Month: June 2015

‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living,’ wrote Solomon in the book of Wisdom. ‘For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them.’

This is one of the boldest and most radical passages in all scripture. And if it is true, we need to talk about it.

If God did not make death: we need to talk about it.

For over the centuries we have blamed God when people have tragically died; and we have involved God in our projects of death. We have enlisted God onto our side in wartime to justify the slaughter of enemies; and when our own people have been killed we have drawn on the language of sacrifice to sanctify their loss. If God did not make death: then why have we done these things?

If God does not delight in the death of the living: we need to talk about it.

For we have grown accustomed to using the language of accusation to explain away people’s misfortunes. We have blamed homosexuality as a cause for everything from autism to tornadoes; we have used the language of judgement in which God is the force behind the disasters befalling the feckless and the wicked. If God does not delight in the death of the living: then why have we used God in this way?

If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: we need to talk about it.

For we have separated ourselves from nature, our advanced industrial societies have regarded nature as something to be overcome and exploited to meet our needs, rather than to be worked with in partnership. We have come to see the forces of nature as something to be protected and insulated from and insured against. If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: then why have we made them our enemy? [4]

We need to talk about death – because we are a society of death-deniers. Our culture is death-phobic. Our instinct is to deny the reality of death, and to try to resist the inevitability of our mortality.

There is our climate denial; there is our funeral denial; there is our nuclear denial; and there is our climate change denial.

We see our climate denial in the rows and rows of supermarket shelves full of products designed to keep us fit and young: anti-wrinkle creams, scrubs and exfoliators, high-energy drinks, vitamin supplements – designed to counteract our sense of ageing and decay. 

We see our funeral denial in the way we organise our funeral industry to distance us from the reality of the physical demise of our loved one, the way that dead bodies are treated almost as toxic and to be avoided, to be got rid of quickly so we do our mourning without them. Our culture unhealthily resists and denies our mortality.

Since the end of the Cold War our fear of nuclear annihilation has been less spoken about – yet deep in our collective psyche the possibility of mutually assured destruction persists; disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have kept the fear of radiation from nuclear power alive; yet we bury these fears in nuclear denial and persevere with developing programmes of nuclear power and weaponry.

And despite the overwhelming scientific opinion on climate change, that the Earth's climate system is unequivocally warming, due to human activities like deforestation and burning fossil fuels, despite clear changes in weather patterns, and the increase of extreme weather events across the world, perhaps because of the challenge which climate change poses to our established ways of life, many persist in climate change denial.

Yet if God did not make death, and does not delight in the death of the living; if God created all things so that they might exist; if the generative forces of the world truly are wholesome, with no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth – then we must talk about these things.

– the start of my talk today, If God did not make death, we need to talk about it.

Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 23, 24, Mark 5.21-43

Queen Camel ‘Together at Ten’, Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 28 June 2015

 

‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living,’ wrote Solomon in the book of Wisdom. ‘For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them.’

This is one of the boldest and most radical passages in all scripture. And if it is true, we need to talk about it.

If God did not make death: we need to talk about it.

For over the centuries we have blamed God when people have tragically died; and we have involved God in our projects of death. We have enlisted God onto our side in wartime to justify the slaughter of enemies; and when our own people have been killed we have drawn on the language of sacrifice to sanctify their loss. If God did not make death: then why have we done these things? [2]

If God does not delight in the death of the living: we need to talk about it.

For we have grown accustomed to using the language of accusation to explain away people’s misfortunes. We have blamed homosexuality as a cause for everything from autism to tornadoes; we have used the language of judgement in which God is the force behind the disasters befalling the feckless and the wicked. If God does not delight in the death of the living: then why have we used God in this way? [3]

If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: we need to talk about it.

For we have separated ourselves from nature, our advanced industrial societies have regarded nature as something to be overcome and exploited to meet our needs, rather than to be worked with in partnership. We have come to see the forces of nature as something to be protected and insulated from and insured against. If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: then why have we made them our enemy? [4]

We need to talk about death – because we are a society of death-deniers. Our culture is death-phobic. Our instinct is to deny the reality of death, and to try to resist the inevitability of our mortality.

There is our consumer denial; there is our funeral denial; there is our nuclear denial; and there is our climate change denial.

We see our consumer denial in the rows and rows of supermarket shelves full of products designed to keep us fit and young: anti-wrinkle creams, scrubs and exfoliators, high-energy drinks, vitamin supplements – designed to counteract our sense of ageing and decay. 

