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?

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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)?

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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:

26 Jesus 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:

29 Jesus 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).

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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:

5 When 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?’ 6 He 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:

7 Philip answered him, ‘It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!’

8 Another 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:

14 After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ 15 Jesus, 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.

19 When 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:

20 But he said to them, ‘It is I; don’t be afraid.’ 21 Then 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?

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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)

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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?

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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.

5 He 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:

11 And 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.

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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:

43 He 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.

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Finding Jesus in the Storm (Mark 4:35-41, Ordinary 12)

Mark 4:35-41

This week in the south-east of England our weather has gone from the extreme heat of Wednesday with temperatures around 29C to rain and thunderstorms with the temperature not above 16C on Friday. We’re used to the idea that a period of considerable heat can be broken by thunderstorms. Often we’re grateful!

On the Sea of Galilee with its particular local geography they were used to sudden vicious squalls appearing, like the one in this story. However, they weren’t welcomed, because they could be a threat to life, especially to those who made their living on Galilee from fishing.

Our story from Mark depicts on such naturally occurring storm, just as all sorts of naturally occurring events can disrupt our lives and plunge us into fear, as it did Jesus’ disciples.

But alongside the naturally occurring threat are hints of something else. Jesus and his disciples are striking out on a new stage of his kingdom of God proclamation. ‘Let us go over to the other side’ (verse 35) is not an idle comment. It’s not like saying, ‘Let’s cross the road.’ Jesus wanted to go from the Jewish side of Galilee to the Gentile side. He wanted to go from the place where people sought to be true to the faith (although some of the most fiercely devout people opposed him) to a place where what was practised was dodgy and often heretical.

Not only that, he also leaves the crowd behind (verse 36). Fancy leaving behind all these people he has built up. But he does.

So imagine that for his disciples this is about leaving behind the familiar and the successful for a venture into an area that didn’t traditionally practise conventional and orthodox forms of faith. Jesus is extending the reach of the kingdom outside natural comfort zones. It’s something we in the church often don’t like to do. We’d prefer to stay with people who are just like us, with whom we feel safe. But the ministry of Jesus is rarely safe!

In that context we might see the storm differently, and not least because when Jesus wakes on the boat and responds to the disciples’ plea, we read that he ‘rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’’ (verse 39). This is the sort of language he uses in exorcisms! It’s as if Jesus sees demonic opposition behind the storm, which is not surprising if this boat ride is a journey to extend the kingdom.

Add to that the fact that Mark borrows some language here from Jonah chapter 1, where Jonah the reluctant missionary finds himself on a boat in a storm, and you have further evidence why it’s not far-fetched to see a mission dimension to this story.

And maybe that’s why we like to stay safe. We know that the call of Jesus may put us into tricky and risky situations. It will. But rather than saying ‘No thank you, I’ll stay at home,’ this story gives us reason to go on that risky adventure with Jesus.

I want you to have in your minds any challenging call you have from Jesus. It might be the general challenge most churches are facing at present to navigate a new future in a world scarred by COVID-19. It might be that Jesus is calling you or your church to a new form of outreach that is beyond your experience or involves people you don’t naturally like.

And I also want you to hold at present any of the ordinary storms of life that may be buffeting you. Serious illness, bereavement, job losses, problems in your family, and so on.

Into those storms come two truths about Jesus.

Firstly, Jesus is present in the storm.

Sometimes when we are in a storm it feels like Jesus isn’t there. Or we might acknowledge his presence in theory, but to all practical ends it feels like he isn’t or he might as well not be.

I suppose it was something like the latter for the disciples here. They knew he was there but ‘was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion’ (verse 37). And maybe we can identify with them waking him and saying, ‘Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?’ (Verse 38)

Perhaps we should ponder, then, from this story what it means when we know Jesus is present in our storm, but we aren’t hearing much from him. Could it be the equivalent to him being asleep here? But rather than that indicating his lack of care for us, is it actually a sign to say, ‘It’s all right, I’ve got this’?

Could it be that Jesus is quiet in our storms because he is saying to us through his silence that we don’t need to fear? Could it be that this is an occasion where Jesus shows his will for us not in his words but in his example? He is not afraid of the storm, and we don’t need to be either, seems to be the message of him sleeping in the stern.

