A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,
18 February 2024
Mark 9.30-37; 10.17-31
18 February 2024
Mark 9.30-37; 10.17-31
Apparently, despite a million memes to the contrary,
Mahatma
Gandhi didn’t actually say that,
‘The
true measure of any society can be found
in
how it treats its most vulnerable members’.
But it doesn’t have to be a quote from Gandhi,
to still be
a valid point!
And so I find myself worrying that the current trajectory of
British society
is towards
the promotion of self-advancement
and
self-improvement of the already-capable,
at the
expense of those whose capacity to achieve is more restricted.
I suspect the rhetoric in the local and national elections this
year
will laud
people in so-called ‘hard working families’,
while vilifying
those who are deemed to be ‘benefits scroungers’.
The changes to the benefits system in recent years,
have left
many vulnerable people without access to support;
and a National Audit Office survey
found that a
significant number of suicides
could be
linked to problems with benefit claims.[1]
Dr Chris Allen, a Consultant clinical psychologist
with the
Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust,
wrote that:
When worth is increasingly defined by ability to be economically
productive, and mental health issues are discounted as a reason to not be in
the workforce, the underlying message is that you are a burden and that you
don’t belong.
He continues,
A compassionate society would care for people experiencing difficulty,
recognise that contributions can be made outside work, and facilitate this,
rather than communicate a sense that if you cannot work you may as well be on
the scrapheap, or even not here at all.[2]
To take this train of thought a bit further,
in our
society, even caring for the victim or siding with the weak
is sometimes
viewed as being a somehow ‘suspect’ endeavour.
Indeed, a headline from the Daily Mail a few years ago,
suggested
that ‘Nobody likes a do-gooder’
and that ‘selfless behaviour is 'alienating'’
The unnamed ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ explained:
They probably think their selfless behaviour makes them popular
but the truth about 'do-gooders' is nobody really likes them.[3]
Far better, clearly, at least in the Daily Mail’s eyes, to
get on, and get ahead.
While those
who fall behind,
as
Johnny Depp says in Pirates of the
Caribbean,
get
left behind.[4]
Well, in our first reading for this morning, from Mark’s
gospel,
we met the
disciples having an argument about which of them was the greatest,
and in response to their quarrel,
Jesus
offered one of the most powerful and challenging
re-envisionings
of human power dynamics
that
has ever been uttered.
Verse 35: ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of
all.’
And this week, as we begin that period of the Christian
calendar known as Lent,
when people
traditionally focus on self-denial
as a
preparation for the journey towards the Cross,
the invitation here is for us to join with the early
disciples,
in
re-thinking the basis of our self-worth,
and in
reconsidering where we will place our priorities.
The disciples in Mark’s gospel,
quarrelling
about who was the greatest,
were stuck in a mind-set of personal and individual
advancement,
with
delusions of grandeur and achievement dominating their self-worth.
I’m a huge fan of the musical ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’,
and the
lyrics of one of the songs
brilliantly
captures something of this hubris on the part of the disciples.[5]
They sing:
Always hoped that I'd be an apostle.
Knew that I would make it if I tried.
Then when we retire, we can write the Gospels,
So they'll still talk about us when we've died.[6]
This culture of personal advancement and spiritual
achievement
is still
something which haunts disciples of Jesus in our own time.
Many of us have been nurtured in our faith
in contexts
which emphasised the following of Jesus
as a
personal decision which each of us must make for ourselves.
And whilst I don’t fundamentally disagree with this:
- there is
always an element of personal choice involved -
it can all too quickly take us
to an
individualised understanding of the gospel,
where
the good news, is good news for me,
and where
what matters most
is my personal relationship with Jesus.
Many of the songs we sing
speak of
Jesus and God in highly personalised language:
‘My
Jesus, my saviour’
‘Be
thou my vision’
‘O
Lord my God’
And whilst I like, and choose, all of these songs,
we need to
be alert to the temptation of falling into an individualised gospel,
because the
temptation to pride is always before us.