We see our funeral denial in the way we organise our funeral industry to distance us from the reality of the physical demise of our loved one, the way that dead bodies are treated almost as toxic and to be avoided, to be got rid of quickly so we do our mourning without them. Our culture unhealthily resists and denies our mortality. [5]

Since the end of the Cold War our fear of nuclear annihilation has been less spoken about – yet deep in our collective psyche the possibility of mutually assured destruction persists; disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have kept the fear of radiation from nuclear power alive; yet we bury these fears in nuclear denial and persevere in developing programmes of nuclear power and weaponry. [6]

And despite the overwhelming scientific opinion on climate change, that the Earth’s climate system is unequivocally warming, due to human activities like deforestation and burning fossil fuels, despite clear changes in weather patterns, and the increase of extreme weather events across the world, perhaps because of the challenge which climate change poses to our established ways of life, many persist in climate change denial. [7]

Yet if God did not make death, and does not delight in the death of the living; if God created all things so that they might exist; if the generative forces of the world truly are wholesome, with no destructive poison in them, and if the dominion of Hades is not on earth – then we must talk about these things.

We must return to those scriptures which we have misread or misrepresented or simply ignored, to refresh our understandings and remedy our denials.

We might go way back to the story of Abraham and Isaac to realise that God put an end to human sacrifice very early on in human history. This God who did not make death, and does not delight in the death of the living, stayed Abraham’s hand at the altar and saved his son from sacrifice. This God who created all things so that they might exist, said through the prophet Hosea, ‘For I desire mercy, not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings’. When you rail against the so-called ‘sacrificial’ loss of countless innocents in warfare and conflicts across the world, it is the anger of God, God’s passion for life, which is rising inside you. [8]

We might go to the gospel story of Lazarus and that unique picture of Jesus at the graveside – weeping at the loss of his friend, to confirm the view that God does not delight in the death of the living. For watching Jesus there in tears the onlookers said, ‘See how he loved him.’ When you weep at the loss of a loved one, Jesus weeps with you. When you stand before a stone memorial to remember the dead, Jesus stands there with you, for he understands your sadness. [9]

We might go to Genesis of course, and the innocent beauty of the Garden of Eden, to celebrate the truth that the generative forces of the world are wholesome; but acknowledging our place in a fallen world maybe we should also return to the narrative of the Book of Job, which is a long and serious discussion around the suffering of innocent people, a meditation on the possible powerlessness of  God to alleviate the pain of the world; in which God, having listened to the laments of the righteous Job, describes the stars and heavens singing because of the order God has brought to creation, talks about creatures finding benefit in the natural cycles of life that God has established for them, suggests that God frees creatures and gives them a place on earth for them to value and enjoy. [10]

Now some thoughtful people say that religion is a form of death-denial; that its tendency to divide the fallen, physical world, from the eternally good spiritual world, is a defence mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, a survival mechanism in a deadly world. But Solomon turns this inside-out when he writes, ‘The dominion of Hades is not on earth’; suggesting that in God’s view the world is good, our fulfilment is to be found here, not – or not only – in some promised afterlife. [11]

But, you might be thinking, ‘hell on earth’ does well describe what life seems like for those who are suffering from a chronic illness or facing the death of a child, it describes what whole societies are going through in lands troubled by economic chaos and political unrest.

If there is no ‘hell on earth’, then why does it hurt so much that a loved one has died, and that there is so much suffering in the world? Solomon isn’t avoiding these questions, he’s addressing them head on. He’s inviting us to look at death in a whole new way. He is doing what other biblical writers do: revealing this astonishing truth – that death does not figure in the ways of God. [12]

The prophet Isaiah foretold it. ‘On this mountain’, he writes, ‘God will destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations.’ [13]

What is it that hangs like a heavy storm cloud over the peoples of the earth, which God will remove? It is death. ’He will swallow up death forever,’ Isaiah says. Death does not figure in the ways of God; he removes it from above us. We do not need to live under its oppressive weight, its threat, its curse. Our human spirit need not be defeated by the threat of doomsday destruction, the spectre of that exhausted, chaotic world we avoid by nuclear and climate change denial. With eyes wide open to all of this, we see that in God there is another way, a way of life.

In today’s gospel reading we saw Jesus saving Jairus’ daughter from dying; and saving the haemorrhaging woman from a kind of living death she had been enduring for twelve years: a death involving poverty, constant bleeding, a worsening condition. ‘Get up!’ he told the girl; ‘Go in peace, and be healed,’ he told the woman. 

This is the same Jesus who, having drawn his dead friend Lazarus out from his reopened tomb, said: ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ In Christ, no-one is bound by death. This is the same Jesus whose generative forces of life break forth from the empty tomb discovered by Mary Magdalene and the disciples. In Christ, the power of death is broken.