On this subject, I used to quote the lyrics of a song by an artist who used to be known as Leslie Phillips (no, nothing to do with the British actor of ‘Ding dong!’ fame, this Leslie Phillips is female and American). She is now known as Sam Phillips, which confuses her with someone else.

Anyway, she wrote a song called ‘Answers Don’t Come Easy’ that is relevant to this idea that Jesus is present in the storm, even when he’s not speaking to us. The chorus says this:

Oh, and I can wait
It’s enough to know you can hear me now
Oh, I can wait
It’s enough to feel so near you now
And when answers don’t come easy
I can wait

I want to assure you that whatever storm you are facing, whether it’s the risky adventure of following Jesus out of our comfortable church existence into mission in the world or whether it’s a painful life crisis, he is with you. His silence speaks. And his silence tells you that even as the elements rage he’s still in charge.

I invite you to find that silence in the middle of the storm.

The second truth is that Jesus is in charge during the storm.

When Jesus gets up and stills the storm, some English Bible translations have it that he says ‘Peace!’ but he doesn’t. If it were, you would have the Greek word eirene here from which we get the girli’s name Irene.

The NIV which we read gives a better flavour when it says he ‘rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’’ (verse 39). The natural elements are given a telling-off by Jesus! It’s like even the elements here are in disobedience to him and he commands their obedience.

You might say his words are like scolding naughty children, but it’s stronger and that word ‘rebuked’ gives the game away. As I said earlier, this is exorcism language. Every part of creation, not just human beings, is commanded to come under obedience to Christ. One day, as Paul told the Philippians, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10-11). Or as Charles Wesley put it in his hymn ‘Jesus, the name high over all’,

Angels and men before it fall
And devils fear and fly.

Now you may say that day isn’t here yet. We don’t always see the storm calming down. And you would be right. The kind of dramatic intervention by Jesus that happens in our story today isn’t an everyday occurrence, although maybe sometimes we’re too scared to ask.

No, we’re not yet at that time Paul prophesies about in Philippians where every knee will bow, and so in the meantime sometimes Jesus saves us from the storm and sometimes he saves us through the storm.

But rest assured of one thing. The storm will not have the final word. Jesus will. For we are people of resurrection faith.

So in conclusion, how might we respond when we are in a storm? Well, if we can appreciate that Jesus is present, even when silent, and if we can believe that he is in charge, even as we wait for the fulness of his kingdom, then I pray our faith and trust in him will grow and we shall not hear him say to us as he did to his first disciples, ‘Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?’ (Verse 40)

Instead, while they then wondered and pondered, ‘Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!’ (verse 41), may we, who know who he is, turn our wondering into worship and our pondering into trust.

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Video Teaching: First Principles of the Gospel (2 Corinthians 5:6-17)

2 Corinthians 5:6-17

In my O-Level Physics class there once came an occasion where our teacher set us a problem for homework that none of us could solve. When my parents saw me struggling with it my Dad decided to write a letter to the teacher, asking him why he had set homework that none of the pupils could do.

In response to that letter the teacher phoned my Dad. He explained that all we needed to do to solve the problem was go back to the first principles we had learned in that topic.

When I heard that, I learned an important life lesson. Always go back to the first principles.

There is something of ‘first principles’ in our reading from 2 Corinthians. It’s a strange selection of verses in the Lectionary – but hey, what’s new there? But even despite that and the fact that we’re reading these verses out of context, we can pick up on some first principles. Because like my old Physics teacher, the Apostle Paul also always went back to first principles.

So today we are going to think about some of the First Principles of the Gospel. What are the first principles Paul talks about here, and how do they affect the way we live?

Number one first principle is that we live by faith, not sight.

Paul tells us that in the life to come we shall be at home with the Lord and shall see him, but right now we are away from home and do not see him, so we have to live by faith, trusting in the God whom we do not yet see. But when we do see him, he will call us to account for all that we have done while away from home (verses 6-10).

What does that mean for us? To live by faith means that we trust that even though we don’t yet see God, one day we shall. And in the meantime, we are to live as those who know we shall see God one day. That’s what living by faith is here: trusting that we shall meet God face to face in the life to come, and letting that reality direct the way we live now. The Gospel promise of meeting God face to face one day is meant to change us on this day.

