Rethinking Life (Mark 9:30-37) Ordinary 25 Year B

“How many times must I tell you?”

If you are a parent, how many times have you said that to your children?

And how many of us remember being on the receiving end of those words when we were kids?

Today’s reading is a ‘How many times?’ moment between Jesus and his disciples. It contains teaching that he gives them on more than one occasion, not just here.

And if we’re kind to the disciples, I can understand why they needed to hear this several times from Jesus. Because what he teaches them here is so contrary to what they would have picked up from the incumbent religious leaders of their day.

Yes, we are talking about teaching that needs to be repeated because it’s revolutionary and requires transformation in thinking and behaviour.

And perhaps surprisingly, even after two thousand years of Christianity, some of the things Jesus calls his disciples to rethink here are ones we keep having to rethink if we are to follow him more closely.

Firstly, says Jesus, his disciples need to rethink suffering – and specifically, his suffering as the Messiah.

He said to them, ‘The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.’ (verse 31)

We know what a revolution it was for the first disciples to consider that Israel’s Messiah would be a suffering figure, not an all-conquering, triumphant warlord in the conventional sense.

And we stand on centuries of Christian tradition about all that Jesus accomplished through his death on the Cross – the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God and one another, the defeat of death and the powers of evil, all out of his love for us. We mark that with crosses in our churches and we celebrate it at Holy Communion.

But despite that, we too lapse from the centrality of Jesus’ suffering at times. We want to settle our arguments via the ‘might is right’ route. We like to see our political opponents well and truly ‘done over’ at the ballot box. We talk of that neighbour we’re never going to forgive. In one form or another we default to that ‘might is right’ approach, ignoring the way of Jesus.

The hymn writer named in Methodist hymn books as Frances Jane van Alstyne and known in most other books as Fanny Crosby wrote a hymn called ‘Jesus, keep me near the Cross’. The first verse reads,

Jesus, keep me near the cross,
There a precious fountain;
Free to all, a healing stream,
Flows from Calv’ry’s mountain.

But I venture to suggest that being kept near the Cross isn’t just about remembering the mercy and forgiveness we receive, it’s also about modelling the life we live. Remember what I said last week about being willing to suffer for our faith.

Secondly, says Jesus, his disciples need to rethink serving.

Now we get to the argument the Twelve were having, and which they’re embarrassed about when Jesus asks them about it, because they were arguing about who was the greatest (verses 33-34).

³⁵Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, ‘Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.’

‘Sitting down’ – that’s the posture of an authoritative teacher, the same way there is a special chair, the kathedra, for a bishop – a cathedral is where a bishop has his or her place of authoritative teaching. It’s like universities saying that a professor ‘holds a chair’. What Jesus is saying here is important.[1]

And it’s a direct repudiation of our fame and celebrity culture, as well as the way we are deferential to people just because they hold a certain office.

Now you might think that sort of thing doesn’t exist in the church, but not only was it very real among the disciples of Jesus it’s also alive and kicking in the Christian church today. And it’s a poison.

A controversial American pastor called Mark Driscoll came over to London a few years ago and preached at an event held at the Royal Albert Hall.

After the event, a few people were waiting outside to get Driscoll’s autograph and a photo with him.
Afterwards, as they drove away in a taxi, the colleague [who was accompanying him] expressed amazement that a pastor would get this kind of response. In reply, Driscoll says:
‘I don’t know if you have noticed or not, but I am kind of a Big Deal.’[2]

Now you may say that’s an extreme example and to some extent it is, but given how we have our Christian celebrities, and given how we think certain people of a particular rank are more important in the Church than others, I suggest to you we have a problem here and we’re not taking Jesus seriously.

Mark Driscoll never learned his lesson and his large church in Seattle imploded. We need to learn the lesson for the sake of our own spiritual health and the health of the church. Our concern needs to be with whether we are serving people rather than whether people are admiring us and looking up to us.

And that takes us to the third and final lesson Jesus has for his apostles here:

³⁶He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, ³⁷‘Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.’

What is this about? Some people have a very sentimental answer about it being to do with either the simplicity or the innocence of children. But I have to wonder how much time such people have spent with children to think that!

No: Jesus here is calling his followers to rethink status. In first-century Palestine children had no social status whatsoever. They were under the care and authority of others with no rights of their own.[3] How do we receive that in a culture where we’re forever banging on about our rights?

This brings everything Jesus has said so far to a climax: if you’re going to model your life on the suffering of Jesus and if you’re going to be more concerned about how you serve people, then the whole human addiction to status starts to fall away.

Should we be worried about the lack of status the church and her ministers have in our society? Sure, we know that some of that is an indication of just how widely the Christian message is rejected today, and that should concern us. So is the assumption that ministers are either here to fleece the flock of their money or to abuse children – we’ve given society ammunition to shoot at us.

But the lack of status should not worry us at all. It means we can be released from the trappings of power to get on with serving people with the love of God in Jesus.

The thing is, everything we’ve talked about today is counter-cultural. But we’ve heard the opposite for so long and in so many ways it’s become part of us and it takes a lot of teaching from Jesus for the upside-down nature of his kingdom to sink into our minds and begin to transform us.

For Jesus does indeed call us to swim against the tide of our society. To live on the basis that God uses suffering for good, and to live as a servant rather than a celebrity, quietly getting on with the ways of Jesus with no worry for our status contradicts the ambitions of so many.

I’m not surprised it took a long time for some of this teaching to sink into those first disciples, and I’m not surprised if the same is true with us. But I hope what I’ve shared today contributes to that radical change of life to which Jesus calls each one of us.

God bless you all as you seek to serve him each day.

[1] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-radical-inversion-of-community-values-in-mark-9/

[2] https://gracetruth.blog/2021/09/14/i-am-kind-of-a-big-deal-insecure-pride-and-humble-confidence/

[3] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-radical-inversion-of-community-values-in-mark-9/

September 19, 2021 0

Take Up Your Cross (Covenant Service, Mark 8:27-38) Ordinary 24 Year B

Mark 8:27-38

We’ve had some very hot weather this week and it feels like it will be quite a while before the central heating has to go back on.

Nevertheless, I would guess that by a month’s time it is likely that many of us will have warmed up those radiators again.

Well, this is the point in Mark’s Gospel where the heat starts to turn up. Up until now, Jesus has certainly had criticism and opposition from the religious establishment, some of it serious, but mostly he has had a positive reception from the crowds in the north of the country. Now, as he begins the journey south to Jerusalem, he warns his disciples of what is to come and what it consequently means to follow him.

We come to this annual Covenant Service (although thanks to COVID-19 it’s our first for two years) as people who, like Peter, confess that Jesus is the Messiah. We know and accept the later story that Peter found hard to accept, about Jesus going to the Cross and rising again. These things are the Good News that are the basis of our commitment to Jesus.

In the light of that, it seems appropriate on a day like today to explore Jesus’ statement that

‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ (Verse 34)

What do those three elements of discipleship – self-denial, taking up the cross, and following Jesus – entail?

Firstly, self-denial.

I have an amateur theory that in our society self-denial is for others, but self-fulfilment is for us. We can applaud the sporting hero who has endured years of disciplined training at the expense of other comforts along with a diet few of us would wish to eat when they end up winning a gold medal at the Olympics.

But for many of the rest of us, the exhortations to success are different: follow your dreams! Base your career on your passion! You must be personally fulfilled sexually!

Now it isn’t all wrong, because we are expected to use our gifts and our resources in the service of God, and the Covenant Service has a balance between ways of serving we will find personally rewarding and other ways we will find difficult. But the problem with our society’s values is that these things are usually expressed in very self-centred ways, and that’s where it’s wrong.