However astonishing it seems to us, the evidence of scripture is that in God, we learn not to deny death, but to face its reality, and see its limitations; in Jesus, we embrace the power to live unbound by death.

Learning to live unbound by death is a lifetime’s work. For we are so bound by a culture which is weighed down by death, the fear of death, the use of death as threat, the endless cycle of death through violent retaliation, it is hard to be unbound, and let go from such powerful forces.

Yet at that moment when Mary Magdalene discovered an empty tomb, our world began to learn to live unbound by death, and the influence of the resurrected Christ is now everywhere to see. 

The German theologian Dorothee Sölle said that ‘Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition. It is not the final departure we think of when we speak of death; it is that purposeless, empty existence devoid of genuine human relationships and filled with silence, anxiety and loneliness.’ [14]

Learning to live unbound by death means being encouraged that in Christ, we can live purposeful lives, in a deep relationship of love with him which equips us to develop flourishing relationships with others; full, unbounded, lives. Lives in tangent with the natural cycles of nature in which we share.

As you know, Pope Francis last week published an encyclical [15] in which he reminds us of the words  of Saint Francis of Assisi, that the earth, our common home, ’is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us…. [a] sister [who] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.’

The Pope wrote: ‘For human beings… to destroy the biological diversity … by causing changes in its climate …; to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life – these are sins.’

He calls for a ‘global ecological conversion’, following the example of St Francis of Assisi ‘of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically. … He shows us just how inseparable is the bond between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace’.

‘All is not lost,’ writes Pope Francis. ‘Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start, despite their mental and social conditioning. We are able to take an honest look at ourselves, to acknowledge our deep dissatisfaction, and to embark on new paths to authentic freedom. No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful, or our God-given ability to respond to his grace at work deep in our hearts. I appeal to everyone throughout the world not to forget this dignity which is ours. No one has the right to take it from us.’

‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them.’

It is possible for us to live unbound by death. It may change our world around completely, to try. But that is our mission, and that is our joy.

 

Notes

[1] This sermon draws on from that preached as There is no death, in Christ, in Devon on All Saints’ Day 2012.

[2] See S. Mark Heim’s Saved from Sacrifice, A Theology of the Cross, and my my review of the book here.

[3] Evan McMurry, 6 most absurd things the Christian right has blamed on gays, Salon, April 11, 2014.

[4] See Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, for a fierce critique and inspiring appraisal of what is possible in our relationship with the climate and the earth.

[5] Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematorium, is an eye-opening memoir of mortuary work and an impassioned argument against the way that ‘the public [are] being cheated out of [death] by the funeral industry… The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality.’ (p.114). She has founded The Order of the Good Death, ’a group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality’…  ‘The Order is about making death a part of your life,’ she says.

[6] David Ropeik, The Rise of Nuclear Fear – How We Learned to Fear the Radiation, Scientific American Guest Blog, June 15, 2012.

[7] See Klein, This Changes Everything, for extensive coverage of climate change denial, its perpetrators and its consequences.

[8] Genesis 22.2-8, Hosea 6.6.

[9] John 11.

[10] See my sermon from last week, On a Boat with Jesus – on the rocks with God, for more on this.

[11] See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize and widely regarded as one of the twentieth-century’s great works.

[12] I am grateful to Luis Rodriguez, Hanford Sermons, for his Pentecost 5 sermon, God Did Not Make Death, which influenced this section of my sermon.

[13] Isaiah 25.6-9. 

[14] Dorothee Sölle, The Mystery of Death. Translated by Nancy Lukens-Rumscheidt and Martin Lukens-Rumscheidt, p. 121. Quoted in Virginia Sloyan, A Sourcebook about Christian Death, p.49.

[15] Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis. On Care for our Common Home.

[In] the essential humanness of Mark's Christ … we have something we can aspire to rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy. 

Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity – our ordinariness, our mediocrity – and it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to fly. In short, to be Christ-like. 

– enjoying quoting from my favourite Nick Cave text again today, his Introduction to The Canongate Gospel According to Mark (reproduced in full on his website). And astounded to consider that another of my all-time favourites, Simon Jenkins' poem 'Ship of Fools', was published thirty-five years ago… Well, quality lasts. I quoted that again today too. A sermon I first preached way back in 2003: On a boat with Jesus – on the rocks with God.

Job 38.1-11, Mark 4.35-41

Weston Bampfylde, Third Sunday after Trinity, 21 June 2015

 

ship of fools [1]

 

what ship plays with icebergs 

and plays soft music as it sinks into the ocean? 

what ship on the throw of a dice 

feeds a prophet to his fishy destination? 

what ship breaks its spine on the rocks 

and turns the waves black with lubrication? 

