The Resurrection and Forgiving Peter (Mark 16:1-8) – #BigRead12

There’s a moment, a very quiet moment, in Mark’s account of the resurrection, that speaks volumes. It’s Easter Sunday, and a group of women, including Jesus’s mom and Mary Magdalene, have made their way to the tomb. The rest of the story is so well known we take it for granted – the tomb is empty, Jesus is risen. But here’s the bit that jumped out at me when I reread the passage:

But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”

Wait a minute – why the distinction here? Peter is a disciple; heck, he’s the leader of the disciples. He’s the one who first confessed that Jesus was the Messiah and, as a result, became the guy on which the early church would be built. Peter’s a disciple.

But then Peter was the one who, rather than just running away, actually denied knowing Jesus three times. There Jesus is, on trial for his life, and one of his best friends is outside telling a kid he’s never heard of this alleged Messiah from Galilee.

Now, we can… Well, maybe not excuse this, but we can understand that people are capable of crumpling under pressure and panic. For all his boasts, Peter couldn’t handle the fear and confusion Jesus’s arrest and, frankly, the possibility that the same thing could happen to him.

What makes it worse is that Jesus prophesised this betrayal. And, on remembering that, Peter broke down and wept. It’s probably a fair bet that, right at this very moment, Peter is at the lowest point he’s ever been. The other person who betrayed Jesus ended up committing suicide – who knows what mental state Peter is in at the moment?

Well, the angel knows.

“Go and tell Peter that Jesus will see him in Galilee.”

There are two ways Peter could end up taking that message, I guess.

You could take it as a veiled threat – “You sold out Jesus and now you’re going to face the consequences.” Not Jesus’s style in any way, shape or form, but when you’re wracked with guilt, paranoia can take over. Would you want to look into the eyes of the one you betrayed? You could hear this as a message of judgement.

Or there’s another way to take it – “Come home Peter. You thought I was dead and gone and that this great adventure was over. It’s not, the gang’s going to be reunited. Come on home.”

It’s a message of hope. The women need to carry this back to Peter so he can be forgiven and healed. All the things Jesus said about him being the rock among the disciples are still true. Yes, Peter’s messed up royally, catastrophically, but his story isn’t over. Restoration is on the horizon.

And yet there’s an edge to this – the angel gives the women a message that specifically seems to over an open hand to Peter… And they don’t deliver it, not immediately: “They said nothing to anybody, because they were afraid”. In other words, Peter’s healing and restoration is potentially delayed because of the fear of other people.

There’s a message there somewhere, right?

But let’s not leave it there, because the message did get delivered. Let’s leave it on the shore of Lake Galilee, where Jesus forgives and reinstates Peter. Because that’s what Easter is all about – forgiveness, hope, restoration.

Resurrection.

The Rich Young Ruler (Mark 10:17-31) – #BigRead12

So one day a rich young man falls on his knees before Jesus and asks what he needs to do to inherit eternal life.

“Well, you know the commandments,” says Jesus before listing them.

Only that’s the interesting thing. He doesn’t list all of them. After all, everyone knows there are Ten Commandments, so why does Jesus only list six?

This story is as much about what’s left unsaid. Go to Exodus 20 where the Ten Commandments first appear and there, partially, is Jesus’s list. However, he seems to have replaced “do not covet your neighbour’s possessions” with “do not defraud people” (which is a key part of the Jewish Law, but not one of the Ten).

Effectively, once we untangle Jesus’s list, the rich young man has actually only kept five of the commandments. One of them we’ve touched upon – do not covet. Maybe this guy’s wealth has been getting in the way of that one. Maybe he’s been looking around at his fellow socialites and power-brokers, seen their fancy houses, their fine clothes…

It seems a shame to think this way – the fact is, when he begs to know what he needs to do to get eternal life, he seems 100% sincere. Jesus doesn’t verbally smack him down like he does hypocritical Pharisees, he respects this young man enough to make his point fairly subtly, for now at least. But something’s wrong here, the young man is missing the point fairly spectacularly.

That point is seen in the four commandments Jesus omitted – Don’t worship other gods, don’t make idols, don’t misuse the name of God, observe the Sabbath. In short, all the Commandments covering how humanity should relate to God. Jesus seems to be implying that the man’s relationship with God isn’t what it should be.

The young man doesn’t pick up on this – “I’ve kept all those since I was a little boy!”

“Okay,” says Jesus, “Now you need to sell everything and give it to the poor.”