Today is a day when we say to Jesus that we are willing to deny ourselves for the sake of the gospel, because he did precisely that. He gave up the glory of heaven for earth, and life as part of a poor family, at that.

Today is a day to ask ourselves some questions. One is, what have I given up for Jesus? Because if I haven’t given up anything for him, I have barely accepted what it is to be a disciple.

And another question is whether Jesus is asking me to give up something for the sake of his kingdom now. It isn’t always bad things he asks us to give up. Sometimes it’s good things. We may look down on the Roman Catholic insistence on celibacy for their priests, but I know a Methodist minister who said to me he knew in his case that to fulfil his call to ministry he would have to give up all hopes of a wife and family. That was the only way he could answer the call.

So – where are we denying ourselves like Jesus for the sake of God’s kingdom?

Secondly, taking up the Cross.

We must not water this down to the saying, ‘Everybody has their cross to bear.’ This is not about the general suffering of the world, dreadful as that is.

This is about being willing to suffer for Jesus. Christians from the days of the apostles to our day have known that the call to follow Jesus risks martyrdom. Not only did many of the first disciples lose their lives due to their faith, the same happens today. In India under a militant Hindu nationalist government. In Pakistan and Iran under the influence of extremist Islam. In Cuba, North Korea, and China under Marxist governments.

We may be grateful that these are not the conditions in which we live out our faith, but we should not be glib. Even if we do not risk martyrdom, we know that there is at least a secondary application of Jesus’ teaching, the one brought out in Gospels other than Mark, where Jesus is recorded as referring to taking up our cross daily, and that’s our willingness to suffer for our faith.

The late John Stott put it like this:

The place of suffering in service and of passion in mission is hardly ever taught today. But the greatest single secret of evangelistic or missionary effectiveness is the willingness to suffer and die. It may be a death to popularity (by faithfully preaching the unpopular biblical gospel), or to pride (by the use of modest methods in reliance on the Holy Spirit), or to racial and national prejudice (by identification with another culture), or to material comfort (by adopting a simple life style). But the servant must suffer if he is to bring light to the nations, and the seed must die if it is to multiply.[1]

I wonder what Christian faith has cost any of us? If over a period of time we haven’t lost something significant from our lives then we need to reflect how serious we are about being a disciple of Jesus. Because it cost him everything.

Thirdly, following Jesus.

So what does it mean to follow Jesus? Perhaps that’s a strange question for many of us when we’ve been Christians for many years?

I see it as encompassing two things: imitating Jesus and going where Jesus goes (although arguably the latter is part of the former).

Here’s why I say following Jesus involves imitating him: it’s because that’s what disciples of rabbis did two thousand years ago. Disciples sought to copy as best as possible their master’s lifestyle – right down to some precise and even private details! To follow Jesus is to say, I want to be more like him. Today is a day when we pledge that.

But as well as doing what Jesus did we need to go where Jesus went – and go where he is going today, by his Spirit. In other words, there is not just the general imitation of his character (which is challenging enough!) but the openness to the specific directions he gives for each of us.

What do I mean? Questions like these: is Jesus calling us to go to the poor with his love in a particular way? Is he calling us to move home or to change our job? Is it as simple as Jesus wanting us to change where and how we are doing voluntary work in the church or the community? It can be small things as well as big things.

For me, I remember being clearly called away from leading a church Bible study group which I greatly enjoyed to serve a Youth For Christ centre committee instead. Both were rewarding, but I knew my time at the Bible study group had finished, and I was filled with a desire to move on.

In conclusion, all of these three callings as a disciple are deeply challenging. The self-denial of giving up cherished things. The taking up of the Cross in being willing to suffer for our faith. Following Jesus by doing what he does and going where he goes. It’s a tall order.

But Jesus points us to a future

‘when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels’ (verse 38)

and while he talks about it in the context of those who are ashamed of him, the positive converse of this is that here is the great joy and glory to come for those who love and serve him.

So have a vision today not only of the challenge it is to follow Jesus but also of the rewards in the age to come. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews wrote about Jesus,

‘For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.’ (Hebrews 12:2b)

Let us take up the cost of discipleship with one eye on the joy and glory set before us.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1023823078452194&set=gm.6304018576305311

September 12, 2021 0

Following Your Calling (Mark 7:24-37) Ordinary 23 Year B

Mark 7:24-37

There is a meme on the Internet with these words: ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.’

It then claims that the quotation is from Abraham Lincoln – think about it!

One area where we should be very careful not to believe everything we read on the Internet is when all and sundry offer commentary on difficult Bible passages. And boy do we have a difficult passage this week. What does Jesus think he’s doing, speaking to the Syro-Phoenician woman like that?

²⁷‘First let the children eat all they want,’ he told her, ‘for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’

Well, the stupid and arrogant brigade are only too quick to tell you. They say that Jesus was a racist and that even he had to learn how to treat people of other races well from the woman.

Of course, what they’re really saying is, you should all be as enlightened as us!

When you get a difficult passage like this and when you come across Jesus saying strange and apparently disturbing things, the first thing you need to do is study the text very carefully. Jumping to conclusions just based on how it reads in English without checking with specialist biblical scholars is dangerous. So is reading it as if it’s a contemporary incident in our culture.

For one thing, racism as we know it didn’t exist in Jesus’ society. There were forms of prejudice, yes, but not in the way that we shamefully discriminate against another race or a person of different skin colour. Therefore, to assume that Jesus was being racist is a fundamental mistake.

In any case, this comes in a series of chapters in Mark where Jesus is criss-crossing Lake Galilee between Jewish and Gentile populations. He has healed a Gentile like the Gerasene demoniac. In the previous episode which we considered last week, he has brought down the barrier of the Jewish food laws. To make Jesus a racist against the Gentiles beggars belief.

For another, we need to look at translation issues. If we think Jesus is referring to the woman as some kind of feral dog, we are wrong. The word is not that for a wild dog but for a pet dog, a lap dog, a house dog. This story (in its form here in Mark and also in Matthew) is the only time that word is used. Everywhere else the word for dog is a street dog – but not here.[1]

What does this mean? Jesus is painting a rather more endearing picture of a family where the children give scraps to the beloved family dog. It’s rather more affectionate than that painted by those who jump in screaming, ‘Racism!’

Now granted, it’s still provocative in a way because it’s not what you expect Jesus to say in response to a request for healing, but that’s because what Jesus is doing here is speaking in the form of a riddle. It’s designed to elicit a response from the woman, and that’s exactly what he gets:

²⁸‘Lord,’ she replied, ‘even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’

And by the way – did you notice how she said ‘the dogs under the table’? She had definitely understood Jesus to mean family pets, not wild dogs.

Jesus is saying something like this. My first calling is to take the kingdom of God to Israel, the People of God. I’m not concentrating on the Gentile mission, which comes after that.

Nevertheless, given the woman’s faith, he heals her daughter by expelling the demon. Even Jesus with his focussed calling on bringing the message of the kingdom to Israel recognises that faith exists outside Israel’s boundaries and on occasions like this he can flex his calling to bring the love of God to this woman and her family.

And having got to that point, I think we can now make a couple of applications from the story to our own lives.

Firstly, are you living out your calling?

Jesus was clear: his priority was to go to ‘the lost sheep of Israel.’ That was his focus. The good news of God’s kingdom had to come first to those whom God had made into his people over many centuries. They were the priority in his calling. For he was the Son of God, which means not only that he was divine, but also that he was the True Israel. He was fulfilling the destiny of Israel. So he had to come to them first.