 

a ship of fools 

but there are fools and 

those who seem to be 

 

what ship is built on a dry highland 

is launched in a downpour 

and flies on watery wings to the peak of a mountain? 

what ship has a crew 

of taxmen thieves and fishermen 

who decide in the howling storm 

to make a small sleeping carpenter 

their captain? 

 

yes 

a ship of fools 

but there are fools and 

those who only appear to be 

 

This poem by Simon Jenkins suggests that living the Christian life is a bit like travelling on a ship of fools. This talk is about being on a boat with Jesus, and what you might expect to happen on that watery journey. 

Our gospel story shows that if you¹re on a boat with Jesus on the Lake of Galilee then you should expect storms. 

Galilee was notorious for its storms. They came literally out of the blue with shattering and terrifying suddenness. Even on the calmest of days, terrible squalls can hit those waters without any warning. [2]

If you’re on a boat with Jesus voyaging across that lake you might expect to encounter just such sudden storms as this. And of course, that boat, that lake, those storms, are metaphors about us and the bumpy ride that we often find ourselves on, in life. We can put ourselves onto that tiny Galilean boat, into the story of that stormy day. 

So in your life, if you’re on a boat with Jesus you might expect confrontation. 

You’ll be confronted with uncomfortable truths about yourself. On the sea of life, you might not be a fisherman, accustomed to travelling this way. You may be a tax collector, a civil servant, a landlubber. Happy enough to take a Poole Harbour ferry trip for an hour’s gentle cruise, but terrified if that little boat got carried out into the English Channel and started to rock in the wind and the waves. On the sea of life, sickly and shaken, out of your depth, you may have to face your weaknesses, on a boat with Jesus. 

You’ll be confronted with uncomfortable truths about God, too. Things like, when there’s a crisis, when there’s a storm, finding that God is asleep. You’re panicking, you’re fearful, you’re being tossed and blown by the most awful winds of change. And though you know that God’s there with you, God doesn’t seem to be paying any attention. Just when you need him most, if you go looking for Jesus¹s help, you may find him sleeping. 

And when you wake him – it’s up to you to wake him – if you’re on a boat with Jesus you might expect to find more questions than answers. 

Questions like, how do I wake up God? Do I have to tiptoe around God, give a little nervous cough, in the hope that the almighty will stir and notice me waiting there? Can I shout at God, when the storm is loud can I scream at God through it to get God’s urgent attention? Is it ok to pray that way? 

Questions like, can I argue with God? Call God to account: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” 

And if I do get into an argument with God, many many more questions:

• Why is this happening to me? 
• Why do innocent people suffer? 
• If you’re a God of love why all this horror? 
• If you’re a God of order why all this chaos? 
• If you’re so powerful why do you seem so impotent? 
• What does the future hold for us?

If you’re on a boat with Jesus you can expect to find that your questions are likely to be answered in unexpected ways. Our other reading today illustrates this point. 

Job wasn’t on a boat with Jesus, but he was on the rocks with God. 

Job was in the middle of a personal crisis. A devout man, having lost his loved ones and his livelihood, aching, twitching and scarred by the most awful skin disease, Job wanted answers from God. He was a bit fearful about what God would say, but his need to know was stronger than his fears. 

And sure enough, God answered Job’s questions, and answered them in unexpected ways, turning Job’s words around to provoke him to see life in a whole new way. 

So for instance when Job says God causes mountains to fall and all sorts of chaos on the earth, God asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” [3], and describes the stars and heavens singing because of the order God has brought to creation. 

When Job asks God why human beings live hard lives in their brief time on earth, God asks, “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?” [4] and talks about creatures finding benefit in the natural cycles of life that God has established for them. 

When Job suggests that he’d be better off in hell, where he’d be free from God like a slave free of his master, God asks, “Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Will it spend the night at your crib?” [5], suggesting that God frees creatures and gives them a place on earth which they value and enjoy. 

God wanted angry, traumatised Job to see the world as a place of order. Though the man was trapped in deep despair, Job’s maker encouraged him to see the freedom God had built into his divine designs. 

As it was for Job, on the rocks with God, so it is for those on a boat with Jesus. Jesus spoke, and calmed the storm. Overcame the evil in the wind and waves. Let the waters become the sailors’ friend again, no longer their enemy. He restored order to creation. He encouraged the amazed disciples to look deep inside themselves to search for what faith they could find there, that could  awaken and liberate them. 

If you’re on a boat with Jesus, you should expect storms, and many questions. You should expect God to turn your eyes to another view of the world. 