Boom. This is the nuclear option. Because this is the line that makes the young man walk away, leaving both him and Jesus saddened. His relationship with God isn’t what it should be because his money and possessions are getting in the way, to the point that they’re making him break the Commandments about idolatry. His money has become his god and he hasn’t even realised it.

That’s challenging. It’s fairly easy to not bow down in front of a golden calf. It’s stuff like money and career and power that are more insidious, pushing God off his throne without us even noticing. It’s scary stuff.

And it’s not only scary because of that, although that’s bad enough. It’s scary because, when the young man and Jesus talk about eternal life, they’re not talking about what happens when we die, we’re talking about what happens when God’s kingdom comes and is established on Earth. The young man was seeing that as some future event, but that’s not how Jesus saw it – his ministry and his imminent death on the cross were already inaugerating that kingdom. It was already there and it’s already here – not fully consolidated, sure, but here all the same. God’s work, God’s power are breaking through, changing lives, bringing resurrection in a whole variety of situations. Part of that involved feeding the hungry and making sure the poor were looked after.

The young man wanted to inherit eternal life by entering God’s kingdom at some point. What he didn’t realise that this wasn’t going to be in the future, this was now, and so him selling his possessions and giving to the poor would have been him helping to inaugerate the kingdom there and then. There were poor people in his community who needed that help.

And yet he couldn’t do it. He may well have seen his money as a reward from God for all his years of trying to keep the Law, but he’d missed the point. He was blessed to be a blessing, but his part in this chain had fallen apart.

Jesus goes on to talk about how wealth and power can get in the way of us entering the kingdom, but let’s watch the young man walk away. He thought he’d been keeping the Law, loyally following God for years. And yet he hadn’t. Judging by Jesus’s list he’d barely managed 50%. We all fall short of the glory.

And that’s something that God understands – that’s why grace is so important. But we need to acknowledge we need that grace, to realise that, no matter how sorted we seem to be, there’s always the possibility that something’s creeping in between us and God.

I like to think the rich young man looked at himself in a mirror and changed his ways after this encounter (I know someone who has a theory he might have been St. Paul…), but we never find out. We leave him walking away from Jesus, sad looks all round and an unspoken challenge for us all in every retreating footstep.

The Young Man Who Runs Away (Mark 14:51-52) – #BigRead12

And so Jesus is being arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Temple police have shown up, armed to the teeth, Judas has carried out the most infamous act of betrayal in history, and the disciples have fled. Hundreds of sermons have been preached on this, because this is moment the cross really starts to cast its shadow, the moment that Easter begins.

And yet there are a couple of verses that, while fitting the narrative without a problem, stick out like a sore thumb:

“A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.”

 Everything crashes down from the epic themes of treason, cowardice, non-violence and injustice to this, an anonymous young man slipping out of his shirt to escape arrest.

On the one hand, it’s understandable. Maybe the disciples have all gone, but this young man has got too close the action. There’s a brief struggle and he runs. The fact that he’s naked emphasises his cowardice and shame – running around with no clothes on was a pretty dramatic social no-no at the time. Heck, no-one would be keen on this today. It highlights the sheer abandonment of Jesus – the people following him have all gone, in one case even leaving their clothes behind. This is a pretty comprehensive desertion of Jesus.

Tradition states that the young man could have been Mark, the traditional author of the gospel. If that’s the case, maybe this is his confession – “You look at Judas with contempt, you look at Peter with anger, but I abandoned Jesus too. And maybe you’d’ve done the same thing in my place.”

And yet it feels like there’s more going on in this verse. The young man doesn’t seem to have been one of the disciples (past, present or future) so maybe it wasn’t Mark, maybe we shouldn’t have expected him to risk his neck for Jesus. But if he wasn’t a disciple, what was he doing there?

Well, he was wearing a linen shirt on a night where, not long afterwards, Peter was warming himself next to a fire; the guy’s not really dressed for the occasion. So maybe he wasn’t following Jesus, maybe he was a local kid who heard the noise, ran out in his night clothes to see what was going on, and ended up narrowly avoiding getting caught up in something far bigger than himself. Perhaps he’s an innocent young bystander who nevertheless can’t avoid becoming a part of the story, because when you encounter Jesus a response is demanded. You can’t stand on the sidelines, rubber-necking the story of Good Friday. That option isn’t really available.

I like that idea, but at the same time it feels a little tenuous. The anonymity of the young may be important, but important enough to warrant a mention here, as Jesus’s ministry approaches a climax? I don’t know.

