Meditations from Pastor Drews

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Help my unbelief

While Jesus, Peter, James and John were returning from the experience of the
Transfiguration, the rest of the disciples were trying to deal with a problem. A man had
brought his son to the other disciples to be healed – which they were unable to
accomplish. All the disciples had previously been able to cast out demons in Jesus’
name, but this one had them stumped. We are given the impression that the crowd
became impatient with them. Jesus’ response to the problem is to comment on “this
faithless generation,” and to wonder aloud how much longer he will be with them. He
apparently senses the lack of faith among the group.


After the disciples’ failure to heal his son, the man isn’t sure that Jesus himself will
manage it. His request is made with almost a shrug of the shoulders: “But if you can do
anything…” Jesus teasingly rebukes him, and bounces the question right back: “If you
can…” This puts the man on the spot. It’s now his turn to speak: “I believe; help my
unbelief!”


Jesus rebukes the spirit; it leaves the boy apparently dead, but Jesus “…lifted him
up, and he arose.” Both words are regular resurrection words in the New Testament.
When we face crises ourselves, pray with whatever faith we may have: “I believe;
help my unbelief!”

The Kingdom of God is the solution

Jesus said, “What goes into you from outside can’t make you unclean. What makes you unclean is what comes out from inside.” Mark 7:15

Some of the most famous martyr stories in Jesus’ world were about Jewish people who had been tortured and killed for refusing to eat unclean food, particularly pork. That’s why Jesus had to use parables. It was the only way he could say some of the most devastating things he wanted to say.

Jesus expected his disciples to get the point, but they are slow on the uptake. Only when they get back in the house does Jesus explain. He hadn’t been talking about food that goes in the stomach; he’s talking about what comes out of the heart (the real need of humans for a deeper purity of motive). Even though we know that the actual heart pumps blood, not motivations, most cultures talk about motives coming from the heart.

Jesus insists that good and bad external and physical actions come from internal and spiritual sources, and that human motivation is the real problem.

Interestingly, Jesus says nothing at this stage about his proposed cure for the disease he has diagnosed. We are left to infer it. As in a later passage, [Mark 10:5 (ESV) 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.] the assumption Mark clearly wants us to make is this: Jesus is offering a cure for the problems of the heart, for the springs of motivation that result in wicked thoughts and deeds. He doesn’t only show us what’s wrong but he also hints at a solution.

The Kingdom of God is the solution. The Jews in the Middle East had for centuries been surrounded and infiltrated by paganism, both as cultural force and as military might. What more natural than to reinforce the purity codes which said, “We are Jews! We are different! We don’t live like you do!”

However, what Jesus suggests is that the kingdom of God meant throwing open the doors of God’s people to anyone and everyone who would repent and believe. Mark’s little comment [“Thus he declared all foods clean.” Mk 7:19b] is his little comment to his own Christian community. The old Jewish laws about clean and unclean foods, laws which divided Jew from Gentile even though they were in theory now one in Christian faith, were irrelevant. Jesus’ basic point is that purity laws, including food laws, don’t actually touch the real human problem, and that that is what the kingdom of God addresses. Jesus brought the old scriptures, the whole covenant with Israel, to a new completion, a new fulfilment.

The scriptures spoke of purity, and set up codes as a signpost to it; Jesus was offering the reality. When we arrive at the destination, we don’t need the signposts any more, not because they were worthless but precisely because they were correct. The starting point is to realize that the Jewish scriptures aren’t to be seen as a timeless code of behavior, but as the story which leads to Jesus. The deeper truths to which they pointed has now arrived.

Obeying God's Word over traditions

Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees are debating a highly complex and developed system of Jewish purity regulations at the time of Jesus . All societies had purity laws of one sort or another; our children today are taught when and how to wash their hands to prevent infection and disease, and any restaurant owner has a very strict code of hygiene. So, what’s the problem? Why would anyone grumble about purity laws?