So for one thing, living by faith means that we consider our attitudes and our actions now. Would we act the way we do if we had to live our every moment before the visible face of God? How does the fact that we shall one day see him face to face affect how we live today? What would we be happy doing in that knowledge? What would make us ashamed?

For another thing, we know that the Lord has entrusted us with resources, gifts, and talents in this life. So another part of living by faith is to consider how we use these things. From the abundance of creation to our natural talents, how would we use these if we were doing so before the face of God? How would we use our brain, our artistic abilities, our work skills, our homes and gardens, our possessions? The answers to questions like these will show how much we are living by faith – or not, as the case may be.

We often restrict the expression ‘living by faith’ to those Christians who have to trust God to supply their financial needs. I have no quarrel with that: I have had to do that at times. But Paul tells us to expand our vision of living by faith, because he tells us here that all Christians live by faith. How are we going to live now, knowing that we shall one day see God face to face?

Number two first principle is that Christ’s love compels us.

Paul talks about the love of Christ being a compelling motive in the Christian life, and he links it to his death on the Cross. If you hadn’t heard the whole reading but were just hearing his letter read out in public for the first time you might have thought that the link from the love of Christ to the Cross was going to be the forgiveness of our sins through the Cross. But it isn’t.

Of course, it’s true that Christ’s love brings us forgiveness through the Cross, but Paul makes a different point here. His punchline comes in verse 15:

15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

Christ’s love compels us, because his example shows us that we are to live for Jesus and for others, not primarily for ourselves.

That’s why a church that gets hung up on just wanting the things that the members themselves like is an unhealthy church: it’s not modelled on Christ’s love.

In fact, were I to choose a church to be part of based on my own preferences it almost certainly wouldn’t be the Methodist Church. There are so many things in Methodism that I find tedious, frustrating, or annoying. But God called me to serve here. He loves me in Jesus, and calls me to return that love in the context of Methodism.

You may know the famous comment of Archbishop William Temple, when he said that the church is the only institution that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. It’s not a perfect statement, but it does capture some of this idea: Christ’s love means we live for him and for others.

Each and every one of us needs to be asking ourselves, how am I imitating the love of Jesus by serving him and serving others?

Number three first principle is the new creation.

16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!

Following Jesus makes us treat people differently, says Paul. But it’s that final verse where I need to give you this week’s episode of Bible Trivia.

‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,’ said many older translations. Some newer translations say, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.’ That’s bit different.

So which is it? Is it that the convert is a new creation? Or is it that conversion promises the general new creation of all things?

If you go back to the Greek you’ll see why we have this problem. It’s ambiguous. A literal translation would be, ‘If anyone is in Christ – new creation!’ For us English speakers there are missing words. To translate it into English, we have to add words. Whether we opt for ‘the person is a new creation’ (favoured by those Christians who emphasise personal conversion) or ‘there is a new creation’ (favoured by those who care about the environment and social justice) depends largely on our existing theological preferences.

But what if the words ‘If anyone is in Christ – new creation!’ are deliberately ambiguous and cover both of these possibilities? I think both are true biblically.

When we are united with Christ, God makes us new by his Spirit, and starts a work of holiness and healing in us that will not be complete until glory. He calls us to co-operate with his Holy Spirit in this work.

But our union with Christ also shows God’s project to make the whole creation new, just as he makes us new. He is not content to leave the world as it is and calls us to join with his Spirit in the renewal of all things.

So he will send us into the world both to call people to conversion and to make a social difference.

Therefore, if any of us prefers personal piety to social justice, we have sold the Gospel short. And if any of us is willing to campaign for social justice but not seek personal conversion and holiness, then we too have diluted the Gospel.

To sum up, the three Gospel first principles we’ve looked at today all lead to transformed lives and transformed society. When we live by faith, not by sight, we live as if we were doing so in the presence of God, and that surely changes our actions and our priorities.

Christ’s love compels us through the Cross to live for him and for others, rather than for ourselves.

And the new creation is both personal with our conversion and our journey of holiness but also social as we anticipate God making all things new.

Each of us needs to ask: in what way is the Gospel changing me? And in what ways am I serving the kinds of change God longs to see in his world, as a result of the Gospel?

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