The whole thing feels… I don’t know, liminal. While looking into this, I stumbled across something interesting – other than here, the only other use of this word for ‘linen’ in the gospels is when describing the grave clothes that Jesus will soon be wearing; meanwhile, the Greek word used here for ‘young man’, neaniskos, is only used once more in Mark – when describing an angel that announces the resurrection of Jesus. It might be a stretch, sure, but maybe there’s something else going on here, something visionary, something prophetic?

But then you’d expect Mark to make more of this. As it stands, the verse is straight-forward, almost feeling too…banal to be a vision or a prophetic enactment by an angel or something. Maybe there’s a key in pointing out that the man was young?

But then the disciples as a whole were probably teenagers and in their early twenties. We’re not talking a group of old men, despite all the art that gives them beards and receding hairlines. I always find it a little sobering that Jesus, standing before Pilate, nailed to a cross, was younger than I am now. The naked guy was young, but so were the rest of the disciples.

Maybe there’s something in what’s come before. People were expecting the Messiah to be a military ruler – that seems to be true even of the disciples who’ve been following Jesus for years. Even after Jesus has told them that he’s got to die, that this arrest is part of God’s salvation plan for humanity, the disciples still try to resist this – Peter cuts off a man’s ear with a sword, earning him a slap-down from Jesus. This isn’t the violent revolution that people were expecting, this isn’t about fire from heaven consuming their enemies. This is about the cross, and it seems as though this is the moment that the disciples realise this, their youthful impetuousness and desire to see the Romans kicked out falling about when confronted with the truth of the situation – that one of their friends has sold them out and that Jesus is going to die.

And, either because they can’t process this now it’s become a reality, or because they’re just plain scared, they run. And the young man, last one standing, flees in shame and nakedness. Rubber-necker, Mark, heck, even an angel, the end result is the same. Jesus faces the cross alone.

What do we do with this story?

I’m not sure. There are too many ‘maybes’ to draw any definitive conclusions. But I do know this – sometimes there are moments when we get scared and we want to run, no matter the cost to ourselves. And yet, later in the Bible, these people who have run end up becoming the founders of the church, great evangelists and preachers and gospel writers. What changed?

Jesus came back. The Holy Spirit came in power. And the world changed, but more than that, individuals changed, teenagers who once turned and ran became powerful men of God. And as we remember what happened in Gethsemane, with all its questions and confusion and fear, we need to remember what was about to happen just a few days later…

 

James and John Get Cocky (Luke 9:51-56; Mark 10:35-45) – #BigRead12

Jews and Samaritans did not get on at all. This is important to remember.

After all, the Samaritans were considered half-breeds; when the Assyrians conquered the region centuries before, they moved their own people into depopulated areas, where nature took its course and the new arrivals started families with the remaining Jews, resulting, in some eyes, in a compromised religion and a sullied gene pool.. Several hundred years later and things weren’t pretty between Samaritans and Jews; a couple of decades before Jesus started his ministry, a group of Samaritans sneaked a bunch of human bones into the Temple, promptly getting their countrymen banned from Jewish festivals. And, because this is a tit-for-tat feud, and because Samaria lay between Galilee and Jerusalem, Samaritans refused to offer hospitality to Jewish pilgrims making their way to the Temple for the great feasts.

So when Jesus and the disciples are turned away from a Samaritan town, James and John are furious; so furious, in fact, that they offer to call down fire from heaven to destroy the town. This, to me, raises a fundamental question:

C’mon lads, who do you think you are?

I mean, what made them think they had that sort of power? Only a few verses earlier Jesus is upset that the disciples (admittedly not including James and John themselves) can’t even handle a single evil spirit. When you look at other examples of fire being called down from heaven, it’s associated with big hitters – 2 Kings 1, where it’s linked with Elijah sorting out the emissaries of the corrupt king Ahaziah, and a couple of examples from the ministry of Moses.

Ahh. Moses and Elijah. Maybe that helps explain things. Because it hasn’t been long since the Transfiguration, a spiritual experience during which James, John and Peter encountered, in some form, those same two heroes of the Jewish faith, not long after which the disciples get into an argument about which of them is the greatest.

So were James and John getting cocky because of their experiences? Did they think meeting Moses and Elijah, seeing Jesus in all his divine glory, made them a cut above everyone else? Calling down fire to destroy people? Heck, the story that threat most closely resembles is that of Sodom and Gomorrah, and that was God acting in judgement. They’re putting themselves in some illustrious company.

