Month: October 2021

This month of November, we’re going to have a series of festival Sundays here at St Margaret’s: Next Sunday will be All saints’ Sunday, then we will celebrate St Margaret’s on November 14^th; the week after, November 21^st, will be Christ the King which will finally lead us to the first Sunday in Advent on November 28^th. After this Sunday, we will read from John’s Gospel until we reach Advent when we will start a new liturgical year – Year C – reading through Luke’s Gospel.

So this Sunday is sort of an “in between” Sunday. This is actually the last time we hear from Mark’s Gospel, and I find it very fitting that the last we hear is Jesus’s summarizing all the Law with these commandments of loving God and loving neighbor. It’s important to notice that it’s not just a “memo” though, a flash card for good disciples before they take their exams – Jesus is in Jerusalem, living his last days on earth. Those words we hear today are actually Jesus’s testimony, Jesus’s last will. If you remember Jesus’s farewell discourse in John’s Gospel, well, this is where we are in the timeline. What takes John four chapters to present is here condensed in a few verses by Mark. We have studied in Chapter 10 how people came to Jesus asking “all the wrong questions” until a blind man comes with the right disposition of heart. But you see, it’s not over until it’s over. After that, Jesus has many other encounters in Jerusalem with people asking him questions. But this time, in chapter 12, Mark puts a final dot. Our passage ends up with Mark concluding: “After that, no one dared to ask him any question”.

Loving God and loving neighbor is a summary of all the Law, and that’s it! But of course commenting about that would take all the sermons in the world and we would not even have begun to cover it. So instead of trying to do that, I think it would be more helpful to focus on the way Mark specifically puts the saying into context, and then we can have a look on how the commandments are actually formulated in Jesus’s mouth on that occasion.

1. First of all, what is specific about the context of this saying?

– A scribe comes to ask Jesus a question and in the end, Jesus praises him for his wisdom.

It’s important to notice because we can easily fall into caricatures about the scribes and the pharisees as the “bad guys” of the Gospel, and we don’t want to adopt this kind of thinking that could lead us to antisemitism. The scribe is praised by Jesus for his wisdom, and he “isn’t far from the kingdom of God”. We cannot reduce people in categories of bad and wrong / good and right in the Gospel. Jesus was tough with the Pharisees, but remember that Jesus had disciples among the pharisees (Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus). Some scholars believe that Jesus was himself a pharisee, and it makes sense because we are often tougher on our own people when we have moral expectations. For example, for us, our job would be to hold Episcopalians accountable to higher standards. It is okay because it’s something we need to require of ourselves, because we are Episcopalians, it’s not like we kept on saying that really Catholics should do a better job at being Christian! Jesus didn’t see the Pharisees and the scribes as outsiders, they were his people and so he could ask them to give their best.

– In Mark’s context, we also need to notice that it’s okay to ask questions! Actually, I am in awe to realize how many people in this Gospel ask questions to Jesus. And yes, they ask the wrong questions, but little by little, some people show up with better questions. The questions are not “wrong” because of their content, but what we learned last week seeing how Bartimaeus made his request is that people who came before him had the wrong attitude rather than the wrong questions. They asked questions to trick Jesus, to make him contradict himself, or contradict the law. They used their questions to show off or to justify themselves and Jesus refused to play the game. But when they come up asking questions genuinely and expectantly, Jesus always answers and he even praises those people. So it is for us. Our faith is not to accept everything silently, part of our faith is to ask reverent and relevant questions and to come up each time with better, deeper questions that will bring us closer to the Kingdom of God.

2 – Which leads us to the content of the saying = What is specific to Mark in the way it’s formulated?

