a man in a hurry

  

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
(February 18^th) 2024

 

READINGS

1 Peter 3:18-22

Psalm 25:1-5      

Mark 1: 9-15

 

Back in the 1980s an actor named Alex McCowan had a huge run of successes performing a recitation of Mark’s Gospel account around the world. His venues included both the Edinburgh Festival and the Festival of Sydney – goodness knows where else. Unfortunately, although I was in Sydney for the festival the week he performed I was unable to get a seat - and that despite my brother being on staff at the festival - because it was sold out.

Even at the time, and it was around the mid ’80s, it struck me as both amazing and extraordinary that in a fiercely secular city at a fiercely secular festival a recitation of one of the books of the Bible would draw sellout crowds – as indeed it was doing around the world, including New York.

And yet a part of me gets it. Mark, and I am conservative enough to see no reason why he may not have been the companion of Paul mentioned just eight times in the New Testament, is a man of urgent passion There is a tendency amongst biblical scholars in my more liberal tradition automatically to assume that whoever is traditionally considered to have been the author of a biblical book probably wasn’t, as you can see by my notes on our reading from 1 Peter. Sometimes I think the scholars are right, sometimes I think they are wrong, and I am arrogant enough to trust my own judgement.

But I digress. Mark, unfortunate enough to be the companion of Paul fell out with the prickly pastor. Many people did. Yet it is a sermon in its own right to know that Mark and Paul found ways to work together despite their differences, resolved their disputes, became powerful forces in the proclamation of gospel hope.

Let us leave that thought there. But we are I think invited to explore the question why did Mark’s gospel account, as admittedly recited by a great actor, play to packed houses around the English-speaking world? And in our reading today we are given one of the most powerful examples of a reason. There is no pause for breath. Jesus is baptised. Commissioned to do God’s work, and immediately sent out to the place of pain, self-doubt and suffering. As it happens pain, self doubt and suffering uh exactly where the story will end. Or, depending on our understanding of the end of Mark’s gospel account, where the story will not end. But of that more in the weeks and months to come.

Mark the writer is in a terrible hurry. He is an instinctive storyteller. He would not top the grade in English classes. John and Luke in particular we are masterful creative literary minds. Matthew too, though perhaps a little more given to hell fire and fury. No, Mark is the sort of figure I often saw around campfires in Australia, perhaps more than New Zealand at least in Pākehā culture, telling yarns. And a yarn, far from being untruth, is often the most powerful vehicle of truth, as Jesus demonstrates in his telling of parables.

Mark is in a hurry. Forty-one times he uses the adverb “immediately.” Were I his English teacher I would mark him down for overuse. But I was not and am not, and thank God the gospel is not dependent on literary snobs. Mark was in a hurry. Perhaps like many of the early Christians this was because he had a pressing sense of urgency, an expectation that the predicted return of Jesus would come soon. We may sneer at that, and many critics of Christianity do, but I fear we do so at some considerable risk. Either speaking in a faith-based way, or in the shadow of nuclear, environmental, economic, or astronomical disaster, or in the shadow of our own mortality, we are never far from the sword of Damocles.

Mark was in a hurry. He tells of a Jesus who is sent from what for most people is something of a peak experience, a rite of passage, albeit one conducted by his somewhat dour cousin John, sent into the harshest, most inhospitable places of geography or of the human psyche. He is sent there to wrestle with demons, however we understand that.

But there in that wrestling, we begin to see the kernel of Mark’s urgent message. Neither demons nor darkness nor death are permitted the final say. We will come to the closing remarkable words of Mark’s original story in several weeks’ time, but many of us will be aware that his ending was so shocking that at least two early Christian writers edited and amended it. Badly, I would dare to say, and it seems to me that their much weaker endings stand in the scriptures as a reminder to us of how we should not water down the shocking news of resurrection.

But that for another time, too. For now, Mark simply wants us to know that it is in the most desolate human spaces that God generates light and love and faith and hope. That, as the author of Psalm 139 put it so eloquently, there is no place, even the darkest depths of hell, where God and God-light are not. Jesus demonstrates the impetus of God to generate hope even in the darkest and deepest of trials.

And as bearers of Christ and Christ light we are called to do so likewise.

40 years after the late Alex McCowan’s recitation of Mark’s gospel account a new actor, Stefan Smart, has been doing the same thing. Like his predecessor, Smart has performed to sellout crowds around the world. Smart has gone a step further and produced a film version of his recitation. That too has taken many secular festivals by storm. It is our task to learn how in a sceptical age we two might be bearers of the shear urgent unstoppable energy of Christ light.