St Mark tells us in today’s Gospel that Jesus came home with his disciples. Which home is he coming to? What does St Mark mean by home. He belongs everywhere and he is rooted in the Father’s love, as we belong anywhere that we find our Christian family, but most of us have a mental image or place memory of a home of some sort. Mark tells us that when Jesus came home the crowd gathered together there ‘again’. This crowd was not just composed of inquisitive neighbours or curious locals. It was drawn from Galilee and from Judaea, and as far away as Jerusalem. The bounds were even wider since some came from Idumea, from beyond the Jordan, and from Tyre and Sidon. These people were not just pious, respectable Jews; they were not just eager suppliants hoping for something from Jesus, they were Gentiles as well as Jews. Some came from beyond the Jordan, and from Tyre and Sidon. They were a mixed bag. Jesus has already begun the construction of his new Israel. He is building his new house which will become the new temple, the temple of his body. He is redefining the meaning of the concept of ‘home’ while standing in the place that even his own family think is his ‘home’. It’s only chapter three, and he is already set in defying expectations!Jesus’s home in Capernaum is probably the home of Simon and Andrew. Jesus is building a new house, an alternative to the Temple of Jerusalem. There access was restricted, but this new house is open to the great crowds who have come in search of him, as well as the tax collectors, sinners, scribes and Pharisees. In the midst of all of this Jesus’s relatives come in to ‘seize’ him. The word is a very strong one. It is used again in the Gospel to describe the action of the guards when they come to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Mark suggests that Jesus’s family did not understand the nature of his mission, they come to him out of love. They want to prevent him from being hurt by failure. These disciples have begun the journey away from their own homes and families. Later on, they will say ‘we have left everything to follow you.’ To leave family means to leave security, to leave those who care for you, who will tend you when you are sick and when you are old. The ones who hear the word of God and do it are his disciples. They have begun this journey. Just how much of a sacrifice this family life is can be seen at the end of Jesus’s life. His brothers abandon him in the Garden of Gethsemane and leave him to his fate. In that dreadful human solitude it then becomes obvious to whom he belongs.Those scribes who arrive today and were behind his arrest in Gethsemane were theological heavyweights. They represent the authority and theological wisdom of the temple establishment — the same establishment whose leaders will ensure that Pilate crushes Jesus at the end of the book. We should understand those scribes’ credentials as impeccable. Their pronouncement, that Jesus is a satanic agent and not a divine one, recognizes power at work in him. He is no charlatan or illusionist. But they decide the power is perverse. They offer the most damning assessment they can.Once the three groups — crowd, family, and scribes — have found themselves brought together in the same narrative space, so to speak, in these interwoven scenes, Jesus speaks. He has a few declarations of his own. Jesus spends little time refuting the scribes’ assessment. He indicates the absurdity of their reasoning, for he says that satanic power never shows an interest in loosening the screws that hold oppression and indignity firmly in place. We also read implied pronouncements from Jesus about the state of the world. The reign (“kingdom”) he associates with Satan is a formidable, coordinated power. It enforces a fearful hegemony. It retains that dominance because it is ruthlessly unyielding. Jesus’ comments suggest that the scribes appear to grasp all of this very well, since their accusation ironically exposes them as having succumbed to that kingdom’s inflexible logic.Mark is, therefore, a story of redemption from a “house” of oppression that manifests itself on many levels of human existence. There is no escaping this Gospel’s accent on conflict and clashing powers. Finally, the focus returns to Jesus’ family, the ones who have come to spirit him away from the crushing crowds, the consequences of the dangerous criticisms he levels against the religious leaders, and his dangerous visions of a battle he fights for the sake of the world. Not only does Jesus resist the intervention of his mother, brothers, and sisters; he renounces their claim on him. They remain “outside” while Jesus embraces those encircled “around him” in the crowded house.Scribes and relatives cannot figure him out, and so they attempt to quarantine him. He seems rather willing to write them off for the sake of achieving something great. Only three chapters into the narrative, and a lot of people are understandably worried. In many ways, we still should be. What’s certain here is this: the reign of God Jesus keeps talking about is certainly not going to be about maintaining business as usual.