It is only a short step from knowing that we are special to
God,
to thinking
we’re somehow more special than others,
or possibly
more worthy of God’s love than some others.
There’s a wonderful quote from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape
Letters,
where the
senior demon Screwtape is writing to his nephew Wormwood,
offering
this junior demon advice on how to tempt his first human subject.
Screwtape says:
Your patient has become humble; have you drawn their attention to the
fact?
All virtues are less
formidable to us
once a person is aware
that they have them,
but this is specially
true of humility.
Catch your patient at the moment when they are really poor in spirit
and smuggle into their
mind the gratifying reflection,
“By jove!
I’m being humble,”
and almost immediately
pride – pride at their own humility – will appear.
If they awake to the danger and try to smother this new form of pride,
make them proud of this
attempt – and so on,
through as many stages
as you please.
But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake their sense of humour
and proportion,
in which case they
will merely laugh at you and go to bed.
What the disciples, arguing about who was the greatest,
needed to
learn from Jesus,
was that he had called them to be part of a very different
kind of community,
where
greatness and humility were measured in substantively different ways.
And Jesus teaches them this through a kind of enacted
parable,
involving a
small child.
It’s a highly dramatized scene,
as Jesus draws
the little child into the centre of the group.
I’ve mentioned before that it’s always worth paying
attention in Mark
to the geographical
clues he gives us about where events take place,
and the setting here is in the midst of a group of people,
in a house,
in the town of Capernaum.
This isn’t happening out on some isolated hillside
somewhere,
it’s taking
place right at the centre of community and family life.
And the thing is, normally, a child would have been excluded
from such a setting.
Children,
and other powerless members of society,
would never have been welcomed into
the centre of a social circle;
they
would have been kept outside, unseen and unheard.
In fact, more sinister than this,
the normal
pretext for drawing a powerless person into the middle of circle
would have
been as a precursor to stoning them.
Let’s never forget that the scapegoating of the vulnerable
isn’t
something we only find in the ire of the Daily Mail and its ilk.
But Jesus subverts all of these power structures,
by drawing
a small, weak, powerless child
into the
centre of the circle of power;
and he takes the child in his arms
and
embraces it with love, and welcome, and inclusion, and acceptance.
The most powerful person in the place
honours the
least powerful and least deserving.
As object lessons go, this one packs a punch;
particularly
given that it is Jesus’ answer
to the
argument about which of the disciples is the greatest.
Jesus says to them, and by extension to us,
that the
greatest is the weakest,
and that
the last shall be first.
And I wonder how we can hear this challenge
in our
world, in our context, in our church.
Who has power in this room?
And who
doesn’t?
And where do we locate our estimation of value?
You see, the community of Jesus’ disciples, both then and
now,
is to be a
place where the weak and the vulnerable are valued,
where the helpless are nurtured,
and were
personal prowess
is
secondary to the service of others.
This is a topsy-turvy view of power dynamics,
where those
whom society would normally side-line or scapegoat
are brought
into the centre, and honoured and valued.
But here’s the thing,
Jesus
doesn’t welcome the child and tell his disciples to do likewise
because
it’s a nice thing to do;
or to earn
approval from God and society;
or
to make himself and the disciples feel like better people;
or to enact
some kind of first century equivalent
to
politicians kissing babies on the campaign trail;
or to set
up a community of ‘do gooders’
who
make the rest of the world feel guilty and resentful…
Although, I have to note, Christians have a pretty poor
track record
of doing
all of these things with enthusiasm...
But rather, the Jesus-community, which is you and me
in our generation,
is
instructed to do good to the weak and the powerless;
because this is the antidote
to the
envy, jealousy, greed, and resentment
that keep some down in the gutter
whilst
raising others to the stars.
In first-century society, just as today,
so much of
societal advancement
was
built on some achieving greatness,
whilst
others were trampled along the way.
And if you look around you today and see a society creaking
at the seams,
with a
rising number of vulnerable people falling through the cracks,
and if you find yourself thinking, there has to be a better way,
then the
good news is that there is,
and
it is here in this enacted parable
of Jesus bringing a little child
into the heart of the community.
