Month: June 2018

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

Eldroth, Keasden, Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 1 July 2018

 

‘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, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.’

This is a bold and radical passage of scripture. And if it is true, we need to talk about it.

Now, I know that most of us don’t like to talk about death at all. We are a society of death-deniers. Our culture is death-phobic. Our instinct is to deny the reality of death, to resist our mortality. 

Whether through our reliance on anti-wrinkle creams, high-energy drinks, vitamin supplements – designed to counteract our sense of ageing and decay; 

Whether through our practice of quickly giving over our loved ones to funeral directors and doing all our mourning without their physical presence; [1]

Whether through suppressing our fear of nuclear annihilation in the face of disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima and the dangerous posturing of hawkish presidents; [2] and persisting in denying climate change despite the overwhelming scientific opinion that human activity is unequivocally warming the Earth’s climate system: [3]

… our instinct is to deny the reality of death, to resist our mortality. 

The certainty of death is real; we must face it. The threat of death is powerful, and we are all affected by it. So how important it is that we do grasp the need to talk about these things. And as Christians, to grapple with the significance of the wisdom of Solomon before us today.

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

For it’s God we often blame when people have tragically died; and it’s God we always enlist onto our side in wartime – on the one hand to justify the slaughter of enemies; and – on the other – to use sacrifice to sanctify the loss of our own people. If God did not make death: then why have we done these things? [4]

For way back in time, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, we learn that God is opposed to human sacrifice. This God stayed Abraham’s hand at the altar to save his son from sacrifice, and later said through the prophet Hosea, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings’. If you lament the loss of countless innocents in warfare and conflicts across the world, if in remembering the First World War you deplore all that carnage justified as human sacrifice, then it is the emotion of God, God’s passion for life, which is rising inside you. [5]

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

For we have been in the habit of explaining the misfortunes of those we judge as feckless and wicked by accusing them of bringing God’s judgement on themselves. If God does not delight in the death of the living: then why have we used God in this way? [6]

For there at the heart of the gospels is that unique picture of Jesus – weeping at the at the graveside of his friend Lazarus, to confirm the view that God does not delight in the death of the living. 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 memorial stone, Jesus stands there with you. [7]

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

For we have separated ourselves from nature, regarded our fellow creatures as things to be exploited to meet our needs, or to be protected against and insulated from and insured against. If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: then why have we made them our enemy? [8]

We can go all the way back to the beauty of the Garden of Eden, to so many of our wonderful Psalms, to celebrate the wholesomeness of the natural world. And we have been gifted the Book of Job, a long and serious discussion around the suffering of innocent people, on what looks like God’s  powerlessness to alleviate the pain of the world. ‘Job’ culminates in a passage describing the stars and heavens singing because of the order God has brought to creation, painting a picture of creatures at peace in the natural cycles of life that God has established for them, celebrating how God frees all creatures to value and enjoy their place on earth. [9]

Now, what about this line Solomon writes, ‘The dominion of Hades is not on earth’? That ‘hell’ does not have the upper hand on earth?

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 ‘hell’ does not have the upper hand on earth, then why does it hurt so much that a loved one has died, or 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 affirming this astonishing truth – that death is not dominant in God’s world. [10]

This goes so much further than that defective religious message that we should put up with this painful physical world, and look forward to the eternally good spiritual future world. Solomon’s wisdom is that in God’s view this world we live in is good, that we can find our fulfilment here and now, no need to wait for the promised afterlife. [11] Even when it’s hurting hard, in this life, hell need not overcome us, for God invites us to choose life. 

The prophet Isaiah once wrote, ‘[God] will swallow up death forever.’ [12] God is not dominated by death; no – just the opposite – God lifts from us its oppressive weight, its threat, its curse. Our human spirit need not be crushed by a sense of our own mortality, or haunted by the spectre of doomsday destruction. With eyes wide open to all of this, we see that in God there is another way, a way of life which starts now and continues into eternity.

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, drawing his dead friend Lazarus out from his reopened tomb, said: ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ In Christ, no-one is bound by death. In Christ, the power of death is broken. At that very moment when Mary Magdalene discovered his empty tomb, our world began to learn to live unbound by death, and the influence of the resurrected Christ is now everywhere to see. 

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.

