Persecution

An address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 24th April 2016, the 5th of Easter but celebrated as the Feast of St Mark the Evangelist.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – bless the bed that I lie on.

I learned this simple child’s bed time prayer from my mother, God bless her, when I was just a toddler. I’ve never forgotten it, and it sprang to mind when I was thinking about St Mark, and what I would say today on his feast day. The prayer names all four evangelists, the four people who wrote the Gospels, through which we learn of Jesus and his teaching. The 2^nd Gospel does not say who wrote it, but according to Papias writing around 100AD the name of the author is Mark – Mark the Evangelist.

St Mark’s is the shortest of the four Gospels. Most scholars believe it was the first to be written, perhaps shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD following a Jewish uprising against Rome. Both Matthew and Luke seem to have had his text in front of them when they wrote theirs, since they include many of the same incidents, often in the same words. So we owe special thanks to Mark – without his work so much of Jesus’s life and teaching would be lost to us.

What do we know about Mark? Very little for certain! Two people called Mark are named in the New Testament.

·         First there is John Mark who is mentioned several times in the Acts of the Apostles.  He is the reason for the sharp disagreement between Paul and Barnabas we heard about in today’s 1^st reading (Acts 15: 35-41).

·         Second there is Mark the cousin of Barnabas mentioned in some of Paul’s epistles as a companion of Paul’s during his imprisonment in Rome.

These two Marks are traditionally identified with Mark the Evangelist, though not all scholars agree. Mark – Marcus in Latin – was one of the commonest names in the Roman Empire. We simply can’t be certain that these are the same person as the Evangelist.

Our Egyptian Coptic brothers and sisters in Christ have a tradition that Mark was born in Cyrene in Libya and was martyred in Alexandria, where his relics were venerated. In 828 the reputed relics were stolen by two Venetian merchants and taken to Venice. When St Mark’s Basilica was being built in 1063 they couldn’t be found – until, that is, the Saint himself pointed to the place by sticking an arm out of a pillar.

Some of these traditions are doubtful – and some of them downright fanciful – but does that really matter?

Surely, all that really matters is what Mark tells us about Jesus, and how that speaks to us today.

So let us turn to reflect on what Mark tells us in today’s 3^rd reading (Mark 13: 5-13). The context is this: Jesus has just foretold the destruction of Herod’s magnificent new Temple in Jerusalem. The disciples Peter, James, John and Andrew take him aside to ask privately, ‘How will we know when this will happen?’ Then Jesus replies in the words we have heard. Both Matthew and Luke have almost exactly the same story in their Gospels – no doubt they both got it from Mark.

Jesus knows his likely fate – to be killed by the authorities as an agitator.

He is sure he will rise again, and that his disciples will continue his saving mission. But he realises it is inevitable that there will be false leaders too who will distort his message. So he begins by warning them, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, “I am he!”’ Christians today must still take care to distinguish between imposters and those who really do come in Christ’s name.  In today’s 2^nd reading (Ephesians 4: 7-16) St Paul suggests a test we can apply: do they equip the community of believers, the church, for the work of ministry as the body of Christ?

Jesus knows that his disciples are worried for the future.

Stories abounded then - as they do now and have always done - about terrible events in different parts of the world. It would be all too easy for his disciples to give up the hope they need to continue his mission. So he reassures them in these words, ‘When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs’ - the start of something new.

Jesus’s words send a shiver down my back, as I think of the frightful news that fills the media – now brought to us in our living rooms on screens as it happens in full colour. But hasn’t it always been like this? My grandparents lived through the horrors of WW1 trench warfare, armed rebellion and internecine civil war. My parents lived through total war in WW2 and survived to bring me into the world. I have contemplated nuclear annihilation during the Cold War and made pathetic plans to protect my family. My children fear dastardly terrorist attacks and are terrified by the prospect of catastrophic climate change.

These fears of ours and people in every age are no more than a sign that the great work of building God’s kingdom is in progress now. All of us who are Jesus’s disciples are called to play their part in it. Christians must not let go of hope for the future.

Jesus’s disciples must proclaim the good news to all people.

But Jesus knows they will meet resistance, and some will face persecution. ‘Beware’, he says, ‘for they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them.’ Nobody can say that Jesus is other than realistic and brutally honest with his disciples. He understands that religious minorities are often made scapegoats, as the first Christians were.  Christians are not being persecuted in Ireland today – but they are in many other places. And not just Christians: other religious minorities are also suffering, among them Muslims.

If this happens to you, says Jesus, ‘do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.’ Jesus recommends to his disciples that when they face interrogation for their faith they should confront their persecutors directly and frankly. Please God this will never happen to me, but it is surely good advice – tell the truth as the Spirit moves you, as there is nothing to be gained by dissembling and lying at a show-trial.