I am going to skip a bit the part about the love of neighbor – just because we had already said a lot about it when we studied James, but also because this is not in this part that stands out in Mark’s rendering of Jesus’s words. What I would notice though is that if Jesus insisted so much on love, and made it a commandment – it’s because it’s not easy! We have a tendency to put ourselves first, a natural tendency of self preservation that can turn into something sinful when we lose focus that our neighbors are as important as ourselves, and it’s something we need to be reminded of constantly. We had a meeting this week at church and we discussed how this time of pandemic had increased in us our feelings of insecurity and defensiveness, and how we find ourselves in needing to learn to love each other again. It’s okay! It’s in the Gospel: We constantly have to work on being more loving. And we can always start again, start anew.

– Now I would like to turn to what I think is really the specificity of Mark’s Gospel today, and it’s about the love of God. If you know a little about Hebrew Scriptures, you will notice that Jesus quotes the “Shema Israel” the great prayer of the Jews from Deuteronomy 6. What is remarkable is that, as often, Jesus takes some liberties when quoting the Scriptures, and he actually adds a line! In Deuteronomy, the commandment is to love God with your “whole heart, whole soul and whole might” whereas Jesus says “to love God with your whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, and whole strength (or might)” and then the scribe repeats what Jesus says “yes, you have to love with all your understanding” – I think this addition is amazing. It’s amazing because this is what Mark encourages us to do, as noted earlier. Mark encourages believers to inquire, to ask questions, to seek understanding. Maybe you’ve heard of John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal Bishop, who died recently. That’s what Spong used to repeat all the time: “We have to do a better job at loving God with our mind and we need to seek understanding of our faith”. He did that all his life and it certainly put him at odds with some of the teachings of the church, and we may not agree with some of his theology, but we can recognize in him the integrity of the scribe who instead of siding with his peers mindlessly, just repeating what he had heard, was able to think for himself and asked Jesus for clarification. Spong said that asking questions was “taking God seriously”.

So it should be okay to ask questions, God is a mystery but in Jesus God reveals himself and responds to us and make God known to us. Don’t be surprised by the ending line of our passage. People “didn’t dare to ask any more questions” to Jesus not because they felt silly or humiliated. They were in awe (=the meaning of the “fear of God” in the Bible). They stopped asking questions because they have had their answer to their deepest question: What is it, in the end, that matters the most – the scribe’s question.

As a conclusion, just notice that Jesus is asking us to be whole, to love God with all our being, as God is one, we should be one, all given to our quest for God – which is of more value than all the sacrifice, as the scribe notices – the giving of self in building our relationship with God.

– If you remember from the study we did this past summer on Mark 3-6, we have noticed that Mark invites us to question Jesus’s identity throughout his ministry in Galilee. As we read, we can come up with different kind of insights: Jesus as a teacher, Jesus as a savior, Jesus as a healer…And indeed, in Mark’s Gospel there are a lot of stories of Jesus performing acts of healing. This is where we are today, with one of the most famous healing, the healing of the blind man Bartimaeus.

When we look at stories of healing, there is a lot we can gather about Jesus: We learn that Jesus cared about people, that he wanted to help them, that he wanted to make them whole…That’s all important things. Yet, I am glad we have spent so much time on the whole Chapter 10 of Mark as we hear this last story, because if we hadn’t had a look at the context, we could certainly learn from this healing, but it wouldn’t take us much further than “Jesus performing another healing”, with the general conclusions we can draw from it. Having studied the whole chapter though, we can certainly go a little bit deeper wondering about this passage not only as “another of Jesus’s miracle” but pondering the significance of this very miracle: Why is it that Mark tells this story right here, right now? This is where I would like us to start today.

In this chapter 10, we have looked at three people / group of people coming to Jesus to ask something from him. The Pharisees who wanted to know if it was okay to divorce their wives, the rich man who wanted to know what to do to inherit eternal life and then James and John, Jesus’s very own disciples, asking to share in Jesus’s glory. Mark places the story of the blind man in the same context: He comes to Jesus, asking for something. What we have learned so far is that in this chapter all the people who came to Jesus came with the wrong questions – questions that revealed their preoccupation with self and their hardness of heart. They all left Jesus disappointed and frustrated.

