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| Tudhoe Methodist Church |
I
have just returned from a beautiful relaxing holiday in the Canary Islands. I
woke up to 14 days of clear blue skies and sunshine, from my hotel balcony
window I could see wavering palm trees and shimmering swimming pools, across
the ocean I could see the island of Fuerteventura. I can home rested and at
least half a stone heavier! Although I had a refreshing holiday, one thing I
did miss was my daily newspaper - I missed the gossip columns, the financial
scandal, the religious press, Olympic and football news.
So when I opened the
lectionary to look carefully at this Sunday’s gospel reading I was surprised to
find in Mark another shabby, sordid and shameful headline tabloid scandal that
might have been found in the news columns of the Galilean press - the scandalous goings-on at Herod’s birthday
party with his step daughter performing an erotic dance, his rash and no doubt
drunken promise and his command to execute in a grisly way the noble righteous
and lonely prophet, John the Baptist. The outrage and dishonour of the tragic
event would have fed the palace rumour machine and tittle-tattle of gossipy
newspaper columnists for days.
I
wish I could make sense of John the Baptist. He is not a comfortable character.
He always seems to me to stick out from the rest of the New Testament like
something of a sore thumb. All the other characters in the Gospels are there
because of the necessary parts which they play in the narrative of the Jesus story;
but John the Baptist is different. He was clearly an important historical
character in his own right, and we might well have heard of him even if he and
Jesus had never even met each other. His preaching in the wilderness clearly
attracted enormous crowds, and he clearly collected around himself his own band
of devoted disciples, including the ones we are told, who came to bury his body
after they had heard the news of his death. John the Baptist and Jesus were
clearly very much on the same side, and Jesus accepts baptism at John's hands.
The
usual way of looking at John the Baptist is to see him as being a part of the
Old Testament’s
tradition of prophesy, and as being the last of the great prophets prior to
Jesus. This prophetic tradition is one of the most remarkable features of the
Old Testament, of the Hebrew
Bible, and it is unique within the literature of the ancient world in that it
offers us a criticism
of the values the powers-that-be operated by in those days, namely the
religious legal system of its day and the rule of the Roman Empire which the
people of Jesus’ time were subject to.
If
John the Baptist were around now I would imagine him as a bearded guru heading
up protest marches and carrying his placard, living not off locusts and wild
honey but off an organic vegan diet, and dressed very scruffily though not
wearing goatskin because in this day and age it would be considered unecological.
I would look for him alongside protesters marching against the invasion of Syria
or against Israel’s behaviour in Gaza, or in the occupy camp outside St Paul’s
Cathedral, the international protest movement set up against social and
economic inequality. A couple of weeks ago he would very definitely have been
out on the streets in Tahrir Square, Egypt. I too would like to think that John
the Baptist was amongst the members of last weekend’s URC General Assembly,
marching to the Town Hall to hand in an assembly statement to the Scarborough Tory MP Robert
Goodwill, regarding the impact of spending cuts and poverty and inequality in
the UK. Being
a prophet demands an enormous amount of courage. And Mark in his gospel is at
pains to say that John was a righteous and holy man and the kingdom of which he
had spoken and the forgiveness he had offered, were the reality that would win
the day. Even in so solemn and ugly a story there can be found real
encouragement to faithful witness and constant hope.
But
there's also a sense in which it's relatively easy because all that a prophet
needs to do is criticise, and there are quite a lot of questions which a
prophet just doesn't need to address, in particular about how things might be
made better; "a voice crying in the wilderness make straight the way of
the Lord", but under no obligation to spell out what the way of the Lord
actually is, or how straightening it might best be achieved. If Syria is not to
be invaded for example, how can the Syrians who are being killed by Government
forces behelped? And how is Syria going to be governed next without degenerating
into civil war? If all the big banks and all the big bankers are to be got rid
of, how are jobs for people who are unemployed going to get created?
But
John the Baptist was more than merely a political critic. He challenged the
religious and secular leaders of his day, yes, but he also realised that the moral
behaviour of the individual mattered too. A clean heart matters. A new moral
code matters. Today when we are faced with banking scandals, rate fixing and
resignations, the foul-mouthed reality of Premier League football, morality
matters, just at it did in John the Baptist’s day. Not just laws, regulations,
supervisory authorities, committees of inquiry, courts fines and punishment but
morality, the inner voice of self restraint that tells us not to do something
even though it may be to our advantage, even though it is legal and even if
there is a fair chance we won’t be found out. Because it is wrong. Because it
is dishonourable. Because it is a breach of trust. Bending the rules is wrong.
