Two awkward Bible passages

Sermon for 30 January 2000, 8:00, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet, published on www.trikeshed.com

Revelation 12 1-5a, Mark 1 21-28

One of the benefits of coming to church, rather than practising a personal faith at home, is that it forces us at times to face awkward, uncomfortable words and stories and truths. We might hear something in the Bible or in a sermon that does not sit easily with the neat way we might think we’ve organised our lives. Stories that seem to be from harsher times, where death and violence seemed to be somehow more acceptable than we would find them now. Or pictures of heaven and hell, with heaven as a sparkly, golden city, glitzy and grand, and hell as a place of torture and fire.

I think today’s readings generate such a feeling of discomfort or distaste – in fact that is something that links the two passages together.

First we heard some of John’s amazing vision on the island of Patmos. We read of a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, a crown of 12 stars. The pain of childbirth. And a horrible picture of a dragon, an enormous red dragon with 7 heads, 10 horns, a tail that flung stars out of space. Standing in front of the woman, ready to devour her baby. Excuse me, but do we have to hear this stuff? I would much prefer to hear the nice bits of the Bible.

Then in Mark’s gospel, more down to earth at least. In Capernaum. Ah – I’ve been there. Teaching in the synagogue. But it seems he’s not been there ten minutes when we have something very unpalatable. A man with an evil spirit, shouting out. Jesus speaking sternly, and the man shaking violently and emitting a horrible shriek. Imagine it happening here! Horrible! Disturbing!

And yet, somehow, we do need to hear these things. We need to stand under the holy scriptures as something bigger than ourselves. Now this is nothing to do with evangelical and liberal theology – whatever we believe about the nature of this book’s inspiration it is at the ground of our faith and our church life. We don’t really want a Bible with all the difficult, distasteful or nasty bits taken out. After all, it does us no harm to have to squirm a little.

But that’s not where it ends. God surely does not wish us simply to squirm. We are given the Holy Spirit in part as an interpreter of these words to us. So how does the Spirit help us get beyond the awkward stage of just having to accept that not everything we are taught is pretty? Let me give three ways in which we can be helped:

We see that the Scriptures are for real. Thank God that this book hasn’t been tidied up, sanitised, vetted for political correctness, even censored! Real people wrote about what they really saw. John had a vision. Mark, or at least someone close to him, actually saw Jesus at Capernaum, actually saw the man healed of his evil spirit and heard his shriek.
But we also see that there is more to everything we read here than meets the eye. There is layer upon layer of interpretation, history, context, psychology, all there for anyone who wishes to study. So we look at Revelation 12. It’s written in the context of a persecuted church, looking forward to Christ’s imminent return. And it’s full of the Old Testament. Daniel had a vision of beasts – seven heads, ten horns. Numbers abound, 7 and 10 both have a sense of completeness. 10 horns, 10 kingdoms – all the kingdoms of the world. 12 stars on the woman’s head. 12 tribes of Israel. But the story goes even beyond that. The Greeks told it of the birth of Apollo. The Egyptians, the Babylonians – they all had their versions. A universal myth, maybe, but here John is showing how it is also the truth of the birth of the Messiah and the fight against evil. And that evil spirit in the man in the synagogue – in some senses universally present, maybe under different names, but also specially during Jesus’ time on earth. Of course – because if there is a force of evil it’s going to be present where it can do the most harm. So much help and opportunity is available for us to make sense of these mysterious stories and passages that bother us when we come to church.
But now here’s a third way in which we can be brought round to accept, even rejoice in, these bizarre, uncomfortable stories. And it comes from the question – just who is uncomfortable here? Who in these stories of encounters between God and man and evil actually comes out the most uncomfortably? Is it us, scurrying out of our warm homes and facing some of the huge, stark truth about the universe and its unimaginable greatness and power and terror? Or is it actually God himself, leaving his throne and his kingly crown, coming to earth for me? The all-powerful God who could so easily have turned his back and had nothing to do with evil spirits, and devouring dragons, and Antichrists; but instead poured himself out to fill and heal every gaping wound, who chose to fight and conquer evil because of his great love, who let his Son be harassed by men with evil spirits taunting him, and soldiers placing thorns on his head, and hurt by his own people rejecting him because they too were marred by evil, and killed on a cross.

I think that if we realise that it was our God who has had to accept the bitterest taste of all through his coming to earth among us, we might better understand those parts of his revelation to us that are shall we say a little less succulent, and see him in his true glory!

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