The story of this little boat which Mark told, is a metaphor for our spiritual lives. But it’s also something we believe happened in time and space. We mustn’t forget that Jesus lived this, in the physical, because that awakens us to expect that in a mysterious way, he lives with us in the physical here and now, with all its storms and chaos. 

For many years the musician Nick Cave has been fascinated by the windswept, rain-lashed Jesus of Mark’s gospel, and he once wrote:

[In] the essential humanness of Mark’s Christ … we have something we can aspire to rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy. 

Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity – our ordinariness, our mediocrity – and it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to fly. In short, to be Christ-like. [6]

 Jesus is with you in the storms of life, as he was with those folk on Galilee that day. So, when those stormy times come, you should expect to find Jesus encouraging you to let your fear go the way of the wind, to embrace faith, to find order in God’s ways, to find new freedom in being who you are in God’s creation. 

God wants to transform your moments of greatest crisis into moments of great illumination. Jesus doesn’t want you to drown, but to fly.

 

Notes 

Amended a little from a sermon first preached at Holy Trinity, Wavertree in June 2003.

[1] Simon Jenkins, from Rhinocerous, Fool Books 1980. Simon’s ‘Ship of Fools – The Magazine of Christian Unrest’ has since mutated into an award-winning website. 

[2] William Barclay: The Daily Study Bible: Mark.

[3] Job 9.5-7, 38.4-7.

[4] Job 7.1-3, 39.1-4. 

[5] Job 9.16, 39.9-12. 

[6] Nick Cave, Introduction to The Canongate Gospel According to Mark (reproduced in full on Nick Cave’s website).

[7] Michael Leunig, from A Bunch of Poesy.

… The [Kingdom is a] journey from violence to non-violence, wealth to poverty, power to powerlessness, selfishness to selfless service, pride to humility, indifference to love, cruelty to compassion, vengeance to forgiveness, revenge to reconciliation, war to peace, killing enemies to loving enemies. [5]

– borrowing a quote from Nobel Peace Prize nominee Fr John Dear, for my talk today Magna Carta and Mustard Seeds – defining the Kingdom. My informal worship session on the subject at Sutton Montis included King John's Real Plantagenet Hustle, an extract from the CBBC Horrible Histories Magna Carta special….

2 Corinthians 5.6-17, Mark 4.26-34 

The Second Sunday after Trinity, 14 June 2015

Queen Camel, Sutton Montis, Corton Denham

 

So, the ‘petty, spiteful and cruel’ King John [1], the extortioner, the one who confiscated church property and sold it back to his bishops at a profit, the one who took cash from his barons to fund his war efforts and then decided not to fight, the King increasingly unpopular for the nastiness and injustices of his rule, agreed to come to the negotiating table.

KING JOHN reached Runnymede on 10 June 1215, and after five days of intensive negotiations with the barons, on Monday 15 June 1215, the King sealed his agreement with them. Tomorrow, 800 years later to the day, the Queen and other members of the Royal Family will be at Runnymede. Three people will address the gathered guests: the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Master of the Rolls, who is the judge in charge of civil justice in England and Wales; and the Prime Minister.

It is a token of the continuity of government in this country that these three will address a direct descendant of King John, a Sovereign who has served her people for more than 60 years. It is also a token of Magna Carta’s own significance that its most famous words are on the statute book to this day:

“No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

“To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”

Yet we may still ask, why are we celebrating Magna Carta: what good will be in place in 2020 or 2025 that would not be in place without such celebrations?

Anniversaries have the value of reminding us as nations and communities who we are, and of reinforcing that identity. All of us in England and throughout the Common Law world who share in the Charter’s legacy can claim a share in its history, too, wherever we have come from.

Equality before the law, fair trial, constitutional and fiscal restraints upon the executive – all these can be traced in a direct line back to Magna Carta. And all of us who value these rights are united in the debt we owe to the generations of politicians and jurists who have secured and developed them.

What we share is not just Magna Carta, but the structure of checks and balances on power which has been built on its foundation. Magna Carta is an icon of the start of the tortuous and contested journey towards the rights we enjoy today. By today’s standards the Charter was very limited. But over the centuries the Magna Carta’s great clauses on justice became a grand statement of principle, protecting men of all estates with that still-famous phrase “due process of the law”.

In 17th-century England this inspired the opponents of royal absolutism, in 18th-century America those who saw in English rule little more than tyranny. Those clauses on justice have spread round the world in every Common Law constitution and in every human-rights instrument of the 20th century. 800 years after Runnymede, they are the bedrock on which much of the world’s freedom is built.