Needless to say, Jesus has to put them in their place.

It doesn’t seem to sink in, however, because later in Jesus’s ministry, they’re at again. In Mark 10:35-45 they’re asking to be seated at the right and left of Jesus in God’s kingdom – in other words, the two most important positions. This is utter arrogance, and Jesus asks them if they can walk the path he has to walk.

“Yep! Sure can!” they answer.

And yet, when Jesus does inaugerate his kingdom – on the cross – those on the right and left of him aren’t James and John (James seems to have done a runner, and John’s just a spectator), they’re a couple of criminals – “bandits”, which implied they were revolutionaries against Rome. And of those two, only one of them was willing to place his future in the hands of Jesus.

(The repentant bandit turns out to have given his name to San Dimas, the town immortalised by Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which is irrelevant but I always find it cool.)

But wait – sure they’re arrogant, but maybe James and John have a point. After all, at the beginning of Luke 9 Jesus sends out the twelve core disciples to proclaim God’s kingdom and to heal the sick, and it seems to have been successful. Maybe the problem isn’t so much the idea that they could access God’s power – they already have – but the attitude behind it. Jesus isn’t the sort to go around calling down fire from heaven to destroy a bunch of people, but here’s the thing – the Messiah was widely believed to be a military leader who would boot out the Romans and restore Israel’s fortunes. Looked at in that context, James and John’s moments of arrogance are a bit more understandable,

And that’s the central tension in Jesus’s ministry – the idea that the kingdom is achieved, not through violence and imperial ambition but through grace and suffering (the repentant bandit doesn’t get into paradise through revolution, after all). Instead of talking about fire and thrones, James and John should have been talking about forgiveness and humility and becoming like a child. It’s a lesson they’d painfully learn (James was the first of the Twelve to be martyred, after all) but, for now, they’re still following a mistaken agenda.

And that’s a lesson, Do we make Jesus in our own image, as a prop for our own agendas? And should we be talking about the cross more than we talk about fire?

 

Jesus and the Fig Tree: God Hates Figs (Mark 11:12-25) – #BigRead12

Well, no, God doesn’t hate figs, but I’ve never met a pun I didn’t like. And besides, I’m celebrating getting back on the blogging horse by publishing two tree-related posts today. I feel productive.

All that said, there’s one instance in Mark 11 when you’ve got to wonder whether Jesus had fruit-related issues. There he is, walking towards Jerusalem, when he gets hungry. Finding a nearby fig tree he finds that there isn’t any fruit, mainly because it’s only spring and it’s not the right time of year to harvest figs.

And then he does something that seems, on the surface of it, to be out of character. Saying, in earshot of the disciples, “May no-one ever eat fruit from you again”, he gives up on the tree and heads off to Jerusalem. The next day the group is passing the tree again but now it’s dead.

Hmm.

Of course, there’s more to this story. There has to be – Jesus isn’t the sort of person who kills trees in outbursts of petulance. And the key to it is what happens in the middle of Mark’s narrative, because that turns the incident with the fig tree into a physical metaphor. In the middle of this story is the cleansing of the Temple, the moment when Jesus launches into his most dramatic attack on corrupted religion.

Some context: the Temple was central to Jewish religious life, but at the time of the gospels, the wheels were falling off. The priesthood was corrupt, profiteering, nationalist and painfully nepotistic. Here, during the Passover festival, the place has become more of a market than a place of worship, specifically excluding the poor and non-Jews from getting close to God. The key function of the Temple is crippled and, because Jesus really doesn’t like religious leaders who put unnecessary barriers between the people and God, he starts overturning tables, driving out animals and accusing the authorities of turning the place into a den of robbers. Obviously this doesn’t make him popular, and is one of the dominoes that falls and leads towards the crucifixion, but what’s it got to do with dead fig trees?

Well, the answer lies in the Hebrew scriptures, particularly Jeremiah 8, which talks about the corruption of religion, how Israel turned away from God, and which includes the following:

“‘I will take away their harvest,
            declares the LORD.
   There will be no grapes on the vine.
There will be no figs on the tree,
   and their leaves will wither.
What I have given them
   will be taken from them.’”

There’s also a piece in Micah 7, where Micah prophetically surveys the land and is horrified by its corruption:

What misery is mine!
I am like one who gathers summer fruit
   at the gleaning of the vineyard;
there is no cluster of grapes to eat,
   none of the early figs that I crave.
The faithful have been swept from the land;
   not one upright person remains.

