Download Did you mean to die like that,

Lent Talk Four:
Mark my words:
Mark and the Passion
By Bishop David Wilbourne
(Reading: Mark 15:21-39)
Did you mean to die like that,
was that a mistake,
did you know your messy death
would be a record breaker?
croons Judas,
in Jesus Christ Superstar.
William Vanstone, in his book The Stature of Waiting,
divides Mark’s Gospel into two parts.
The first part catches a hyperactive Jesus,
suddenly doing this,
suddenly doing that,
a Jesus who not only frequently speaks,
but whose innermost feelings we have access to,
a man who,
angry and grieving,
wonders at their unbelief,
who has compassion on the crowd,
who looks on the leper with anger,
who knows that power has gone out of him.
Jesus is the centre of a very active show:
Mark’s version of the call of the disciples (3:13-19)
is, to say the least, terse,
yet in just 7 verses
Jesus is the subject of 7 verbs.
Mark 8:27-33
describes Peter confessing
that Jesus is the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi:
in just 7 verses
Jesus is the subject of no less than 12 verbs.
Verbs are ‘doing words’
we used to be taught at school;
in 14 verses Jesus does 19 things.
Not so much
me, me, me,
but Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
Jesus,
in his passion, trial and death
obviously remains the centre-piece of the drama.
But from the moment of being handed over
to his dying on the cross
(Mark 14:43 - 15:39)
the emphasis dramatically changes.
In a total of 68 verses
Jesus is the subject of just 9 verbs.
Imagine two teams,
Verbs versus Verses,
playing two matches against each other.
If the first match’s score is 19:14,
the next is 9:68.
You realise something has gone very wrong:
the team,
the conditions have dramatically changed.
During Mark’s account of the passion,
Jesus is chiefly passive,
is the object of the action rather than the subject,
and we have access
to none of his innermost feelings.
Rather than the frenetic doing
of the earlier part of the Gospel,
Christ is done unto.
Yet Vanstone makes the point
that it is this second part of the Gospel,
with its characteristic lack of voice and action
from its star player,
which has nevertheless turned the world,
beginning with the centurion’s confession,
‘Truly this is the son of God,’
and continuing through two millennia
to numerous conversions in the present day.
In this bloodied and bruised little man,
stripped of all dignity,
who says and does hardly anything,
the dark world sees its light.
Almost as if a world,
which justifies itself
by hyperactivity
and an intense programme of works,
nevertheless realises that its actual salvation
lies in none of that,
but rather lies in grace, sheer undeserved gift.
The world despises inactivity,
be it the inactivity of unemployment,
illness or decline.
But for all that,
in seeing God in all his fullness
proclaimed in Jesus’ trial and death,
a world which tries to fill every second of every hour,
realises that inactivity,
even in its most brutal forms,
is nevertheless the holiest space
in which the true value of life dawns.
As Rowan Williams commented
after the Charlie Hebdo massacre,
‘Christians are constantly being pointed back
to the stark image
of an infinite and unconditioned God
exposed, unavenged
to murderous brutality and injustice.
His greatness is that he lives
even in heart of death and horror,
and doesn’t really need
our frenzied activity,
policing
or protection.’
This repeated silence and inactivity
of Christ before his accusers,
like a dumb lamb to the slaughter,
is also explored by Rowan Williams
in his book Christ on Trial,
which I paraphrase.
‘If, in his greatest hour,
Jesus had gabbled on,
setting out his manifesto page after hyperactive page,
complete with expansive gestures
and running here and there around the stage,
he would have merely taken on the colour
of the world’s insanity.
It would have been just another bid
for the world’s power,
in a history peppered with bids for the world’s power,
just yet another identification
with the unaccountable tyrannies
that decide how things shall be.
Jesus described in the ways of this world,
accepting the world’s terms
that only by incessant talking and doing
are you worth anything,
then he would be
just another competitor for a space in it,
part of its untruth.’
As Soren Kierkegaard wrote,
‘Woe, woe, to the church
if it triumphs in this world,
for then it is the world that has triumphed
and not the church.’