Jesus invites his followers to create communities,
where the
rich, the powerful, the educated, and the articulate
set
aside their privilege and their advantage,
learning
that these do not add to a person’s worth before God.
He invites his followers instead to become communities
where the
vulnerable and excluded are welcomed in,
and
placed in positions of honour
as
their worth is restored to them in God’s name.
As the rich man in our second reading discovered,
it would be
so much easier
if it was
just a matter of keeping the basic commandments.
Here we have a guy who seems on the surface to be getting it
all right,
he’s not
killing people, he’s not cheating on his wife,
he’s
not stealing, or lying, or defrauding,
and he’s
still doing very nicely too,
thank
you very much.
This is the kind of guy who is, as some might put it today,
#winningatlife.
But he knows that something isn’t ringing true,
and that despite
all his success, and all his efforts,
his life lacks vitality,
it’s
missing the deeper significance that Jesus calls ‘life eternal’.
And Jesus offers him a prescription for what ails him,
which is
that he needs to let go of his money.
This is not easy for us to hear, in London in 2024,
where
almost all of us are richer than two thirds of the world’s population.
Challenges about money are never easy to hear,
and
invitations to give it away are always problematic.
Thankfully, Jesus knows this;
he says
that it is hard for those who have wealth
to
enter the Kingdom of God,
and that it
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,
than
for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.
I’ve heard people engage in all kinds of exegetical squirming
to get out
of this.
One of the commonly asserted get-outs in the armoury of
well-heeled preachers,
is that
there was an ‘eye of the needle’ gate in the wall in Jerusalem,
which
was narrow and low,
and that
the only way a camel could get through it would be on its knees;
concluding,
of course, that the way a rich person
can
get into the Kingdom of God,
is
on their knees in prayer.
The only problem with this is that there is absolutely no
indication
that such a
gate ever existed.
It’s a completely invented story.
Others have claimed that ‘camel’ is a mis-spelling,
and that instead
of ‘kamelos’,
it
should be the similar sounding word ‘kamilos’
which means rope or cable.
But again, there isn’t any textual variation in the
manuscripts to support this.
The problem is that there isn’t really any way out of the
fact
that Jesus
basically says it is impossible for those who have wealth
to find
their way into God’s kingdom on merit.
And, speaking as someone with, in global terms, a certain
level of wealth,
I don’t
know why any of us are surprised at this.
Those of us who have bank accounts, and savings,
and
pensions, and houses,
will know from our own experience
that these
things can weigh heavy on our souls.
The temptations to selfishness, to pride, to greed,
to envy, to
gluttony, and to laziness,
are all amplified by wealth,
and by the
privilege and power that comes with it.
None of us can resist these on our own,
and for
some, the corrosive effect of wealth
may indeed
mean that the call of Jesus is to give it away.
But I don’t actually think that it is responsible exegesis
here
to take the
encounter between Jesus as the rich young man
and
extrapolate from there to an ideology
where
all of us should give everything away;
any more
than it would be responsible exegesis to suggest
that
the young man was rich in the first place
because
God had rewarded him with wealth
in return for his diligence in
keeping the commandments,
as
some prosperity gospel preachers have suggested!
Rather, the message for each of us to hear
is a
challenge about our attitude towards our possessions,
it is a
question about the extent to which
they
influence and determine our sense of self,
and a
demand that we reject any patterns of worth and value
based
on money, power, and status.
There is also a challenge here, I think, about how we handle
our giving,
and the
attitude with which we give.
I have said before that giving to God through the people of
God
is not the
same thing as giving to a charity that we want to support;
and nor should it be one of the good works that we do
to assuage
our consciences and discipline our wallets.
Our giving to God should be a sacrificial offering,
which we
surrender to the people of God,
so that together we can discern what God would have this
community do
to bring
the kingdom of God into being in and through this place.
I don’t preach tithing as something binding on all
Christians,
and
arguments about pre-tax or post-tax tithing seem entirely misplaced.
