honesty later on in life.

" Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. Those of us who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits us. For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotical revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever." (p.273)
Atheism is believed not because it is convincing, but because it is convenient. And to be honest that is the way our hearts most normally work. We decide what we wnat to believe, and then look for reasons to justify it.
If you do not recognise Jesus to be the Lord this morning, let me suggest to you that you will have a bias to keep yourself in that belief; it will protect your perceived right to rule your own life.
So committed are we to this philosophy of self, that without the supernatural work of the Lord Jesus himself, we will remain blind to his rule over us. We are no more able to see and understand who Jesus is than the blind man was able to make himself see.
This means that Christians should be a people marked in all our discussion with Non-Christians with complete humility. We are not those who are intellectually superior, and have searched harder to find the meaning of life. The initiative belonged to the Lord. Without his gracious work in our lives we would not have given him a second thought, and we would still be heading for hell.
No, our conversations with Non-believers are, as one person has put it, merely one beggar telling another beggar where we have found bread.
This also liberates us as Christians to realise that we don’t have to be super-spiritual to be of use in any other believer’s life either – we just need to be going together to hear from God’s word. We were thinking last week a little about the dangers of hypocrisy. If you are struggling to remain faithful in your Christian life, it is not hypocritical to try to encourage others towards faitfulness.
Parents: you don’t need to be doing really well in your Christian life to give you the right to read the bible with your children. Husbands, you don’t need to be doing well to read the bible with your wives. Single people, you don’t have to be doing well to ask a friend to meet up once a week to read the bible and pray together, and more than you have to be well to encourage a sick friend to go to the doctor.
No – we are all utterly dependent upon Jesus’ work in our lives, so let’s encourage each other as much as we can. He alone can open blind eyes. He alone can give a growing clarity of sight that leads to a greater vision for who he is, and therefore for what it means to belong to him and worship him.
Clear sight recognises Jesus’ centrality
27(F) And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" 28And they told him,(G) "John the Baptist; and others say,(H) Elijah; and others, one of the prophets." 29And he asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him,(I) "You are(J) the Christ." 30(K) And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.

The coming of the Christ, or Messaiah had been expected for 1000 years, and predeicted from the beginning of history.
This is the first time in Mark’s gospel that the disciples openly say he is the Christ.
After the miracles that we’ve already read about in Mark’s gospel and others that he didn’t record, everyone had an opinion about him. And most people recognised that he was someone important sent by God.
John the Baptist had recently been executed by the cowardly herod Antipas as we read in chapter 6. Herod then had superstitiously feared that Jesus was some kind of resurrected John the Baptist, and others seem to have picked up on this belief. Never before had two such key prophetic figures come one after the other in such quick succession.
Elijah was reported in the Old Testament as being taken straight to heaven without dying, and it was prophesied that one would come in his Spirit before the coming of the Lord. More about him next week.
Saying Jesus was one of the prophets is no less a claim. There were many prophets in Israel, but to say that he was not just a prophet but one of the prophets was a claim that he was one of the great prophets who would speak for God at a critical time in Israel’s history – perhaps even the great prophet who was to come as promised by Moses in Deuteronomy 18.
But Peter gets it exactly right. Jesus was not just one of the prophets; he was the one whom all the prophets were preparing Israel for. He was the Christ.
The Christ is the greek term for the Messiah: literally meaning the anointed one. He is the great king in the line of David who had been explicitly promised for 1000 years. But long before that there were promises made that would only be fulfilled in the Messiah; right back in the Garden of Eden, it was promised that a seed of Eve would crush the serpent’s head. Similarly a single seed was promised from Abraham to whom the inheritance would be given. After the promise had been made to David, David himself, under the inspiration of the holy Spirit, wrote Psalms that hinted of how this coming king would not be a mere man, but would in fact be God himself; this theme was picked up by the prophets; and so Isaiah would describe him as “Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty god, the everlasting Father, the prince of peace.”
And, perhaps most grand of all was the scence depicted by the prophet Daniel. Let’s turn their now. Daniel chapter 7. In verses 9-12 there was a picture in of the throneroom in heaven, with God, the Ancient of Days seated upon a throne; books of judgement were opened, and through God’s enemies are destroyed. And how does he achieve that victory? Let’s pick it up in verse 13.