This is a lifetime’s work. For we are so bound by a culture which is weighed down by the fear of death, the use of death as threat, the endless cycle of death through violent retaliation, it is hard to unbind ourselves from such powerful forces. But the power of life in Christ is greater.

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.’ [13]

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. [14]

It is possible for us to live unbound by death. It may completely change our view of the world, to try. But that is what God invites to do.

 

 

Notes

This sermon is revised from If God did not make death, we need to talk about it, preached at Queen Camel in 2015, and draws on There is no death, in Christ, preached in Devon on All Saints’ Day 2012.

[1] 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 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.

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

[3] See Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, for extensive coverage of climate change denial, its perpetrators and its consequences.

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

[5] Genesis 22.2-8, Hosea 6.6.

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

[7] John 11.

[8] 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.

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

[10] 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.

[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] Isaiah 25.6-9. 

[13] 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.

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

… One small detail of this gospel story which struck me reading it this time – is that it wasn’t just the one boat struck by that storm on Galilee that day: ‘other boats’ were on that lake, Mark records. Now, you may not be totally sure if you are on the boat with Jesus, you may not be convinced that you have fully signed up to the ship of fools, you may not be too certain that you are actually travelling his way. You may see yourself as being carried along by another sort of craft altogether. But if so, then hear this: when Jesus wakes to calm the storm, every traveller on the lake of life benefits, regardless. …

– Metaphor or miracle, it's powerful stuff all the same - today's talk, On a Boat with Jesus – on the rocks with God

Job 38.1-11, Mark 4.35-41
Austwick, Clapham, Keasden, Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 24 June 2018

 

Centuries before the cross became the ubiquitous symbol of Christianity, it was the image of a boat out on the water which Jesus’ followers used as their badge of identity. With Noah and Jonah and Galilee’s bungling fishermen in mind, there are some who say that living the Christian life is a bit like travelling on a ship of fools. [1] This talk is about being on a boat with Jesus, and on the rocks with God. 

Because today’s gospel story illustrates what many of us know: that if you board a boat with Jesus then things could get rocky. If we’re using the sea as a metaphor for the spiritual life then you may see yourself as one of life’s landlubbers. Happy enough to take the Yorkshire Belle out of Bridlington for an hour’s gentle cruise, but terrified if that little boat got carried out into the North Sea and started to rock in the wind and the waves. But our experience tells us that if we’re with Jesus on the Lake of Galilee of our own life, then we 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]

So those voyaging across that lake with Jesus would be anxious about being hit by one of those sudden storms. 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. We can put ourselves in the place of the characters on that boat, confronted by their greatest fears. 

And if we see our Christian life as like being on a boat with Jesus, if we are serious about living faithfully and well as we travel with him, then we know we should expect at times to be confronted with uncomfortable truths about ourselves. This isn’t easy. On the sea of life, we may find we don’t have the stomach for it when things get rough. On the sea of life, sickly and shaken, out of our depth, if we’re on a boat with Jesus we’re bound to find we have to face our weaknesses. 

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

And in those moments then it’s up to you to wake him – it’s up to you to be proactive in prayer. It’s up to you to be insistent in intercession.

How can I wake up God? You might ask. 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 in my life is loud can I scream at God through it to get God’s urgent attention? Is it ok to pray that way? 

How can I argue with God? You might ask. How do I call God to account: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” 

For life’s storms stir up questions for us all; if we’re on a boat with Jesus then we will probably find ourselves at times directing these questions to him:

Why is this happening to me? 

Why are innocent people suffering? 

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 me?

Jesus never gives straight answers; he answers with tangential words, unexpected emotions, with miracles of nature. If we’re on the Christian journey then we learn to expect to be surprised by the direction of the responses he gives us.

Look at what happened to Job, a precursor of the disciples and of us. He 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], inviting Job to put himself in that wondrous moment of creation; and hear the stars and heavens singing, because of the order God has brought to creation, an order which even holds the wild seas in their place. 

God wanted to assure angry, traumatised Job that every element, every creature of nature is in God’s hands – each and every one held safe and firm in his overarching divine design. 

As it was for Job, on the rocks with God, so it was 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 this boat with Jesus, this ship of fools, you should expect storms, and many questions. And you should expect God to turn your eyes to a new view of the world in which you are held.

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, through all its storms and chaos. And that in his company, we can make miracles out of it.

