Sunday 6 June, 2021, Trinity 1
What is this house that Jesus wants to establish? What is the kingdom of God?
Jesus is rather grumpy in today’s Gospel. ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ this certainly isn’t! The Jesus we encounter in Mark 3:20–35 is harsh, austere, and impatient. I wonder whether our theology allows us to have a bad tempered Jesus – a man who didn’t sleep well the night before, or was simply hungry, and as a result, just a bit irritable. That’s an interesting Christological question to ponder, particularly if we have a tendency to overweight Jesus’ divinity!
In this passage, Jesus ignores his family. And instead of responding to the scribes with a patient and empathetic response, he shreds their arguments with clever parables. He accuses them of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit — an ‘unforgiveable’ sin. As an aside, this phrase has caused anguish for many people throughout the centuries – I’ve had people asking me whether they have committed the unforgiveable sin? My response is that God never refuses to forgive… there are no limits to God’s mercy, love and forgiveness. Perhaps it’s something to do with the hardening of the heart of a person so that they become indisposed to seek forgiveness.
But back to today’s Gospel. Without wanting to soften the passage, how can we make sense of it? One suggestion is that Jesus is grappling with his own identity, which is just forming and changing as his ministry starts. Perhaps he’s asking the sort of questions that immigrants and their children do when they arrive in a new country: Who am I? Who are my people? To whom do I belong? Where should my loyalties lie? Perhaps Jesus is redefining his identity. And when one does this — whether in a family or in a religious institution — it can be provocative.
Picture the scene. Outside the house stand the people who might be considered the insiders — Jesus’ own family and the religious professionals. The religious ones think they know how God works, and it doesn’t look like right. Inside the house sit the outsiders — the misfits, the rejects, the tax collectors, the prostitutes. They’re not interested in institutional religion. They have largely been shunned by Temple faith – they are considered too dirty to enter the sacred space of the Temple. So, they aren’t particularly interested in that sort of religion. They just need love, a chance of redemption, and of a new start. And they have found it in a man who shows compassion, heals the sick and feeds the hungry. And in the midst of this motley group? Right in the centre of the sick, the insane, the deviant, the hungry, the unorthodox and the unwashed? There sits Jesus saying, ‘This is my family’.
This is a radical turning things upside down. And it’s no wonder it produces such a stark conflict. Jesus is expressing a change of perspective. Outside is in, and inside is out. What’s more, the people least likely to get it are the ones who consider themselves the most knowledgeable and the most religious. It’s not difficult to see how the conflict will soon take a serious and deadly turn for Jesus.
Next week marks the fourth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower tragedy in which 72 people died, just a mile from here. We will be ringing the church bells at 7.30pm to commemorate that day. I hope that the ongoing Public Inquiry will get to the truth of all that led up to the fire at Grenfell Tower and that justice will enable true reconciliation and healing.
On the day of the tragedy, on 14 June 2017, and in the aftermath of the fire, we saw something remarkable happen. There was a period in which we gained a glimpse of a different way; we experienced a sense not of us and them but something of what Jesus was expressing: ‘This is our family’.
We saw and experienced a sense of tribal barriers collapsing. The barriers based on social background, ethnicity, and religion: these seemed to evaporated as many of us and other communities offered a helping hand. Deep down, many of us sensed a well of compassion, recognising that these were our fellow human beings in desperate need.
Various faith centres – Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Jew – as well as community centres with people of no religious faith – we immediately opened our doors and offered clothes, food, and water, as well as a space to pray and reflect, and to provide a listening ear for those in pain to tell their tragic accounts.
In the response, we saw a glimpse of what a more compassionate society could be like. This was a concrete expression of the kingdom of God. The sort of house that Jesus wants to see built. A place that is more spacious, more welcoming, and more beautiful than anyone can imagine. A house where tribal barriers are not put up to exclude or marginalise. A house where people are loved and valued and listened to. We here in the United Benefice must believe in and work for this house, that it will be a house of healing for all.
Reference : Debie Thomas, Sunday June 10, 2018