And so what happens today is that we know that the story tells us something different: The man is granted his request. So this could tell us that he did something right, correct? What did he do? What did he say? Only this: He asked Jesus to have mercy on him and he asked to be able to see again.

Now this is interesting because there is a strong connection in the Gospel between sin and blindness – something that is very obvious if you read John’s Gospel who, as always, has the most extensive and comprehensive narratives about Jesus’s signs. Blindness is not, as the disciples first assume, a consequence of sin. Quite the opposite, in John’s Gospel (Chap 9) Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” And Jesus says also to the Pharisees: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains”. In a much condensed way, this is also what we find in Mark: The man asking for mercy is then made able to see. The chapter we have just read is about hardness of heart, which is the emotional name for what is the deeper reality of spiritual blindness. This chapter is about hardness of heart, spiritual blindness and the way to overcome it: By asking Jesus for mercy, for forgiveness, which in the Gospel is what enables us to be able to see (spiritually). Note that the man asks to be able to see “again” – which is sort of a way of asking to go back to the state of innocence or purity that has been lost. The man throw his cloak away: he is to be made new, to be “re-made” as God intended him to be from the beginning.

And so in the end we learn that’s the right question to ask, that’s the request Jesus wants to grant to all who want to be his disciples, the request that will finally make us well instead of leaving us disappointed and frustrated. Asking Jesus to set us free from the sins that blind us. As I think about it today, it seems to me that there are three main areas where we may want to ask for clarity:

– Jesus can grant us the ability to see ourselves. This may feel like something difficult to ask and a bit scary, but we would be wrong if we’d assume it’s only about asking God to be able to see our own sin – even if it’s of course part of it. Bartimaeus asks Jesus to “have mercy”: He asks for forgiveness and compassion in the same time, and we believe that God always reveals love and compassion as God shows us our sins. God helps us to understand our wounds, our story, the way our minds work… Maybe we need to ask God to be able look at ourselves with love and compassion too so we don’t have to be so tough with ourselves or ashamed of who we are. Self acceptance is the first action we can take to overcome the hardness of our hearts.

– Jesus can grant us the ability to see others in a different light. At the beginning of the story, Bartimaeus is only able to hear the people who are criticizing him, but then he hears also those who have for him words of encouragement. As he asks mercy for him, his vision changes of what he perceives in others. I’ve heard many times Christian saying that, when they have difficulties with someone, they ask God to be able to see those people as God sees them. This is a very good prayer. It shouldn’t be limited to ask God to be able to see what’s lovable in others though. It should also start with Bartimaeus’ prayer “Have mercy on me!”, acknowledging that the way we see others is often distorted by our own sin, or at least by our own issues. We see others through the lens of our own agenda, our past experiences, our assumptions, our personal prejudices or the prejudices of our social class, of our race. So repentance is at the heart of being able to really see others, seeing them for who they are instead of seeing them only in comparison with ourselves. As we ask for mercy on ourselves, we start to have compassion for others, and that’s another way to overcome the hardness of our hearts.

– Last, but not least, Jesus grants us to see God for who God is. A commentator of this passage notices how wonderful it is that the first thing Bartimaeus is able to see is Jesus’s face! He opens his eyes and he sees God truly manifested in the person of Jesus! In comparison, the mistake of the Pharisees, of the young man and of James and John is that they weren’t seeing the real God, they were looking for a God of judgment and a God of power. But here, as Jesus is heading towards Jerusalem, we know that Jesus will reveal through his passion a God who is to be found in holiness, love and giving of self. Our heart remains closed if we come to God only to fulfill our own agenda, but if we are open to God’s agenda, we overcome the hardness of our hearts.

– Conclusion: This story is the conclusion of Jesus’s different encounters but it is also a foretelling of Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem. Anticipating the crowd, Bartimaeus lays down his cloak and acclaims the Son of David. We also have a glimpse of the meaning of the passion. Jesus manifests a God who “makes everything new” (Revelation) – as Jesus gave his new eyes to the man, in the same way God can place new hearts in God’s people – and that’s always the right thing to ask, even today.

