Today’s gospel, Mark 9:30-37, occurs within the second major section of Mark (8:22-10:52), which contains a threefold pattern that appears three times, or three of Mark’s ‘sandwiches’ as theologians put it, with the bread of context and the filling of teaching. Jesus predicts his passion and resurrection (8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34), the disciples don’t understand (8:32-33; 9:32; 10:35-41), and Jesus then gives the disciples further teachings (8:34-9:1; 9:33-50; 10:42-45).In the narrative arc of Mark’s gospel, 9:30-37 furthers the revelation of Jesus’ identity, using the title “Son of Man” (Daniel 7:13) There can be no doubt by now in Mark’s gospel that Jesus is no ordinary rabbi. Yet still the disciples are confused.Here it will help to remember that this entire section in Mark’s gospel is framed at the beginning and end (a super bread of context if you like) by accounts of blind people who are given sight (8:22-26, 10:46-52). This stark image of going from blindness to sight is a big literary clue. As the blind man is given sight, however gradually, so the disciples, who are blind to Jesus’ mission and identity, are given sight, albeit gradually. The bread of the blind being given sight holds the filling of the teaching of who He, therefore, is. It’s a spectacular grammatical motif that belies the brevity of Mark and points to a grammatical structure that eloquently gives us a clear message.So how are we to accept and hear that message? In today’s gospel reading even the disciples, the people who were in the constant company of Jesus, were factious and antagonistic towards one another, quarrelling as to which of them was the most important and deserving in the group. At least they knew status should not be their concern because when Jesus asks them what they were discussing they are embarrassed about it. And no wonder. Jesus had just told them how he would abandon himself to the will of others, becoming the least in that he would put himself at the service of all, even going as far as dying for them. In that way he would become the greatest, a paradox at the heart of Christianity. So, Jesus teaches his disciples how they should behave.If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.Jesus then took a child as a visual aid. The Aramaic word for ‘child’ is also the word for ‘servant’ and to understand the implications of this we must realise that the disciples were looking at a child of their time and not of ours. Then children were totally at the mercy of adults, unlike today when adults are at the mercy of children. The children of first century Palestine were not demanding expensive toys from their parents or clamouring for the latest trainers because everyone else at school had them. Childhood is a recent concept, before which the vulnerability of children was obvious. Many died from childhood diseases which today are no threat to our children. To see what a child from the time of Jesus was like, look at children in the developing world today: babies dying from drinking contaminated water; young children helplessly weak with incurable illnesses; most children lucky if they have enough to eat to keep them alive and well; children scratching a living working in the fields; children helping to run the house and taking care of their orphaned younger brothers and sisters. It is this kind of child that Jesus tells his disciples to receive. He took one of the most vulnerable and powerless members of his society and asked the disciples not to become like one of these children, as he does in the other gospels, but to look after it and make sure it was flourishing. Jesus insisted that the Christian had to extend concern to the weakest members of society, to those who had not the power, authority or means to look after themselves.The sandwich filling is revealed in this way – once you know who I am, spend your life working for those who have less than you, and conform your lives to love – then I will know that you have heard me. It’s a hard challenge to a rank and privilege obsessed church, with its slightly ridiculous customs and points of difference, and there is a great deal of casting down the mighty and learning to be done, but here it is – the bread of new sight to the blind contains the filling of immortality, and to eat the sandwich, we must first learn to see if anyone else is hungry and, if so, to give it away.
Today’s Gospel invites us all to make two decisions. Each of these decisions threatens to overturn our whole life and our whole normal way of thinking. Each will demand absolutely everything from us, up to our life itself. We could say that the purpose of St. Mark, in writing his Gospel, is to help us face these decisions, and, by God’s grace, make them our own.First of all, Jesus himself asks: who do you say I am? Just before that, the disciples told Jesus what other people say. By and large, people could agree that Jesus is a great and authentic religious teacher. Clearly, he fits within the tradition of the Old Testament Saints. But who do you say I am? And as if with the force of an electric shock, Peter makes his declaration. Compared to the parallel account in St Matthew’s Gospel, particularly, this declaration according to St. Mark is stark; stripped to the bone. Simply: You are the Christ. That is: you’re not just one more in the line of prophets. All of them, by definition, pointed beyond themselves, pointed forward. All of them prepared God’s people for a definitive intervention to come. But no. You are yourself the object of their prophecy. You are the one towards whom all sacred history has been moving. In fact, you’re the central reference point for all human history, and even for the whole history of the universe. Through you, God will accomplish all he has promised to Israel. In you, God has made his definitive saving intervention. Beyond you, nothing further is to be expected. You are the reason that the Word was first spoken.We are here now because we also have reached St. Peter’s conclusion and taken his