We see this happening sometimes, don’t we – for instance, in the miracle of those people who, having been told by a consultant that they only have months to live, spend the rest of their days bringing their distant loved ones together, making right those relationships which had gone wrong, speaking those important words which had always been left unsaid, tying up loose ends – bringing order into a chaotic time.

One small detail of this gospel story which struck me reading it this time – is that it wasn’t just the one boat struck by that storm on Galilee that day: ‘other boats’ were on that lake, Mark records. Now, you may not be totally sure if you are on the boat with Jesus, you may not be convinced that you have fully signed up to the ship of fools, you may not be too certain that you are actually travelling his way. You may see yourself as being carried along by another sort of craft altogether. But if so, then hear this: when Jesus wakes to calm the storm, every traveller on the lake of life benefits, regardless.

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, the message is: turn to Jesus, give him a nudge if you need to, and then see  what he does to cause 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. 

 

 

NOTES 

A revision of the sermon first preached at Holy Trinity, Wavertree in June 2003. More recently at Weston Bampfylde, 2015.

[1] Earlier versions of this talk began with Simon Jenkins, ‘Ship of Fools’:

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

– 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. See also Job 7.1-3, 39.1-4 and Job 9.16, 39.9-12. 

 

… This is crucial for the times we are living through. For we are a homeless people grasping for our identity in things which may harm and embitter us, which may divide and alienate us from each other. If we can grasp that in God comes our sense of self-worth, that in Godcomes our safety and  security, that in God comes our well-being – then we have truly come home.

The Kingdom of God is like a homecoming. It is living day to day in the knowledge of the presence of God in our lives and in the everyday world. It is being able to look forward in hope because we understand that heaven is ahead of us and around us.

How much our prodigal society needs to come home.

How much our homeless society needs to know that our Father God is waiting in longing to welcome us home.

This is the great secret grounded in our faith; Jesus sowed the tiny seeds in his teaching about the Kingdom of God. He trusts you and me to water and nurture the growth of that Kingdom as we embrace God’s presence in our own everyday lives, as we look out for what God is doing in the world around us, and as we help others to find their home in him.

– from today's talk, The Kingdom of God is like a Homecoming. 

2 Corinthians 5.6-10, 14-17, Mark 4.26-34

The Third Sunday after Trinity, 17 June 2018

Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth

 

I’ve had a few conversations lately with people who’ve been away on holiday or visiting relatives; and more than once, when I’ve asked if they enjoyed it, people have said, “Oh, yes – but I’m glad to be home.”

You know that feeling, don’t you – I hope you do – when you get back home – to that familiar place, that well-loved place, which is where, more than anywhere else, you feel safe and secure, you feel you most deeply belong.

When someone tells you, “Put wood in th’oil” it’s not just about keeping the cold out; it’s about putting the worries of the world behind you, in that safe secure place, as you sit in your favourite chair while the kettle boils. And when we say that a flock is hefted to an area of land we mean that they’ve inherited a deep knowledge of their territory through generations before them passing on their instinctive learning of that place.

The Welsh have a word called hiraeth. It means a longing for one’s homeland, but it’s not just  homesickness. It’s an expression of the bond a person feels with their home country when they’re  away from it. This tells us that you don’t necessarily need to be physically placed at home to be able to carry home around with you; for home – in another well-known phrase – home is where the heart is.

And the mind. I visited a very elderly gent the other day who now lives a long way from the place he thinks of as home. But in his mind he’s still living in Austwick. He asked me how business was at The Smithy, and what had happened to that house on The Green which had recently had a fire. A sense of home transcends the false boundaries of time and place.

To help meet our deep needs of well-being and self-worth, we need a sense of belonging. Arguably we need this sense of belonging more than we need wealth or physical comfort. This need to know ourselves as rooted and grounded; the need to know our home: this is why we are constantly drawn back to the traditional ways of doing things; this is why we are prone to nostalgia. And in a rapidly-changing world neither traditionalism nor nostalgia should be too-easily dismissed because they are rooted in this deep and genuine human longing for home. [1]

Not everybody feels at home, of course. Today is the beginning of Refugee Week and in thinking about this theme of home, and what it means, we must keep in our minds those whose homes have become places of terror from which they’ve had to flee, we must think about their search to find a place where they can, now, truly feel at home. We might better understand their need to hold on to aspects of their traditional culture when they come to a new place, for that’s vital in helping them feel at home there. [2]

Some here may have had, or be having, the experience of no longer feeling at home, even in a place you’ve been in a long time, because something vital has changed – maybe losing a partner who you’d made home with for so many years; maybe declining health making mobility in this place a challenge now, causing you to start feeling estranged from the space you live in. 

