VICAR'S LETTER
January 2012
Dear Friends
A happy new year to everyone!
With Christmas festivities behind us, we can turn our thoughts to the New Year using the quiet period of early January to reflect on our lives and to consider how we might most wisely use the months to come.
One of the many benefits of the Christian calendar is that over a three year cycle we focus in turn on each of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, taking our readings from one of them through the year to explore Jesus’ life and teaching. (Passages from John are read throughout the three years for particular occasions.) In 2012, we will take our story from Mark and his account of the “Good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.”
One of the features about the way we read the Bible in church is that, divided as it is into daily readings, even the regular weekly churchgoer does not hear the Gospel as a whole but rather in specific, sometimes widely disconnected selections. This is a particular pity in the case of Mark because his account, in my view, benefits most of all from being read as a continuous book.
Firstly, his story is told in broad brush strokes with vivid images, in many ways it is more like a modern film than an ancient manuscript. Divided into two roughly equal halves, the first part is breathless and fast paced setting the scene, sketching out the characters and moving forward with great urgency (the phrase ‘immediately’ or ‘straight away’ is used forty two times in the first half alone).
As Jesus moves towards Jerusalem though, to his trial and crucifixion, the pace slows until there is an intense almost hour by hour forensic dissection of the events. It is almost as though the reels of the film have changed from the early wide, long lenses of the panoramas to tightly focussed close ups. Mark’s intention is to draw us irresistibly in to an ever deeper contemplation of Jesus’ death, its meaning and our response.
So I recommend that one of your New Year resolutions be to curl up with a good book! Try to read the Gospel of Mark in one or two sittings; it is quite short, only twenty pages in my edition and it flows very easily off the page. The disciples, you will discover, are far from star pupils, remaining uncomprehending in many ways for the whole of the story. We are asked to identify with them, and so to recognise that even though we too have failings, Jesus will work patiently and incessantly with us exactly as he did with them.
With blessings and good wishes for 2012 and happy reading!
Steve