Bubbling Over

Here is a perfect example of Mark in a hurry. Jesus appears, is baptised, driven into the wilderness, tempted and is back proclaiming the kingdom of God, almost without drawing breath. We read “ and was baptised by John, and just as he was coming up, and the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness and as well now after John was arrested. It is as if Mark cannot wait to get to the miracles, the story is brimming inside of him, he cannot hold it in, in fact he doesn’t for the first words of Mark's Gospel are “In the beginning, the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”

For a long time this Gospel was thought to be less authoritative than especially the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew after all was accepted to be one of Jesus’ apostles while Mark was not. Here is PAPIAS the bishop of HEIRAPOLIS (a city then in modern day Turkey) writing on the topic in AD 140:

“Mark, indeed, who became the first interpreter of Peter wrote accurately as far as he remembered them the things said or done by the Lord, but not however in order for he (Mark) had neither heard the Lord, nor had been his personal follower.”

It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led by German theologians who had been examining the interrelations between between texts that it became generally accepted that Mark’s was the first Gospel and that Matthew, and Luke relied heavily on this account. [Incidentally this is why our Bibles present the Gospels in the order Matthew, Mark, Luke and John because Matthew was thought not only to be the most important but the first of them to be written.]

So this most enthusiastic of evangelists is someone we know very little about; he is mentioned in the book of Acts and some of Paul’s letters but only in passing. Nonetheless he absorbed Peter’s teaching and preaching and was fired up to tell the world what he had heard and what he fervently believed. 

There is something here for all of us, this Gospel is short easy to reads focussed from the start on who Jesus is and this is repeated at the end when the Centurion says “Truly this man was God’s son. ” The enthusiasm that Mark has and more importantly conveys is a lesson. We like him did  not hear the Lord directly, have not had the inestimable privilege of being his personal follower in the sense that Papias intends it but we have had the benefit of two thousand years of preaching and teaching  not as intimate as Mark’s from Peter but distilled, refined, pondered, debated, agreed, codified and written down from Augustine to Moltmann, from Aquinas to Williams.

All of which is very fine, but for me (at any rate) will not touch the first chapter of Mark; I want to be bowled over again by the God News of Jesus Christ. To try and find a way of telling people about that bubbling over of belief, of faith, of knowing, is something please that we should all be striving to convey to others.

Amen.

What is Peter thinking?

There are many questions to ask about the Transfiguration. Did Jesus really become luminous ? What kind of light was it? Where did Moses and Elijah come from? Why did Jesus tell the disciples not to speak of about this? Where did Moses and Elijah go? But the one that has been bothering me this week is “What on earth was Peter up to? I am trying to get into his head “Rabbi it is good for us to be here, let us make three dwellings one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” Why did Peter want to make homes, booths, tents, tabernacles or shelters all of which descriptions appear in the various translations of the Bible that I consulted? It seems so strange, Moses and Elijah have certainly come from heaven, after all they have been gone a long time, and Jesus has also come from there even if Peter may not know that yet. So really they hardly need a hut! 

Peter’s reaction then cannot be about Jesus, Moses or Elijah but must be about him. He says “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here.” I believe him too, on top of a mountain, high up, with his closest friends James and John and then suddenly so clearly and palpably in the presence of the divine. Moses, Elijah and Jesus, himself so gloriously transformed, and the voice of the Father. It would have been good to be there. So Peter’s instinct is to preserve this, to hold onto the feeling, the intensity of which we can only guess at. And as we might have done he suggests a way to keep the moment, to keep Moses, Elijah and Jesus there in a tabernacle, a tent one for each. It is at once a slightly childish idea, let’s keep everything the same and all will be OK and also a very deep thing : a need for security an escape from fear of the future or as he so clearly expresses it a shelter : it is good here and now.

But as we know Jesus and the church needed to move on. Jesus takes the three back down the mountain knowing that he, Jesus, has not come to be comfortable but to challenge the church of the Pharisees as he found it, to go to Jerusalem, to be crucified and then  by his resurrection to show us the truth. 

The newspapers and magazines last week have been full of comment on a leaked paper from Church House proposing cuts in stipendiary clergy. This caused alarm from all sides prompting a volte face from the archbishop of York who had previously stuck to the line “there are no plans, noting to see here” to “there have to be plans but not from me.”  We may be feeling  more or less like Peter : We like it how it is. So let us do what we can to preserve where we are. But the church is n ot our church, it is Christ’s church. We cannot box up God and so we need faith that whatever we may fear Jesus will lead us down the mountain to the right place.

Amen