Sunday 29th September 2024
Readings: Psalm 124; Mark 9.38-50
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord
Picture the rough suburbs. A young man in his late teens out too late on a Saturday night. The buses not running according to schedule and anyway he’s lost his Oyster card. He’ll get home more quickly if he leaves the main road and cuts through the side streets. Five minutes later and he knows he’s made a mistake. A big mistake. Someone’s noticed him. There’s shouting, jeering. He can hear footsteps coming from different directions. He’s not carrying but that won’t make any difference; they’ll assume he is. If there’s any sort of a scuffle – and how can there not be – he could easily get stabbed. And no mates around to get him to A & E in time. Ahead, a car turns in from a side road, coming towards him, driving slowly because of the speed bumps. He takes to the middle of the road and runs straight towards it, making sure he’s in the head-lights. The horn is blaring. Brakes applied. Enough choice abuse from the driver to make the toughest guy envious. But it’s all he needs. He’s past the car and sprinting away from the action, every sense alert, back to the bright lights and the long way home.
It was a close shave. A near thing. Something worth getting down on your knees for.
Such an incident, in danger from another’s aggression, may not be in everyone’s experience but many of us will recall a moment – perhaps a car accident narrowly averted, perhaps a fall which could have been so much worse – when we realise that we have had a lucky escape. Or we have read of situations, perhaps reports from the war in Ukraine, when soldiers facing apparently insurmountable odds, have found their way to safety, not through their own skill or cunning so much as by the happy alignment of circumstances.
I do not know whether Psalm 124 was inspired by a particular incident, in which King David’s faction or the Israelites as a nation triumphed. But what the psalm expresses is a deep-felt recognition that, when the odds are stacked against you, only God can redeem the situation. “If it had not been the Lord who was on our side…” Well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. The images of being swallowed alive or drowned in the raging waters are powerful. The psalmist, we feel, knows only too well what defeat could mean. He inhabits a brutal world. But he also knows that force does not always triumph. He and his companions have slipped free of the snare, like a bird evading the fowlers’ nets. And it is this image of escape and liberation, against the odds, which prompts him to recognise the saving help of the Lord…and, importantly, the Lord who made heaven and earth, who sits outside our mortal experience.
In just eight verses, we travel from a declaration of relief (“what a fortunate escape we had!”) through a potent recognition of the real danger we face, to a profound metaphysical understanding that enduring salvation can only be granted by God, who holds all things in his power.
The psalmist trusts in God’s saving power and, significantly, is moved to give thanks: “Blessed be the Lord who has not given us as prey…”
But.
We know, victory does not always fall to the righteous. The history of man’s inhumanity to man is riddled with examples of military defeat, subjugation, tyranny and worse being meted out to weaker nations who have the misfortune of being seen as an obstacle to another nation’s ambitions. Innocence is no protection from aggression. Nor, we are obliged to conclude, is Christian faith. Good people do “fall prey to the teeth” of their enemies.
There has been a trend over recent decades to assume that the world – that human affairs – are moving steadily towards better times. Until comparatively recently, we were lulled into the idea that liberal democracy was the world-order all nations would soon espouse. And I fear many of us began to think that God, as a result, was to an extent dispensable. He had been working his purpose out very nicely. We were comfortable and more or less content: thank you very much.
But.
The rise of powerful, authoritarian regimes, a shift away from a world-order dominated by America ( a friendly power), the political upheaval in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, the increased migration following on from that chaos and the backlash against it, and the growing evidence of a climate change with destructive weather patterns more and more frequent are real dangers we cannot ignore. The future is not likely to get brighter; quite the contrary. Personal safety and physical well-being may no longer be ‘the given’ for millions of people who have been used to that security.
Perhaps one of the demons which has afflicted the Western World in recent years is complacency. Another may be the spiral of self-centredness, exploited by social media, which sends us spinning round and round inside our own echo-chambers. We have, as a civilization, forgotten to put God at the centre. We have been busy creating a world in our own image, not his. What more menacing demon can there be but that?
It is no surprise then that Jesus corrects John for trying to frustrate the casting out of demons by a man who is not a card-carrying, signed-up follower of Jesus.
We might be tempted to dismiss this demon business as ignorant superstition, divorced from our enlightened times, until we realise that it chimes well with the interest our own society has on mental health. Doctors today understand how an individual’s mental and emotional state can be adversely affected by chemical imbalance or repercussions from acute stress or trauma. Without treatment, such individuals may be condemned to a life where they are trapped at the mercy of their ‘demons’. From Jesus’s perspective, anyone who helps restore the mentally disturbed to equilibrium, is to be congratulated because that is how they can find themselves on a path which leads to him.