And taking a wider view, many here might understandably say that we don’t feel at home in this world which we’ve made, this fast-moving world of mass transportation and digital communication; this world where competitiveness is privileged over community, where human identity seems to be more about image than about substance. Every generation feels this, it’s not just the old.

No wonder we grasp after things which we hope will strengthen our sense of who we are – our sense of belonging – our sense of home. We should be careful in what we grasp for: for when nationalism spills over into racial hatred, or when nostalgia for doing things the old way creates barriers to healthy innovation or creativity and stops the young from having their say or their day: that’s when our grasping for home gets misshapen. But there’s nothing wrong with the instinct. We should keep searching for home, and building it when we find it. In the place we live; in our hearts and in our minds.

Now this is where I want to introduce the phrase which Jesus used so often in his teaching that it’s clearly very important to him that we understand it. Our English translations call it The Kingdom of God, or The Kingdom of Heaven. 

The word ‘kingdom’ maybe conjures up for you the idea of a nation united beneath a monarchy; a top-down ruler whose subjects we are. That goes a little way towards helping us understand what Jesus is saying. But – check out the Good Book – you’ll see that Jesus is never concerned with imposing power on others from on high. Just the opposite, as we know, from our reading of the Sermon on the Mount.

I’d like to suggest that we can understand The Kingdom of God as the place where God is at home; The Kingdom of Heaven as the place where we are at home with God.

Most famously, as we hear at funeral services, Jesus tells his followers that he is “going to prepare a place for them” [3], which is him assuring us that we have a home with God for eternity. That is why the old traditional gospel song goes,

This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through

My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue

The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door

And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore. [4]

But Jesus’ teachings about The Kingdom of God, The Kingdom of Heaven also firmly suggest that whilst we wait with longing for heaven, in the meantime we can be at home with God on this earth, this changing, challenging space we share with others not like us: we can be at home with God on earth. 

Jesus’ teaching breaks down any supposed divisions between a heavenly, spiritual kingdom and an earthly, physical kingdom. That’s why he came to earth of course. To bring heaven and earth together. To completely and intimately connect the spiritual and the physical. [5]

And, though we hold to the hope of a final wondrous home where we will live with God, Jesus teaches us that our foretaste of that heaven, and our preparation for it, are to be found in the here and now.  The Kingdom of Heaven is ‘in your midst’, Jesus says in Luke, or translated another way, The Kingdom of Heaven is ‘within your grasp’. [6]

This is crucial for the times we are living through. For we are a homeless people grasping for our identity in things which may harm and embitter us, which may divide and alienate us from each other. If we can grasp that in God comes our sense of self-worth, that in God comes our safety and  security, that in God comes our well-being – then we have truly come home.

The Kingdom of God is like a homecoming. It is living day to day in the knowledge of the presence of God in our lives and in the everyday world. It is being able to look forward in hope because we understand that heaven is ahead of us and around us.

How much our prodigal society needs to come home. 

How much our homeless society needs to know that our Father God is waiting in longing to welcome us home. 

This is the great secret grounded in our faith; Jesus sowed the tiny seeds in his teaching about the Kingdom of God. He trusts you and me to be the ones to water and nurture the growth of that Kingdom as we embrace God’s presence in our own everyday lives, as we look out for what God is doing in the world around us, and as we help others to find their home in him.

 

Notes

[1] I’m indebted to Andrew Rumsey for these reflections on nostalgia and the Kingdom. Andrew Rumsey, Nostalgia should not be dismissed. Church Times, 15 June 2018.

[2] Refugee Week website: “Refugee Week takes place every year across the world in the week around World Refugee Day on the 20 June. In the UK, Refugee Week is a nationwide programme of arts, cultural and educational events that celebrate the contribution of refugees to the UK, and encourages a better understanding between communities.”

[3] John 14.1-6.

