St Margaret’s Newlands
Genesis 3: 8-15
2 Corinthians 4: 13 – 5: 1
Mark 3:20-35
Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure. … For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
There is so much that could be said about today’s readings. They touch on the relationship between knowledge and sin, on the balance between family and Christian community, on how diabolic cannot stand up to the truth, on how power requires responsibility, and on the relationship between heaven and earth. Reflecting on them I found all that somehow to be encapsulated in this short section of our reading from second Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. What matters, Paul is saying, is not the externals but what is internal. He says it in words that may speak particularly to those of us who are getting older and are no longer physically able to do what we once could, or to look as we once did. It may feel that our outer nature is wasting away. And even if these words do not fit our own physical state we may feel a sense that things around us are declining, or that we are living in times of affliction in which “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, to quote Yeats.[1] But Paul encourages us to recognise that this not all that there is to life: “look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
Reflecting on the theme of aging, Janet Morley wrote a poem called “The Bodies of Grownups” which, she says “come with stretchmarks and scars, faces that have been lived in, relaxed breasts and bellies, backs that give trouble, and well-worn feet.” Also there are internal, emotional signs of aging: grownups have “bruises on their heart, wounds they can’t forget.” “And yet,” she writes, “there is a flood of beauty beyond the smoothness of youth; and my heart aches for that grace of longing that flows through bodies no longer straining to be innocent but yearning for redemption.”[2]
“Not straining to be innocent but yearning for redemption.” That’s some of what Paul is getting at, I think, and it links us back to the account of the Fall in our reading from Genesis. What is described here is God’s realisation that the man and the woman have lost their original innocence: they see that they are naked, and want to hide that. There is also a deepening of knowledge here, which in some readings of this narrative is not entirely a bad thing, for it leads ultimately to a sense of the need for forgiveness and redemption. The Fall is sometimes called the felix culpa, the “happy sin”, precisely because it creates the need for Christ, opening up the way of redemption. Without Adam and Eve, no Christ would have been necessary. Janet Morley’s point in her poem is that we can’t (and shouldn’t) try to recreate that lost innocence, just as we can’t (and shouldn’t) try to recreate the physical people we were in the past. We can’t get back to a perfect body, or a perfect world. This focus on the way the inner transcends the outer is not some kind of other-worldly focus, that says that this physical world and the here and now are not important, but rather a theology, a spirituality, that takes seriously where we are and asks how God is speaking into that situation to redeem where and who we are here and here and now.
There’s something of that going on in the gospel as well, I think, with the encounter between Jesus and his family. His mother and his brothers and sisters are worried about Jesus. People are saying that he’s gone mad, and they want to keep him safe. Jesus’s response is tough. “‘Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asks. And Mark goes on: “looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’” This passage is one of several in the gospels – and indeed in the New Testament – that poses a challenge to the idea that Jesus stands for family values as they are often understood today. Jesus’ true family, he says, are those who understand and follow his teachings: “Those baptized into Christ become brother and sister with a bond that is deeper than the natural kinship of family. … People responding to the will of God revealed in Jesus find a kinship deeper than family.”[3] William Brosend writes: “The family Jesus has in mind for us unleashes the Spirit within and among us as we support each other in all our best or fumbling attempts at discipleship.”[4] Again, there is a truth here that is deeper than external appearances or first assumptions.
There is also something similar going on in the accusations made against Jesus by the scribes. Jesus repudiates them: “How can he be in league with the Devil, he argues, if he is so evidently releasing people from his very clutches? Rather, he is binding the Devil … providing release from the power of darkness.”[5] For Helen Alexander, release and restoration are the key characteristics of Christ’s ministry. But today’s gospel, she says, reminds us that the complexity of judging where release and restoration are happening:
That good can appear evil, or at least less good. That the breakthrough to health can often initially manifest itself as breakdown. That sometimes conventions need to be questioned and the resultant
furore experienced and endured. That what has ‘aye been done’ isn’t necessarily the healthiest way forward for the future. That sometimes it is necessary for us to upset our friends, even our families and those we hold most dear. That sometimes it may even be necessary to leave them, at least for a while. That sometimes apparently authoritative leaders of communities, churches, nations don’t know best and may even be going down the wrong road altogether. That sometimes the seemingly best-informed are not the wisest. That sometimes communities including churches need to undergo difficulty and upheaval for the sake of the ultimate health and welfare of the whole.[6]
That might take us back to Paul where we started: to the reminder that when things seem to be disintegrating they may on another level be growing. James Ayers sees Mark’s Gospel as “the story of salvation for the hopeless. In situation after situation where all hope is gone, Jesus comes and works restoration.”[7] That hope, he says, is offered through the Holy Spirit: “your life can only be transformed by the power of the transforming Spirit.”[8]
Sharron Riessinger Blezard writes:
For Jesus, home [or family, or true being] is all about where the heart is, about how we live our lives,
and how we move and breathe. Home is not about buildings or possessions or any of what our world calls security. Home is about being centred in Christ, about doing the will of God, and about
letting go of the false illusions of security and worth to which we cling.[9]
Faith – discipleship – is about being centred on Christ, about being attentive to the inner, to the deeper meaning of what is going on in us and around us. About letting go of our illusions that we can return to innocence, to our younger selves, to some kind of mythical past. About recognising the need for – and the signs of – redemption in the here and now.
I’d like to end with a prayer by Janet Morley relating to today’s gospel:
God of community,
whose call is more insistent
than ties of family or blood:
may we so respect and love
those whose lives are linked with ours
that we fail not in loyalty to you
but make choices according to your will,
through Jesus Christ. Amen.[10]
[1] W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming“”: online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming.
[2] Janet Morley, All Desires Known, 3rd edition (London: SPCK 2005), p. 116.
[3] Dennis Hamm, SJ, “Let the Scriptures Speak: Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 9, 2024” (online at: https://liturgy.sluhostedsites.org/10OrdB060924/theword_hamm.html).
[4] Wiliam Brosend, “10th June: 3rd Sunday after Pentecost,“ The Expository Times 129 (2018), 371-372, at 372.
[5] Helen Alexander, “7th June: 2nd Sunday After Pentecost: Mark 3.20-35,” The Expository Times 126 (2015), 392-394, at 393.
[6] Ibid.
[7] James Ayers, “Mark 3:20-35,” Interpretation 51 (1997), 178-182, at 181.
[8] Ibid., 182.
[9] Online at: https://www.stewardshipoflife.org/2015/06/theres-no-place-like-home/.
[10] Morley, All Desires Known,15 (collect 31).
Wings of the Morning 