decision. But we’re also here because we know we have to keep taking it; we have constantly to refresh and renew it.Everything around us these days seems to conspire to make us let this decision about the identity of Jesus grow gradually cold, and even wither gently away. Modern secularism will tolerate religious belief, to an extent, so long as everyone understands it’s all strictly private, and purely relative. If Jesus is one religious teacher among others; if his preaching is all really just about benevolence and brotherhood; if he offers some people a certain inspiration or personal consolation: fine. But if he is presented as the single and unique mediator between God and man; if we say there is no salvation apart from him; if his demands become inconvenient or painful or sharply counter-cultural: then that cannot be tolerated.Just before this episode, St. Mark tells how Jesus gave sight to a blind man in Bethsaida. He did it gradually, in stages (Mk 8:22-26). So with the revelation about who Jesus is. By divine inspiration, Peter now sees the truth and declares it. But he doesn’t yet see the implications of this truth, and he quite radically misunderstands what it must involve for Jesus. For complete understanding he will need new grace, new light. He will receive that in its fullness at Pentecost.But now, Jesus immediately rebukes Peter and begins to teach how he must suffer and die, in order to rise victorious from the dead. And here we are confronted by our second decision. Having accepted who Jesus is, we have to be ready to follow his way. In principle, this will cost us everything.If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, says Jesus, let him renounce himself, and take up his cross, and follow me (8:34).Allow me to point again to the pressure exerted on us these days to evade these demands of the Gospel. It seems to me that a great temptation faces the whole Church these days. We want to soften out all the hard and difficult sayings of Jesus, in order to be accepted, liked, even honoured, or at least left alone, by those who hold power and influence in our society. These are no longer the elders and chief Priests and Scribes. They are the media, and those who dictate what is currently politically correct, and those who control big tech., and big finance. Submitting to their dominating will, we can land up keeping the name of Christian, doubtless, but in quite radically secularised form. In St. Paul’s words, we become conformed to this world (Rm 12:2). So we accept Jesus as one who offers us therapy; but not as one who invites us to take up his Cross.Here then is the paradox of the Gospel. We win our life by giving it away. Denying ourselves, we find ourselves. To decide to follow Jesus, even to the point of martyrdom, is supreme wisdom. Because this is actually what is supremely desirable, beyond all other things whatever. To follow Jesus, to be one with him, wherever he leads, is the greatest grace and blessing anyone could ever attain. Even in this life it brings rewards beyond measure. Beyond that: by this way we come to God, and to eternal life with God in heaven.
Usually, telling somebody not to tell other people about what you are about to do to them or with them is a bit of a worry, to say the least, and we might well want to pass over such a story, leaving the clearing up to others better equipped to do so. Today we have a Gospel reading which seems quite familiar – a healing, yes, remarkable for being so, but one of a number we encounter over the long summer months and not as dramatic as the raising of Lazarus or that son of the widow of Nain, and this coupled with the exhortation from Jesus to ‘tell nobody about this’ may make us think that, maybe it was not very worthy of our attention. Conversely, the fact that we are still hearing it two thousand years later suggests that, at the least, the man did not take the request to tell nobody about it very seriously.We are struck immediately by the visceral, life changing healing taking place here – it gives the man a capacity for speech which is altogether new for him, and so could Jesus really expect the man not to speak about it? Can a man who has spent his entire life silent, now suddenly having the capacity for speech, not talk about it? Even in a basic way, what would he say when people asked him how this came to be? And surely, like those who have been touched in some way by God, we want to tell of it, that’s what disciples do, surely. No wonder, as those who wrote the Gospel today say, ‘The more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it.’So did Jesus misjudge the situation or ask the man to do something he knew he would be physically incapable of, or is there some other dynamic going on here, because certainly, nobody takes his command to the man who was unable to speak and now can, to be silent very seriously, and I suggest that we are not supposed to either. He knows beforehand that they are not going to keep quiet about the miracles he works - he understands that sometimes the best way to get people to do something is to tell them not to do it. We can be disobedient to Jesus, it seems, when it’s a matter of proclaiming his mighty deeds of salvation.The miracle we hear today is a little like our own baptism in which we are healed so that we may hear God’s word and thus proclaim God’s deeds. We have been given, as for the first time, a voice, which we are to raise to the praise and glory of God the Father. We are not told to keep silent about it and to tell nobody, although you might think that we had sometimes and the sad thing is that too many of the baptised seem to have taken seriously Jesus’s command not to proclaim it. Too many seem to spend their Christian lives as if they would remain voluntarily unable to hear and speak, at least when it comes to being disciples and witnesses, and if we are anything, its witnesses to God’s love, which is not silent, and to be agents of God’s love, which suggests that we must be able to hear the voices of those who suffer.And how does