This determined what he did and where he went. He knew this was his Father’s will for him.

Every Christian has a calling. It isn’t always to a ‘religious job’, such as being a minister. It can be to a certain profession or industry. It can be a calling in family life. It can be something we’re called to do in the church or the community. It can be about the use of a particular gift or talent.

If you don’t know what yours is, then pray about it. In the meantime, dedicate the gifts and resources you know you have to the service of God, and consider the maxim offered by the spiritual writer Frederick Buechner when he said that vocation was ‘where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’

Once you do have a sense of calling, then the example of Jesus means that it becomes a significant factor in determining what you do and what you leave aside. It helps you when people ask if you will take on a responsibility, because you can consider whether their request matches your calling. If it does, then fine. If not, then the answer is probably ‘no.’

Actually, I suspect that many of us need to say ‘no’ a lot more in order to be able to fulfil our callings. We get more hooked into a human weakness of wanting to please people and remain popular with them than we do following the call of God on our lives.

A few years ago, a very popular book for businesspeople and leaders in society was a title called ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown. Basically, it’s a book that teaches you to say ‘no’ to everything outside your calling. McKeown says that if you have doubts about whether something is consistent with your calling, then you should say ‘no’ to it. I wonder whether many of us in the church should listen to him.

Secondly, though, are you flexible about your calling?

I say that, because I think that’s what Jesus showed in this story. Yes, his calling was to the people of Israel, but here he was in a place where there was less likelihood of him being able to do that. Tyre was a Gentile town.

So although he’s trying to stay low profile and undercover, when the woman discovers his presence and brings her heart-rending request he certainly has the opportunity to meet her need with his divine compassion without adversely affecting his calling.

Therefore, although following our calling is usually pretty decisive, we need to listen to God for those occasions when we need to be flexible rather than rigid.

Jesus homed in on that here as he told his riddle and the woman showed evident faith in her response. When he sees that faith, he acts.

In other words, he knows that God is at work here. The Spirit of God has surely been working in the woman’s life, preparing her for what will lead to Jesus’ life-saving intervention.

That, then, gives us an idea about when to be flexible about our calling. It’s not simply that we have some down time and a gap in our diary so we can fit in one of the people who is regularly badgering us. Instead, it’s about discerning the work of the Spirit who is doing kingdom things and making kingdom opportunities available.

One good way of discerning whether we’re being called to flex our calling is by consulting trusted friends. If you start to get enquiries and requests from people for your time and what they want are things that go beyond your regular calling as you understand it, then it can be wise to take the details of those approaches to your spouse, or to some wise friends. Let them help you discern an answer to these questions: does this request constitute a reasonable flexing of your calling or will it distract you from your calling?

In conclusion, then, when we dig into this story and get beyond the superficial ways of treating it, what we discover here is that the example of Jesus is very practical for us living out our calling, whether he’s called us to serve him in the church or in the world.

He wants us to follow our calling with a passion, but also to listen carefully for those occasional diversions from the route when something else is required of us.

As we do this, the kingdom of God will advance.

And that’s what we want. Isn’t it?

[1] On this and the general thrust of this sermon, see Ian Paul, Did the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7 teach Jesus not to be racist?

September 5, 2021 0

Finding The Will Of God (Mark 7:1-23) Ordinary 22 Year B

Sorry about the typo in the opening titles!

Mark 7:1-23

I have known more than one friend who went vegetarian find themselves derailed from their noble intentions by the same stumbling block.

They couldn’t face life without bacon. The smell of it sizzling in the pan drove them back to the carnivore world.

I also know friends who are going vegan, because they believe the research that shows the amount of red meat production in the world to be a contributor to climate change.

Neither my friends who are former vegetarians nor those who are currently vegan made their decisions in the light of Jesus’ teaching in our passage today that all foods are ritually clean. There is a tiny minority of Christians who believe we should still follow the Old Testament kosher laws on food, but overwhelmingly the Christian Church has taken Jesus’ abolition of the kosher laws here as read and we make our ethical decisions about food on other bases.

If that’s the case, how is today’s reading relevant to us?

The answer is that it has a wide relevance to how we understand the will of God and put it into practice. It helps us guard against living our faith in the sincere but sterile way of the Pharisees and instead in the life-giving way of Jesus.

I have three ‘H’s for you.[1]

Firstly, the Holy Spirit.

The Pharisees had the Scriptures, such as were recognised at the time. Jesus had the same Scriptures. But what set them apart?

The Pharisees knew that the Scriptures weren’t exhaustive for every single situation you would face in life, and so they made up for that by fencing the Scriptures off with their own traditions which they believed enabled you to be faithful. You heard some of them in the reading. It was a sincere effort to do the right thing, but it wasn’t a godly one. It was much like the way we prescribe our own rules for churches and organisations.

But Jesus said these traditions were signs of how far from God they were, not least because the human rules and traditions tended to take over from the Scriptures.

Jesus lived differently. The Son of God lived as a man empowered by the Holy Spirit. As the Son of God, living by the power of the Spirit, he isn’t someone who can be contaminated by what is unclean. He doesn’t need the precautionary measures against ritual and moral uncleanness that ordinary people needed, according to the Old Testament Scriptures.

For us, the application is simple. The example of Jesus leads us into the New Testament era where all disciples of Jesus receive the Holy Spirit. We don’t become divine like him, but we do receive the Spirit when we commit our lives to him.

And it is living by the Spirit that is our answer to hedging every Scripture around with particular rules and regulations of our own making. When we live by the Spirit, who inspired the biblical writers, then we have our way of being faithful to divine teaching.

In his Epistle to the Galatians the Apostle Paul called on believers to keep in step with the Spirit, that is to live by the Spirit and be led by the Spirit (Galatians 5:16-18). For the Holy Spirit desires the opposite of sin and will guide us in the spirit of scriptural teaching, having himself inspired those same Scriptures.

So this is our first strategy in seeking the will of God – it is to listen for the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit making sense of the Scriptures to us.

Secondly, history.

Just because we believe the Bible is inspired doesn’t mean we can read a verse from here, a verse from there and another verse from somewhere else, treating them all the same. There is more to the Bible than that. We don’t seek guidance by playing ‘Bible Bingo’, where we almost randomly select verses and treat them all as having equal weight.

No. We set them in their historical context. We take account of where they fall in the canon of inspired writings to which the church submits. What is the cultural background? What is the historical context?

A good example is to compare two different things in this passage. We have the food laws, which Jesus says are no longer needed (‘Thus he declared all foods clean’, verse 19), but we have other ethical standards, including sexual behaviour, which certainly come over from the Old Testament, but which he clearly retains. Hence, the way the reading ends:

²¹For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, ²²adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. ²³All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’

What’s the difference? Historical context in the great story of God’s salvation that the Bible tells provides us with the answer.

In the case of the food laws, they do not originate at creation, where the first humans are given some simple vegetarian permissions, nor later in Genesis after the Flood where meat-eating is also allowed. They come specifically in the context of how Israel will inhabit the land. I have heard a doctor suggest they may even be specific to what was hygienic at the time, but I am not qualified to judge that.

The sexual laws here, banning fornication and adultery, however, have a much bigger context. They can be traced back not only to the prohibition of adultery in the Ten Commandments but to the earliest teaching about such relationships, way back in the creation stories, in Genesis 2:24, where sexual relations are defined as being between one man and one woman exclusively for life. Furthermore, Jesus and Paul both base their teaching on sexual ethics on that verse.

So history shows us that the food laws were for a particular context which has since passed, but the sexual ethics were for all time.

