Posts Tagged ‘temptations’

Holding on to Jesus

February 3, 2024

Epiphany 5 – 2024

Mark 1:29-39

Marian Free

In the name of God who will not be held or confined. Amen.

The gospel reading set for today raises far more questions than it answers. What looks like a relatively simple healing story, followed by a story of Jesus’ sense of mission is much, much more. You will remember that Jesus has spent time in the synagogue. There he was confronted by a man with an evil spirit.  When he cast out the demon he raised the ire of the leaders of the synagogue because they interpreted the exorcism as ‘work’, something that was forbidden on the Sabbath. 

In today’s reading Jesus leaves synagogue and goes to the home of Simon and Andrew.  On hearing that Peter’s mother-in-law has a fever, Jesus goes to her, lifts her up and the fever is gone. The mother-in-law immediately gets up and serves them. At sunset – when the Sabbath has ended – people (the whole city!) bring the sick and the possessed to be healed by Jesus. We are not told, but we presume that Jesus has some time to sleep, because he gets up before dawn to find somewhere quiet to pray.

The account seems straight forward, but if we look closer we are left wondering about a number of things.

  1. Why, in a patriarchal society, is Peter’s mother-in-law living in the home of Peter and Andrew? If she is a widow, her sons not her daughter would be responsible for her and yet she is here with Peter.  
  2. If Peter has a mother-in-law, then he has a wife who is never mentioned and is presumably left to run a household and care for children while her husband and sole source of support abandons his job and his family to go with Jesus. 

We learn nothing else about Peter’s family life.

  • Another puzzle is this – why does the author say that the woman (Peter’s mother-in-law) got up and served them? Is it to prove that she is completely made well or is something else happening here. Peter’s wife is the host, it would be her role to serve the guests. The woman’s actions make sense if we understand that in the ancient world healing was seen not just as a cure for the physical ill, but as a restoration of the person to the community.  Serving guests would have been a sign of the woman’s full re-integration into the family and the community. That is well and good but why, one might ask, does the author use the word ‘diakonos’ for serve? Diakonos – the word we use for deacon – is used by Mark only for Peter’s mother-in-law, angels, and Jesus. Is this a hint that women had formal liturgical roles in the Marcan community or played a significant role among the disciples?
  • Another Greek word is equally puzzling. Mark uses the word “katadiöxen” when speaking of the disciples looking for Jesus.  This word can be translated in a number of ways – “hunted” (as in our translation), “pursued”, “looked for”, or “searched for”. ‘Hunted’ gives us a sense of the disciples’ urgency. They have woken to find Jesus missing and are anxious to bring him back. By now, they have seen what Jesus can do, and they know that they want to be part of it. As his disciples, they would also have felt a sense of responsibility for all the people of their city who still seek Jesus’ healing power.
  • Lastly, and this is the question I’d like to focus on, is why, when the crowds are searching for Jesus does he insist on abandoning them and moving to another place?

The author gives us the answer. Jesus responds to the disciples: “Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”

“So that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”

Jesus’ primary focus was never on the miraculous, but on the message. It was never about having crowds of adoring fans, but on challenging people to change their lives around. His mission was not to heal, but to proclaim the good news, to teach God’s inclusive, unconditional love and to draw the whole community into a relationship with God that was based not on their observance of the law, but on God’s love for them.  Jesus heals because he can. Jesus heals because he has compassion not because that is what he was sent to do. Jesus casts out demons because they stand between him and his message of love and inclusion. He casts out demons because they hold people in their thrall and keep them separated from the love of God – not because he wants to draw attention to himself. 

Jesus’ mission was never about building his ego as is made clear in the accounts of the wilderness temptations in Matthew and Luke. There, the devil tempts him to turn stones into bread, to jump from the Temple so that the angels can catch him. Jesus resists the temptation to do the showy and obvious – even though that might have been a much quicker way to gain an audience and to build a following. But it is not about him. It is not about what he can do, but about the message he has come to bring.

Jesus knows that some will follow him because of what he has to offer them. He knows too that they will not last the journey.

If we turn Jesus into a miracle worker, we see only the surface. If we want a hero who works magic then we will lose interest when the magic is not in evidence. If we want someone to make everything right, we will fall away when life gets hard.  So when the disciples seek him out and urge him to return, he turns his face away from the easy option. He will not stay and be made a local hero. He will do what he came to do and preach God’s kingdom.