[4] Many renditions of this traditional spiritual are easily found with an online search. I got to know and love it many years ago through Maria McKee and Lone Justice’s characteristically raucous take on it. Lovely bluegrass version by Blue Highway, here.

[5] A nod here to a 2017 sermon, The kingdom of heaven is here. 

[6] Luke 17.21. My Heaven in Ordinary material from 2007 explores this theme in depth.

Genesis 3.8-15, Mark 3.20-35 

The Second Sunday after Trinity, 10 June 2018

Austwick, Clapham, Keasden

 

If you had one word to describe Jesus, what would it be? I doubt it’d be the same one which the religious leaders of his day called him. For the word they used – in accusation against Jesus – was evil – they said 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 bad? Or was there wisdom in his riddling which throws light on how he saw the world and his mission in it?

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. [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 Jesus the healer had been exorcising demons in Seventeenth-Century England they’d have put him on trial as a witch. If Jesus the healer had been preaching liberation to the poor in 1950s America they’d have branded him a communist.  And 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’ – by singling him out and calling him evil they were 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. The Satan he was talking about was the way in which their society righted wrongs. By finding and casting out their so-called ‘Satan’, the one they accused of evil, by creating a scapegoat, they were the ones acting satanically. In Jesus’ riddle the way in 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?

Jesus’ riddle made a nonsense of this way of acting, by showing that it always failed.

‘… 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 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 fails 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 scapegoating that child 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 girlfriend, who in their judgment never fitted in; but there will soon be a return to other niggles within houses divided against themselves. 

I’ve been struck this week in reading accounts of the events around the Grenfell Tower fire a year ago, and how, in searching for someone to blame, people began calling the deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, ‘evil’. The eventual forced resignation of Rock Fielding-Mellen and his colleagues at the top of the council may in the short term have helped to assuage the anger and pain of the people on the ground, but as the ongoing public enquiry is now showing, the failures which caused the horrors of that night are multiple, and systemic, with many players involved, none of whom intended for this to happen. [4]

Now we know that some scapegoats are completely innocent – those ostracised in the workplace  purely because their face doesn’t fit, the Traveller family ostracised in the village purely for looking and speaking differently, the Muslim woman going about her everyday business wearing traditional dress.

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, and attract opposition. For  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 is introducing the idea that he is the one who will lead the revolt against their powers, to bring their rule to an end. Jesus is declaring ideological war with the religious establishment, the scribes. 

If you had one word to describe Jesus, I doubt it would be the same he used of himself in that moment: thief.

‘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 said. [5]

Jesus is the plunderer of Satan’s evil house. Jesus is the one who binds up the strong man, Satan; Jesus is the one whose way of love alone carries the power to overcome the broken ways of the world.

This is Jesus setting in motion a new way for us to see 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 loving forgiveness. 

No wonder Jesus’ family wanted to restrain him at that point: wouldn’t you if you saw your child  facing up so audaciously against the powers-that-be, inviting their inevitably hostile response.

No wonder Jesus’ mother and brothers, hearing people asking if he had gone out of his mind, tried 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.’

Now we may feel a little uncomfortable with the Jesus portrayed here in Mark. This is no ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. [6] This Jesus is less concerned with issues of personal salvation, and more with addressing social evils. This Jesus is unconcerned with what we might call ‘family values’, who is  dedicated to building a new community of faith, consisting of those willing to join him in his mission, people from all walks of life, all cultures, learning how to live together in the way of absolute forgiveness, regardless of the opposition they would receive. 

So had Jesus lost his mind, as some said? Or was Jesus evil, in the words of his accusers? Or was this the beginning of his battle with the Satan of the broken powers of the world, his task of binding that strong man?

When he had one word to describe himself this was the one Jesus chose: thief. He is the thief who steals away the madness and evil of the world; he is the intruder with the life-giving spirit of absolute love and forgiveness, who opens up the space for healing and reconciliation in which we can all share.

 

 

Notes

A revised version of Jesus – was he mad or was he evil?, preached at Sparkford and Weston Bampfylde in 2015.

[1] I’m grateful, as ever, to Paul Nuechterlein 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, Nuechterlein 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 by Walter Wink [summarised here], and Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, which takes its title from today’s passage.

[4] Andrew O’Hagan, The Tower. London Review of Books V.40 N.11, 7 June 2018. Chapter V. Whose Fault?

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

[6] 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.’