And until morality returns to the British and international markets we will continue
to pay a heavy price.
What
John realised was that human beings, and not just those of us who are in positions
of power, are in competition one with another, and that this competition
sometimes flares up into violence, and that, insofar as all of us, and not just
those of us who are in positions of power, are out to get whatever it is that
we are wanting for ourselves, it is bound to be at other people's expense, and
other people are bound to get hurt. This is why he urged the crowds which
followed him to repent. To find a new and different way.
Jesus
shared John the Baptist's vision of what was wrong with the way the world, but
the big difference between the two of them was that Jesus did a great deal more
than just protest and criticise and urge repentance. He came up with a new and
different way, a better way of doing things. He spelt out for us what his
alternative and superior set of values actually was, and he showed us ways in
which these values are capable of being put into practice. He showed us what putting
them into practice was actually going to be like. He showed us God. He showed
us how people are capable of living together without hurting one another, and
how power is capable of not being abused. This is God's way, the way of love.
He set out for us in the Sermon on the Mount what the way of love requires of
us, giving our coats to other people who are needing our shirts, and going the
second mile with them, and loving our enemies; he showed us how potentially
violent competition can be pre-empted by turning the other cheek.
And
then, in his parables, he illustrated for us what a world in which competition
has been
replaced by love is going actually to look like, and he called the world when
it is governed
by love the Kingdom of Heaven. But there is a problem, which is that we human beings
are required to live together in a world in which competition still rules, and
we have to survive
in it, so the gospel of love becomes impossible for us to put into practice all
of the time,
so we are all of us inevitably sinners, and we are all of us in need of
repentance and of forgiveness,
and the stories of his ministry, and in particular the stories of his healing ministry,
show us how forgiveness is both given and received.
And
then what about their deaths. The deaths both of John the Baptist and of Jesus
were
political
executions, both of them were innocent of any crimes, both of them had to be
got rid of by the powers-that-be because their influence was perceived as
becoming subversive of the existing order of things. John the Baptist had
criticised the marriage of Herod and Herodias, his brother Philip's widow, and
Herodias found this criticism very threatening, and she thought that she would
feel more secure in her second marriage if John were to be got out of the way,
so she contrived a way of having him killed. And there have been thousands of
other people, both before John the Baptist and after him, who have been got rid
of in the same sort of way, and political executions of this sort continue to
happen, in Zimbabwe, in Iran, Syria and in the western provinces of China.
And
Jesus, too, was perceived as being subversive of the existing order of things,
and a way of getting him killed was also contrived. But his death was
different, and we are able to understand the difference because his death has
been described for us, not from the perspective of the powers-that-be who were
wanting him out of their way, but from the perspective of his bereaved friends
who were able to understand exactly what was going on. What their descriptions
of the crucifixion do is expose for us the whole sordid nature of political execution,
and they enable us to see it for what it actually is. They make it clear to us
that getting rid of critics does absolutely nothing to shore up the existing
order of things, but merely exposes its inherent rottenness. The better way of
doing things, God's way, the way of love, is not to confront this rottenness by
using its own rotten methods against it.
God's
only option, the way of love's only option, is to offer no resistance, but to
remain vulnerable, and to accept whatever it is that the existing order of
things intends doing next. And death in such circumstances kills off death.
Death has no more dominion over us. Love triumphs over all the hurt which is
inherent in the human world we have to live in, the world of competition and of
doing other people down. Love triumphs over all of this, and triumphs even over
death, and this triumph is glorious. The way of love becomes vindicated, and
humanity is redeemed. And this takes us back to the passage from Ephesians,
because Paul was able to see all this, and to fully understand it, even before
the Gospels had been written down. In Christ our release is secured, and our
sins are forgiven, through the shedding of his blood, and therein lies the
richness of God's amazing grace, imparting to us full wisdom and insight. The
letter to the Ephesians is not just a letter to the Ephesians, but a letter
also to us, because we too, when we hear the message of the truth, become
incorporate in Christ, and we too receive the seal of the Holy Spirit, and we
too enter into our heritage, to God's praise and glory.
Ray
Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street
LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit
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