Who is Jesus to you?  Would you like to own and contain him as your personal helper or are you willing to stand on your own two feet, take Jesus’ teaching as your standard and your comfort and let Jesus go so that his message might ring throughout the world?

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No quick fix

February 13, 2016

                                                                       Lent 1 – 2016 – some thoughts                                                                                             Luke 4:1-15

                                                                                                                                                                  Marian Free

In the name of God who asks for all that we have so that God can give us all that we need. Amen.

Some time ago, I had surgery on my foot. As part of the healing process I was to keep off my foot for a fortnight and not drive for six weeks. It has to be said that even with lectures to prepare and movies to watch, two weeks stuck on a couch seemed like forever. Once the pain had diminished, it was tempting to move about to fill in the time in other ways, but in this instance I knew that a “quick” recovery meant doing what was required. So, bored and uncomfortable I stayed on the couch with my foot on a stool and moved about only when absolutely necessary.

It is tempting to cut corners, to avoid the hard yards that a good job requires. At first it might appear that it made no difference that we went back to work too soon, that we used an injured limb before the recommended time, that we didn’t properly prepare the timber before we painted, that we didn’t properly cream the butter and the sugar for our cake. In fact, there will be times that we don’t experience any ill consequences for our failure to do something properly. However, there will be times when the consequences of our failure to follow through are disastrous. A bad paint job will need redoing sooner rather than later, a cake that has not been properly stirred might be lumpy, but a limb that has not properly healed might cause us even worse problems later on, and a return to work when we have not fully recovered from an illness may mean that the infection returns – more virulent than before – and we lose even more time from work than had we been patient in the first place.

Here, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is offered a short cut, a way out of the difficult and painful course that lay before him. The tempter tells him that doesn’t have to be hungry. It would be easy enough for Jesus to turn stones into bread. As the Son of God Jesus he could simply enforce God’s rule, bend the wills of people to his own, there was no need to persuade and encourage. He didn’t have to endure the suffering and pain of the cross when he could simply call on the angels to save him.

Jesus has been driven into the wilderness to reflect on his call and on his role. The temptations are anything but theoretical. They reflect the very real choices that faced Jesus – to fully enter the human experience or to exert the power of his divinity, to impose his will or to draw people to his way of seeing things, to gain attention by being a miracle worker or by working beside people, to try to escape pain and suffering or to place his trust completely in God and believe that the cross would be worth it.

 

Forty days in the wilderness have taught Jesus that near enough would not be good enough and that easy solutions would not achieve the end goal. Jesus knew that people who were impressed by easy miracles would not stick around for the long haul, that loyalty that was forced would be no loyalty at all and that without the cross there would be no resurrection.

Jesus will be a very different sort of Christ from the one whom many expected. His leadership will be marked by service and his victory will look like defeat, but it will only be through his complete submission to God that Jesus will be able to restore the relationship between God and the people of God. So Jesus refuses to be drawn into the devil’s ruse, he resists temptation to take the easy way out and sets his mind to the task that is before him.

What is true for Jesus is true for us. Later in the gospel Jesus will ask the disciples: “Who do the crowds say that I am?” When Peter identifies him as the Christ, Jesus makes sure that the disciples know what this means telling them that he must suffer and be rejected and killed and that on the third day he will be raised. He goes on to say that those who follow him must set their minds to the same experience – figuratively if not literally. They must deny themselves and take up their cross daily. If they want to save their life, they must lose it.

Jesus’ life and death not only win our salvation, but they provide the model for our own spiritual lives. If we are to realise our full potential as children of God, we, like Jesus must be prepared to go the full distance, to put in the effort that is required, to give ourselves whole-heartedly and with conviction. In order to be formed into the image of Christ we must be prepared to stick with it,, to understand that short-term pain leads to long-term gain. We must try to see the big picture rather than getting caught up in the minutia of the every day. We must learn that near enough is simply not good enough.

Lent provides an opportunity for us to share Jesus’ wilderness experience, to ask ourselves once again, what it is that God wants of us. Lent allows us time and space to see how we are going, to ask ourselves whether we are content with the superficial or whether we are ready to explore the depths of our existence, to consider whether our focus is on the present or on eternity. Lent gives us space to ponder whether we trust God sufficiently to give ourselves completely to God or whether we are still holding something back, whether we understand that it is only by giving all that we have that we gain everything that we could ever want or need.

Lent forces us to ask whether we are just giving lip service to faith or whether we are really ready to allow God to be all in all.

How will you spend this Lent and will your practice equip you for the rest of your journey or will it simply fulfill the needs of the moment?

 

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