“I saw in the night visions,
And behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a Son of Man,
and he came to the ancient of days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away.
and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”
The picture is incredible: this one is human: like a Son of Man; but he is also clearly more than merely human. He enters the very throne-room of God; and God gives to him divine authority. There is only one whom all peoples, nations and languages should serve – and that is the Lord.
So the picture is one of the God who would become man in order to achieve victory.
And this idea of divine victory would be first people’s minds in 1st century Palestine.
They knew who God’s enemies were: the occupying roman forces. So the expectation was the the Messiah would come, call to himself and army, and drive out the Romans with the sword, in order to purify and reconstitute and rule over Israel.
If the nations would serve him, it would be because he had defeated them.
Such were, we assume the glorious expectations that Peter had when he recognised Jesus to be the Christ. One with all authority, to whom all must bow the knee.
We cannot have a picture of Jesus that is less glorious than this if we are to see him clearly.
Though details of the hope were mistimed, the level of glory that the Messiah has – the glory of God himself means that if we merely think of him as being great we insult him with faint praise.
The whole world was created for this king.
We do not have our right place in this world unless we are living to serve this king.
Every joule of energy we exert should be exerted in service of this king.
Every word that is spoken should be spoken to the praise of this king.
Every penny that is spent should be spent for the glory of this king.
Every smile that breaks forth across our faces should be smiled to the delight of this king.
Every tear that is shed should be shed in dependence upon this king.
Every hour that is spent should be spent in service of this king.
In him alone will we find our significance, our joy, our identity
–for so it has been decreed by the ancient of days who alone is seated on His Heavenly throne.
If we are to see clearly we must see that Jesus central, and bow before the authority of this great king.
Clear sight understands Jesus’ mission
31(L) And he began to teach them that(M) the Son of Man must(N) suffer many things and(O) be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and(P) after three days rise again. 32And he said this(Q) plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, (R) "Get behind me, Satan! For you(S) are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man."

It is wonderfully encouraging to see how Peter, like most of us can fall so flat after reaching so high. We read in the other gospels that Jesus explicitly said that it was only by revelation from God that Peter had recognised Jesus to be the Christ; we know that in Mark’s gospel through the parallel with the sotry of the blind man. Peter’s sight of jesus had been given to him; but he only saw partially. He understood who Jesus was absolutely rightly. But he did not yet know what Jesus had come to do.
And when Jesus says, Peter is incensed. Jesus had strictly warned the disciples not to reveal his identity in verse 30, as people would have thought him to be the wrong kind of king. Jesus caution is proved wise by Peter’s outburst in verse 32.
And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him
The word for rebuke is the same strong word used of Jesus in verse 30.
Do you see the irony; Peter has just declared that Jesus is the divine king before whom all people in the world ever must bow, and the very next thing he does is rebuke him.
“No Jesus – you’re not supposed to be that kind of king – not a suffering King. I won’t have it”
33But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, (R) "Get behind me, Satan! For you(S) are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man."

Was this harsh of Jesus! No, he surely saw the temptation of Satan in Peter’s words. Satan too had offered Jesus a throne which he could take up without suffering. But Jesus knew it was necessary.
the Son of Man must(N) suffer.
This was an extraordinary statement, and we can perhaps well understand Peter’s confusion; the Son of Man was that title from Daniel 7 that we read earlier. The highest picture of the Messaiah in the whole Old Testament. Surely the Son of Man’s enemies should suffer – but the Son of Man should reign with all bowing before him.
Why must this glorious king suffer?
Well Jesus is drawing on another well-known old Testament passage – the passage that was read to us earlier: Isaiah 53. There we read of a suffering servant. Why must that servant suffer?
We heard in that passage: We esteemed him stricken; smitten by God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the punishment that brought us peace, and by his wounds are we healed...
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief.
Jesus would suffer not because of anything that he had done; but for the rebellion of his people.
Gospel.
That is why he rebuked Peter so strongly.
Look at what he does just before he rebukes Peter.

