Mark: Provoking A Reaction

Click to see the original by Gun Legler

In chapter 1 of Mark we saw Jesus starting his ministry: moving quickly, urgently to tell people good news about God and about his kingdom, and illustrating that in his actions. He called disciples and they followed, he healed people and set them free, and multitudes came out to see him. But as the story unfolds we see other reactions.

Soon the grumbling starts.

Jesus doesn't just heal a paralysed man, he tells him his sins are forgiven: he has been set free of more than just his physical need. The religious leaders see that as blasphemy.

Jesus calls a tax collector - not just a collaborator but also unclean, a sinner under Jewish Law - who follows him, and invites his friends to meet Jesus. The religious people complain.

Jesus' disciples collect grains of wheat as they walk through a field and eat them. It was a Sabbath so the religious leaders object.

Then Jesus heals a man with a withered hand ... on the Sabbath ... in a synagogue! He challenges his critics' toxic views on religious duty, then shows what is right by healing the man in need. Jesus is angry and upset at their callousness; the religious leaders are incandescent and start to conspire with those in power to destroy Jesus.

Jesus and his message provoked reaction, but not always a good reaction. Jesus seems to have set out to bring people's deeper selves to the surface, whether that is a deep need of healing and acceptance, or a deep antagonism to anything which disrupts or challenges a set worldview.

One of the big challenges for any who wish to follow Jesus is how to balance humility with conviction, how to listen respectfully to others whilst challenging what is wrong and sharing hope with those in need, especially with the excluded and the disregarded. Part of doing that, it seems to me, is being aware of who Jesus helped and affirmed and who he challenged.

Jesus consistently reaches out to the excluded and the powerless, those who are despised. He equally consistently attacks those who would exclude, those who would delay healing, and those would highlight their own importance by putting others down.

In today's UK, especially after recent elections, popular attitudes to immigrants and to Muslims spring to mind. In much of the church, although less so perhaps in the UK as a whole, exclusion based on gender and sexuality remains an issue.

By the end of chapter 3, even Jesus’ own family have turned against him, as they say that he's out of his mind, and they come to take him away. Jesus responds by saying that those who follow him are his true family: “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” The rule of God overrides even ties of family.

At the time Mark was writing terrible persecution of Christians in Rome had divided families, both by setting them against one another, and by people having family members murdered. Mark is quoting Jesus's words as comfort to those who are bereaved or estranged: one of the roles of the church, Jesus' body, is to be family to those who have lost their families, to be brother, sister, mother to the lost and the alone. It is not just physical healing that Jesus brought then, and wants to bring now through his followers.

You can find the chapters of Mark I have been talking about on the Bible Gateway: Mark 2 and Mark 3 (in the occasionally idiosyncratic NRSV translation).

What is your reaction to these stories? What impression do they give you of Jesus? How would you feel if you heard and saw these things?

Note: A quick mention of the "unforgivable sin" referred to in Mark 3:28-29, as people sometimes get worried. Imagine you are lost at sea in stormy weather, about to drown, when the air-sea rescue helicopter comes out to rescue you. If you are so convinced that all helicopters are instruments of the devil, out to do you terrible harm, that you desperately and successfully fight off your rescuer, you will drown. So it can be with those whom the Spirit would save.

Grey Day Ramblings

Grey, gloomy, damp and chilly. I think I must be letting it get to me.

There is a story that has been floating round Facebook for a few days now about a Muslim family allegedly asking that a Romany Roman Catholic be exhumed because he had been buried in the grave next to one of their relatives.

The story was originally reported by The Hinckley Times, before being picked up by right-wing newspapers and Islamophobic groups around the world.

The Hinckley Times have now pulled the story from their website (it was here). When I looked at it earlier in the week it was a classic 'local news' unresearched story, basically reporting on someone feeling upset about what they thought they had been told, but not bothering to check the story out with any of the officials involved. The mainstream newspapers who had copied the story did their follow-up the next day and promptly printed stories saying that no there would not be an exhumation. It was a non-story.

The local parish council, the officials involved, later put out a statement saying:

"An inaccurate, divisive and inflammatory article printed in The Hinckley Times appeared to indicate that Burbage Parish Council has considered the exhumation of a person recently interred at Burbage Cemetery – this is totally untrue and without foundation."

The underlying fact is that in England parish councils cannot exhume anybody, that can only be done by a direct order from the Home Office, which there was never any prospect of in this case.

It looks as though there was a misunderstanding about the purpose of this particular area of the cemetery, the council tried talking to the people involved, the local press found out and misreported the situation, the bigots and racists picked up their report and ran with it, and people get indignant because they cannot be bothered to check things out for themselves.

On a more religious note, I have been trying to find a commentary on Mark's Gospel which mentions what was going on in the Roman Empire at the time (civil war and chaos, basically). None seem to. It is as if this Gospel just exists in a sort of religious bubble, unrelated to the concerns and fears of those it was written for.

Churches wonder why non-churchgoers find what we do irrelevant to their daily lives. If those who study the Bible - which we claim to be the foundation of our faith - cannot even be bothered to think about how what was written related to the daily lives of those who lived then, what chance is there of any of them bothering to look at how it relates to the real world now.

Mark's Gospel seems to have been written for busy, cosmopolitan, politically aware readers. There are a lot of people like that in Caversham, but nothing to communicate what it says to them/us. Traditional translations, even traditional preaching, are framed as churchey meaningless woffle, without contemporary meaning or content (except for the traditional 'moral' lessons, of course).

What I find most frustrating about this, though, is that I am not clever enough to do it myself. I can adapt and comment on other people's work, but actually clarifying what Mark was saying to people in the midst of civil war and political chaos, then restating that for people living through the economic and political chaos of the beginning of the 21st century, say, is beyond me.

Yet those who are clever enough, and who say they care about what the Bible has to say, seem unwilling to present it as something real, speaking to real people in a real society.

As I say, it's a grey day and I feel grey. Nevertheless, tomorrow is another day, and life is a gift, to be celebrated and enjoyed as best we can. Grace and peace to you, and all you care for.