he get to where he is? He travels from Tyre to Sidon to the Sea of Galilee to the region of the Decapolis, a place of ten cities. Jesus has been here before. In Mark 5:1-20, Jesus enters the Decapolis and meets a man possessed by multiple demons named “Legion.” He casts out the demons and sets the man free.But here, in this story, when Jesus returns to the Decapolis, he meets a man who suffers not from a spiritual disability, but a physical one. He carries out different actions with this man. Jesus takes him aside away from the crowd, He plans to give him his undivided attention. Jesus puts his fingers in the man’s ears. This man is deaf. He can’t hear Jesus’ words, so Jesus uses a form of sign-language. He spits. Interestingly, this isn’t the only time Jesus spits. In Mark 8:23, a blind man is brought to Jesus, and we’re told that Jesus spits on the man’s eyes and at that time, spittle was thought to have healing properties.Jesus is entering this man’s world, his beliefs, his customs—to communicate “I’m going to heal you.” He touches the man’s tongue. Jesus once again uses non-verbal communication so the man can understand. He looks up to Heaven. This is a gesture of prayer. Jesus is revealing the source of his power—His Father in Heaven who has the ability to make all things new. He sighs. This is the only place in the Bible where Jesus is said to sigh. Jesus is expressing grief for the way this man’s body has been ravaged by the fall. He empathizes and identifies with his pain. Jesus says to the man, Ephphatha. What’s about to happen is so astounding that Mark decides to leave the original Aramaic word here: Ephphatha. It means “Be opened.”To reach him and rescue him. Jesus had to become human—take on a physical body. A body with saliva glands, speech and eardrums. He entered his world. Jesus pursues us by embodying our world. This is a parable that shows what will be accomplished on the Cross, that to heal us, He has to become human and become like us, and that is why we should never be ashamed of our faith and should speak about it, because He did, at the cost of His own life and body, which united our lives and bodies with His.
Dear friends,As summer begins briskly folding itself away and autumn establishes itself with its leaves and familiar smell of expectation and the occasional blast of chill air reminding us of the jumpers and fires yet to come, I thought I might share some of the thoughts on my mind with you, as Christmas planning begins.1. A change to the weekly pattern. It is gratifying that numbers for the Thursday and Friday masses are buoyant – long may this continue! Tuesday and Wednesday are less so, and so I have decided to discontinue the Wednesday evening Mass. Tuesdays do fine, particularly when we have a discussion group after the Mass, but as the nights draw in, people comment that 7.30pm is quite late. However, beginning in November, we will have a Walsingham Cell Mass on the First Wednesday of each month, with exposition and rosary from 7pm to 7.20 and Mass at 7.30pm.2. Talking of Tuesday discussion groups, we have a new one beginning soon looking at Meditation and Contemplation in the Christian tradition. This begins on Tuesday 15th October for four weeks, and it is my hope that it might establish a regular meditation session in Church after that.3. Altar Frontals. You will have seen the new and beautiful frontal in the Lady Chapel in memory of Pam Bryant and her many years of service to our parish. I have also ordered one in black for the Columbarium Chapel, which will help to unify the painting to the altar visually. This costs seven hundred pounds and will be blessed on All Souls Day. It would be splendid if we were able to raise this through donations in memory of a loved one. Please write ‘Altar Frontal’ on the front of a yellow envelope with your donation in. Thank you.4. We are currently gathering quotes for the repointing of the Narthex and westward prevailing walls, which have been badly damaged from years of wind, rain and salt water lashing them. The work should begin in Spring next year and is likely to cost up to ninety thousand pounds. This, so soon after the quarter of a million pound roof rescue works we had done last year is not ideal, to say the least, and we will have to launch a fundraising drive as well as increase our parish share payments, which were very small over the course of last year as we had the roof done.All these things will hopefully aid our community here, and we also launch our new ‘St Stephen’s Fridays’ with activities at 2pm (eventually) every week. For now, we have the North Blackpool Film Club launching soon, the Recorded Music Society and our established Tea and Chat on alternate weeks throughout the year. We are also hoping to begin Street Dance classes with House of Wingz shortly in the large hall on Saturdays. As ever, we need to increase the numbers attending our church and campus throughout the week in order to remain viable.We have a few other events coming up:13 to 15 September – Heritage Open Weekend, including at 6pm on the Sunday Choral Evensong, wine and nibbles reception and a talk from BBC Comedy Producer Gill Isles.20 September – Brass Band Concert – see posters.23 to 26 September – Walsingham Pilgrimage.15 October – Meditation/Contemplation sessions begin.25 October – Greek Night in the small hall. Tickets available soon.22 November – Wine Tasting in the hall.24 November – Choral Evensong and Benediction with Cantantes Domino.And then, of course, we have Christmas Fairs and much else to arrange, but we do so joyfully, and with hearts full of love, because we are able to operate this beautiful campus here in Blackpool to the greater glory of God and for the benefit of the people here, those we do know and those we do not yet know. It has not been the easiest Summer, God knows this, but we continue in our mission which we have been given, confident in our faith and rejoicing in the many, many blessings which we receive and will continue to receive as we serve our God and our community.Fr Andrew