33 but turning and seeing and seeing his disciples
33 but turning and seeing and seeing his disciples
Peter, you would save me from the cross would you? You would save me from going through that hell... but peter, you don’t understand that if you save me you will damn the whole world. Look at my disciples with me, Peter... i have come to save them, not to damn them. And with them to save millions upon millions of others. If I am not crushed by the Lord then you will be: You, my disciples, everyone who had ever lived would be crushed by the Lord forever in hell.
It is necessary that the Son of Man would suffer.
My friends; this is our great hope. God has not left this world to face the judgment we deserve; the Son of man would willingly suffer in our place. And for the rest of the book, Jesus is walking the road towards that cross.
That he would take that road would lead to the arrogant reproof of peter now. It would lead to the betrayal of Judas. It would lead to all of them abandoning him. Why did he do it: for he loved the very disciples who would reprove, betray, abandon.
Without this understanding of Jesus mission there is no good news. Unless Jesus has born the punishment that we all deserve we will most certainly face it ourselves.
This must define as a church; we cannot admit to membership of the church someone who has not trusted that Christ has borne their punishment, lest we give that person false assurance of their salvation.
Without the Son of Man suffering for our guilt there is no church. Jesus says in John 10 “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
This must define which other churches we can work with in the name of the Lord Jesus.
I’m meeting up with other local ministers as part of getting to know what the Lord is doing in Fulham. I met with one vicar this week and asked him whether he thought Jesus bore the punishment that we deserve; I was a little taken aback by the clarity of his answer – “absolutely not.” I felt compelled to tell him that I would seek to love him as a human being but that we could not do things together in the name of the Lord Jesus, for we do not believe in the same Jesus.
Is this because I want us to be thought of as that weird little separatist church? No, honestly I’d much rather be liked by people. I personally found him a very pleasant man. But I fear that Jesus would have said the same rebuke to that vicar that he’d said to Peter, only the stupidity of the claim now is so much more tragic. He has already died! The punishment has already been paid! The Lord has proved it by raising Christ from the dead! The way is open to freedom from guilt, to fellowship with God, to an eternity serving the Son of Man. But that way is through trusting that Jesus has borne our guilt, and paid our punishment, the one message that this vicar said he absolutely does not believe, and therefore I assume absolutely will not preach to his congregation – denying their ears the only offer of hope there is in this guilty world.
This message is the only hope for your marriage.
Husbands: this is how you are to love. Not to succumb to every object of your wives: but to love in ways that she may not always appreciate, ways that will cost you more than they cost her, but ways you know are for her eternal good. Beware of leadership that costs your spouse more than it costs you.
Pray particularly for the elders of this church in this regard. Pray that we would love our wives as Christ has loved us; one of the ways in which the devil would seek to undermine the Lord’s work in this church is by attacking the marriages of those in leadership.
We must grasp the mission of Christ if we are to see clearly; and it must grip us. It must transform every area of our lives.
Clear sight accepts Jesus’ affliction
34And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, "If anyone would come after me, let him(T) deny himself and(U) take up his cross and follow me. 35For(V) whoever would save his life[b] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake(W) and the gospel’s will save it. 36(X) For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37For(Y) what can a man give in return for his soul? 38For(Z) whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this(AA) adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed(AB) when he comes in the glory of his Father with(AC) the holy angels." 1And he said to them, "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not(AD) taste death(AE) until they see the kingdom of God after it has come(AF) with power."
“Deny yourself” sounds to our culture’s ears like the words of a kill-joy. Our culture is about self-indulgence, not self-denial. Our adverts encourage us to say “I’m worth it”. Our fast food restaurants ask us if we want to ‘go large’; our tv programming increasingly seems to have lost any kind of censorship – the argument being that if people want something it should be available, and if they don’t they don’t have to. We should all indulge ourselves in whatever is to our taste.
We’ve just been thinking about what a glorious king Jesus is. Why would that king say that we must deny ourselves? And if denying ourselves in not enough, “take up your cross” is even more radical. This isn’t the colloquial watered down use of this phrase that we have today. “We’ve all got our crosses to bear” perhaps mine is my ingrowing toenail, yours is your difficult boss at work, someone else’s is a difficult relationship with a family member.
But that is not how the disciples would have heard this. If someone was bearing a cross, it was not just a burden that got a bit heavy for them. They were on their last walk to the place where they themselves would be nailed to that cross and die. To take up our cross then, is to begin a journey to a slow and painful death.