One of the things we can do when we are faced with difficult biblical teaching is to look for the context of the canon of Scripture, the cultural background, and the historical context. We may need to ask those more learned than ourselves, or to research on the Internet, being careful to keep to reputable websites. But probably many more Christian homes could do with having a one-volume Bible commentary on the bookshelf, and maybe one or two other helpful resources as well.

Two ‘H’s so far: the Holy Spirit and history.

The third is the heart.

Jesus is very clear here and in the Sermon on the Mount that it’s the inner attitudes which determine the way we live as Christians. What goes on inside our lives determines what comes outside into the world. What we dwell on, what we love, what we spend our time thinking about will have an effect on our actions.

That’s why so much of Scripture is addressed to the inner life of disciples. It’s not to keep everything inside and private. It’s to recognise that the rôle of Holy Writ is to address those inner attitudes and tune them towards our life with God.

What we cannot do is simply treat the Bible as a collection of rules that regulate human action. That would make it no different from the kinds of laws that Parliament passes and to which the Queen assents. If we treat biblical teaching as just a collection of laws that regulate our behaviour, we will find that it lets us down and that we let God down.

I once heard a Muslim teacher say that this was one area where Muslims and Christians disagreed. Islam, he said, had no time for the question of inner motives and the workings of the heart. It only looked at the outer actions.

Followers of Jesus cannot go down that road. When we read the Bible and seek to hear God speaking to us about our lives through it, one thing we need to do is to ask, how does this form my inner life? How does it impact all my affections and the things I love? As one Christian writer has put it, ‘You are what you love.’

If we do that, then we will draw closer to God and that will have the knock-on effect that we live in greater holiness. Let the Scriptures focus on our attitudes of heart and the result will not be that grimy list of sins that Jesus lists at the end of the reading: that is what comes when we focus on the outer rule-keeping without the inner formation of the spirit.

No: allowing the Scriptures to mould our hearts will lead instead to the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

So in conclusion, this is how we work with the Scriptures to discover God’s will. We listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures and are willing to be led by that same Spirit. We explore the history, including the cultural context and the place in God’s great story. And we let the Spirit use the Scriptures to work on our hearts, forming us into the people he wants us to be, rather than just folk who forever struggle and fail to conform to outward regulations.

[1] My inspiration for what follows (but not the three ‘H’s) comes from Ian Paul’s blog post, Do followers of Jesus obey OT food laws (Mark 7)?

August 29, 2021 0

What’s In It For Me? (John 6:24-35) Ordinary 18 Year B

John 6:24-35

When it was announced in one of my previous appointments that I was due a sabbatical, the only reaction from my senior steward was, ‘What’s he going to bring back for us?’ There was no concern that it might be beneficial for me, or that I might need it.

It was rather like the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question that we often find in wider society. Politicians know how significant that question is, and so when elections come around their manifestos are packed with promises to the voters about what they will do for them, rather than casting a vision of a better society.

And ‘What’s in it for me?’ is very much the attitude of the crowd that has hunted down Jesus and his disciples after they tried to escape across the water when Jesus knew they wanted to make him king by force. That’s what Jesus tells them their motives are:

²⁶Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.

I’m not going to deny that there are many benefits that come from following Jesus, but the crowd were only following Jesus in a geographical sense. They weren’t following him as their Teacher, let alone their Lord and Saviour. They were in it for themselves.

And if we’re honest, sometimes our words and actions as Christians betray similar attitudes. ‘I didn’t get much out of that service this morning,’ say some people – completely missing the point that worship is an act of giving, not getting.

Instead, Jesus says this:

²⁹Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’

But is that good enough for the crowd? No! They want a sign like manna from heaven (verses 30-31), despite what they witnessed with the feeding of the five thousand. There’s just no pleasing some people!

Which I guess is the point. Jesus hasn’t come to please people, any more than ministers have. Sometimes when strangers discover what my work is they say to me, ‘It must be hard trying to please everyone.’

My response is, ‘It isn’t my job to please everyone.’

You get the impression that no matter what Jesus says, this crowd has little intention of becoming disciples. In fact, were you to skip to the end of the chapter you’ll find that apart from Jesus’ inner circle, nearly everyone bails on him.

And Jesus lets them go. He doesn’t soften his message for them. He doesn’t redesign his message around their ‘lived experiences’. That’s something today’s church would do well to ponder.

So what does it mean ‘to believe in the one [God] has sent’ (verse 29) and to feed on Jesus, ‘The bread of life’ (verse 35)?

Well, let’s eliminate one very basic, minimal thing. Believing in Jesus is not simply about believing he exists. Jesus is right in front of the crowd – they know he exists – so it can’t be that.

It’s something more. It’s believing in him in the sense of trusting in him – and trusting in him to the extent that we entrust our very lives to him. What does that involve?

Firstly, it’s going to involve trusting in his teaching, and that’s quite a radical step to begin with. So much of Jesus’ teaching cut across the norms of his day and that’s every bit as true, if not more so, today. Loving God and loving our neighbour ahead of ourselves? Forgiving people that our society freely calls ‘unforgivable’? Serving others instead of lording it over them?

Oh sure, when we see other people living selflessly, we applaud and we nominate them for an honour from the Queen, but to think that we should all do this – isn’t that a bit much? We’ll let these other noble people do the good acts vicariously for us.

But if we believe in Jesus and his teaching, we won’t make excuses like that.

Secondly, it’s going to involve trusting in his kingship, which is very different from the kingship that the crowd imagined. No military ruler killing his enemies here.

Instead, Jesus spoke language about being lifted up as if on a throne – you find this in John 12:32:

‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’

But he is referring to his death on the Cross! That is where he will be enthroned as King of Israel and King of all creation.

Believing in Jesus means trusting that his Cross is what changes the world. The Cross is where notice is served on the powers of evil. The Cross is where our sins are forgiven, and we begin the journey of living a new and different life.

Thirdly, it’s going to involve trusting in his love, because all that I’ve mentioned so far about the teaching of Jesus and of his Cross indicate what an upside-down approach to life he brings. Does he have our best interests at heart when he calls us to self-denial? How exactly can his death serve as the turning-point of history?

I believe Jesus knows that what he asks of us is the opposite of what the world broadcasts, but he invites us to look at all he has done for us and then answer the question as to whether we will trust him.

In particular, he reminds us of all he has done in giving up the glory of heaven to take on human flesh among the poor, and in going to the Cross for us.

All this is for us to trust in his love for us and hence also trust in his teaching and his kingship.

And with that relationship comes all the blessings we long for. They don’t come by us grabbing all we can have for ourselves with the ‘What’s in it for me?’ mentality.

By trusting ourselves into Jesus’ hands we gain more than bread to feed our stomachs: we gain the very Bread of Life, Jesus himself (verse 35).

August 1, 2021 0

Tests Of Faith (John 6:1-21) Ordinary 17 Year B

John 6:1-21

Early in the pandemic my wife received a letter inviting us to take part in monthly testing for COVID-19 on behalf of the Office for National Statistics. Whenever you’ve seen reports about the ONS data, we’ve been part of that.

More recently, testing has become much more frequent than monthly for many people. Our kids had to take twice-weekly tests to attend their Sixth Form colleges on site. We ministers in my Methodist circuit have talked about self-testing before taking services and other appointments.

And testing is a major theme in today’s reading:

⁵When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming towards him, he said to Philip, ‘Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?’ ⁶He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.

But to my mind that’s just the first of three tests in the passage. All three tests are tests of faith in Jesus, but in different ways.

Today, I’d like to explore those three tests of faith to think about how Jesus tests our faith in him.