We’re already in our third week in this Chapter 10 of Mark, a chapter where we have noticed that everybody “asks the wrong question”. And from what it looks like, one week after another, we add a layer of wrongness on top of the other. No only the requests are getting more extravagant, but they also come from people who are closer to Jesus and therefore should know better than that.

If you remember, the first week, we had Pharisees asking if it was okay to divorce their wives who had become displeasing to them. Kind of tough, but it didn’t really come as a surprise either. Pharisees are often presented in the Gospels as legalistically minded, most of them are focused on the law, rather than they do wonder about what is the loving thing to do.

Then last week, we had this man who wanted to know how he could inherit eternal life. Unlike the Pharisees who weren’t very impressed with Jesus, this man seemed eager to follow, yet not at the cost at leaving everything behind. He still thought about eternal life as something to add to his many possessions rather than an experience to be lived out in answering the call of the Gospel.

But now this week, it’s Jesus’ very own disciples who don’t get it, and they really, badly, don’t get it. And this comes as a surprise because they’ve been following Jesus all along and indeed they should know better. And their demand is actually doubly wrong:
– First they ask for glory when we know that Jesus taught the way of humility
– And then they ask for glory when Jesus has actually just mentioned his own death. We are at the gates of Jerusalem, Jesus announces his passion for the third time. The lectionary skips this passage, but it’s right there in the preceding verses (v32-34).

Speaks about insensitivity! If we can shake our heads at the request of the Pharisees or at the rich man’s question, this demand from James and John is probably much more shocking – and the story says that actually the ten (others disciples) were quite angered with James and John, cuing the reader in the right way to react. And we are not the only one to be shocked! If you have in mind Matthew’s Gospel, it’s James and John’s mother doing the asking. Well, most scholars assume that it’s the way Matthew put the story because it was too shocking for him to see the disciples being so wrong about something (Remember, at the time Matthew wrote, James and John were probably church leaders!)

Now we can be offended at James and John – but look at what Jesus does: He takes this opportunity to teach all of the disciples. I wonder if Jesus is offended – maybe he’s well aware of James and John’s naivete and maybe he knows the ten are not far from this thought process as well. They think: Yes, we follow Jesus but in the end…what’s in it for us? Remember from last week when Peter reminded Jesus that they had left everything for him (unlike the rich man) – surely, they would get rewarded too?

And so maybe we are offended, like the ten, but maybe we too have something to learn because I am pretty sure most of us have wondered at some point what it is that we would gain by following Jesus. We have wondered about that, first of all, because it seems like a reasonable question to ask before you do anything – whatever it is, it’s better to do something knowing why you do it! – and we also wonder about that because at times we don’t see the benefits of following Jesus, we’re discouraged or just impatient.

To this, as he did to James and John, as he did to the ten, Jesus responds again today: Don’t look for yourself, don’t look for your own advantages, as I came not to be served but to serve. Jesus says: “If you want to become great, be a servant, if you want to be first, be a slave to all”. I mentioned last week that Jesus had difficult words to those who ask wrong questions and indeed this could use a little bit of unpacking, right?

Well, there are three things I would like to draw your attention on and leave it to your own reflection for this Sunday:

– First of all, notice that Jesus is addressing all the disciples, the whole community. Those words of “servants” and even “slaves” can ring very wrong in our modern ears (and probably at the time too!) but Jesus is not asking his disciples to be servants or even slaves of their Gentiles masters. On the other way around, he says that the disciples shouldn’t do what the Gentiles do! Jesus says to the disciples that they should be servant and slave in their community, and more important towards one another, for one another. It’s not about serving someone who lords it over you, it’s about serving someone who is also your servant! Don’t let anyone abuse you by telling you that because you’re a Christian you should do whathever they need you to do!…If they want you to serve them, they have to serve you as well. That’s what being a Christian is about.

