One of the things I feel very grateful for at this point in my life is that, after forty years in ministry, I still feel very enthusiastic about what it means to be a priest. I do agree with Job in the first reading when he talks about how his days have passed ‘swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,’ a feeling I know many of you share, but I have no sense, as he has, that man’s life on earth is nothing more than pressed service, his time no better than hired drudgery. I have met people who feel this way, sad, disillusioned or burnt-out individuals who see the world through negative and pessimistic eyes, deeply unhappy with the way their lives have turned out, but it always fills me with sadness. To live and end up like this is a tragedy for any human being, the good news being that today’s Gospel contains, I believe, the secret of how to make sure this does not happen to us. So let’s look at it again.
In it, Jesus, as we heard last week, has just caste out an unclean spirit from a man in the synagogue at Capernaum. The afternoon heat in that part of the world is tiring enough, but dealing with unclean spirits is itself an exhausting business, and so, after leaving the synagogue, Jesus heads straight for the house of Simon and Andrew where food and rest await him. In the evening, however, the people of the town come crowding round the door and, as a result, Jesus spends many hours healing the sick and casting out devils. The next thing St Mark tells us is that in the morning, long before dawn, Jesus got up, left the house and went to a lonely place to pray. At which point, as I have done before when we have read this passage, I would like to add something which helps me make sense of it and explains why it has come to mean so much to me personally and helped me make sure that I don’t myself become cynical, pessimistic or disillusioned.
And in this imaginative addition to St Mark’s story, I picture Jesus, as he lies down to sleep, feeling a bit uneasy about the day that has just passed. Something has not been right about it, and its this awareness and the need to get to the root of it which makes him decide to get up early the next morning to pray. Mark says nothing, of course, about what happened in the prayer, but the story contains an important clue in the form of Jesus’ reaction when Peter comes and tells him that the people from the town are all out looking for him. What had been wrong with the previous day, I suggest, is that, the crowd had been setting the agenda. But, in prayer, Jesus sees that this is not right. He has not come into the world to do the will of the crowd, to conform to the expectations of those around him or keep people happy by doing what they want him to do. He has come to do the will of his Father and its because he has got in touch with this again in his prayer that he says to Peter, ‘Let us go elsewhere, to the neighbouring country towns, so that I can preach there too’ leaving behind in the process, some pretty grumpy people who had other plans for him, because – and here is the key to everything – ‘that is why I came.’ In these five words, ‘that is why I came,’ Jesus sums up the purpose, not only of his own life, but the life of every human being. Each individual person is a unique, unrepeatable image of God and until we discover what our own uniqueness involves, until we discover, in other words, who we really are – in the words of Jesus ‘why we have come’ – and be that person, regardless of what anybody else wants us to be or demands that we be, we will never be truly happy or our lives fulfilled. And while the answer to the question of who we really are - why we have come - will ultimately only be known if, in the context of our own lives, we get up in the morning long before dawn and go of to a lonely place to pray, just as with Jesus as he lay down to sleep the night before, the process starts with a sense somewhere in ourselves that something is not quite right. And the signs of this are all around us today.
What, for example, is the most common ‘disease’ in Britain today, in many ways the plague of our modern age? It is, of course, stress and all that goes with it. But what is stress if not evidence that we are living in a way which is not in tune or in harmony with who we really are. We are trying to be something we are not, live at a speed and in ways we were never designed to live and so our bodies are screaming out against it. Why else do millions of people today live with constant anxiety, a sense of frustration, a feeling of dissatisfaction, a sense that there must be more to life than this, a sense which lies behind the problem of drugs in our society, if it is not that there is more to life than this and the quicker we find out what it is the better? Why are so many people today unhappy in their work and longing for retirement if not that something is rotten in the State of Denmark? Why is it that, despite years of material prosperity unknown to people in past generations, report after report tells us that we are less happy now than our grandparents were in a far less affluent age? Why, for goodness sake, has the whole world economic system collapsed about our ears if not that, for a long time now, something has been profoundly wrong with the consumer society in which we have all become embroiled?
And at the root of all of this – and we could go on all day giving examples of it – is a spiritual problem. Its the problem of why we have come, who we really are, and what, if any, is the point of our existence. In the end, it is about whether there is a God or not. As we hear so much these days about Charles Darwin, are we simply chance products of evolution or are we created to know love and serve God in this life and be happy with him forever in the next. One thing is certain. If there is a God and we live as if there isn’t, then we’re in serious bother.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer this weekend by holding up before God the millions of people who feel the way Job does in today’s first reading. For them, the world is a negative and unhappy place. They see no point to their lives. Lying in bed, they wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen, they think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’ Many suffer from clinical depression, while others are simply overcome by the problems they face. And so we ask God to touch them all today..... Lord hear us
For most of us, things are rarely as dark as they were for Job. And yet, at a much less intense level, people today do feel the same things as he did. We ask ourselves what life is about. Deep within ourselves we know that things are not right. We feel a sense of dis-ease, a sense that they way we are living is not healthy, that we need to change something in ourselves. And so we pray for the grace to see God in this experience, calling us always to new and deeper ways of living.........Lord hear us
If we are to understand what it means to be human and begin to find out why we exist at all and where our lives are ultimately leading, in some way we all have to do what Jesus did, get up long before dawn and go to a lonely place to pray. Ultimately, of course, this lonely place is within us and only those who visit it and become familiar with it can ever lead fully human lives. And so we pray for the insight we need to know where this place is and the courage to go there often..............Lord hear us
In the 1960s, the Patriarch Athenagoras famously remarked that the god the atheists didn’t believe in, he didn’t believe in either. These were prophetic words which mean even more today that they did then. The god millions are losing faith in today does not exist. He is the god of magic, superstition and religion without faith. He is a god who stirs fear in people and the atheists of today are right to reject him. And so we pray that they will come now to know the God who does exist..................Lord hear us
We heard today how, if there is a God and we live as if there isn’t, then we are in serious bother. And the signs of this are everywhere: rampant individualism, consumerism, materialism in all its shapes and forms, the constant pursuit of happiness in places which can never deliver it and so on. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to read these signs of the times, understand them, and respond to them in a faith-filled way which helps the world at this time...............Lord hear us
Perhaps the most obvious sign of the spiritual malaise we suffer from today has been the collapse of the world economy. We have been appalled and amazed by the sheer extent of the greed which has caused it and which has forced people all over the world to reflect seriously on what has been going on. And so we pray that this experience will lead to deep and lasting change and that we will not imagine that we can somehow go back to all that once the storm has passed...................Lord hear us
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