Crook Churches Together - Day 6 Week 2 : Mark 6: v45-56
Little Women is based on Louisa May Alcott's classic 1869 semi-autobiographical novel. But have you heard of the musical, Little Women, which came to Broadway in 2005, lyrics by Mindi Dickstein, and music by Jason Howland? The musical follows the book, it focuses on the four March sisters — brassy, tomboy-like, aspiring writer Jo, romantic Meg, pretentious Amy, and kind-hearted Beth — and their beloved Marmee, at home in Concord, Massachusetts while the family patriarch is away serving as a Union Army chaplain during the Civil War. Intercut with the vignettes in which their lives unfold are several recreations of the melodramatic short stories Jo writes in her attic studio. But things are not going well for Jo, she receives a notice of rejection from another author in New York City, making it her twenty - second rejection. Laurie, decides to ask Jo to marry him, but gently he is rebuked . Jo tells him that she will never marry Laurie. Jo then ponders her future, which is changing significantly. She vows to find another way to achieve her future and sings one of the best loved songs of the whole musical at the end of Act 1 entitled astonishing.
Astounding: amazing, surprising, astounding, shocking, beyond belief. These are some of the words that come to mind when the disciples had watched Jesus walking on the water. Let’s zoom in to the scene on Gennesaret - There they are, hair plastered down by lake water, crouching in a boat, its hull now caressed by gentle wavelets. For all the calm around them, in their hearts and minds they are buffeted by questions, fear, awe, wonder, confusion. Perhaps a tempest of recrimination blasts at them? They have woken up to their spiritual amnesia. Jesus is always healing and teaching, healing and teaching; the stakes are raised when demons are driven out, storms are stilled, the feeding of the five thousand, and now this: walking on the water. Guys, you saw Him heal people. You heard him teach. No, I don’t think the calm on the lake is matched by calm in their hearts. When is it all going to end, what’s going to happen, where is it all heading – He now has power over the elements. He is sovereign over the natural world. If the feeding of the 5,000 hadn’t astonished them then walking on the water will totally astonish them.
And what of us? What astonishes us........ are we immune from this spiritual amnesia.
* Have you had those moments of an intense sense of God, times when you have prayed and seen God at work – powerful, fearful, wonderful.
* That retreat when you were overwhelmed by the love of God.
* That time in the garden when the wonder of creation moved you so deeply you wept.
* The sublime beauty of the quiet of the spiritual space, infused with His presence.
* A moment with a mentor or spiritual director when you see that what looked like death is a gateway to life.
* The consoling presence of God filling you up and you tell yourself that you have moved on in your faith to a new place.
Perhaps you write this in a journal and come across it some time later and you are surprised by the memory. You’d forgotten it. Like some lost love letter written 40 years ago, a precious time when life was vibrant, challenging on full green ahead. But now in the amber years the tensions, trivialities and traumas of life had robbed you. The banality of life numbs you in its routine. Spiritual amnesia. It shrinks Jesus down until he is dashboard sized. We forget - the Lord of heaven and earth, God almighty, is only a heartbeat away. Sometimes we need an astonishing moment to wake us up, as Jo March sang in her song from Little Women
Sadly the disciples in Mark are slow on the uptake, astonished, yes, surprised, scare out of their wits, slow to believe “because their hearts were hardened.” They don’t seem to be learning the lesson, all this rushing around, and Mark does go at a fast pace, healing and teaching, the restless running around and people being brought to Jesus. I think Mark is inviting us to ask the question ourselves, and to ask in addition whether we are like the disciples, watching events happen but not drawing the right conclusions, or whether our hearts have been softened or perhaps opened to believe the extraordinary thing that is occurring before our eyes. Mark is at pains to bring to our attention in this part of the gospel at least is that Jesus is the Messiah, this is where the story is going - the deeper meaning Jesus divinity as shown by his walking on the water will come later. When the New Testament writers want to tell us that Jesus is in some sense divine, this is not something set apart from hunger, thirst, fear, sorrow and death itself, but found mysteriously in the middle of them all. Our astonishment comes not by seeing Jesus as divine but by seeing him as human. We are right to be astonished, but our astonishment come from seeing something more mysterious by far, a dimension of our world which is normally hidden, Mark is offering Jesus to our startled imaginations as the world’s rightful king, now returning, putting things right.
This astonishing news makes us at least blink and rub our eyes – Mark indicates that we are in good company. I don’t think his remark about the disciples being hard hearted is a major criticism of them, what else one might expect. He is simply warning that to grasp all this will need more than suspension of belief, it will take a complete change of heart, and that is what Jesus has come to bring. It is in our thinking, our imagining, and our praying as well as in our bodily health that we are invited to come, like the frantic crowds and touch the hem of Jesus garment, looking for salvation. Now that is astonishing!
Amen
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