HE LIKED TO LISTEN TO HIM.

8 February 2019 Josephine Bakhita

‘HE LIKED TO LISTEN TO HIM.’ (Mark 6:14-29)

What a miserable situation!  Herod ‘likes to listen’ to John the Baptist but then he goes and cuts his head off.  He is mildly attracted to the man just as Pilate later would be to Jesus, but it made no difference when the weight of public opinion – ‘what would people think?’ – came into play.  So he compromises with his own conscience.  We know the papers are full of similar stories.  The question is what do I do? There are ideas and ways of acting that I like and approve of.  But when they touch how I should lead my life?  There is the rub.

TAKE NOTHING FOR THE JOURNEY

7 February 2019

‘TAKE NOTHING FOR THE JOURNEY.’ (Mark 6:7-13)

How opposed to our way of thinking!  We plan and try to think of everything we will need. And, of course, we are right.  We have to.  But Jesus is talking about an attitude.  Do we think we can do everything if we can plan every detail? At the end of the day there is no guarantee. A surgeon knows that.  They can take every precaution but ultimately it is not in their power.  They cannot say for certainty. And so it is for everything. There is that gap which we cannot predict.  We call it trust.  When I have done everything I can to make sure something goes right at the end of the day I have to trust – not luck, not fate – but an all-loving God.   

‘WHERE DID HE GET ALL THIS?’

6 February 2019. The Martyrs of Japan in the 1590s and of Zimbabwe in the 1970s

‘WHERE DID HE GET ALL THIS?’ (Mark 6:1-6)

The people of Nazareth were outraged when they heard Jesus speaking a wisdom way ahead of anything they knew.  They were not open to the message because they were jealous that one of theirs should have gone so far ahead of them.  He stood out.  But he only did so to invite them to change their ways and reach beyond the contented way of life they were used to.  Martyrs of all times – and today we remember martyrs in Japan and Zimbabwe – step outside the accepted ways of their contemporaries and make a stand. Jesus’ contemporaries, people who thought they knew him, wondered, ‘where did he get all this?’ A good question!  Where do we get the courage to be different?   

IF I BUT TOUCH

5 February 2019. Agatha

IF I BUT TOUCH (Mark 5:21-43)

A woman makes her way through the crowd, ignoring all conventions, and reaches out and touches the cloak of Jesus.  She is healed immediately.  As in many places, Mark draws us to the heart of the matter.  A person rises above all her problems and the social expectations around her and reaches out to Jesus and ‘immediately’ – how often Mark uses that word – she is cured.  All we have to do is ponder the scene and all the reasons why we are hesitant.  Why do we not pay attention to that decisive call? What are these excuses we make?

WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME?

4 February 2019. John de Britto

WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME? (Mark 5:1-10)

It is striking that as soon as Jesus lands in the country of the Gerasenes a man with multiple evil spirits recognises immediately who he is and the power he has.  A dialogue ensues and the man is freed of the spirits but it is all too much for the locals.  Jesus’ presence is just too threatening for them and they ‘implored’ Jesus to leave.  It is a dramatic incident revealing the power of God but also the reluctance of the people to come to close to Jesus.  He might make them change their ways radically just as this possessed man is changed radically and ‘went off and spread throughout the Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him.  And everyone was amazed.’   

THE ONE AND THE MANY

THE ONE AND THE MANY

The problem of ‘the One and the Many’ is an ancient philosophical one which seeks to understand the unifying element behind all the diversity we experience. For our ancestors in medieval times God was the source of all that exists and the only problem was how created things share in his being.  Many today, in our secular age, do not believe in God and so they seek some other explanation for the origin and existence of ‘the many’.

I only mention this issue because it can be seen as the broad background for a more pressing interpretation of the relationship between the one and the many today.  I refer to the relationship between the individual person and the community in which they live. African writers remind us that Ubuntu teaches the direct opposite of the rational western concept of individualism: ‘I think, therefore I am’.  Ubuntu says, ‘I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.’ ‘I am’ because I am a member of a group.  Pressing the concept further we might say: if I step outside the group I no longer am.

At first sight this community consciousness is admirable and at its best the community cares for all its members.  It provided a ‘welfare state’ long before the concept was used to describe modern developed societies.  The problem is it takes unusual courage and risk for the individual in the community to think or act outside the community norms.  Nazareth in the time of Jesus was probably just such a tightly knit community and when he announced to them the coming of the Kingdom we are told they were enraged.  ‘Who does he think he is?  He is one of us. We know his parents and his brothers and sisters.’

Jesus replies, ‘no prophet is accepted in his own country.’ It was a threat to the community that ‘one’ of theirs should stand out from the ‘many’.  But we can quickly see that if individuals do not stand out and speak up nothing will ever change.  Somebody has to break the iron grip of custom and tradition when these paralyse a community or a whole country.  I suspect we have all had the experience, when a question is asked that carries consequences depending on how it is answered, where people look around the room to see what others think before they respond.  We bury ourselves in the group rather than saying or doing what we believe.

When God calls Jeremiah he charges him (he almost threatens him), ‘Do not be dismayed in their presence or in their presence I will make you dismayed.’  The call to speak and act as I believe I should is always going to be hard.  But there is no other way to make progress in our personal lives or in our politics.

3 February 2019          Sunday 4 C

Jeremiah 1:4…19        1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13      Luke 4:21-30

MY EYES HAVE SEEN

2 February 2019. The Presentation of the Lord

MY EYES HAVE SEEN (Luke 2:22-40)

From Samuel to Simeon there had been a great longing in the heart of every Jew for the appearance of the Messiah, the one who would liberate them – though they had little idea what ‘liberation’ meant.  Now he ‘suddenly appears’ (Malachy 3) in the temple, sealing the link between the promises given to Abraham and their fulfilment.  Simeon understands and he rejoices: ‘my eyes have seen it’.  Jesus was only six weeks old and had nothing to do with the arrangements for going to the temple, no more than we had if we were baptised as infants.  The adults saw to it. They knew all had to be ‘fulfilled’.  What they didn’t know was how it would be done. But Simeon knew a sword would pierce the soul of Mary.