Firstly, faith goes beyond our understanding:

⁷Philip answered him, ‘It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!’
⁸Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, ⁹‘Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?’

It’s hard to be cruel about Philip and Andrew. They survey the scene, gather the evidence, and come to a conclusion.

Now I’m a big fan of evidence, logic, and reason. I’m quite an analytical person. But if this story had stopped at this point, it would have been tragic.

And sadly many church stories or individual Christian stories stop at a similar point. Jesus starts challenging them and the response is, ‘But we can’t do it.’ It all shuts down there. We can’t do it. End of.

It’s true that Philip and Andrew couldn’t sort out the problem. It’s true that Christians and churches on their own can’t do what Jesus calls them to do.

But the issue is this: what is Jesus saying? What does Jesus want to do?

Because for all the value of reason, logic, and evidence-gathering, the ultimate question here is Jesus saying, ‘Do you trust me enough to do what I say?’

When we do, then amazing things happen. When we don’t, we drift into spiritual decline.

Secondly, faith goes beyond our preferences:

¹⁴After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ ¹⁵Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.

You can see the preferences and the preconceived ideas going on in the people here. ‘We have just been miraculously fed. A king feeds his people. We want and need a king, especially one who will get rid of the Roman occupying forces. Let’s make Jesus king.’

But as we know with hindsight, Jesus refused that idea of kingship. The kingdom of God is different.

Sometimes we have our own preconceived ideas of Jesus, too. And those preconceived ideas are often based on what we would prefer to believe. So I’ve been in a service where I’ve read a passage from the Gospels in which Jesus says some tough things, only for someone to tell me afterwards, ‘Jesus wouldn’t have said anything like that.’ The trouble is, they’ve got a fantasy Jesus in their minds, one that won’t disturb their comfortable little worlds, one who conveniently agrees with them on sensitive subjects.

One of the most common forms of this fantasy Jesus is believing he loves us as we are (which is true) but forgetting that he loves us too much to leave us as we are (thus avoiding challenging things like the way Jesus challenges us to be transformed). It’s all the benefits of the Gospel, but none of the responsibilities.

The only real faith in Jesus is one where we accept and worship him for who he is, and where we are willing to come under the authority of his teaching, not our wishful thinking.

The crowd missed out on the real Jesus. Let’s make sure we don’t.

Thirdly and finally, faith goes beyond our fears:

Now we move onto the story of Jesus walking on the water.

¹⁹When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were frightened.

Well, who wouldn’t be frightened by such an out of the blue experience? I’m sure I would be.

And even if we haven’t had strange supernatural experiences like that, it’s also true that in whatever way Jesus starts to come close to people, many become frightened like the disciples did.

Why is that? I think many of us become so conscious of our sins and failures when Jesus comes close that all we can think of is to say, ‘Please stay your distance!’

It’s like we want just enough Jesus to be sure our sins are forgiven, but not so much Jesus that we can’t cope. Because in our hearts we know that the fluffy fantasy Jesus I talked about in the last point doesn’t exist.

C S Lewis captured the feeling in this famous passage from ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’:

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

And so it’s no wonder that when the disciples are frightened to see Jesus walking on the water towards their boat, what we read next is this:

²⁰But he said to them, ‘It is I; don’t be afraid.’ ²¹Then they were willing to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading.

Let our faith overcome our fear of Jesus and welcome him close, because he is good. His presence makes a difference to the disciples with their boat reaching shore immediately, and he will make a difference to us, too.

Could it be that one reason we don’t see so much of Jesus’ power in our churches is that we don’t want him to come too close to us? Maybe it’s time to choose faith over fear.

So let’s wrap with a summary:

Jesus tests our faith, because alongside all our gifts of reason we still need to trust him.

He tests our faith so that we put our trust in the real Jesus, not some fantasy Saviour.

And he tests our faith so that it wins out over fear of him, he draws closer to us, and we begin to see amazing things happen for the kingdom of God.

So let’s not run away when Jesus tests our faith. He tests us so that our faith grows and the kingdom of God extends.

That’s what we want. Isn’t it?

July 25, 2021 0

From Stress to Rest (Mark 6:30-34, 53-56) Ordinary 16 Year B

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Last weekend I finished three and a half months as the Acting Superintendent of my Methodist circuit. Our actual Superintendent was on sabbatical, and as the next most senior minister I stepped up.

Mostly I didn’t find it a daunting issue, because as a longstanding minister I had plenty of experience to draw on. What I did find harder was that I had to do this on top of my existing responsibilities, rather than simply as part of them. By the time I finished a week ago you can imagine I was ready for a rest.

But did I get one? No. My first week back as an ‘ordinary’ minister (if I dare describe it like that) brought me a major safeguarding problem and the death of a church member among other things. Both situations were urgent, time-consuming priorities.

I don’t suppose it will surprise you, therefore, if I say that I identify with Jesus inviting his apostles to come aside to a quiet place for some rest, because the demands of people on their time were such that they didn’t even have time to eat (verse 31).

And I feel for them even more, because of what happens next. Even when they have sailed to a solitary place, crowds see them and flock to them (verse 33).

Not only that, when they later land at Gennesaret, something similar happens, as crowds beg Jesus to heal their loved ones (verses 54-56).

This overload and stress isn’t unique to Jesus and the apostles, or to ministers of religion. It’s a common feature of life, experienced by many. The other week at Wimbledon, the eighteen-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu had to retire from her match due to breathing difficulties that were later attributed to stress.

And as companies try to cut costs to survive the economic impact of COVID-19, so there will be fewer workers, but still expected to deliver the same output that the larger workforce used to manage.

We know that some stress is good, but that over-stress isn’t. An elastic band needs stress on it to work, but pull it too far and over-stress breaks it. So with human beings, too. A certain amount of stress stretches our faith and our willingness to work, but too much damages us.

So firstly, let’s think about the importance of rest.

The first of our two episodes puzzled me for many years. Here we have Jesus telling his apostles, who have just come back from a busy mission trip, to get some rest, but as soon as the crowds find them, Jesus springs into action. So much for rest, I used to think. Does Jesus drive himself and the apostles into the ground by this action?

But then I thought more about the context. Because there’s no evidence that Jesus has been busy just before the incident, only the apostles. And when the crowd comes, it’s Jesus who ministers to them, not the apostles.

For us, the call to rest is not only the call to physical rest, and I say that as someone who has become notoriously bad at getting a good night’s sleep, but it’s also about resting spiritually in Christ. It’s about being recharged for what is to come through our relationship with God.

I’m not talking about the sort of prayer that is intense and is like wrestling with God for big things, as can happen when we engage in intercession. I’m talking about prayer as relationship.

Right now I have the privilege of reading an advance copy of a new book on prayer. It’s called ‘Seven Ways To Pray’ by Amy Boucher Pye. In the Foreword, another author named Sharon Garlough Brown says this:

On the wall in our kitchen hangs a chalkboard with these words in my handwriting: ‘Prayer is about being deeply loved.’[1]

And as Amy herself goes on to write a few pages later, `

I’m reminded of the interview of US newscaster Dan Rather with Mother Teresa, when he asked her what she said during her prayers. She responded, ‘I listen.’
Rather asked, ‘What does God say to you?’
She said, ‘He listens.’[2]

Just as it can be restorative simply to sit quietly with a beloved family member or our spouse, so something similar is possible in prayer. We don’t need an elaborate technique. We don’t need a shopping list of requests. Prayer can be as simple as quietly stopping and being loved by God. That sort of rest alongside physical rest can give us peace and new strength to face the demands of life.

