I’ve stolen that text from next week. Why? Not to spike the next preacher’s guns but because it’s the right reaction to today’s Gospel – last week’s too.
Reading Mark, we have to forget ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. We see instead someone who at first seems paradoxical. Contradictory: Hard to understand. He seems with one breath to ask for perfection and with the next to welcome and accept the hopeless and unacceptable.
Today we hear him set the bar higher than any of his contemporaries in relation to divorce, higher even than the rules of his own Scriptures (you can see them set out in Deuteronomy, chapter 24) . These rule provided for a regular form of divorce. But Jesus goes back to square one: God’s original intent, that man-woman should become one indivisible flesh.
Yet a moment after this teaching, which (to our ears) seems stringent and rigorous, here is the same Jesus welcoming the little brats whom his disciples were sternly excluding. And, yes, they would have been seen as little brats by the unsentimental adults of those days. Then he tells his disciples (and us) to be like them.
“Who then can be saved? ” Does Jesus rule out all divorcees, all those who will not give up all their wealth to follow him (next Sunday’s reading), anyone who swears, anyone who gives the glad eye to someone of the opposite sex or calls another person a fool? (All in the sermon on the mount).
Here’s how it is. Here’s how we can make sense of it. Jesus preaches a whole new creation which he calls the Kingdom of God.
In one sense that means going right back to square one; to everything that God intended in creating us in the divine image to reflect divine love. So Jesus will allow no settlement, no rules of convenience, no compromise which might help us to forget God’s fabulous founding intention. Yes, Jesus asks the very best of us.
But then, if we ask Jesus, “What is the route from the mess we’re all in now to that Kingdom, that re-creation of righteousness and love? He will say over and over and over again: this is the way, by receiving the forgiveness and acceptance I offer you from God – just as these little brats let themselves be scooped up onto my knee. You shop-soiled, life-soiled imperfect images of God, forget your self justification and self-concern, and let yourselves be scooped up into the new creation by Jesus’s love.
Reverend Canon Peter Fisher