So Jesus’s encounter with the fig tree is nothing to do with having a problem with a tree and more about his anger at the way in which the structures of his nation’s faith and politics have been corrupted, abused and turned into a means of oppression. The tree is a metaphor for the Temple, and in Mark 13 we get to see a fuller prophecy from Jesus about the destruction of the Temple (which also includes a reference to fig trees!).

And so the story of the fig tree is about the failure of people of faith to show the fruit of their beliefs, and about how false, corrupted religion will not stand. Looked at in that way, it becomes a difficult passage, especially for those of us who claim to follow Christ. How much fruit – and I guess we can use the Fruit of the Spirit here as a guideline – do we display? Is our religious practice just a case of going through the motions and grieving God? Are our temples on the verge of collapse, even though we don’t recognise it?

 

(This post was based on this week’s reading for The Big Read 2012 – ‘Signposts’.)

 

 

Breaking Rules (Mark 7:1-13) – #BigRead12

Over the years, some churches have implemented Rules.

These Rules-with-a-capital-R may not appear anywhere in the Bible, but still they were considered important. And anyone breaking those rules wasn’t a proper Christian. Heck, worst case scenario was that Rule Breakers were heretics, fit only to be driven from the community. Or possibly burned at the stake.

Some examples:

No drums, for rhythm is satanic. Or possibly just noisy.

No hymns that didn’t involve Charles Wesley somewhere along the line.

Or a far more abhorrant Rule: for example, ‘No black people allowed in this church’.

Nothing to do with the Bible, of course, but those were the Rules and boy, did people keep them. The problem with keeping Rules, of course, is that Jesus was an almighty Rule Breaker.

There’s a story in Mark’s gospel, where the disciples are criticised by religious leaders for not washing their hands properly before meals. This is a big deal to them, all tied up with notions of purity and clean-verses-unclean, but rather than politely accept their Rules, Jesus lets rip. “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions!” he says, summing up one of his major problems with the religious environment of the time.

To emphasise this he quotes Isaiah, someone else who was speaking at a time when talking the talk was easy but wasn’t backed up by much walking of the walk:

“‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’

And there’s the problem. Rules are created ostensibly to help people follow God but, thanks to legalism and hypocrisy, the Rules can actually take the place of God; one day you wake up and realise you’re not worshipping God, you’ve simply deified the Rulebook, and while your outward actions might look good and righteous, inside your heart is shrivelling.

And after all, if the story of the Bible is effectively the story of God’s relationship with humanity, then anything that presents a barrier to that relationship is going to be a problem. Jesus broke the Rules, yes, not because he didn’t care about following God, but because he knew that truly following God is a matter of the heart, not observances, and therefore the heart needs to be aligned to God’s – that will mean offering love and grace to those around us. That’s why Jesus broke the Rules and talked to outcast women and conniving collaborators and people from a different background who didn’t follow the Rules in the right way.

This is the cause of my twitchiness over the WWJD? thing that was big a few years ago – Jesus did the unpredictable and the scandalous and we need to appreciate that when trying to follow him. And the only way we’ll truly manage that is through relationship, through his Spirit and his grace, because any attempts to follow him without them could end up with us writing another Rulebook.

And guess what? The world doesn’t need another Rulebook.

It needs love.

It needs grace.

Go break some Rules.

 

(This post was based on this week’s reading for The Big Read 2012 – ‘Expectations’.)

 

 

Power and Fear: Jesus and Legion (Mark 5:1-17) – #BigRead12

The disciples are freaked out.

They’ve just witnessed Jesus calm a storm with a handful of words, displaying the sort of power reserved for God alone. And then, as they bring the boat ashore, they’re immediately hit with another situation. They’ve had no time to process the calming of the storm when they arrive, wet and scared, in a bad part of town.

Not that this is their town. This is an area known as the Gerasenes, part of the Decapolis, an unofficial confederacy of Greco-Roman cities just over the border of Jewish territory. This is a city of outsider, people who have different customs and worship different gods, and while the Roman Empire might have been fairly cosmopolitan, first century Judaism was known for its passionate desire to live up to its job description as a people set apart from the sin and corruption of the world around them. They were meant to be God’s people and everyone else had to deal with that, and yet here they were, a bunch of young scared men in a town that didn’t play by their rules.