I have no sermon to give on Corpus Christi. Not because I have no thoughts to speak of – quite the opposite – but because we simply have no time for a sermon, procession and Benediction if we hope to keep our celebrations at least modestly within the expected timeframe. I have thoughts about that as well, having spent a long time in an area where the quality of Sunday worship was measured partly in how long it lasted – the longer, the better! When I first came here to meet you, someone made their dislike for sermons over five minutes quite clear, and I thought ‘how do you teach the children about the faith in five minutes a week’ particularly against a backdrop of other religions having adherents well versed in their beliefs and us being, generally, less so.Today is a day which needs thought and teaching, for all of us, because otherwise what we do can seem almost farcical, a little dressing up and a bedraggled parade. None of which would be true. It’s a matter of deep faith and love that we process the risen Christ in His body, soul and divinity around our parish, to bless it and to encourage others in their faith, to take what we believe out into the street precisely because those out in the street are not coming in here.We do all this out of love, and I have a sonnet to share with you by the wonderful Fr Malcolm Guite, which explains a little of how I, and I hope you as well, feel about this day, this gift;Love’s ChoiceThis bread is light, dissolving, almost air, A little visitation on my tongue, A wafer-thin sensation, hardly there. This taste of wine is brief in flavour, flung A moment to the palate’s roof and fled, Even its aftertaste a memory. Yet this is how He comes. Through wine and bread Love chooses to be emptied into me. He does not come in unimagined light Too bright to be denied, too absolute For consciousness, too strong for sight, Leaving the seer blind, the poet mute, Chooses instead to seep into each sense, To dye himself into experience.May he who has laid Himself upon the cross and died for our sakes, who lays His body upon the altar day after day, bring us closer to an understanding of what we are witnesses to, who’s body we share, who’s blood we consume, who’s church it is and who’s example we follow in the hope that where He has gone, we may also, as we do this day, follow. We should not fear death, because we have faith in everlasting life, but we should very much fear the death of our faith, for then the world knows nothing to counter the darkness which ever threatens to consume it. Today we celebrate the light, let us pray that we may magnify it by our lives and our actions that the world may come to know the meaning of this blessed, glorious day.Picture: EucharistSource: PixabayArtist: Robert Cheaib
‘Go, make disciples of all the nations, baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’. A few years ago, I baptised a baby in church, his Mother was there with us, his Father on Zoom in Nigeria and the Godparents on Zoom in Ghana, nobody else in church, because Mum had only just arrived, fleeing home to bring their baby to safety. They were Christ’s disciples, and in asking to have their child baptized, they knew that the Lord was indeed with them, and their newly-born and newly-baptized baby, till the end of time.Today is Trinity Sunday and the gospel passage chosen is the end of Matthew’s Gospel. It is a glorious and moving conclusion to the Gospel and the beautiful conclusion to the immediacy of the incarnation by which it begibs. Matthew has started with the genealogy, showing that Jesus was descended from Abraham, and from David. He tells us of the Magi, pagans, coming from the east to pay the infant Jesus homage. Matthew ends the Gospel with the disciples worshipping Jesus, falling down before him, though with some hesitation or doubt. The true king of Israel, the Messiah has come, and he is indeed God and He is still immediate before them, but ascends to make His immediacy permanent, until the end of time in the same way as He was and is for the Baptism family on Zoom.The disciples encounter Jesus on a mountain, which reminds us of Moses who received God’s law on a mountain. It reminds us of Elijah, the greatest of those anarchic holy men of old, who encountered God on a mountain. But on this mountain, the disciples encounter Jesus, their friend and teacher, yet they fall down and worship him – there is the new law, a New Covenant, made on a mountain like the first, and kept not in fear of He who inhabits the Ark, but out of love for He who has ascended – the immediacy of the divine presence now in sacramental signs, here in flesh through faith.The Holy Spirit enables us to continue this act of worship, and our own humanity allows us to hesitate, to be uncertain. The Spirit is given us to make us holy and lead us into all truth. The Spirit unites us. The eleven disciples hesitated in their worship. It did not all quite make sense yet for them. Christianity doesn’t always make complete sense for us. There are parts of the mystery that we can’t understand yet. But we live it. Our lives, as the lives of those who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, are lives of faith, hope and charity. Our lives become, in a profound way, part of the divine life itself, part of the Trinity who famously was prefigured at Mamre as the three men taking the form of God went to visit Abraham and Sarah.We who have been made in the image and likeness of God, now start to live mystically in God. We love each other and love our neighbours – though not always very well we readily admit. We hesitate, like the Disciples. We have faith in the risen Christ who died for our salvation. And we, like the parents of the baby I baptized that day, have hope in Jesus, for he said ‘I am with you always; yes, to the end of time’.Christianity stands or falls by this proclamation of the closeness of God who is Triune Love. Christians proclaim the Father. Not a stern Victorian parent, but the one who knows and cares even for the sparrows, the one portrayed in the parable of the prodigal son as rushing towards his child and embracing him, the one Jesus tells us is perfect.We run from the God of Love by turning the world or nature or history itself into our god, seeing in him only the reflection of our gradual decay. But there is no world spirit, no impersonal spiritual realm that can save us. There is only the Holy Spirit, the one who is the personal searching, healing and transforming one, who even searches the depths of God. Immediate, and before us and with us, until the end of time, and loving us in a way that an impersonal spiritual realm never could.The doctrine of the Trinity should make us uncomfortable, of course; not because it is for the clever to speculate about, but because it is the most radical challenge ever issued to human beings. It’s an invitation to share in divine love, and hope and peace, and to allow ourselves to be lost in that to some extent.If God really is this love who is involved with our world and who has embraced us, then we have a choice: we must either in turn love this God and embrace all that he embraces — and then of course, we shall be crucified as the distance we have put between ourselves and God dies away in love — or we must be content to watch the world around us from a distance, imitating the god who does not and can never exist. We enter into a mystery of love, in which one day we will dance and sing and rejoice, with and in the God who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who calls us, loves us and saves us. To Him be the glory both now and unto the day of eternity.