But why should the Church be celebrating the Charter? To merely sanctify a current constitutional cause? Or to recognise that the Church’s best hope of security and freedom lies in the equality of all citizens, whatever their faith, before the law?

Yes, but we have better grounds than these. In 1215 Stephen Langton the Archbishop of Canterbury was central to the drafting and sealing of Magna Carta. Two archbishops and seven bishops advised the King to grant the Charter. The Charter was entrusted to cathedrals, for safety from those who wanted to suppress it. The Salisbury Cathedral copy is there for all to see today. [2]

It became part of the parish clergyman’s job description to know the charter, and to publicise and enforce it. Anyone who broke the Charter’s terms were publicly excommunicated by notices given out in parish churches, accompanied by lighted candles and the ringing of bells.

Sir James Holt, respected historian of the Charter, wrote: “The men who were responsible for the Great Charter of 1215 asserted one great principle. In their view the realm was more than a geographic or administrative unit. It was a community. As such, it was capable of possessing rights and liberties which could be asserted against any member of the community, even and especially against the King.”

The Sovereign no longer threatens our rights and liberties; the Church no longer threatens excommunication. The lessons we can draw from so long ago are more rhetorical than practical. 

But the Church’s part in the creation, promotion, and enforcement of the Charter offers an inspiration of its own. Through our engagement with scripture we in the Church know the power and importance of foundational texts re-interpreted and selectively re-applied, generation by generation. The Charter still calls on us to build out of our country’s disparate components a single, peaceable, and just community, with all the courage and insight of Archbishop Langton himself. [3]

In responding to this calling, our inspiration is another foundational text – the foundational text – the Bible, and especially the gospels. For our scriptures teach us to be wary of kings, to resist putting our faith in the kingdoms of this world, to direct our desires towards the Kingdom of God, to put ourselves to work at the outworking of its values.

What is this so-called Kingdom of God? 

We can define it by what it isn’t – it’s not the rule of God by force, by ‘pettiness, spitefulness and cruelty’, by extortion, confiscation, taxation, manipulation. It’s not the the way of corrupt kings, governments and corporations. 

Neither is the Kingdom of God a geographical space, a bounded area within which God has his or her way. 

[However tempting it might have been to offer the people utopia as an alternative to Roman rule], Jesus never asks his followers to imagine the Kingdom of God as a place. Rather, it is something dynamic – a process carried along under its own momentum, difficult to stop once it has started. [4]

In Mark 4 Jesus defines the Kingdom of God as someone scattering seed on the ground, and the seed sprouting and growing, without him knowing how. 

The parable of the sower takes us to the harvest; for the crop is grown to be used, not just admired in the field. There will come a time, in the proper order of growth, when it is ready to be gathered. [4]

Then Jesus defines the Kingdom of God as like a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds on earth but when it grows up, the greatest of all shrubs, growing large branches, ‘so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’

The parable of the mustard seed takes us back to small beginnings. The unstoppable process of the Kingdom, as it develops into something strong and sheltering, is out of all proportion to its modest origins. [4]

This is a very different ‘kingdom’ than the ‘kingdoms’ of the world; an unbounded space where a loving, creative God is uppermost in the hearts of those who share this space with their creator.  And it is a growing space. Our discovery of the Kingdom of God is a journey parallel to the journey we are on with charters of human and environmental rights. For, to borrow a quote from Nobel Peace Prize nominee Fr John Dear, 

… The [Kingdom is a] journey from violence to non-violence, wealth to poverty, power to powerlessness, selfishness to selfless service, pride to humility, indifference to love, cruelty to compassion, vengeance to forgiveness, revenge to reconciliation, war to peace, killing enemies to loving enemies. [5]

According to Jesus, the Kingdom of God is an unbounded space whose ultimate expression is a sprouting tree where the birds of the air make nests in its shade. 

This takes us so far from the practices of the ‘petty, spiteful and cruel’ King John; it takes us so far from the inheritors of his kingdom today, the destroyers of this world’s community and peace. And it invites us into the mission of the Kingdom of God, of which the Magna Carta was an expression, to build out of the disparate components of our world, a single, peaceable, and just community.

 

Notes

[1] As described in Ralph V.  Turner, King John: England’s Evil King?

[2] Salisbury Cathedral: Magna Carta.

[3] The entire italicised section is my adaptation of the feature article by Robin Griffith-Jones, Called for 800 years to build community, Church Times, 12 Jun 2015.

[4] Bridget Nichols, Readings: 2nd Sunday after Trinity, Church Times, 5 Jun 2015.