Have you thought of carving out some time just to sit quietly with God? Is there a particular time of day or time in the week you could dedicate to that? Might there also be a particular place where you can go to do this, whether it’s a room in your home or another location – even a park bench? Make your own holy place for quiet resting and restorative prayer with God.

And when you can take these breaks – be they for prayer, a holiday, or a sabbatical, like my Superintendent – you become a healthier person. No longer are you someone who needs to be needed and does things because you’re desperate to be liked[3], instead you respond out of that relationship with God in which you know just how much you are loved by him.

So here we’re going on to the second of the two things I want to share today, and it’s about response, because a healthy response to the pressures and demands that life brings us is one that flows from that knowledge of being dearly loved by God in Christ.

Here’s how we see it in the reading. Jesus, knowing how much he is loved by the Father, responds with ‘compassion’ to the large crowd, ‘because they were like sheep without a shepherd.’ And the nature of his response is that ‘he began teaching them many things’ (verse 34).

How does that make sense? Sheep without a shepherd need feeding. What does the disciple of Christ feed on? The word of God. So Jesus teaches them. And he can teach them, not just because he is the Son of God, but because he has been in communion with his Father.

This is why those of us who are called to preach and teach the Gospel must not only study the Scriptures, we must maintain a prayerful relationship with God where we rest in him. When you pray for preachers, don’t just pray for their studying, pray for their relationship with God in Christ.

That same compassion is at work too in the second of our two episodes, where crowds bring Jesus many sick people. This time we see his compassion in his works of healing (verses 55-56). He doesn’t act out of obligation, because it’s in his job description, or out of a need to fulfil people’s expectations. He has compassion. And that’s only natural to have when you’ve spent time with the heavenly Father who loves you so much.

We may or may not have a healing ministry like Jesus, but we will come across people in all sorts of need and may wonder how to respond. Some of that may include a certain amount of overload, given that our modern communications tools make us aware of so many needs in the world.

But if we are prepared by resting in Christ, then we will have the strength to be compassionate for those people Jesus wants us to love in his name.

So what about it, then? The resting and the responding are joined. A prayerful resting in Christ is never meant to be an escape for the world. It’s fuel in the tank for the journey.

Do you need some time with Christ so that you are ready for where he wants you to show his love to others?

The truth is, we all do.

[1] Sharon Garlough Brown in Amy Boucher Pye, Seven Ways To Pray, p xiii

[2] Op. cit., p 4.

[3] See Carey Nieuwhof, 5 Signs You’re A Leader Who Needs To Be Needed (Why You Never Get A Break)

July 18, 2021 0

Good News in a Bad News Story (Mark 6:14-29) Ordinary 15 Year B

Mark 6:14-29

I expect that, like me, most or all of you have been besieged in the last few years with scam messages – some by phone, some by email, others by text message.

The other day my mobile phone began ringing and it identified the calling number as being in Czech Republic. I have no connections with that country. At a push, I could name one or two of their footballers, but that’s about it. So I ignored the call.

It nevertheless went to my voicemail, and I later retrieved a message accusing me of misusing my National Insurance number and demanding I press 1 on my keypad to speak to an officer. Well, not likely! And all the more so, given that much of my work in the Civil Service was to do with National Insurance numbers! I can’t say I lost any sleep over it.

But sometimes these messages hope to trick people by playing on a possible sense of guilt. That’s certainly the idea behind those messages which say they’ve loaded software on your computer and they know all about your viewing of pornographic websites. The criminals hope that someone who has done that will be so terrified that they will be duped into the scam.

When there is lurking guilt over our past actions, all sorts of things can trigger a response of fear. I think that’s what happens in our reading when Herod Antipas hears about the ministry of Jesus. He thinks that John the Baptist, whom he ordered to be beheaded, has been raised from the dead (verses 14-16) and perhaps he’s come back to haunt him or expose him.

This is not the same Herod as who tried to kill the infant Jesus – that was the so-called Herod the Great. This is one of his sons. Herod Antipas proved to be every bit as ruthless as his wicked father, but he didn’t have the same political skill. He wasn’t actually a king, but he liked to be known as one – hence ‘King Herod’, as Mark calls him, is an ironic title. He also loved luxury and magnificent architecture. Jesus summed up his character in Luke’s Gospel when he called him ‘that fox’[1].

If you want an example of his lack of political skill, the divorce which John condemns morally here got Herod into trouble politically as well. His first wife, whom he so cruelly dumped for his sister-in-law, was the daughter of Aretas, king of Nabatea, a region east of the Red Sea. Aretas took out reprisals against Herod, inflicting a crushing military defeat on him in AD 36. Three years later the Emperor Caligula had had enough of Antipas, and he banished him and Herodias to Gaul (modern-day France)[2].

Ultimately, the life of Herod Antipas is a story of someone who was never willing to be free of his baser instincts. They harmed him and others. Imagine the innocent people killed when Aretas took out his reprisals – all because Antipas wouldn’t control his lusts. Imagine the pain of John’s disciples and family at his execution, because Antipas wanted to suppress his conscience and also made such a foolish vow in front of witnesses to his daughter.

When we would rather pursue our own selfish desires there are costs not just to ourselves but to others as well. It’s surely clear that one of the reasons for the huge rates of family breakdown in our society is to do with that. I know the situation is more complicated than that, but by way of illustration consider this: Becky more or less forgot Father’s Day this year. Why? Because she had planned to go out that evening with five friends. None of those five friends had a father living at home, and so Father’s Day just wasn’t on their agenda, and hence Becky, mingling with these friends, forgot too. Obviously, I don’t know why all her friends’ parents split up, but inevitably I wonder.

The life of Herod Antipas, then, is a sombre warning for us about what life looks like and what life leads to when we live without the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Sin has devastating consequences. If we cherish our sin above other things, we wreak havoc in our lives and the lives of others, both those close to us and strangers.

And that’s without even talking about the eternal consequences of choosing sin over grace. In some respects the consequences in this life can be variable. Depending on how just the society is and how much power the offender has, someone may or may not get away with brutality or slavery to one’s own senses and appetites.

But eternity is different. There, a verdict is certain and so is a sentence. It involves eternal separation from God, the source of love, truth, and beauty. What kind of existence would that be?

But while that sentence may be certain it is not inevitable. What Herod Antipas needed was grace. It was tantalisingly close to him, if only he had accepted it. John the Baptist’s call to repentance was the call to put himself in the place where he could receive the free and unmerited grace of God. The ministry of Jesus that he heard about and which evidently troubled his conscience would have done the same, only more.

When we struggle with unhealthy desires, or with good desires gone bad, there is a remedy, and it is the grace of God. For in Christ God looks at each of us with favour yet in the full knowledge of our sin, providing forgiveness at the Cross. There is hope for us when we struggle with our besetting sins. There is hope for those who are addicted to their passions. That hope is found only in Jesus. To him we turn in our own need; to him we point when others are in similar need.

So, if one thing we learn from history in this passage is about our need of grace, what might we learn from the context of the reading?

You see, all we’ve done here is read this particular episode. But this story is the filling in a sandwich, something Mark does quite a bit. He puts one narrative inside another. So, if this is the filling, we need to look at what forms the slices of bread.

The filling ends with the decapitation of John, his head presented on the same kind of platter from which Herod’s dinner guests had been eating, and then we get the grief of John’s disciples as they bury his body (verses 28-29). The taste of the filling is pretty horrible.

It makes us think of persecutions right up to this day, where evil regimes and organisations seek to ‘decapitate’ a movement by targeting its leaders[3]. Only the other day I read the story of how the Chinese police had arrested the pastor of a church under false charges of fraud, so that he was removed from his congregation. It used to be that the Chinese authorities targeted the unregistered churches, but now they are also going after the churches that registered with the government as well.

