Magazine letter September 2024

A Nebraska banker whose bank went into failure during the depression came home and told his wife that they were going to lose everything. She said, “what shall we do?” He replied, “maybe we should pray.” She said, “Has it come to that?”

Freedom – it’s all about freedom. Release from imprisonment, from behind the prison wall; freedom to love. The narrator of the section of the Song of Songs we heard this morning is inside her parent’s property, kept for safety’s sake, kept for the demands of propriety. Her parents will find her a match, they will decide who the appropriate suitors are to be. But she has other ideas – as does her beloved.

Our Old Testament reading today recalls the consecration of the Jerusalem Temple by King Solomon. The purpose of the Temple, at its best, was as a sacred place of God for all people. However, locating God in one place is problematic; God is both transcendent and imminent, beyond all things and close by.

It’s very physical this Christianity thing. Sometimes I like to pretend it’s all rather esoteric, and spiritual. But then we read something like that and we realise that Christianity is all about incarnation, about God alongside us… in this world and with this world – a part of this world. 

So we continue the story of David and it is not for the faint-hearted. Still, at least the rape of Tamar has been missed out, as has the successful beginning of the coup d’état staged by David’s third son Absalom. David is forced to run and his cause seems lost. Only through the loyalty of his “old guard” and with much slaughter is the kingdom won back.

The inadequacy of the disciples is a constant theme in Mark’s Gospel, their weakness of faith, their propensity to get the wrong end of the stick, their hope for power and eventually glory, their depressing similarity to the rest of us. And yet Jesus’ never gives up on them, even at the end when they have run away and left him to his fate, his resurrection message sent through the young man in white is addressed to them. “I am going ahead of you into Galilee, you will see me there” – business as usual, back to work, the daily work of living and proclaiming the gospel.

John’s crowd ask the wrong questions, they are looking for grapes on a gooseberry bush. They think they have seen a miracle, or heard of one, and they want more. Jesus must put them right. He doesn’t talk in physical terms, the physical is only there to reveal the spiritual. He talks in metaphor because there is no other language to use. The food of which he speaks stands for an experience which his hearers have not had and cannot understand.