Some will even face betrayal and death for their faith. ‘Brother will betray brother to death’, says Jesus, ‘and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name.’ But there are worse things than death for a Christian. Worse than death would be the shame of denying our faith. ‘The one who endures to the end will be saved’, says Jesus. If death is to be our fate we should face it bravely, in the knowledge that through it we enter God’s heavenly kingdom, where we will meet Jesus, who died on the cross to show us how it is done.

Let me finish with a prayer for those persecuted and martyred for their faith:

Loving Father God, your Son Jesus Christ suffered and died for us.

In his resurrection he restores life and peace in all creation.

Comfort, we pray, all victims of persecution and those oppressed by their fellow humans.

Remember in your kingdom those who have died for their faith.

Lead the oppressors towards compassion and give hope to the suffering.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Finding life by losing it

An address given at Templederry and Killodiernan on the 2nd Sunday of Lent, 8 March 2009

‘Get behind me, Satan! Get thee behind me, Satan!’

What a shock it must have been for Peter to hear Jesus address him in these cutting words, as recorded by Mark (8:31-38) in the reading we have just heard.

Peter had been the first to say, ‘You are the Messiah’, when Jesus had asked ‘Who do you say that I am?’ But Mark tells us Jesus then ‘began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering … and be killed’. Peter realised that Jesus was referring to himself, but he was quite unable to understand this teaching. Like most Jews of his day, he expected the promised Messiah to come as a great conqueror to destroy the gentiles – including the hated Romans - and to rule over a revived Kingdom of Israel. The Messiah would vanquish his foes, not be killed by them! So Peter remonstrates with Jesus: ‘Look here, Jesus, that can’t be right!’ he says - or words to that effect. Then Jesus turns on him and likens him to Satan – and he does so in front of all the others!

Why was Jesus so hard on Peter, his great friend and disciple? Jesus knew that God’s way was not the way of violent earthly conquest, but the way of self-sacrificing love. He needed to teach Peter and the other disciples to change their thinking. I feel sure Jesus didn’t want to die a painful death, but he surely realised this was the inevitable outcome of what God called him to do, and he was determined to face it bravely. But Peter tries to argue him out of it, in an echo of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness.

Isn’t this often the way it is? When we have made up our minds what the right thing is to do, even though we know we will suffer for it, our friends and loved ones may try to talk us out of it. The tempter can be the very person dearest to us! Yet we must not allow even the pleading voice of love to stop us from doing God’s will. This surely is what Jesus felt that day – no wonder he responded as he did.

But Jesus immediately seized the moment to show the disciples his way, the way of the cross, how to find life by losing it. As usual, Mark has compressed Jesus’s teaching to a very few words, but it goes to the very heart of our Christian faith. I think it is worth reflecting on it sentence by sentence.

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

Jesus’s honesty is startling isn’t it? No one can ever say Jesus lured them to follow him on false pretences! He does not offer his disciples an easy life or a comfortable way to God. Like other great leaders, he calls us as Churchill did to ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. But again like a real leader, he does not call us to do anything more than he was prepared to do himself.

First Jesus calls us to ‘deny ourselves’, to say no to our own selfish instincts. We must do God’s will, not our own will, to the best of our ability, in all things.

The old tradition of giving something up for Lent is good practice for this, particularly if we turn it into something positive, like giving what we save to a good cause. It’s not too late to make a Lenten resolution if you haven’t done so already!

But more than simply practicing self-denial, Jesus tells us we must be prepared to take real risks – even to risk our very lives – if that is what God, through our conscience, tells us is right.

‘For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.’

Jesus focuses our attention with this great paradox: to save life is to lose it, and vice-versa.

The very essence of life, I think, is in risking it and spending it, not in saving it and hoarding it. If we live cautiously, always thinking first of our own profit, comfort and security, if we make no effort except for ourselves, we are losing life all the time. But if we spend life for others, if we follow Jesus’s way of loving self-sacrifice, we are winning life all the time.

The truth is that the only way in which we can find a life that matters is by losing it in the love of God and the love of our neighbours. That is the way of Jesus, that is the way of God, and that is the way of happiness too.

‘For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?’

I have no doubt that you, like me, can think of people who are outwardly hugely successful, but who in another sense are living a life that is not worth living. In business, they may have sacrificed honour for profit. In politics, they may have sacrificed principle for popularity. In their personal lives, they may have sacrificed their deepest relationships for their own ambitions or desires. Whatever the reason, such people are unlikely to be comfortable inside their own skin, and they often live to regret their bad choices.

It is a matter of values really, isn't it? Jesus is asking us where our values lie. As he says elsewhere, you should store up your treasures in heaven, not on earth, ‘for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’. Our values should be God’s values, as Jesus reveals them to us, not the false values of worldly success.

‘Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’

Jesus knew that many people around him were uncomfortable with what he said and how he behaved. He stood up for the poor, the despised and the rejected, and he was the friend of sinners. And the scribes and the Pharisees – the pious and the respectable - criticised him for it. With these words Jesus warns his disciples not to be ashamed to follow him publicly. For if they are ashamed, how can they expect to share with him and the holy angels in the glory of God’s kingdom?