And every week, my prayer email from Christian Solidarity Worldwide documents similar stories around the world – from obvious places like China, North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran to Nigeria, Mexico, India, Sri Lanka and many other nations.

We often give thanks for the freedom with which we can worship God, but we live in a generation where across the world there has never been more persecution of those who own the name of Christ. It’s something the first readers of Mark’s Gospel would have understood well, living in Rome where Claudius had expelled Jews, including leaders of some early Christian groups, and where Nero was using the Christians as scapegoats. Many of them would face the same fate as John the Baptist.

As I said, it’s an ugly filling to the sandwich. It’s enough to cause despair.

But that’s why you need the slices of bread on either side. Because Mark has sandwiched this inside the account of Jesus sending his disciples two by two on mission to villages to proclaim and demonstrate the kingdom of God. In verse 13, immediately before our reading, we hear that they cast out many demons and healed a lot of people; in verse 30, the verse immediately after our reading, they return to Jesus and tell him all their amazing stories.

Therefore if the filling of the sandwich is a sombre warning that being a disciple can come at a terrible cost, the bread of the sandwich tells us that no matter what happens, no matter how much evil forces seek to decapitate the kingdom of God movement, the mission always goes on. God will not allow his mission to be defeated by the forces of evil.

Here is the good news for the faithful believing church. Whatever attempts are made to curb the influence of the Gospel, be it secular opponents, hostile groups from other religions, or even those within the church structures want the Gospel to capitulate to modern cultural norms, the assurance here is that the Gospel will prevail. We could lose our leaders, we could lose our buildings, we could lose our finances and charitable status, but Jesus will never stop building his church.

This apparently gruesome tale, then, is a good news story. There is good news for God’s faithful people even in the face of opposition and suffering. And there is good news for sinners who will cast themselves upon the mercy of God in Jesus Christ.

[1] Luke 13:32

[2] On Herod Antipas, see James R Edwards, The Gospel According To Mark, p184.

[3] I take this idea from Ian Paul’s blog post What Is God Doing During The Beheading Of John The Baptist?

July 11, 2021 0

Leaders of the Opposition – dealing with resistance to the Gospel (Mark 6:1-13)

Mark 6:1-13

Are you a glass half-full person or a glass half-empty person? I know plenty of people of both persuasions.

As some of you have heard me say before, I come from a family which has a history of depression, so you can imagine there can be quite a bit of half-empty in the Faulkners.

But I also have friends who are entrepreneurs and who can find opportunities even in a crisis. I think of one particular friend whose business collapsed when the first COVID-19 lockdown happened, but he saw new and different opportunities in the changed circumstances, and soon he had invented two brand new businesses plus a new expression of an old business.

Both incidents in our reading today contain the possibility or the reality of difficulty for the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t get anywhere when he returns to his home town (verse 5), and he warns the disciples that they may have to shake the dust off their feet against those who refuse to listen to them (verse 11). In both cases the narrative teaches us important things about following Jesus’ call to mission.

Firstly, let’s consider Jesus at Nazareth.

⁵He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few people who were ill and heal them.

Only a few people were healed, Jesus? Goodness me, we’d settle for that! It would be an improvement for us, unlike you!

So what’s going on? We have the corrosive acids of cynicism and unbelief. Cynicism from a crowd who think they know all about Jesus when actually they don’t. They think he’s still the carpenter’s son. They take offence – he can’t be any better than us! (Verses 2-3)

Unbelief? Jesus was amazed at their lack of faith (verse 6), but it follows on from their cynicism. If they’re refusing to believe Jesus is anything more than just local lad made good, they will not have the openness to have faith in him and thus receive the blessings he has for them. What a contrast from the many times Jesus says to some individuals, ‘Your faith has made you well.’

If even Jesus can have this experience of running up against a spiritual brick wall in people then at least let that help us take heart when we are attempting to share our faith and no-one wants to know. How we would love them to respond! We might even be desperate for a response! But it isn’t in our hands.

Some of this is about recognising the rôle of free will and of accepting that we cannot force a response. We have to ask ourselves whether we have been truly faithful to the Gospel, because that’s our task.

None of this should stop us praying for the Holy Spirit to be at work. If people are going to respond to Jesus then the Spirit needs to be at work in them before we even open our mouths. This is where John Wesley famously believed in what he called ‘prevenient grace’, where the word ‘prevenient’ is made up of ‘pre’ (i.e., going before something or someone) and ‘venir’, the French verb ‘to come’. The Holy Spirit comes first. Before we even get into the nitty gritty of reaching out to people with the love of God in our words and our deeds we need to pray that the Spirit of God will go ahead of us.

So when we are in mission mode, our task is fidelity to the Gospel. We leave the response to the people’s free will, but we pray that the Holy Spirit will get to them before us and prepare their hearts, otherwise no positive response to Jesus is possible.

But I think before we leave this first of the two episodes we need to reflect on the story in a different way. When I realised that as I said Jesus’ hearers ‘think they know all about Jesus when actually they don’t’ a nasty chill went up my spine.

Because I thought that could describe us.

We think we know all about Jesus, and like them we rarely if ever see him working any miracles among us. Could it be that we’ve deceived ourselves and we don’t know Jesus as well as we think?

Sadly, I think that’s possible. I listen to some Christians describe their understanding of Jesus and it’s very limited, if not downright partial. They just take on the bits of Jesus that they like and they discard the rest in much the same way that we put leftovers from dinner in the food recycling bin.

So as well as encouraging us to be faithful in sharing the Gospel and leaving the results to God while praying for his Spirit to be at work, I also want to issue a challenge today. How many of us have become complacent about Jesus? How many of us have remained with little more than a Sunday School image of him? How many of us go on seriously engaging with Jesus as portrayed in the four Gospels? How many of us are willing to let Jesus reshape our image of him instead of us persistently making him in our image?

It’s imperative we let Jesus challenge us into appreciating a more fully orbed understanding of him, because we can’t afford to proclaim a fantasy Jesus to the world. And praying to a fantasy Jesus will get us nowhere: we certainly won’t see any miracles.

Secondly, let’s consider the disciples on mission.

Humanly, it seems surprising that Jesus entrusts his mission to his disciples at this point. As one scholar says,

Heretofore they have impeded Jesus’ mission (1:36-39), become exasperated with him (2:23-25), and even opposed him (3:21). Their perception of Jesus has been – and will continue to be – marked by misunderstanding (8:14-21).[1]

Fancy Jesus choosing a motley crew like that and entrusting them with his mission! But that’s exactly what he does. This bunch of incompetents is sent out by Jesus to the nearby villages with his message in word and deed.

The Christian church still does similarly crazy things at time, often with young people. My first ever trip abroad was to Norway with a project of the European Methodist Youth Council where young people got used to mission by becoming missionaries in a foreign land during the school holidays.

Later, I would be involved with a Youth For Christ centre where the team spearheading our outreach was drawn entirely from young people in their late teens and their twenties who were taking gap years to offer themselves to the church.

As you can imagine, many of these people (me included) were rough around the edges, but God used us.

What excuse, then, do those of us have who have served Christ for many decades?

And it’s the real thing, too, not a trial run. The simplicity of their sending is similar to the simplicity with which the Israelites had to leave Egypt. This is therefore like a new Exodus. That makes it highly significant in a Jewish context. The clueless disciples get a central role in Jesus’ kingdom mission.

But – just like Jesus – they may encounter difficulty:

¹¹And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.’