First, we need to distinguish the surface issue from the underlying issue. The question Jesus was asked was about purity; but the first answer he gave was about people obeying human traditions rather than God’s word; and he gave an example.

The debate between Jesus and the Pharisees was between two different ways of understanding what it meant to be a good Jew in the first century. This wasn’t just about doctrine or what we would call ‘ethics’, but about political agendas as well.

The charge Jesus levels against the Pharisees and legal experts is that, by teaching as fundamental law what is in fact only human custom rather than divine revelation, they are guilty of hypocrisy. They are claiming to be teachers of God’s truth and law, but in fact they are only teaching human traditions.

To make his point, Jesus reminds them of a clever way in which a tradition, or custom, was being used to enable people to get around their financial obligations to their parents. Like a cunning tax accountant finding a loophole in the law which enables someone to get away without paying any tax at all, the legal experts had found a way in which someone, by declaring their property to belong to God, can be free of all further obligation to their parents. Hypocrisy indeed: it was God who commanded the duty to parents in the first place, and officially ‘giving the money to God’ actually makes a mockery of the God they are claiming to honor.

The wider issue for Jesus and the Pharisees was: who speaks for God today? Who is offering a way of life which honors the God who spoke through scripture (something Jesus assumes throughout)?

The Pharisees had built up over two centuries an agenda which was both political and religious. The two went together. The traditions they had developed meant that scripture was being interpreted and applied in a particular direction, supporting a particular program. Jesus was challenging the very basis on which the Pharisees had built up their ‘traditions.’

Jesus’ argument for what He was doing was that it was the fulfilment of scripture. Go His way, and we got scripture thrown in. Go the Pharisees’ way, and scripture – supposedly the basis for tradition, but actually often undermined by it – would lose out.

King David and the Philistines

One of the most moving, and often forgotten, stories about King David concerns the time when he was fighting the Philistines, who had occupied his native town of Bethlehem. Among David’s fiercely loyal fighting men he had three who were renowned for their bravery and their readiness to do whatever the king might ask. When David and his men were pinned down one day, David longed for a drink, and said out loud how much he would like to have water from the well at Bethlehem – which was of course inaccessible due to the Philistines. But that didn’t stop his three heroes. Off they went, broke through the Philistine army, got water from the well at Bethlehem and brought it back to David.

But David didn’t drink it. His shrewd sense of political judgment was even sharper than his thirst. “God forbid”, he said, “that I should drink the blood of these men, who went at the risk of their lives” (2 Sam.23:17). He didn’t want to be seen to profit from their readiness to put their lives on the line for him. He poured the water out on the ground.

One of the many Jewish regulations about food and drink was that blood was absolutely forbidden (Leviticus 17:10-14). The complex system of kosher butchering has its chief aim that no blood should remain in the animal and so risk being eaten or drunk. And this is why David used the phrase “God forbid that I drink the blood of these men.” To drink this water would be the equivalent of drinking blood. He wouldn’t – he shouldn’t – he couldn’t do it.

Jesus speaks of “drinking his blood” in our Gospel Lesson. He gives us an all-important clue to what he means. If we want to profit from what he’s doing we must “eat my flesh” and “drink my blood.” If we do this we’ll live forever. In the light of the David story, we can say that the deeper meaning of the passage is not that those who believe in him should become cannibals, still less that they should, in “eating” and “drinking” him, break the Jewish law against consuming blood.

What Jesus means is what David meant. David refused to “drink the blood” of his comrades – that is, to profit from the risk of their lives. Jesus, as the true Messiah, is going one better. Jesus will put his own life at risk. He will actually lose it. And his disciples will profit from that death. They will “drink his blood.” They will have their thirst quenched by his death and all that it means.

God is not too small

Jesus’ contemporaries, flabbergasted by what they had just witnessed in the feeding of the five thousand, were about to believe that this Jesus really was the promised Messiah and to start a “Jesus-for-king” movement that would put Jesus on the throne and establish Israel as a great and powerful nation once more. Jesus then set about to disabuse their foolish, fanciful notions of his Messianic ministry and attempted to tell them something of what it really meant to believe in him, to embrace him as their Messiah, and follow him as their King.