It is logical then for Jesus to go on to talk about the stumbling blocks (translated as ‘sin’ in some Bibles) we can encounter on that path. And it is right that he warns his disciples that they could become stumbling blocks themselves.
I think a complacent church could be a stumbling block for many drawn to God.
We might bemoan the fact that fewer people attend church these days than was the case fifty years ago but might that be because too many churches are in the business of dispensinga certain warm, fuzzy feeling each Sunday, always looking on the bright side: “God’s in charge, Jesus loves me and I’m in his team. So that’s alright then. Everything must be lovely…What’s for lunch?”
Perhaps, the number of active church-goers has dropped because of a rejection of comfortable coddling. The world is not a secure, contented place. Life can be grim and to pretend otherwise is blinkered and delusional. The Church must recognise that for more and more people, physical well-being and comfort are not to be expected. The Church must not pretend that it is otherwise.
We have to be clear that stumbling-blocks can be constructed from saccharin and sentimentality as well as hypocrisy and bigotry.
Buit why does Jesus employ such a brutal metaphor when warning his disciples about stumbling? I think he wanted to force them (to force us) to put the physical into perspective. Saving our bodies is not what it is about.
The psalmist had not got this far. He was deeply thankful to God for saving him and his people from physical oppression. He knew that the Israelites’ survival was only thanks to God. Survival was what mattered. But, as we now understand more clearly, survival is not always the outcome, even when we are favoured by God.
Jesus rams this truth home. He stands alongside us, facing the world as we have made it. He knows our lives, in the world as humankind has shaped it, may well be grim. That’s not how things should be, or need to be; it is how they are. And Jesus wants his disciples to understand that he is less concerned with external threats to our physical welfare and more concerned with those internal forces (our demons) which deflect us from a relationship with him.
The message we should be hearing is surely this: that our relationship with Jesus can endure, whatever physical situation we find ourselves in. A relationship with Jesus transcends the mortal sphere.
He makes this point unambiguously by employing the hard-hitting metaphor of self-amputation. Physical well-being is not our primary goal. Nor should we assume that being amiable and smooth – never challenging or confronting that which is destructive – is how we should behave. He wants his followers to be ‘salted with fire’.
I wonder if the image of being salted with fire anticipates the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Perhaps. But by having ‘salt in themselves’ we can surely understand that he wants his followers to endure in the way that salt preserves; he wants them to be defined and distinctive, in the way that salt brings out flavour; maybe he wants their company to be addictive in the way that we know salty foods can be.
This then is not a call to be simpering or weak, to dispense comfortable platitudes, to excuse predatory or selfish behaviour, to accommodate invidious cultural practices out of fear of antagonising, to accept rather than challenge.
But to be ‘salty’ is still a call to seek peace rather than hostility. A fine line to tread, perhaps. Following Jesus will demand vigilance and constant self-examination.
To conclude. God does not want us to suffer. Jesus spent much of his ministry relieving it and we know that, on occasion, we can experience miraculous rescue. Suffering can itself be a distraction, of course. Jesus told his disciples to free people from their demons and strive not to stumble in their quest to get closer to him. He wanted them to be a peace because peace is that demon-free state of mind when we, as individuals, can find the space to explore a profound relationship with Jesus and with each other: our fellows, created like us in the image of God.
God does not want us to suffer. But neither does he want us to be complacent. He doesn’t want sugar and saccharin. He wants salt.
Our primary function in life is to grow closer to God. Maybe the precarious world we now inhabit is the nudge we need to re-set our spiritual compass. For too long, we in the West have been in danger of seeing God as an optional extra, for the Sunday Club or to give shape to our annual festivities.
Instead, we could do worse than heed the words of Habbakuk, at the end of his book. His life was anything but secure and yet he is able to say,
“Though the fig tree does not blossom
And the fields yield no food,
Though the flock is cut off from the fold
And there is no herd in the stalls
Yet I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength.”
His relationship with God is his core, his engine; it will steer his course whatever the circumstances and whatever the hardship he finds himself in. Adopting this mindset is the only way we shall succeed in re-shaping the world as God intends it to be.
And then we shall join with Habbakuk and say,
“he makes my feet like the feet of a deer and makes me tread upon the heights.”
Amen.