To make it worse, they’re being accosted by a man possessed by an impure spirit, and while it may be tempting to say this is just a primitive reading of mental illness, there’s an atmosphere to the story, a darkness. Whatever’s going on, Mark wants us to be clear that this is supernatural.

And so a scarred and tormented man is running towards – but running from where? From the local tombs, a place of the dead. This just makes matters worse – for a Jew to come into physical contact with death like this would render them ceremonially unclean, at least until the necessary purification rituals could be carried out. Not only was someone charging towards them, which perhaps presented a physical threat, there was also a threat of spiritual contamination here.

And the man had been cutting himself with stones. Did this remind them of Elijah’s encounter with the prophets of Baal, ecstatics who slashed themselves with swords and spears in order to attract the attention of their god? This situation was getting worse by the minute.

To make matters worse, they’re near to a pig farm. Pigs, unclean animals. Maybe the disciples shuddered with disgust, wrinkled their noses at the stench. This place was bad, very bad. Everything about Mark’s description screams, to Jewish ears at least, get the heck out of there. There’s something about this in the way the story is told, the weight of oppression maybe. We’re not supposed to think this a nice place to go on our holidays.

But now Jesus is talking to the man – or rather the impure spirit. Only it’s not one spirit, it’s an army of them. Their name was Legion, simply because there were so many of them, and maybe there was a frisson here, as the impure spirits named themselves after a unit in the Roman army. Why would anyone be surprised that the hated and idolatrous Romans shared a military set-up with impure spirits?

But the man isn’t threatening Jesus. He’s not rendering him ceremonially unclean. He’s not a threat. He’s… He’s begging Jesus. He’s begging Jesus not to torture him.

What did the disciples take from this? Jesus hasn’t given any indication of being prone to torture or violence. And yet here’s an army of impure spirits grovelling before him. What’s going on here?

This man has just stilled a storm, and now he exercises authority over evil spiritual forces who seem to fear his very power and holiness.

And then there’s a terrible sound, the screams of tormented animals stampeding down the hills into the lake, because the impure spirits are no longer in the man, they’re in a maddened herd of pigs, a couple of thousand of them. The noise and panic must have been near unbearable.

And then silence.

The man, at last, is at peace and free.

The disciples are trying to process what just happened.

And the townsfolk?

The townsfolk, who lived with a man possessed who hid among tombs and who could snap chains like paper, are scared. So scared, in fact, that they beg Jesus to leave.

What does this tell us?

I mean, we’re not used to people being scared of Jesus. We’re more used to the image of him debating aggressive authority figures or, ultimately, crucified. And when we don’t see these conflicts, we seem him helping people – healing the sick, restoring someone’s life. We don’t often see people react to him in fear.

But maybe this is because this story forms part of a narrative in which Jesus overturns everyone’s expectations. Maybe it’s because, in the midst of this dark and oppressive environment, only just lashed by a storm, Jesus displays unbelievable power, the power of a god – and not just the power of a random member of Rome’s pantheon of deities but the power of the very specific God of Israel. This is taking everything that the locals – and to a degree the disciples – thought had power and overturning in it the face of God’s power. And that’s not only awe-inspiring, it’s frightening, because everything they thought they knew was wrong and they had to face a new reality, one that they were utterly unprepared for.

No wonder they were freaked out.

And yet, in the middle of all this fear and confusion, one man sits calmly – it’s perhaps the first time in years that he’s been able to do so. The man plagued by an army of spirits? He’s better. He’s restored. He’s healed.

Because while God’s power may sometimes demolish our preconceptions, it’s always for the best. He’s powerful and almighty, yes, but he’s reaching out for us and offering healing and peace. Restoration.

Don’t look at the storm. Don’t look at the tombs or the maddened animals or the unclean spirits.

Look at the man. He’s sitting there, clear-eyed and healed. All those things that threatened and oppressed him? Gone, dead and broken in the face of God’s power.

Look at the man.

And remember that God broke an army to make him whole.

Hometown Hero? Jesus in Nazareth (Mark 6:1-4)

You often hear bands comment on how much they look forward to hometown gigs – after all, it’s where they grew up. Everyone’s supportive and excited to see their town’s favourite sons return home and play a few numbers.

Sadly for Jesus, this wasn’t the case in Nazareth.

He’s been travelling around Galillee, establishing his ministry, performing miracles and teaching. He returns home for a while, whereupon he starts to teach in the synagogue. The locals are freaked out by this, hardly able to believe what they’re seeing:

“Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon?”