[5] Fr John Dear, You Will Be My Witnesses: Saints, Prophets and Martyrs. In the original, this paragraph begins, ‘The Gospel [is a]…’

 

If he’d been exorcising demons in Seventeenth-Century England they’d have put him on trial as a witch.

If he’d been preaching liberation to the poor in 1950s America they’d have branded him a communist.

If Jesus the Jew had the misfortune to be living in 1930s Germany then his name would have been on their list for transportation.

So the Jerusalem scribes who accused Jesus of ‘having Beelzebul’ were doing their society’s work in singling him out, creating the conditions for the act of casting him out, for the sake of keeping peace and order, maintaining the status quo, in their human community. 

But in the riddle he riddled, the parable he told, Jesus turned this completely around on them.

‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ he asked. This wasn’t about him any more; it was about them. It was about the mechanism by which their society righted wrongs. It was about them acting as Satan the accuser, in casting out their so-called ‘Satan’, the one they accused of evil. In Jesus’ riddle the mechanism by which society righted wrongs was itself the thing which was evil: ‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ How can a society rid itself of evil when the only way it knows to do so is evil in itself?

And Jesus’ riddle ridiculed that mechanism, by showing that it always failed. … 

– from my talk today, Jesus – was he mad or was he evil? On Mark 3.20-35, such a vibrant and vital gospel passage…

 

Genesis 3.8-15, Mark 3.20-35 

The First Sunday after Trinity, 7 June 2015

Sparkford, Weston Bampfylde

 

They called Jesus mad – his family, seeing the trouble he was getting himself into with the authorities.

The authorities themselves called Jesus evil – saying that because he was casting out demons he must have the Devil in him.

And in response to these accusations, what did Jesus do? He told a parable, starting with a riddle [1]:

‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ He asked. ‘If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.’

So was Jesus mad? Or was Jesus bad? Or was there wisdom in his riddling which made sense of how he saw his mission in the world?

Well, those who study human societies tell us that in every culture there are always people being accused of being satanic, trouble-makers, the cause of society’s ills. We’ve seen this writ large in history through events like the Witch Trials, or McCarthyism, or the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and we see it writ smaller in the everyday tensions that we all experience in our own society, our own community, even our own homes: in the instinct of finding someone to blame when things go wrong. It goes all the way back to that moment when the peace of Eden was broken by first Adam accusing Eve, then Eve accusing the serpent of making things go wrong. [2]

Significantly, the Witch Trials, and McCarthyism, and the growth of Nazism, each took place in societies which were at the time in some ways troubled and divided by economic or social conflict, and the same could be said for occupied Israel in Jesus’ time. Finding a scapegoat was their society’s way of addressing their inner turmoil. 

If he’d been exorcising demons in Seventeenth-Century England they’d have put him on trial as a witch.

If he’d been preaching liberation to the poor in 1950s America they’d have branded him a communist.

If Jesus the Jew had the misfortune to be living in 1930s Germany then his name would have been on their list for transportation.

So the Jerusalem scribes who accused Jesus of ‘having Beelzebul’ were doing their society’s work in singling him out, creating the conditions for the act of casting him out, for the sake of keeping peace and order, maintaining the status quo, in their human community. 

But in the riddle he riddled, the parable he told, Jesus turned this completely around on them.

‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ he asked. This wasn’t about him any more; it was about them. It was about the mechanism by which their society righted wrongs. It was about them acting as Satan the accuser, in casting out their so-called ‘Satan’, the one they accused of evil. In Jesus’ riddle the mechanism by which society righted wrongs was itself the thing which was evil: ‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ How can a society rid itself of evil when the only way it knows to do so is evil in itself?

And Jesus’ riddle ridiculed that mechanism, by showing that it always failed.

‘If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand’ – he said. 

‘And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand’ – he said. 

‘And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come’ – he said. Jesus’ parable made it clear – by asking how a society can rid itself of evil when the only way it knows to do so is evil in itself, he shows that the mechanism of scapegoating can never succeed, it is fatally flawed. [3]

We’ve seen this again and again in history, examples of failed scapegoating: the Witch Trials did not succeed in ridding Europe of plagues and crop-failures or in solving the religious and political conflicts of the time; the American nation did not become united behind McCarthyism, and a broken Germany’s search for stability and reconstruction was spectacularly failed by Nazism. 

And in those places where we have witnessed this Satan at work, it has failed too – everyone in the school playground may be in concord for a few moments in a united act of bullying the odd-child-out; but that child’s scapegoating doesn’t fix all the internal conflicts at play between all the pupils; the family may be uniformly glad to see the back of a nephew’s alcoholic girlfriend, as he jilts her; but there will soon be a return to other niggles within houses divided against themselves. 