As with the people of Jesus’ day, so our concept of what it means to believe in, worship, and follow Jesus is often too small, too immature. What our Lord is saying, in today’s terms, is that the key to authentic Christianity is faith and commitment. The disciples never really understood this until after Jesus’ resurrection; some of us still have to discover it. The faith and fervor of those first followers of Jesus, the devotion and drive manifested in the waking hours of the church, are hard to come by in our generation. 

The Christianity that some of us have been a part of is a kind of streamlined, plush-lined facsimile of the real thing, a kind of defensive, crawling-into- our-holes-to-lick-our-wounds Christianity, an escapism, a running away from reality, a place of refuge and hiding. The soft faith that characterizes the religion of our day is obviously not sponsored by Jesus but is the invention of the minds of men and women who want the pearl without paying the price; who don’t really understand that there is a price to pay, a battle to fight, a life to lose, in the great business of following Jesus.

Maybe our God is too small, a sort of spiritual concoction that offers no threat to our self-centeredness. We do well to ask for forgiveness for making our God too small.

Thoughts on a hot summer day

It was told to me through a friend’s writing that there is a fundamental difference between giving gifts to one’s children and giving gifts to one’s parents.

Gifts are meant to delight our children. To give glee and laughter, the fun of sensation, discovery, and games.
Or if the gift must be some useful thing, then it’s meant to educate the child, or to train, nourish, clothe, or keep him or her.

In either case, as much as we may love to give a gift, gifts to the child come of a parent’s duty. They come of love, too, certainly; but we choose. We decide what’s best – or else what’s permissible. And so we ought. It is our business to care for our children, and gifts are one element of that responsibility.

As parents we initiate the process – hoping they get the idea, of course, that selflessness and kindness and concern for others are all good things, worthy of imitation. We continue to teach them even when we give them things they do not need, things for their delight.

But to parents and grandparents we give back. They are the ones who initiated the giving long ago by giving first to us. In fact, they will likely need nothing we might give them. And if they do not need the thing we give them, then it is the giving itself which is significant. It is a remembering of things past. It is a closure to a love which they began, a solemn and holy circle. It is, therefore, wholeness to a relationship.

Giving gifts to our parents and grandparents is meant to honor them. It declares them honorable. It acknowledges by a visible act their worth. It enshrines them. They are revealed as the finest gift first given by God unto us, their children; and their earlier kindness now is elevated before ourselves and our community.

The giving of the gift says how important children, parents and grandparents are; how important they have been.

Walking on water

This Gospel reading from Mark has produced through the centuries a kind of good- humored or sometimes cynical disbelief. “Walking on water” has entered common usage as a metaphor for something utterly incredible. Read as gospel, however, the reading offers strong comfort to fearful disciples.

Our Gospel reading for Sunday includes two distinct units: Jesus’ walking on the water and the report of many healings at Gennesaret. Both tell of miracles, yet in each case other elements are significant for understanding.

The destination of the crossing of the Sea of Galilee is Bethsaida on the northeastern shore. The actual landing occurs at Gennesaret on the northwestern shore of the lake. Not until chapter 8 will we read of their arrival in Bethsaida, where Jesus heals a blind man.

The expression of Mark, “made his disciples get into the boat” indicates a firm intention on the part of Jesus to be alone to pray. The order to depart suggests that then and now the Lord sends his disciples into situations of danger where their faith will be tested. It is clear that, as the story opens, the disciples are in trouble and do not know that Jesus is aware of it, while Jesus, though absent and in communion with God, knows their distress and moves to their support. The miraculous appearance of Jesus, unrecognized, walking on the water; the terror of the disciples; the words “It is I” and “have no fear”’ and finally the verb “pass by,” lets us know that this is a story of an epiphany, a mind and eye-opening revelation for the disciples

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