In other words, Jesus should have been making tables, not presuming to take on the role of a religious leader. Sure, he had authority; sure, he did miracles. But he’s Mary’s son. we know his brothers, they’re nothing special – look at them!

It’s a strange tension: on one hand, the crowds acknowledge his wisdom and authority. On the other… Well, he’s just the local carpenter. It’s a bit like the “Who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays” controversy, because how could an unknown from a humble background like Will produce some of the greatest plays ever written.

It’s easy for our words to build cages for others, and for ourselves. Snobbery, prejudice, lack of ambition, lack of confidence, fear… They all conspire to confine us. This even affects Jesus somehow – look at verse 5, which reports that “he could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.”

This is no triumphant hometown gig. This is a bodyblow to Jesus, who’s stunned by the lack of faith on display by his own neighbours – by his own family. “A prophet is not without honour except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home”, he says, and he’s right, because sometime’s it’s those who are closest to us that can hurt us the most.

And maybe there’s an even nastier slur. Someone pointed out to me that this same story is reported in Matthew’s gospel, although there’s a key difference in a key line:

“Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?”

What key word does Matthew use that Mark omits?

“Son”.

Now this could be innocent. It could just indicate that Mark’s pointing out that Joseph has passed away and that the responsibility for the family business had passed to Jesus at some point. There could, however, be something darker going on – were there questions about Jesus’s parentage? Neighbourhood gossip?

(Of course, it’s possible that Mark didn’t want to say Jesus was a carpenter’s son because he was the Son of God. Fair enough, but the context of the story doesn’t imply that Jesus is held in much respect by the townsfolk – at the very least they seem to think he’s getting above his station.)

Whatever the reason, Jesus’s reception in Nazareth is another example of him going through the same trials we all do – gossip, dismissal, insults, lack of respect. And yet look at the story that immediately follows this in Mark – Jesus sends out the twelve disciples to teach and perform miracles. And these are people from a similar background to himself – tradesmen, mostly, with the odd political radical and collaborating tax collector thrown in. They’re a motley bunch, but Jesus believes in them, in what God can do through them. Despite the words and cutting looks that can be thrown our way, it seems that Jesus trusts his followers – he believes in them more than they believe in themselves, despite their inadequacies and lack of faith.

That’s because he can take a smidgen of faith – a mustard seed – and do something spectacular with it. He just needs us to take the first step, take that leap of faith, walk towards the unknown and every other religious cliche you can think of. Through ordinary, confused, messed up people, God can do great things. Both throughout the world and right there on your doorstep.

 

Shelter from the Storm (Mark 4:35-41; Psalm 107:23-32; Jonah 1) – #BigRead12

I’ve written before about some parts of the Bible are illuminated by references to other parts of the Bible that aren’t immediately obvious. In honour of the second week of the Big Read, here’s another one.

Mark 4: Jesus and the disciples are travelling across the Sea of Galilee when a violent storm blows up. The disciples are terrified which, considering a bunch of them were fishermen, is cause for concern. Jesus, meanwhile, is asleep.

Unsurprisingly, this does not fill them with confidence. “Wake up! Don ‘t you care that we’re all about to drown?!” they shout, but as he stirs, something far more disturbing is about to happen. Because with a couple of words, Jesus tells the storm to stop.

And it does.

And the disciples are terrified.

Part of it is down to the fact that, well, human beings just don’t command storms. In the thinking of the time, the sea was associated with a sort of primordial chaos, something for The gods (or, of course, God) to tame – which is presumably why, in Genesis 1, the Spirit of God hovers “over the waters”. The effortless nature of God’s commands here just serve to emphasise his sheer power.

So we’ve got Jesus commanding a storm. Now, when the Bible talks about storms, it’s normally as a metaphor for God’s power. Wind, rain and thunder is used to demonstrate the overwhelming strength that God can bring to bear. However, there are a couple of moments in which God is said to calm storms rather than unleash them.

The first is Psalm 107. This talks of Jewish merchants out on the seas, caught up in storms and crying out to God for help, whereupon God “stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed.”

Sound familiar?

So when the disciples, terrified, ask “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”, the answer is implicit – God.

That realisation should lead to one main reaction, and we also see this in the story of Jonah. Jonah, running away from God, is on a ship that gets caught up in a violent storm. Realising that his disobedience is responsible for this, Jonah offers to be thrown overboard and, after some reluctance, the crew agree to this. Jonah is saved by a whale and the storm is stilled.