Now we know that some scapegoats are completely innocent – the child in the playground bullied purely because their face doesn’t fit, the Romany family ostracised in the village purely for looking and speaking differently, the middle-manager sacked during a crisis in the corporation purely for being in an expendable post.

But we’re also aware that others who become scapegoats do ‘bring it on themselves’, in a sense, their words and actions mean that they draw attention to themselves, attract opposition. And this describes the Jesus who we see in Mark’s gospel.

For, having laid bare his opponents’ worldview, revealed their way of doing things as evil and fatally flawed, demonstrated that they can’t ‘clean out their own house’, Jesus then asserts that it is up to him to lead the revolt against their powers, to bring their rule to an end. This is no less than Jesus’ declaration of ideological war with the scribal establishment. He goes on to spin a thinly veiled political parable in which he likens his mission to criminal breaking and entering: 

‘No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered,’ he says. 

Jesus is the plunderer of Satan’s evil house. Jesus is the one who binds up the strong man, Satan, the establishment way of doing things, the flawed mechanism of scapegoating so preponderant in the world.

This is a Jesus awake to the question posed centuries before by the prophet Isaiah: ‘Can the prey be taken from the mighty, or the captives of a tyrant be rescued?’ – to which Jesus answers, yes, they can.

This is a Jesus inaugurating a new way of seeing God in present and future tense: as a thief in the night, breaking into a world at war with itself, armed with the one device capable of bringing peace: the incongruous instrument of absolute forgiveness. [4]

No wonder Jesus’ family wanted to restrain him: wouldn’t you if you saw your son facing up so audaciously against the powers-that-be, inviting their inevitably hostile response. No wonder Jesus’ mother and brothers, feeling that he had gone out of his mind, attempted to drag him away from the crowd. Imagine how they felt when they heard that he’d said to his disciples, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’

Mark’s Jesus is a Jesus we may feel uncomfortable with. He’s a Jesus we’re unfamiliar with, our hymns and songs more often focussing on a gentle Jesus, meek and mild. [5] This is a Jesus less concerned with issues of personal salvation, more with addressing social evils. This is a Jesus unconcerned with what we might call ‘family values’, instead dedicated to building a new community of faith, consisting of those willing to join him in his mission of confrontation with the powers that be, learning how to live together in the way of absolute forgiveness. 

So was Jesus mad? Or was Jesus bad? Or was there wisdom in his riddling which made sense of how he saw his mission in the world?

I encourage you to grapple with Mark’s portrayal of Jesus. To spend time reading that earliest and briefest of gospels. It may be disturbing, but ultimately inspiring, as we see how Jesus’ battle with the Satan of the powers-that-be played out, and how in binding that strong man, the thief in the night introduced a new and life-giving spirit to bring healing into the systems of the world.

 

Notes

[1] I’m grateful, as ever, to Paul Neuchterlein for his notes and resources on the passage in Girardian Lectionary, Proper 5b, and particularly for using the term ‘riddle’ to describe Jesus’ semantic tricks, which I like! As an opener to this extremely valuable web page, Neuchterlein writes, ‘“The Parable of Satan Casting Out Satan” of Mark 3:23-27 is a pivotal text for Mimetic Theory. It is the first biblical text I heard René Girard speak on (in the early 90’s); he first wrote on it in ch. 14 of The Scapegoat (1982). For those not familiar with Girard’s take: when Jesus asks, seemingly rhetorically, “How can Satan cast out Satan?”, Girard essentially answers, ‘It happens all the time. In fact, that’s what human culture is founded on. Our anthropology can be summarized by the phrase Satan casting out Satan.’’

[2] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p164-5 suggested the examples of witchcraft and the cold war to me.

[3] Besides the explicitly Girardian interpretations of this text, in this area of the sermon we’re in the territory of our battle with the principalities and powers (of Ephesians 6.10-12) so well expounded in the work of Walter Wink [summarised here], and Ched Myers’ classic commentary on Mark, Binding the Strong Man, which takes its title from today’s passage.

[4] This paragraph is my adaptation of a passage from Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p166.

[5] ChurchAds.net, MEEK. MILD. AS IF. An advertising campaign, Easter 1999, which famously depicted Jesus as Che Guervara. The campaign generated controversy (see BBC report, Jesus ad campaign ‘not blasphemous’), and the advertisers defended the poster with this statement: ‘Jesus was not crucified for being meek and mild. He challenged authority. He was given a crown of thorns in a cruel parody of his claims about proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Our poster has the most arresting picture our advertisers could find to convey all this – the image deliberately imitates the style of the well-known poster of Che Guevara.’