A sermon preached at St. Mary’s by David Barton on 17th November 2024
After what has been the most difficult week in the life of the church that I have known in my lifetime, it doesn’t seem possible to stand here in the pulpit, and preach a routine Sunday sermon.
Because the first, and crucial thing to say is that our thoughts and our prayers should be with the victims of the abuse we have heard about this week. Lives have been marred – painful memories that are hard ever to escape. They will be part of our public prayers today. But perhaps we could remember them in our private prayers too. We should never forget them.
And also – and I don’t say this to be defensive – is that it has sometimes seemed, in the media comment over the last week, as if Safeguarding in the church has being neglected/not taken seriously. Whatever neglect happened over this matter – and clearly it did – and whatever the failings at a national level, I want to say that here, in this parish and diocese we do take it very seriously. Clergy must have DBS checks, and attend Safeguarding courses regularly. No one can remain in ministry without this. There are no exceptions to that. That is also true of those with responsibility for children. And other officers of the church must take part in these safeguarding courses. Our Parish Safeguarding Officer’s name and number is publicised at the back of the church and in our other buildings, and she can be contacted at any time. And all this locks into a network of Police and Social services support. That structure is very firmly in place and is regularly reviewed. And I would like to reassure you of that.
As I pondered today’s sermon through all this, it seemed to me that one thing we need to reflect again is the basic DNA of being a Christian and a member of the Christian Church. The Gospel story I just read today is the last reading we have from the Gospel of Mark – which we have been hearing over the past year. I often think it is a Gospel written for a church facing difficult times and an uncertain future. It was the first to be written, 30 to 35 years after the resurrection. It is also the shortest, and in some ways it is the most troubling. It wasn’t actually very popular with the early church. There is a very good case to be made out that Matthew deliberately wrote his Gospel to make up for the deficiencies in Mark – 95% of Mark’s gospel is quoted in Matthew. And it seems that as the scriptures circulated, most churches preferred to read Matthew and Luke. Mark is rarely quoted in the manuscripts, and there were no commentaries on Mark until the seventh century.
Part of what was – and still is – so uncomfortable about Mark is that he consistently presents the disciples as failures. They never understand anything that Jesus says. They are always “amazed” and “astonished” – which means they don’t believe. They run away and hide when Jesus is arrested. And the women fare no better. They come to the tomb, (on the day note: that Jesus said he would rise from the dead) worrying about rolling back the stone. But the stone is already rolled back. And a young man tells them that Jesus has been raised. “He is not here,” he says. Then he asks them to tell the disciples to go to Galilee to meet Jesus. But, alas, the women are so frightened they run away in fear and say nothing to anybody. And its there, in Chapter 16 verse 8 that Mark’s Gospel ends: for they were afraid. Two different writers added endings to soften that. But there is no getting away from it. The word “afraid” is where Mark ends. Discipleship, and seemingly the whole mission of Jesus appears to end in failure.
In various different ways Matthew and Luke take Mark’s gospel and soften this harsh judgement. Maybe they were right. But still, the church kept Mark’s book in the bible. And we should be grateful that it did. Because we constantly need reminding that we are not good at being faithful Christians. We really are not. We fail, all of us. There is no room for self righteousness. Pope Francis frequently tells people to say Lord have Mercy. Say it often, he says. And he is right. Mark’s Gospel underlines that.
But I’m also glad we have this Gospel because, in powerful and strong contrast to all of that, it is shot through with God’s unbelievable love for every one of us. That is what moves Mark: the patience and the utter faithfulness of God towards us, seen in the face of Christ Jesus. Its there in that great run of miracles in the first part of the book: 18 of them. God’s healing love making the lame walk, the deaf hear, the blind to see; a great spilling out of hope and life. Its there in that extraordinary moment on the mountain when Jesus shines with a light beyond imagining. A door opens in heaven for him at that moment, but he chooses not to enter it. Instead, he goes back down the mountain to heal and make whole a broken world.
And its there too in the passage we read this morning, from Chapter 13. Jesus and the disciples sit looking out over the City of Jerusalem. The disciples say something about the great stones of Herod’s magnificent temple. Some of those great stones are still there, but that is all. “Not one stone will stand upon another” Jesus says. He foresees the city’s destruction, and the rest of this chapter speaks of the horrors to come. Its the only long speech by Jesus in the whole Gospel. And it is a warning of some unspeakable terrors. Read it now and it conjures up images of the flattened cities of Gaza and Lebanon and Ukraine, where again not one stone stands upon another; people turning against each other, betraying one other. But there, right in the middle of this troubling description, Jesus speaks of the Son of Man coming in Glory. Its an echo of the Transfiguration. As if Jesus is saying: in all of this I will be with you, no matter what. And at the end of the chapter he says: What I say to you I say to everyone: keep awake.
Keep awake, and of the four disciples who hear this, three were with Jesus at the Transfiguration, there on a hill overlooking Galilee. They knew the Glory, but they came down the hill with Jesus to heal and forgive, and to preach God’s truth in a dysfunctional world. That is what the young man at the Empty tomb means when he tells them to go back to Galilee. The Christian life is about being faithful to a God who is unstintingly faithful to us. And being that in a world in desperate need of the love and the hope that Jesus brings. Inevitably we fail. But there is something else. The one person who Mark tells us is loved, is the man who couldn’t live up to the demands of discipleship and walked away. And Mark says: Jesus looked at him and loved him. Its the only instance in this gospel of Jesus loving someone. That love lies at the heart of our relationship with God, yours and mine. We are loved, despite our failure.