Sermons
Trinity 4
Following on from last week’s gospel in which Jesus had overturned the expectations of the religiously respectible leaders of the day by healing the untouchable woman in the crowd, he goes to his home town and to his own family and begins to teach in the house of religious respectability, the synagogue - and is rejected, worse, he is the cause of scandal, again.
The theme of the rejected prophet is rich one in Old Testament writings and in each of the gospels some form of this story appears. John highlights Jesus’ rejection by his own people - he came to his own and his own knew him not, Matthew tells the story in a way that brings to the fore the divisions that Jesus’ teaching caused, and Luke uses the story to kick-start his major theme of the rejection of Jesus, the prophet rooted in the tradition but speaking out against it, the prophet not without honour, except in his own town.
In Mark’s version, which we have just heard, the underlying emphasis is one of scandal and amazement. The source of scandal is Jesus’ apparent ordinariness, who does this Jesus whom they all know - think he is? The string of abusive questions ridicules Jesus…Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ ...and closes with the words, they took offence at him, the word for offence drawn from the noun scandalon, he is a scandal, a stumbling-block. And the scandal is the juxtaposition of Jesus, the man they all know, the man from this very town and this very family, with Jesus the agent of God who speaks with authority and wisdom and carries out great works of power. And this juxtaposition surely is a type of the profound mystery at the heart of the identity being revealed through this ministry, the mystery of Jesus, true God, and truly human, verus deus, verus homo. Jesus’ family and friends seem tempted to believe in this new persona that is emerging in the person they already know, but at the point at which Jairus had come over to belief, the point at which the woman in the crowd had plucked up courage to push through all that religious bigotry that we heard about last week, at this point they tip the other way, from incipient belief to outright condemnation.
This story was important to Mark’s community for two reasons. First it spoke to them of the mystery surrounding Jesus’ rejection by Israel. The first Christian communities were constantly having to address this question - if Jesus was the fulfilment of the prophecies in scripture, the figure who stands at the climax of the history of the Hebrew people, how could his own people have rejected him? Second, the story displays the depth of thought that the community in which Mark’s gospel was formed was bringing to the question of human freedom and its relationship with divine initiative. The story says simply that Jesus divine power and authority is limited by the unbelief of those who mock his actions. Why didn’t Mark write that Jesus could do whatever he wanted, as in contemporary stories about miracle-workers? The gospel here points us to a truth about our relationship with God that would be quite absent if we worshipped a quixotic wonder-worker, a thaumaturge doing tricks on God’s behalf. Mark show us that the divine intiative invites a human response. The sovereignty of God is not compromised in any way in this exchange, but an invitation is offered, an invitation which can be turned down. And the invitation is to belief.
Belief is the divine way, it is the way appointed by God from the time of Abraham, and is expressed with singular clarity in Jesus. Faith is the way to God, forget everything else. And you can see why people didn’t like that idea very much. Despairing of the stark message Paul, people have tended to veer off towards one of two extremes. On the one hand, they might agree that in our fallen state we are utterly unworthy of God’s grace, and incapable of belief or of changing even those small sins we keep returning to; we may as well give ourselves up to sin entirely, ‘in for a penny in for a pound’. If our very nature is corrupted isn’t it just a matter of degree between the sin of the murderer and the sin of the slanderer?
The other extreme, the one called pelagianism by theologians, is to say that God will accept our apparent faith through an exhibition of good works, we will pile them up to please him, we will not tire of being good, we will prove ourselves good before God by attending church, a lot, even when its cold, then surely we will find favour in his eyes, we will achieve religious complacency through pious activity, we might even get ordained, that must guarantee a free pass surely?
How can we avoid these two dangers and believe God? Believing God is the most difficult thing to do. Not so much believing in God as the creeds say, but believing God. We will say shortly ‘we believe in Jesus Christ’, well of course we do, you might as well say we believe in tables and chairs. But to believe God means something quite profoundly different. It doesn’t mean accepting a proposition about his nature, such as that God is three and God is one, or that God came down from heaven and assumed our human nature. We might accept such propositions as reasonable, we might say ‘yes on probability I believe in the God so described, it seems quite likely, and - after all - better safe than sorry’.
But to believe God is something much more like stepping out over the edge of cliff, it is step out beyond the safety of things we can understand and label, it is to step out into the void. It is not something we can manufacture or do. Indeed it is something we tend to avoid like the plague, that is why we have creeds, so that we can talk to each other about this absurd void called belief into which we are invited to step. For in real life if someone were to say to you ‘step over this cliff, you’ll be okay’, what would you say? ‘No, not that way, I will walk around, I may have to go a very long way but there is bound to be another way across, I’ll find a bridge’, or you might say ‘I will certainly not step out, but I will build a bridge here, I will construct something to take me over, I will rely on my knowledge and my experience’, or you might say ‘I don’t need to step out here thank you, I’ll go back, I’m not even interested in what lies over there, you go, leave me here’.
But sooner or later, and in fact again and again in life, we must come to the edge and step out. We come to edge at endings, the ending of a life, the ending of a marriage, of a job, and there seems to be nothing out there before us but the chasm. Sooner or later, and in fact and again and again, we will turn back, or look for different ways around, or try and construct something to take us over, but sooner or later, and in fact and again and again, we must all return and step out into the void. The step is called ‘believing God’. Next time it comes your way, at the next ending, the next void, step out, believe God.