We do not lose heart

The Revd Dr William Lamb
Second Sunday after Trinity

10.30am

Choral Eucharist

2 Cor. 4.13-5.1     Mark 3.20-35

There is a wonderful novel by Nicholas Montserrat called The Kappilan of Malta. It describes the life of a parish priest on the island of Malta in the course of the second world war. He was something of a disappointment to his family, he didn’t really get on in the higher echelons of the Church, he remained a faithful parish priest for his entire ministry.

His church was bombed in the first war-time bombing, so that he withdrew to the catacombs, the tunnels and caves under the island. He was joined there by his parishioners, seeking safety and refuge. And yet, although he thought of himself as a failure, his ministry came to be valued by many people, not because he embraced the values of worldly success, but because in the words of one character, ‘he gave us heart’, ‘he gave us heart’.

That was the phrase that came to mind as I read the epistle set for today from St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. With characteristic boldness, St Paul writes to a somewhat battered, beleaguered community in Corinth, a community wrestling with conflict, riven by factions, uncertain of the future. He says simply this: ‘We do not lose heart’. And the reason he can say this so confidently is because of the hope of the resurrection. The promise that God will ‘make all things new’ enables him to confront the challenges of his day, not with fear and anxiety, but with faith and hope.

And this, in a sense, provides the key to that rather curious gospel reading for today. This is one of the places in Mark, where his usual breathless urgency and clarity of expression – ‘and immediately….and immediately…’ suddenly seems rather opaque. People think that Jesus has gone just a little bit stir crazy: ‘When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’ Others were going even further: ‘the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons’. There follows this curious sequence of puzzling parables about Satan casting out Satan, and plundering a strong man’s house.

What do these sayings mean? The language seems so strange to us. Do we live in a world inhabited by ‘demons’?  Do we believe that human agency can be propelled or foiled by a hidden world of angels and demons? Can we use a word like ‘possession’ to refer not to our rapacious desire for more wealth but to a sense that the human subject is no longer in control? Can we imagine a situation in which our capacity for taking action or making decisions has been taken over by some other power, beyond our control?  Or, when life seems to be spinning out of control, do we need to face our demons?   

When put like that… there is perhaps some resonance with our own experience. When the New Testament speaks of demons and suggests that in his ministry Jesus is overthrowing ‘demonic forces’, perhaps these writers are talking about control – the control of human life by forces, often political, social and economic, which stunt human growth and freedom, alienating individuals from each other and from their own true humanity.

One of the most important and neglected theologians of the twentieth century is a man called William Stringfellow. A lay person and a devout Episcopalian, he had been a leader of the postwar ecumenical student movement. Listening to stories from those involved in the Confessing Church in Germany and their resistance to the Nazi regime led him to embrace a life of radical Christian discipleship. Stringfellow trained as a lawyer, living and working in Harlem, often taking on pro bono cases, working among black and ethnic minorities. A gay man, he was a vigorous opponent of the Vietnam War and an ardent supporter of the ordination of women. His writings are extraordinarily prescient and prophetic.

Early in his forties, Stringfellow fell seriously ill. He almost died. He says: ‘through the danger of a protracted illness, I realized that death – the death which so persistently threatened me, the death so aggressive in my body, the death signified by unremitting pain, the death which took the appearance of sickness – was familiar to me. I had encountered this same death elsewhere, in fact everywhere. The exposure to death of which I had total recall during the illness had occurred a decade or so earlier while I was working as a lawyer in East Harlem. In that urban ghetto my daily routine of cases and causes forced me to contend with death institutionalized in authorities, agencies, bureaucracies, and multifarious principalities and powers. Slowly I learned something which folk indigenous to the ghetto know: namely, that the power and purpose of death are incarnated in institutions and structures, procedures and regimes – the Department of Welfare, the Mafia or the police, the Housing Authority or the social work bureaucracy, the hospital system or the banks, liberal philanthropy or corporate real estate speculation. In the wisdom of the people of the East Harlem neighbourhood, such principalities are identified as demonic powers because of the relentless and ruthless dehumanization which they cause.’(5) Stringfellow says that the language of the Bible regarding ‘principalities – the ruling authorities, the angelic powers, the demons, and the like – sound strange in modern society’(60), but when we hear these words, we must remember that they speak just as much of the reality of our lives, for these words describe the institutions and agencies which rob human beings of their dignity and life of its beauty and goodness. Just for a moment consider the phrase ‘hostile environment’.

Perhaps this pandemic has opened our eyes to the presence and power of death – and I am not just talking about the daily statistics of people who have lost their lives. We may have thought that this virus was a great leveller – but the reality is that those who have been most vulnerable to the disease are more likely to live in poverty, or to live in inadequate housing, or to find employment so precarious that they simply cannot afford to self-isolate if they get sick, or to be denied access to life-giving vaccines because of national or commercial interests. In the course of this pandemic, the deadliness of death has been disclosed to us.

Stringfellow remarks that so many church people, especially those of a white, bourgeois background, have for generations been furnished with an impression of Jesus as a person who went briefly about teaching love and doing good deeds: gentle Jesus, pure Jesus, meek Jesus, honest Jesus, peaceful Jesus, clean Jesus, virtuous Jesus, innocuous Jesus. Of course, then we struggle to make sense of the passion narrative, for it appears that Jesus is so nice and innocuous that, inexplicably, he is crucified for it. Then we wonder why people are baffled by our proclamation of the gospel.

Stringfellow reminds us that in the ministry of Jesus, there is a profound contest between life and death. With breathless urgency, Mark describes the ways in which Jesus casts out demons, feeds the hungry, heals the sick, risking everything in order to challenge and confront the principalities and powers – and he is crucified for it. But Stringfellow also reminds us that if the gospel is a story about death, it is also a story about resurrection. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the gospel of life. Through this gospel, we learn that death is not the last word.

In the face of the deadliness of death and in the moments of greatest need in the lives of his parishioners, the Kappilan of Malta was able to bear witness to the power and the mystery of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Christian mystery does not offer us a rather vacuous optimism that says that ‘things can only get better’. It offers us hope precisely when things appear to be getting much worse. And we can be hopeful precisely because of the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection – this is the mystery which ‘gives us heart’. It is this mystery which we discover at the heart of the eucharist. It is this mystery which gives us the confidence to say with St Paul that ‘we do not lose heart’ for, as St Paul says in another letter, ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’