Mark 5:21-43

It’s easy to feel we ought to be a little bit heroic in the Christian life. Go the extra mile here, turn the other cheek there; invite the homeless poor to take up lodgings in every spare cupboard in the house.

We easily feel guilty when we say ‘no’ to those in need. Or if we’re not up to saying no, we struggle with all sorts of other feelings of resentment and exhaustion, if we allow the demands of other people to surge ceaselessly over our heads like waves over a drowning man.

In Sunday’s Gospel reading (28th June), Jesus demonstrates a different attitude: in fact, a rigorous and startling setting of boundaries against those who would overwhelm him.

It begins with Jesus getting away from from a scene of exhausting conflict by putting the width of the lake behind him (11 miles!) A great crowd gathers. On some occasions, Jesus draws another boundary, by speaking to them from his boat. Here he stays on the lakeside; and immediately, a new demand. A girl is dying; a father is desperate. Will Jesus come?

The answer is yes, but as Jesus walks along he is pressed by the crowds. Like today’s celebrity, everyone wants a piece of him. Now there is a third demand: the woman with the haemorrhage, seeking healing. Wriggling through the crowd she touches Jesus’ cloak and is healed. Here Jesus stops, and demands to know who has drawn forth his healing power in this way. He is unwilling to let the crowd simply take from him, as if he is some divine dispenser. He draws a boundary: if you want healing, you need to show your face.

While he is still speaking, a fourth demand: to give up his attempt to save the girl, the daughter of Jairus the synagogue ruler. She is dead: “Why trouble the teacher any further?” Pushed around by others’ agendas, Jesus draws a boundary here, too. Ignoring the messengers of doom, and refusing the crowd their wish to follow him, he goes on to Jairus’ house accompanied only by Peter, James and John. Once at the house, still more boundary-setting is required. The hired mourners - wailing melodramatically one minute, laughing at him the next - are kicked out of the house, so that only the child’s mother and father are present. And then the seventh and final boundary is drawn; the ultimate ‘no’. In this final boundary, Jesus says ‘no’ to death itself. ‘Talitha cum’ - little girl, rise. And so she does.

The lines Jesus draws are not so that he can have an easy life: they are drawn because he wants to hold back the crowding demands of others’ agendas, in order to pursue his true vocation. Saying ‘no’ can be awkward, especially when others present their needs as opportunities to do God’s work. But in saying ‘no’ to pressure, we can also be saying ‘yes’ to vocation - the calling of a leisurely, gracious, spacious God.

Ayd has done it again, with a wonderful version of The Beatles’ Taxman as a welcome antidote to the hypocrisy, dissembling and unreality of some of our MPs.

Click the picture and enjoy!

Summer is approaching, and I have to renew my passport. To ensure that the person in my passport photo really is me, I have to get someone to countersign the photo, to swear that the owner of this ugly mug is me, the whole me, and nothing but the me.

Who to ask? The problem is, it can’t just be anyone. I have to find a ‘person of standing’ in the community, such as a professional person: a doctor, a lawyer, a priest.

Or perhaps a banker or an MP? For surely, we all know that professional people are more honest than trades people. Professional people never stretch the rules on their expenses to line their pockets; never take risks with others’ money, and expect huge bonuses in return; never run off with a bank’s assets to enjoy a ‘deserved’ 6-figure pension.

Is my passport-form a vestige of Victorian paternalism, where only old-school-tie professionals were really trustworthy; the rest, hoi polloi? Or perhaps the insistence on the professional caste being required for countersigning is really asking something else - it’s saying: find someone with a lot to lose.

In that case, those professional bankers and politicians who have so outrageously (and so exquisitely legally) had their hands in the till,  should be excluded. Why should we trust them, after all? I would sooner trust the word of cleaner who has tended people’s possessions with complete honesty, or the word of a builder who has held the keys to my house. The obvious fact is that integrity and honesty are not products of any profession; they do not run along class lines. They are virtues of character formed over a lifetime of making moral  choices.

It’s time for the passport forms to be changed. At present, they merely reinforce an outdated class apartheid. Those with power and status are perhaps less trustworthy than those without: they know how to dress up their misdemeanours. Perhaps that’s why Jesus stuck with fishermen?

Hi,

My old web host is packing up for good, and I have been evicted.

I have found a new place to stay with Justhost (highly recommended so far, excellent support, unlimited everything, and a fixed annual cost…)

However, moving the old blog over the Atlantic is proving more than my technically challenged mind can manage - so I’m starting again.

A fresh look, maybe. Perhaps no bad thing.

Please bear with me while I unpack.

While you are waiting, take a look at a wonderful advent blog: love blooms bright

Duncan