This model of servanthood actually reminds me of how a functioning couple works: It’s not one partner serving the other, it’s partners mutually serving each other. Jesus models a servanthood that brings reciprocity to the relationships. In this sense slavery could have a must different understanding. When Jesus tells the ten they need to be “salve to all”, it does not mean the disciples should let themselves be abused by their (rich and powerful) Masters, it means that they belong to one another in a life given for one another. And this I how our Christian communities should work as well! Everybody serving everybody: Not the priest being served by everybody and not the priest doing all the ministry, not the vestry serving everyone, but not the vestry being a position of privilege either, and not just a few volunteers for all the community but everyone serving everyone according to their own skills and abilities (You will find that that frequently in Paul’s letters!).

– Now we know what servanthood is about, we can wonder why Jesus mentions servanthood as a response to our own aspirations to glory (in the case of James and John) and to our aspirations to reward (like Peter)?

It’s funny because I read a lot of commentaries about this passage and nobody asks this question. I guess we just assume that Jesus wants quite literally to bring everybody back to earth and give them a lesson in humility. Well, there could be some of that, but beyond that, if we put this passage back in the context of Chapter 10, I think Jesus, again, is redirecting everybody towards relationships, like he did with the Pharisees towards their wives, like he did with the rich man towards the poor. What is Jesus’s glory in the end? Jesus’s glory is his friends and the love he has for his friends (Remember the Farewell Discourse in John?). That’s where true joy and true life is to be found, in loving one another. That’s the reward for all of us.

– Last thing I wanted to add is that maybe the wrongness of James and John’s request is not so much that it is arrogant or insensitive or inappropriate. Maybe the wrongness is just plainly that it does not make any sense. If we’re genuinely looking for God and understand who God is, how could we wish for anything else? There is nothing to be found beyond God. Our relationship with God is in itself its own reward. Maybe what James and John asked for was in a very clumsy way a request to be close to Jesus for all eternity – that would make sense. Yet Jesus reminds them that for now they have to be “drinking his cup and sharing his baptism” and it does not sound like a good news first, but it could in fact be good news because it means that we don’t have to wait for Eternal glory to know him, we can know him right there, where we are, even if it’s through our suffering. And so Jesus shows us that Glory is not an escape from this world but rather a life lived deeply in love with another and with God.

Today we’re continuing with our series of encounters (and conversations) in the Chapter 10 of Mark. If you remember from last week, we have seen that in this Chapter, people come to Jesus and ask “all the wrong questions”: those questions that seem to be seeking God’s glory, but in reality show what’s on the inquirers’ minds and what’s in their hearts. Mark shows us how those people who talk with Jesus, whether pharisees, strangers of even Jesus’s own disciples, by asking their questions express their own self centered preoccupations (Sex, money and pride!). They seem to be seeking God but in the end, they are only seeking themselves. So in each of these conversations, Jesus has to re-direct the people towards God’s will and towards the core of God’s law. Jesus does so not by answering the questions directly, but he offers tough reminders about what’s more fundamental and, as he does so, he reveals to people their own hardness of heart, their own incapacity to love as God has commanded. What we realize is that all those people asking questions to Jesus aren’t actually asking about God for the purpose of serving God, they are mostly trying to figure what’s in it for them, or what it is that they can get away with.

Now what could make it better (but actually makes it worse) is that all those people aren’t bad people. In a sense, they are really trying – trying to understand what God expects of them, how they can have an okay relationship with God – but of course, as Jesus shows them, the call of the Gospel is more radical than that.

So this week, Jesus meets with a man who seems like a great candidate for discipleship. He has a lot of respect and admiration for Jesus, and is eager to follow him. Mark tells us the man runs up to Jesus and falls on his knees. He calls Jesus “good” and by this manifests his own desire to be good. He has been following the commandments and wants to inherit eternity. And Jesus loves the man, actually. Mark tells us that, as the man confesses his striving to lead a godly, holy life and after life, Jesus “looked at him and loved him” – so much that Jesus wants him to follow him. But then something really sad happens. Although the man is very pious and eager, he won’t be able to renounce his “many possessions” Jesus asks him to sell for the sake of the poor. So it starts well, but it’s a sad story. The man leaves Jesus, sorrowful, realizing his own incapacity to answer the call.