In the face of ultimate inactivity
brought about by the cruellest of deaths,
through the folly of the cross
(to coin St Paul’s phrase)
the chiefly voiceless voice
of God-in-Christ calls us all
to turn in our tracks.
Even when Jesus does speak in his final hours,
he seems to marking God’s presence
as an absence,
with his
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’
God’s absence is a familiar theme in the Psalms,
‘Why do you hide your face, O God?’
bemoans Psalm 44.
Presence as an absence
is a familiar theme in poems too,
‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,’
in Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners,
a poem encountered
by virtually every Primary School child.
‘“Tell them I came and no one answered,
that I kept my word,” he said.’
The poem is pregnant
with people who are not there,
literally presence as an absence.
Significantly Mark devotes
a third of his Gospel
to the Passion;
the other evangelists merely a seventh.
As I say,
when it gets to the Passion,
Mark’s scattergun narrative,
which has darted around the Holy Land
unrestrained by timing or geography,
suddenly slows down
to be place and detail specific,
like a slow-motion replay of a goal
on Match of the Day,
a ponderous stations of the cross.
Some scholars see
the final third
of Mark’s Gospel
as precisely that,
taking the reader to the sites and sights
of Jesus’ final hours,
with a terse commentary
which enables the scales to fall from your eyes.
Mark makes it so personal:
Simon of Cyrene,
all the way from Libya,
the father of Alexander and Rufus,
coming in from the country,
compelled to carry Christ’s cross,
the fifth station. (Mark 15:21)
Simon seems such an identifiable person,
‘Oh, that Simon,
the guy from North West Africa,
Alexander and Rufus’ dad,’
Mark’s audience would have exclaimed,
just a handshake
a generation away from Good Friday.
The first recorded words of Jesus in Mark are
‘The time is fulfilled,
the kingdom of God has come near,
repent and believe in the Good News.’
The last recorded words of Jesus in Mark
are
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
the culmination of a nightmare
of bizarre and atrocious incidents.
For instance, the night trial,
when the Sanhedrin never ever met by night.
Or Privilegium Paschale,
where, according to Mark,
the Roman Governor
released at Passover
any prisoner the crowd wanted.
That’s even more ridiculous
than its Life of Brian scenario,
‘Welease Woderick.’
Because it’s utterly bizarre
that Rome in all its brutal power
would let a terrorist off the hook;
Rome acceding
to the wishes of a Semitic crowd,
whipped up to a frenzy by the strangest of festivals,
eating flat bread,
smearing lambs’ blood all over the place.
During all that terrible, terrible loss of power,
everyone losing the plot
is Mark’s
‘I am’ moment.
At the precise moment that Peter,
the crème de la crème of disciples,
shrieks, ‘I am not:
I am not a disciple,
I am not one of them,
I am not a Galilean,’
Jesus,
beaten,
battered,
about to be strung up
says,
‘I am.
You will see the Son of Man
seated at the right hand of power
and coming with the clouds of heaven.’
This is Mark’s good news,
that in this beaten-up little man
is where God is in all his fullness;
mortal man,
at his lowest,
at his weakest,
is where God is.
‘Truly this man is the Son of God,’
the Gentile centurion declares
as Jesus shrieks his final words of desolation
and breathes his last.
All the disciples have missed it,
with their, ‘who is the greatest?’
their Gospel according to Mohammed Ali
rather than Jesus Christ.
The disciples have missed it;
the centurion gets it:
when you have lost everything,
the plot,
status,
dignity,
life itself,
you have not lost God,
but rather found him.
As Mark’s tenth chapter makes clear,
a prequel to the Passion,
Jesus death,
our death,
frees us from the fantasy of the omnipotent God,
the commando-type God
who snatches people from crosses
but somehow doesn’t snatch us.
‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’
God isn’t powering up the tank,
the machine gun,
the stealth bomber,
the exocet missile
to bail us out
and blow our enemies out of the water.
Rather, he’s with us
bleeding and writhing on the cross,
as he bleeds and writhes on every cross,
aching for resurrection.
Jesus’ death caught by Mark
frees us from the fantasy
of immortal invisible God-only wise
and from the fantasy of our omnipotent selves.
Perversely omnipotence is so corrosive,
losing all is so life-giving.