In the upper room, after His death and resurrection, the disciples encounter the ongoing reality of the living Jesus, and the whole world changes – not just theirs, but ours as well. When someone we love dies, we begin to idolise them – I don’t mean that in a negative way, but we carve memories out of hem in our hearts and minds which become a little removed, over time, from day to day reality, as they are no longer sharing in that with us, and maybe after some time has passed, we remember them as whatever the memory becomes. But not so Jesus, not so our faith and not so for the Apostles, as He is very much alive and in front of them, and He is very much alive and in front of us, too, which is why we must continually reject idolising Him and keep on living with Him in the present time that He calls us to. Jesus is not a memory who fades away but a person who stands before us and says ‘peace be with you.’This is a peace that flows from the reality of what Jesus has accomplished for our sakes on the cross, and it is part of who he was, is and shall be forever – a sign of peace to a broken world. As He was broken on the cross, so we are broken by sin and find our healing in the healing and Ascension of His own body. And so it is a peace that speaks clearly to us and calls us to change. It is certainly not the peace that time brings, the slow healer, it’s a peace which is present, immediate and comes in the current encounter that we have with Him, and it stands or falls as we stand or fall before Him. ‘Peace be with you’ is not just the first thing the Risen Jesus says to His disciples: it is the second thing as well. Twice He bids them peace. Twice He makes is resurrected body, bearing its wounds, speak of peace.His first greeting of peace is followed by his showing them his wounded hands and side. The first peace is the peace that stops us being afraid that here is maybe a ghost, or a hallucination. We are reminded that, as Pilate says, ‘ecce homo’ – behold the man. We are surrounded by the stuff of death – tablets to keep away what might kill us, waves that might engulf us, people who might turn on us, governments who might wage war at us, health warnings on everything to remind us, calories counted on menus to put us off. We can control the environment we are in to some extent, but death is always with us in one form or another. But Jesus has shown us His hands and His side. He is marked by death, but He lives. Death silenced him on the cross, but now he speaks to each man and woman.We are brought this first greeting of peace by seeing His wounds, then. They show us that death is not the end and that He is not, therefore, dead. This does not mean that the guilt of the sin which had Him put to death is not upon us today – by no means, we still live in the world to reach paradise by amendment of life. But this peace is a healer, as His body, which has conquered death shows – life is no longer leading to death, but the revelation of what life is. Do not be afraid, be still, for in dying I have changed the meaning of your death, the Lord says to us.But there is more to our faith than a calming of fear. The calming merely prepares us for another gift, as Jesus again says “Peace be with you’, and breathes on his disciples: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit is not given to us to calm our nerves, but to enliven and energise. “Those whose sins you forgive they are forgiven, those whose sins you retain they are retained.”This second gift of peace is not an answer to death so much as an entirely new sort of human life, moving according to the inspirations and energy of the divine life. It does not just make us recipients of forgiveness and mercy: it inserts the us into the ongoing mystery of Jesus, real and present in our world forgiving sin, healing wounds and preaching the mystery of the kingdom. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” It has brought us here, now, to this place so that we can effectively tell the world that death is not the end, and that life is found in the most unlikely of places - and that it is not us as individuals who matter, for Christ did not say ‘peace to you John’ or ‘peace to you Jane’ – but peace be with you all. Christ’s peace also brings us freedom from the desperate worldly fight to be loudest, or best.Today we celebrate the full depth of the peace of Christ, the peace we are part of by belonging to each other in the Body of Christ. He, Our Lord, is not another memory from the past, handed on by a forgetful band of devotees. He is the present offer of grace to us by the Father in the Spirit. Peace be with you, he says to us today. Receive the Holy Spirit, so that through us the world will encounter the joy of forgiveness and hope which, one day, will give the world freedom.