Now this story has raised many questions – and many anxieties – throughout the centuries. It’s about money, of course. Is Jesus really asking us to be so radical and to sell all we have? Isn’t it possible to follow him while still enjoying the fruit of our labor, the comfort and safety of a good house, abundant food, and of course for us, many of the commodities scientific progress and technology have brought? Well, I am not sure I have an answer to this, but I would respond like I did last week when Jesus was addressing the question of divorce with the Pharisees: We cannot take what Jesus has said to one person or to one group of people at a certain time and place and concerning a specific situation, we cannot take this answer and make it a general rule. When Jesus talked about divorce with the Pharisees, he was talking about the sending away of wives who had stopped being pleasing to their husbands. He wasn’t talking about domestic abuse or even mutual consent to terminate a relationship. In our story today, Jesus asks a man to sell his possessions to follow him, but we know he didn’t ask that from all his disciples. The twelve left their home, but Mary, Martha and Lazarus didn’t. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were considered “comfortable”, and we don’t see Jesus asking them to give it all away.

So what is Jesus doing? To me, there are three possibilities we may want to reflect a bit on today:

– First of all, we can acknowledge that Jesus never asked everybody to give it all away but he certainly didn’t encourage them to keep it all either. Jesus does not always condemn rich people for being rich, but he certainly never praises them and insist on how difficult it is for them to enter the kingdom of God. Throughout the Gospel, there is actually a conflict between “serving God” and “serving money”, and it looks like we often deceive ourselves when we think that money isn’t our Master. A good indicator in the Gospels whether money is our Master or not is found in our ability to share or to manifest hospitality. Martha and Mary were very hospitable, Joseph was generous (he gave his own tomb for Jesus to be buried in). It’s an important test for each one of us. Whether we have a money or not, the question is what is it that we do with it? Rather than “rich” or “poor”, maybe the criteria is more about whether we are “stingy” or “generous”: Do we use our money for our own benefit, for the benefit of our families, or are we aware of the needs of the poor and if so, how do we address them? Maybe we can have a look at our bank statements and see what it says about the way we live…We could also have a look at where our money comes from. Notice that Jesus replaces the commandment “Do not steal” by “Do not defraud”: How do we make our money? How do we invest it?

– Second point we can reflect on and that is related to what we’ve just said: To me, what Jesus is doing in our passage today is that he tries to redirect the man from his own self-centerdness to the care of others, from preoccupation with self back to relationships. Isn’t it interesting that the man asks how he could “inherit” eternal life, as if it was something else he could add to his possessions? By asking him to sell all he has, Jesus redirects the man to where eternal, real and abundant life is to be found. It reminds me of the letter of James we have studied last month, when James asks us to stop wondering if our faith is saving us and rather ask ourselves if our faith is saving anyone! Jesus invites the man to move from religious, legalistic preoccupations that end up being preoccupation with self to a life of self giving and relationships – what Peter reminds Jesus they all did. The problem with money and possessions is that they make “self sufficient” and unable to relate to others. Money will easily make us feel like we don’t need anyone beyond our family and we end up being unable to see anyone’s needs.

– Last observation: I think that in the end what Jesus does is to reveal to the man his own hardness of heart. By asking him to let go of his possessions, he makes the man realize how much he hold on to these things, how much his many possessions are possessing him. Well, maybe the man does not realize it, but the reader of Mark certainly does! Maybe it’s an example for us, a counter example and an invitation to think about what it is for us that gets in the way to start living the eternal, real, abundant life that God has promised us. What is it that we hold on to? It does not have necessarily to be materiel possessions, so we need to do some thinking: Maybe that’s a something we could focus our prayers on this week: What is it that gets in the way? As we do that, unlike the characters of the Gospels who ask “all the wrong questions”, maybe we can start realizing what a good and brave question to ask Jesus could look like!