That’s quite a sign, to shake the dust off their feet against those who don’t believe:

This is a searing indictment since Jews travelling outside Palestine were required to shake themselves free of dust when returning home lest they pollute the holy land.[2]

In other words, if people rejected the message, treat them like they are heathens, even if they are Jews living in the Holy Land!

Jesus prepares them for the worst, just as he has suffered rejection at Nazareth. Don’t waste your time with such people, he says, move on to where it will be more fruitful.

Local Preachers and ministers might identify a little bit with the disciples here: we have all known congregations that have been resistant to our preaching of the word. I think there are serious questions about whether the denomination should pour resources into such churches.

In that sense, those we send out on mission should be able to know that they can move on from the places of resistance and opposition to those where the Holy Spirit is at work with the prevenient grace we talked about earlier. I once heard about an Anglican curate who had a terrible time in his first parish. On the day he moved out, he drove to the edge of the parish boundary, took off the socks he was wearing, and threw them down as a sign of shaking the dust off his feet against those who had mistreated him.

All that said, the disciples with their half-baked faith see amazing results.

So – let’s by all means anticipate possible opposition or resistance to the Gospel, but let’s leave things in the hands of the Holy Spirit to work miracles in people’s hearts and minds, and let’s also be willing to walk away from those who are hostile to our faith and go somewhere fruitful.

[1] James R Edwards, The Gospel According To Mark, p177f.

[2] Edwards, p181.

July 4, 2021 0

Keep Quiet – Jesus Is At Work (Mark 5:21-43)

Mark 5:21-43

Last week, when our reading was about Jesus stilling the storm on Galilee, the story came to quite a climax. Jesus’ disciples said, ‘Who then is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!’

It’s quite a punchline. Mark leaves us in no doubt that he wants his readers to consider who this amazing Jesus is.

This week is different. While we have two amazing stories woven into one narrative, the climax after the healing of the woman with the flow of blood and the raising of Jairus’ daughter feels like an anti-climax:

⁴³He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Keep quiet and have a snack. That’s it.

It’s not the only time Jesus tells people to hush their mouths about one of his miracles in Mark’s Gospel, and many people have assumed that the reason Jesus took this apparently rather strange approach was that if word got out that he was the Messiah the expectations people would have of him would be nothing like the way he saw messiahship.

And with that in mind, we have to look more carefully for the themes of Jesus’ mission that Mark wants to highlight here. I’ve found three.

The first is unity.

Look at the contrasts in the story. Jairus’ daughter is young: she’s only twelve. The woman, on the other hand, has had her distressing medical problem for as long as the girl has been alive. She is much older.

The woman is also now in poverty. She had spent all she had on doctors (verse 26). The young girl, on the other hand, is the daughter of a man who is probably quite well-to-do.

The woman creeps up on Jesus from behind (verse 27). Jairus is direct and open, falling at Jesus’ feet to beg him for mercy for his beloved daughter (verse 22).

Young and old, rich and poor, bold and shy – the range is wide but the need is the same. However different they are, Jesus knows they need the mercy and grace of God.

And that’s what he does. He brings people of all circumstances and life experiences into the family of God, because all need God’s grace and love.

That’s a picture of God’s kingdom. Jesus crosses all our human barriers because everybody needs the grace of God. In our social lives and our friendships we might look for people with similar interests or experiences to us. But in God’s family he brings together rich and poor, black and white, northerner and southerner, male and female.

I can look around congregations I’ve served and see people who owned two homes sitting next to others who were on a fixed pension. I can see my West Indian friends from the Windrush Generation and succeeding generations mixing with white Europeans. I’ve even found Arsenal supporters in the church, and that’s hard for me as a Tottenham fan!

Seriously, this work of Jesus to bring all sorts of people into the love of God is the first sign of his work of reconciliation. He reconciles people to God and he brings them into a family where those same people, often or different or even opposing backgrounds end up being reconciled to one another.

I like to put it like this. Jesus accomplished that reconciliation at the Cross. And the Cross has both a vertical beam, indicating our relationship with God and a horizontal beam, indicating that we are also reconciled with one another.

Do you need that reconciliation with God or with other people? Receive all you need for that from Jesus.

The second theme I’ve found is sovereignty.

Sometimes I wonder how I would be feeling in this story if I were Jairus. After all, I have a daughter, too. But to come in desperation and plead with Jesus, who agrees to come to my house (verse 24), only to find that he then stops and spends time trying to find out who touched him (verse 30) when time is of the essence – I think that would shred any remaining nerves that I had in my body.

Not only that, we get to Jairus’ house and we’re told that the daughter is dead (verse 35). Why did Jesus delay?

It’s a little like the story in John 11 where Jesus’ friend Lazarus dies but he doesn’t rush to Bethany where Lazarus lived with his sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus bides his time.

And so too here. Jesus isn’t ruffled. He encourages Jairus to continue believing (verse 36) and he isn’t rattled by the commotion caused by the professional mourners or the crowd laughing at him for saying the child is only asleep (verses 38-40).

It may not look like it to us, but Jesus has the situation under control. Taking only the girl’s parents and his three closest lieutenants, he goes to the girl and heals her (verses 40-42).

I wonder whether there is something that feels like it’s running out of control in your life? Is there something that seems to be descending into chaos and you’re afraid of where that will leave you?

If you are, I encourage you to invite Jesus into the situation. You can sound as desperate as Jairus if you like, it doesn’t matter. Jesus won’t be fazed. Let him walk calmly with you through what you fear will be an impending disaster.

That’s why I say this is about sovereignty. He’s still in charge. So turn to him.

The third and final theme I’ve noticed in the narrative is purity.

The condition of the woman made her ritually unclean in Judaism. For Jesus to come into contact with her would make him unclean.

And similarly, if you touched a dead body, as Jesus did when he took Jairus’ daughter by the hand (verse 41), that also made you ritually unclean.

It’s as if the uncleanness always pollutes the clean. It’s like dropping one blob of ink into a glass of water and seeing the ink affect all of the water.

Except that doesn’t happen here. You could say that the purity of Jesus is so strong that it overpowers the ritual impurity of the woman and of Jairus’ daughter.

In this story, darkness doesn’t finally overcome good. It isn’t even a fight between two equals as some make it out to be. It isn’t even a fair fight at all. Jesus has all the power of divine holiness. That which would ruin lives cannot compete in his presence.

It makes me think about a couple of verses from the First Letter of John:

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the work of the devil. (1 John 3:8)
Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. (1 John 4:4)

Sometimes when we’re involved with all our fallibilities the fight against suffering and sin is long and grim. But with Jesus in charge the final outcome is certain. None of this can stand in his presence. Instead of the virus of sin contaminating him, his holiness infects the darkness, exposes it, and cleanses it.

Isn’t it good news that ultimately the pure holiness of Jesus overcomes all the darkness and despair of this world? If you’re disheartened because the bad stuff so often ends up on top, look at this story and see signs that what Jesus does here puts all the powers of darkness on notice for what will ultimately happen when he appears again on Earth in glory.

Take heart from the superior purity of Jesus!

In fact, take heart from all three of the themes we’ve been thinking about today. Be glad that Jesus opens the kingdom of God to all people, that God longs to see all people reconciled to him and to one another. Rejoice in the sovereignty of God in Christ, where even when we get frantic and time seems to be slipping away he is still in charge. And take heart that suffering and death do not have the final word in all of creation, because the purity of Jesus is superior.

None of this might sound as spectacular as the calming of the storm on Galilee, but believe me, it’s every bit as important.

June 27, 2021 1

Author: Dave Faulkner