But for what it’s worth, I’ve found that a starting point
of giving
ten percent of my disposable income
to God
through my church,
has been a good discipline to remind me that I do not truly
own that which I have,
and that I
don’t want to get into a situation where what I have owns me.
For those of us with money, this is a difficult calling, but
it is not impossible,
at least
not for God.
As Jesus reminded the disciples,
‘for God,
all things are possible’.
I also think it’s worth our while paying attention
to the
language Jesus uses here
when
he speaks of the ‘kingdom of God’
in response
to the rich man’s question
about
what he must do to inherit ‘eternal life’.
Both these terms, ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘eternal life’,
can become
conflated with the idea of heaven
as the
place souls go after death if they have been deemed good enough.
Within the cosmology of ancient Judaism, the ‘heavens’ were
literally ‘up there’
as the
place where birds flew and clouds gathered,
and they believed that God lived up there, above the sky,
seated on a
throne with his heavenly hosts around him.
If you could find a tall enough mountain, or jump high
enough,
you could
theoretically get there yourself,
and in the apocalyptic tradition they imagined the heavens
and described
going there in mystical visions
to gain
other-worldly knowledge.
The idea of heaven being where you go when you die,
is only a
very late addition to the Jewish theology of the afterlife,
and many
Jews at the time of Jesus didn’t believe this at all.
So when Jesus says that it is hard for a rich person to
enter the kingdom of heaven,
and when
the rich man asks what he must do to inherit eternal life,
the issue they are discussing
is not one
of whether a person goes to heaven or hell
for reward
or punishment when they die.
It is all about how people should live in the present,
in the here
and now.
It is about living a quality of life that has eternal value,
and through
which God’s kingdom is manifest and made known.
If we can start to model, in our midst,
the
systemic reversal of the world’s consensus
about where
power, prestige, and status lie;
if we can live into being a community where the value
assigned to a life
is based not
on achievement, or wealth, or some other metric of greatness,
but on the
inherent value of each created being,
then we are at least part of the way
towards the
fulfilment of that for which we pray,
that the
kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
But valuing the weak and the powerless is only part of the
story.
Raising up
others is not enough.
We also have to take a long and considered look at our own
values;
our
addictions to money, power, and status;
our sense
of our own self-worth and self-importance;
and we too have to learn for ourselves, and not just for
others,
that the
value of a life
is measured
only in terms of God’s love.
All the other foundations and walls
that we
have used to define our sense of self
are more of a hindrance than a help
to our
journey into God’s love.
The reason Jesus welcomed a child into the midst of the
disciples,
is because
a child does not need to earn the love of a parent;
or
at least, a child should not have to learn to earn love.
A baby is loved for who it is, not for what it does,
and the
move towards conditional love
that
many of us have experienced,
is a move
away from God’s absolute acceptance and delight in our being.
Many of us have forgotten that we are loved for who we are,
and we have
taken deep into ourselves
the destructive lesson that we are what we do,
what we
have, what we achieve.
We convince ourselves that God and others
will only
respect us or admire us
for our
possessions, or some other metric of greatness,
and we confuse this with God’s love,
which is
never conditional.
We become, in other words, the rich young man,
keeping the
commandments to earn God’s love,
but discovering that this has created a successful exterior,
with a
hollow centre.
And the challenge to us as we enter this season of Lenten
discipline
is
the same as it was to him:
Can we give
up our addictions to money, power, and status?
Can
we give away our false estimations of our value?
Can we move
beyond striving to be good,
into
a place where goodness flows from us,
not because
of the good we endeavour to achieve in the world,
because
we have learned to place the weak and the vulnerable
at
the centre of our value system?
As Jesus says,
‘many who are first will be last,
and the last will be first’ (10.31)
[1]
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/07/dwp-benefit-related-suicide-numbers-not-true-figure-says-watchdog-nao
[2]
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/10/welfare-system-fails-to-protect-vulnerable-people
[3]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1305716/Nobody-likes-gooder-Study-confirms-selfless-behaviour-alienating.html
[4]
https://youtu.be/lcE1u2fAkRY
[5]
‘The Last Supper’
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