These same words should also be a warning for us, I think. In Ireland - and in Europe generally - it is becoming rather unfashionable these days to own up to being a Christian. Even if we believe in our heart of hearts, many of us find it easier not to speak openly about it for fear of being mocked or thought less of. In fact, we behave as if we are ashamed of it.

It is a simple truth: we cannot expect to share with Jesus the joy of shaping the world into the place God means it to be, if we are not prepared to stand up and be counted for Jesus and for his message of loving self-sacrifice.

So to sum up, when I reflect on these words recorded by Mark, I hear Jesus’s voice urging me, down through the ages:

To do God’s will, not my own, and to be ready to risk all for it;

To find true life and happiness by losing my life in the service of God and others;

To live my life by God’s values, not the false values of worldly success;

To follow joyfully, fearlessly and without shame, Jesus’s path of loving self sacrifice.

Let us pray that we may all be encouraged to respond to that voice. In the words of St Igantius Loyola:

Teach us, Good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou deservest:
To give, and not to count the cost;
to fight, and not to heed the wounds;
to toil and not to seek for rest;
to labour and not to ask for any reward,
save that of knowing that we do Thy will.
Through Jesus Christ Our Lord,
Amen

Make straight the way!

An address for Advent 2, preached at Templederry & St Mary's Nenagh on 7 Dec 2008

1. Lets listen again to the prophet Isaiah’s beautiful, poetic words in the 1st reading (Isa 40 1:11):

A voice cries out:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.

Of course we know a lot about making highways here in North Tipperary – just think of the new Nenagh to Limerick motorway. Isaiah’s words could almost be an anthem for the National Roads Authority! Great cuttings have been blasted through the hills. Giant machines have moved the spoil to make embankments. Bridges have been built over rivers. All to make the road as gentle and smooth as possible. Workers will continue to labour hard and long to complete it by 2010. I must say though, that I am very disturbed to read how many subcontractors have not been paid what is owed them for their work. I think the authorities have a moral obligation to ensure they are paid as soon as possible - before Christmas I hope.

Roads were not so vast in Isaiah’s time, but it would still have been a gigantic community enterprise to make the roads through the rugged Judean hill country to allow farmers to transport their produce on pack-mules to market in Jerusalem, and to allow pilgrims to travel to the temple on Zion. The roads knit together the Jewish people in the cities of Judah to Jerusalem, to their holy mountain of Zion, not just in a material way, but also in metaphor as a worshiping community.

I feel sure that for Isaiah the way of the Lord was not a road for God to travel to his people, but a road for his people to travel to God.

Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

2. In our 2nd reading, in the very first words of his Gospel (Mark 1:1-8), St Mark recycles this road building metaphor.

John the Baptist is a wild man, wandering about the Judean desert, clothed in camel’s hair, with only a leather bag at his waist, who ate locusts and wild honey, we are told – the very image of an Old Testament prophet! Mark quotes Isaiah to identify him as: The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’

John proclaims ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. And he is very successful to judge by the crowds he gathers. But John is also the self-effacing herald of the coming of another. Claiming no special position for himself, he says: ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.’ He means Jesus of course. And John continues ‘I have baptised you with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’

3. Why did the compilers of the Lectionary - the people who selected the readings we use each Sunday - choose this reading for today?

John’s message of repentance and forgiveness for sin might seem at first sight out of place in this joyful Advent season. In Advent we look forward to Christmas and the great gift that God has given us. God comes to us. He comes in the form of a little child. His parents Mary and Joseph name him Jesus. We rejoice with them at the miracle of his birth. With angels and shepherds and kings we adore him. And we believe he grows up to lead us to God through his loving self-sacrifice. So why spoil the joy with dismal repentance for sin? I think the answer lies in the metaphor of road building.

Yes, God makes the first move. Yes, God comes to us as Jesus. But he does not force himself on us. He does not compel us accept his love. He made us with free will, and we are free to refuse him. But we cannot share in his kingdom unless we make a move in response. That essential move is like building a road to travel to God on. Each one of us must ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ and ‘make his paths straight’. And to do so we must accept John’s baptism for ourselves, by admitting our own sins, by repenting, and by seeking God’s forgiveness.

4. So to conclude:

By the readings they have chosen for us, I think the people who compiled the Lectionary have tried to correct any tendency we may have to be over sentimental in our anticipation of Christmas.

Yes of course we should look forward with joy to Christmas. Let us wonder at the miracle of Mary’s tiny helpless baby. Let us enjoy the stories of the shepherds and the three kings. And let us sing our hearts out with the angels in the beautiful carols we all love so much.

But let us also reflect that the love God shows us at Christmas is no use to us, no use at all, unless we choose to act in response, unless we build a good smooth road on which we may travel to God. John the Baptist has shown us the way by proclaiming his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. All we have to do is to work at it!