Sermon 26th April 2015

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Adrian Parkhouse, continues our study of the Gospel of Mark. 

The reading is from Mark 1:21-34

  THE HEALING TEACHER

“The Son of Man came not be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” Mk 10:45

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,/
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise,/ and I drank the sound
With joy;/ and often,/ an intruding guest,/
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;/
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs,/ as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;/
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

Where I grew up, John Clare was our local poet.  Stories were told to us in school of how in his later years, after he had reached the peak of his fame as the Peasant Poet, noted for simple descriptions of the countryside of his native east Northants, he used to be seen walking along the paths that became the Billing Road, on his way to take up his usual place sat in the portico of All Saints Church in the centre of the town.  That was a century before I walked some of the same route on my way to school, but the countryside was very close and we could still find what had so enraptured him.

And my walk took me past the gates of the place from which his daily walks began:  for me, St Andrews Hospital;  for John Clare, The Northampton County Asylum.

We continue our reading of Mark’s gospel.  Last week we heard the message of the closeness of the Kingdom of God and the need to repent;  and the call to the fishermen:  “Follow me” and they did.  This week we see the start of Jesus’ ministry.  And straightaway we are drawn into the paradox that is Jesus – the paradox that is summed-up in our theme verse from Mark 10:  that the Son of Man (which is a term that has generated a ton of theological theory – but is at the very least a title that identifies Jesus with suffering and with greatness) came not to be served but to serve:  the strong serving the weak.  And in our passage this morning that paradox emerges from its twin, interwoven themes:  authority and compassion.

The challenge of Jesus’ authority has already emerged – though unspoken.  Why did those men leave their nets, their boats, their families and follow? What was it about this man that so effected them?  The questions intrigue us.  We find it difficult to imagine how it could have happened, why and how they could just have got up and gone.  It so unreal to where we find ourselves, bound up in our complex lives, dependent on so much and so many dependent on us.  Footnote 1: Did you see the press coverage this week about the increased numbers of people (still small) joining religious orders?  I was struck by one new nun’s comment that the religious life offered her the freedom she felt she needed to serve God fully.  She might have explained – to respond to his authority, to follow.

Today this theme of authority becomes explicit:  Jesus’ teaching wasn’t like the scribes’, the teachers of the Law, because “he taught with authority”.   The evil spirit was expelled because “this man has authority to give orders to evil spirits and they obey him.”

What had Mark noticed among the worshippers in the synagogue?  As on the lakeside, what was it about this man that was so strikingly authoritative?  We could answer that from Jesus’ perspective:  while we have saved Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism by John until later in the series, that experience of heaven opening, the Spirit’s descent and the words of authorisation, You are my own dear Son.  I am pleased with you, marked the authority that Jesus felt.  On another occasion, John reports Jesus being challenged outright about his teaching:  Jesus answered, “What I teach is not my own teaching, but it comes from God, who sent me.” (Jn 7:16).  He speaks of what he has seen and heard with the Father.

That is how Jesus accounted for his authority.  But that is not why it would have struck the listeners in such a way.  From their perspective, the authority lay in part in the contrast with the scribes.  The scribes had a formulaic way of teaching:  they started with the Torah and then took and compared the opinions of conflicting scholars of how the Law was to be applied in everyday life.  It was close to lawyers arguing case law before a judge.  But Jesus went to the heart of the matter – in ways which explained not how the Law was to be dissected in a descending order of detail, but rather, looking upwards,  at why the Law was given as a means of enabling God’s people to respond to His grace.  We do not know what he preached that day (Cf Luke 4:17ff ”The spirit of the Lord is upon me …”), but we will see plenty of his teaching in this series and we can imagine the thrill of hearing, not a debate about the minutiae of behaviour, but an exhortation that how we are and what we do is significant if the Kingdom of God is here!  And the Kingdom of God is here.

Cynical though we are, critics that we are encouraged to be, nonetheless, we, like that synagogue crowd, crave to hear a voice of authority.  Stripping away the veneer of our independence, each of us longs to hear the truth; not because it is something forced on us, certainly not because we will like it, but because it is something of authority that we can decide for ourselves to follow;   something in which we can invest – or start to the search for - that part of ourselves that is the “real” us.  In some ways, we should like to be children again – not for the innocence, that cannot be restored, but for the natural trust that children have.  What did Jesus say?  Unless you accept the kingdom of God like a little child …” (Mk 10:15) .  We would like help in the search for, what perhaps we call “meaning”, in our lives.  I think that was the authority of Jesus they saw that day.

What of the other theme:  compassion?  For Mark the first “healing” is not the expulsion of the evil spirit it seems, but the quieter, private events surrounding the cure of Simon’s mother-in-law.  But the handling of man in the synagogue and the other exorcisms recorded in our reading must have been acts, not only used to advertise Jesus’ authority over evil (the first theme) but also acts of healing and so compassion.  William Barclay in his commentary wisely suggests that we can approach these accounts as either being literal, or as being symbolic or as being real in the terms understood at the time.  While I do believe in a power of evil, I favour the last of these alternatives and so for me I am struck that, for Mark, Jesus’ first act of compassion, if not healing, is exercised in respect of a condition that we might now describe as being a mental one (the description is much the same as the insane man in the Gerasene country:  ch.5).

To preach on mental illness is beyond me.  It would require a sensitivity that I lack and, if already, you are concerned, forgive me.  The Bible deals very sensitively and honestly with many forms of illness, including those we term psychological.  Whatever I say will be too simplistic.  Forgive me.

The statistics tell us that a significant proportion of the population and so those in church this morning, are impacted in some way by mental illness.  My own experience bears out the figures:  I share the powerlessness and fear that conditions of mental illness can induce in myself and those I love.  And history shows us that society’s incomprehension and inability to respond has frequently led to exclusion and even incarceration.  We live in more enlightened times and it is a matter of pride that our parish sits so close to a leading caring institution which is the Maudsley and a matter of rejoicing that so many people within our churches are individually engaged in caring for, curing or campaigning for the mentally ill.  From these enlightened times we look back and realise how sometimes the very illness which threatened exclusion may have created greatness.  John Clare is just one very small example:  another close to me was the priest and translator, JB Phillips.  And, without romanticising the real pain, the list of composers and artists is a long one and it continues to be written:  as the experience they, we, have may bring its own glimpses of fullness.  Which is one reason why exclusion is wrong.

As a matter of history, western societies used the resources left behind by the disappearance of leprosy (and we gospel readers love a good leprosy story – one next week!) to incarcerate those whose reason it doubted.  As one excluded class went, it was replaced by another.  Footnote 2:  Watching the news reports this week of the deaths in the Mediterranean, I wondered whether we were now ready to create another class of “the excluded”.  It is not just the attitudes expressed, not just the camps on the edges of towns, but I was reminded too of the “Ships of Fools” which in the Middle Ages used to carry the mentally ill along the great waterways of Europe, from city to city – never reaching home .

The point is that Jesus went straight for the jugular:  no hiding behind cultural nicety, his culture or ours.  He healed equally:  equal respect, equal treatment, equal love.  Why?  Because, Mark seems to want to understand at the outset, whatever we may think – and even when think it about ourselves – we are all the same in the sight of the Father, no matter what. And His love shown in the compassion of Jesus is equally given.

Authority and compassion.  Meaning and inclusion.  That is what you would have experienced had you heard him that Sabbath.  Read the passage again and see if his words don’t reach you still?

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,

My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

I long for scenes where man has never trod;

A place where woman never smil'd or wept;

There to abide with my creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;

The grass below--above the vaulted sky.