Archbishop Stuart Blanch used to talk
about a church he consecrated in Liverpool,
which was concrete-blockish,
devoid of all the traditional church trappings,
stained glass and statues and colourful banners.
Just a slogan above the Holy Table
from the end of Mark’s Gospel:
‘He is not here…’
‘And they were right,’ Stuart Blanch quipped,
‘He wasn’t there!’
When we make a model of God
and get hung up that he doesn’t inhabit our model,
we should question not whether God exists
but whether we’ve got the wrong model.
And every model of the Immortal
we mortals create will be the wrong model.
R S Thomas ponders the saints
who trod the Llŷn before him:
‘Am I too late?
Were they too late also, those
first pilgrims? He is such a fast
God, always before us and
leaving as we arrive.’
Perhaps the forlorn emptiness
of our idol-obsessed world
actually points to something vital being missed.
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
That world,
seemingly so starved of miracles
has opted for a deliberate desacralisation,
has turned its back on the sacred.
Just think of the media contempt for theocracies,
be they in Lambeth or the Vatican or in Iran.
Yet the world feels so empty, so forsaken,
despite its advanced technologies,
despite machine upon machine
to take away every drudgery of former times:
there is still something massive missing.
H G Wells wrote a short story
called The Country of the Blind,
a lost world where everybody is blind
and has been for generations.
But its citizens still have eyes
whose purpose puzzles them.
Yet the very presence of those eyes
are eloquent and objective pointers
that there is something to be seen,
just as the world’s very emptiness
points to a presence,
its very yearning attests
to the existence of something bigger to be yearned.
To return to R S Thomas,
there is a definite call
‘to yield to an unfelt pressure,
that, irresistible in itself,
had the character of everything but coercion.’
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
That yearning world
probably most acutely feels God’s absence
when he seems to fail to act in the presence of evil.
Calvary is a window
into all the calvaries God’s children face
in every place, in every age, in all the hours.
Paradoxically,
mysteriously
the Cross points to God
experiencing the absence of his presence
which the whole of his wounded creation suffers,
as the Omniscient,
the All-knowing
impales himself
on the doubt and confusion and uncertainty
suffered by all his chaotic creation.
God:
‘… call your horizons
in. Suffer the domestication
for a moment of the ferocities
you inhabit, a garden for us to refine
our ignorance in under the boughs of love.’
The garden in R S Thomas’ poem
has multiple connections.
It could refer to the Garden of Eden,
where Adam and Eve,
the spokespeople for humanity,
preferred the knowledge of good and evil
to the ignorance of innocence,
and hid themselves from God.
It wasn’t God that was absent in that situation,
but man.
‘God called, you were out,’
so runs the French proverb.
We absent ourselves
from the very places where God comes looking for us.
Rather than inhabiting our true selves,
the Adams and Eves we were created to be,
we pretend,
we go for the veneer,
so that when God calls on our true selves,
we simply are not there.
Or the Garden could be the Garden of Gethsemane,
a pre-run for Calvary,
where love, the love made flesh in Christ,
freely makes its choice to hang on a tree,
to be passive rather than active.
That Garden reveals God’s gift to us,
the immense cost and sacrifice
that love requires to turn tragedy around,
as life in all its fullness
is forged in the very chaos of abandonment.
Some may writhe
at the agony in that garden and on that cross,
the boughs of love prove too much to bear,
and conclude that this is really is
a God-forsaken world.
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
But for Christians God’s absence
on the third day
in a third garden,
its tomb empty,
that absence is not seen as the end of faith,
but its very beginning.
No wonder the women at the tomb
were struck so dumb.
When I am weak, then I am strong,
declared St Paul.
If only he’d read Mark’s Gospel beforehand
he could have improved on that:
When I am weak, then God is strong.
We can spend a whole lifetime pretending,
strutting around the world
with a George Bush/Tony Blair swagger
and now sadly an Obama/Cameron swagger:
me, me, all powerful me.
Yet we all know in our heart
that one day we are going to lose it,
lose everything,
be as weak as the baby we once were.
We will lose everything,
but at that moment we will not lose God,
but find him,
find that all his power is in utter weakness.
Good news indeed.