If your not a Christian, and you’ve expressed come interest in Christianity, and people have told you that it will solve all your problems and give you a life filled only with peace, then they haven’t told you the whole story.
There is a death to be died. This doesn’t mean that every Christian must be a martyr, though every Christian must be prepared to be. It is in fact far more radical than that. It is I who is to die; my desires; taking up your cross is how painful it will feel to deny yourself.
Really? Yes! Elseshere jesus describes it as being like cutting off your hand or plucking out your eye.
Sometimes the non-christian thinks that Christians are just unrealistic prudes who know nothing about the pull of temptation. That is nonsense. I can assure from bitter experience that the pull of temptation feels much less strong when you are giving into it. It is only when you constantly, daily, moment by moment seek, with God’s help, to resist that temptation that we realise how painful it is.
It is only when we start to follow Jesus that we realise how deep the grip of sin really was on our lives.
Perhaps there were sins that you thought might be incredibly difficult to drop, that actually, with God’s help are largely overcome within a relatively short time, and yet sins that you bearly even realised were sins grip you far deeply than you could have possibly imagined.
One might quickly kick a heroine habit but then struggle for the rest of one’s life with self-indulgent self-pity.
One might be surprised how quickly one stops using swearwords that used to trip off the tongue almost uncontrollably, but there might be a lifelong battle not to use your words to gossip – something that you hadn’t even realised was a problem.
We saw last week how our hearts produce all kinds of evil desires. That doesn’t stop when we start to follow Jesus; it is just that the fight begins in earnest. It is a fight where we are at war with the sin that resides so deep in our heart – each day may seem like agony at times – we really are to take up our cross and follow him.
But is it worth it?
Yes! That’s the whole point. In fact, it seems that the whole point of the church is that there would be a group of people who so delight in Christ that we would proclaim, not with stoic resignment, but with tears of joy, “he is worth it!”
The foundation of the church is on this secure, unmovable roack, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” on the most intimate conjunction of the two natures, the divine and the human, in themselves infinitely distant, in the same person... What are other things in comparison to the knowledge of Christ? In the judgement of the great apostle they are but loss and dung. So they were to him, and if they are not to us, we are carnal.(John Owen)
There are millions who have realised that Jesus is worth following.
That, I think is the point of the often misunderstood verse right at the end of the passage. Jesus is not mistakenly saying that his return would be within that generation. Rather, within the lifetime of some standing there the profession of Jesus as Christ was something not just said by Peter or a handful of disciples. When Jesus had died and risen, and sent his Spirit, the gospel went forth with power. That mustard seed became a great tree, and many from many nations put their trust in Christ.
And they showed that they knew Jesus was worth following, for they were willing to follow him though they suffered much for it. Christians do not seek suffering, but we know that suffering comes from following Christ with hearts that are prone to wander, in a world that hates him.
And Christians almost invaribaly testify that suffering is the time when the fact that the Lord is worth it is clearest to them.
In 1637 Samuel Rutherford, imprisoned in Aberdeen for wrote from prison, “I never knew by my nine years’ preaching so much of Christ’s love as He has taught me in Aberdeen by six months imprisonment. I charge you in Christ’s name to help me to praise and show that people and country the loving kindness of the Lord to my soul, that so my suffering may someday preach to them when I am silent. He has made me to know now better than before what it is to be crucified to the world. I would not exchange my sighs for the laughing of my adversaries, for he has sealed my sufferings with the comforts of his spirit on my soul.
If we have not realised that Jesus is worth all this, then we have not seen correctly.
And one day all our eyes will be opened, and that expectation that Peter had that he would destroy his enemies will come to pass.
35For(V) whoever would save his life[b] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake(W) and the gospel’s will save it. 36(X) For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37For(Y) what can a man give in return for his soul? 38For(Z) whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this(AA) adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed(AB) when he comes in the glory of his Father with(AC) the holy angels."
What are you holding onto. Christ has not returned to judge yet, for he is holding out his nail-scarred hand, offering it to you to take you to follow him now, and one day to be with him forever. Will you hold onto those treasures and sink into the quicksand or Will you let go of the treasures of this world, that you will lose one day anyway, and grasp that hand that is offered to you in love?