One of the features of the early, 1st century Church we can’t have missed as we’ve heard the readings in our worship over these weeks of Eastertide is uncertainty. The disciples continued to meet together for prayer and fellowship, but firstly, they were chastened by the memory of their Lord’s brutal crucifixion and the experience of having failed him. Secondly, even after ‘the third day’, the gradual awareness that Christ was risen spread… yes, joy, but also startlement. His appearances in their midst wrong-footed them at every turn, and the mixed emotion this drew is summed up well by the Gospel writer St Luke who, after the risen Lord has appeared and shown them – and invited them to touch – his hands and feet, describes the disciples in a telling phrase: ‘And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered…’ . But it’s the Gospel of Mark – generally thought to be the first to have been written – that seems to reflect this complex picture consistently throughout its pages.
The starting point of that instruction by Jesus in today’s Gospel from Mark is as he and the disciples are coming out of the Temple in Jerusalem. One disciple remarks on the grandeur of its buildings, leading Jesus to prophecy starkly that those same buildings will all be thrown down and destroyed (as indeed they were, by the Romans in the year 70). Later, when they all ask him when this will come about, and how they will know. Jesus prefaces his explanation by saying, ‘Take heed lest any deceive you’. Though Mark’s account of this prophecy is, as with many others of Jesus’ sayings, virtually duplicated by Matthew and Luke in their own Gospels, this practical realism – even scepticism – is a characteristic of Jesus throughout Mark’s portrayal of him. In spite of its brevity (or maybe because of it), Mark has traditionally been the least popular of the Gospels because of its comparative terseness – with fewer of the recorded miracles and less of the conventional teaching included within it, its puzzling air of secrecy, and the repeated failure of the disciples to understand Jesus. Scholars have suggested variously that his Gospel is written for a church which, in the wake of the rapid spread of the faith to the Gentiles recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, had perhaps become too intoxicated by success, and the sensational, and was now baffled again by failures and opposition as it came under persecution. Rowan Williams observes that the Greek word at the very opening of Mark (translated as ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’) can also carry the meaning of ‘the first principal’, which might imply a stripping-back to the foundations. In a commentary on Mark, Williams suggests that we are meant to identify with the confusion and bafflement of the first disciples – maybe to bring to our reading and hearing of Mark our own dismay at the state of the world around us and the disunity of the church in our own day.
The cross is of course central to all the Gospels, but particularly so in Mark – about one third of his is taken up with the events of the last week of Jesus’ life. Lord Williams invites us to imagine living as Christians in the trouble spots of the world now and what it might be like to read the Gospel of Mark there, and he writes:-
‘These are the sorts of people for whom Mark was writing; writing to reinforce a faith in the God who does not step down from Heaven to solve problems but who is already in the heart of the world, holding the suffering and pain in himself and transforming it by the sheer indestructible energy of his mercy.’
Throughout Mark we are reminded of the complete ‘otherness’ of the Way of Jesus Christ from the ways of the world, and we’re therefore discouraged from ever imagining that we completely ‘get it’. The economy we are invited to live by is not of some plan for growth and prosperity (however necessary such things may be in commerce and government), but simply that of the Spirit of God – the Holy Ghost. As we heard just now, even those about to face persecution were told: ‘take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye’. We may well wonder at the abundance of faith that would really take. ‘Premeditation’ may not be the solution, but Jesus made clear by his teaching and his own example that prayer is the currency of the divine economy. In the Gospel’s first chapter he strides into Galilee ‘preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God’, saying that the kingdom ‘is at hand’ and calling people to repentance. Before long he announces to his disciples ‘Unto you it is given to know the mystery of’ that kingdom – a kingdom which is not of this world, in which repentance completely alters our perspective on living and changes our values. So it is that, when ‘he that shall endure unto the end’ is commended by Jesus at the close of this morning’s Gospel, that ‘enduring’ consists not in grimly bearing all that life deals to us and simply hoping for it to get better, but in praying daily for his kingdom to come and waiting on his Spirit.