Here’s what’s interesting – the sailors, who have no real knowledge of Jonah’s God, see the storm calmed and are immediately awed by the power on display, so much so that they start worshipping God on the spot. You’ve got to wonder if some of that attitude is getting through to the disciples, especially as this story leads in to a bunch of episodes that show that Jesus has power over a range of forces, not just the natural world.

In short, this story is all about showing how Jesus has access to immense power. And yes, that’s awe-inspiring, but it should also be comforting. “Why are you so afraid?” he asks his terrified disciples, “Do you still have no faith?” Didn’t they realise that, not only was he in possession of power enough to calm a storm, but that he’d also use that power to help and save them?

For not only is God powerful enough to command wind and waves, he also loves his people enough to get rained upon with us.

 

(This post was inspired by the week’s reading for the Big Read 2012 – ‘Echoes’. More on this can be found at their website.)

 

 

A Voice in the Wilderness: John the Baptist (Mark 1:1-8) – #BigRead12

I’ve got a strange imagination.

See, for me Mark’s Gospel starts with a desert blurred by heat haze, the distorted image of a man walking towards us and mysterious power chords played on an invisible electric guitar. It’s less the Bible, more Highlander.

And yet there’s something epic and cinematic about Mark chapter 1, because it’s the coming of two of the key figures in the gospel story: Jesus, of course, and John the Baptist. Of the two, John is the unknown quantity, so, in order to establish the Baptiser’s credentials, Mark opens with a prophecy from Isaiah 40. Or does he?

Well, not entirely. Mark actually adds an extra line to his quotation, and so despite what he says, part of the quoted prophecy is actually from Malachi 3.

Now this is interesting.

Look at the context of Malachi: chapter 3 concerns a future time when Israel’s priesthood would be purified and restored. That’s important, because rather than being an eccentric voice in the wilderness, John should have been a priest. After all, that’s what his dad did, and John would have been expected to run in the family. Obviously he broke away from that, not that you can blame him – at the time, the Temple in Jerusalem was dominated by high priestly families who were firmly in bed with the Romans and political expediency. These issues will go on to become one of the central conflicts in the gospels; they’re a central issue here, because although people are flocking to John and he’s carrying out religious duties – in a new form, yes, but for many people, the side of a river is becoming more of a temple than the Temple itself.

Malachi’s also interesting because he ends his prophecy by saying that a new Elijah will one day arrive in Israel to bring people back to God. This is huge, because as prophets go, Elijah was one of the greatest. And, given that one of his defining characteristics was his distinctive fashion sense, there’s a clear link with John wearing a camel-hair shirt. “You know that new Elijah that was prophesied?” asks Mark, “Well here he is!”

The rest of the prophecy quoted by Mark comes from Isaiah 40, which talks about the coming of the Messiah:

“A voice of one calling:
‘In the wilderness prepare
   the way for the LORD;
make straight in the desert
   a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be raised up,
   every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
   the rugged places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,
   and all people will see it together.
            For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.’”

The image here is of a royal procession, a herald going ahead to tell everyone that the king is on his way – clear a path because royalty is coming. And in the gospels, despite their parade of weak kings and corrupt politicians, images of the true king relate to just one person – Jesus himself, who’s about to make his entrance.

So we’re talking about the Messiah and a successor to one of Israel’s greatest heroes. The level of authority that’s implied by these eight verses is immense, and yet look at verse 7 – John doesn’t even consider himself worthy to untie Jesus’s sandals. Now, we can look at that and say it’s an appropriate level of authority to have when relating to the Son of God – fair enough. But that one line reminds us of another act of humility – Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, an act so socially demeaning to someone like Peter that it provoked absolute horror – kings, messiahs, don’t wash people’s feet.

And yet Jesus did – why? Because, in the upside down Kingdom of God, true authority is marked by service and servanthood. You have an important position? Fine, just be prepared to clean some toilets. Service in God’s Kingdom is motivated by love – love for God, love for others. That’s what the religious authorities reacted against by John had forgotten; that’s what John remembered when, further down the line, he watched his own disciples leave to follow Jesus.

Out of the wilderness walks one of the towering figures of the Christian faith; following him is the king himself. We may be driven to follow them, but remember – following means getting on our knees and washing some feet; it means bending down and picking up a cross. John heralds a new kingdom, yes, but it doesn’t work like all those other empires. No; for this is a different kingdom; the kingdom of the Servant King.