Speak out with a voice of joy; let it be heard to the ends of the earth. The Lord has set his people free, alleluia!
The Collect
God our redeemer, you have delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of your Son: grant, that as by his death he has recalled us to life, so by his continual presence in us he may raise us to eternal joy; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s) Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48 Psalm 98 1 John 4:7-10 John 15:9-17
RCL (St Gabriel’s) Acts 10:44-48 Psalm 98 1 John 5:1-6 John 15:9-17
Over the past few weeks, our news media seems to have been concerned with perhaps 3 main stories. One is, of course, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which is understandable given the scale of the pandemic and the effect on people throughout the world it’s had and continues to have. Another thing we’ve heard a lot about in recent weeks is political scandal, and whether that’s who paid for Boris Johnson’s flat, or Keir Starmer being thrown out of a pub, political scandal is always in the news. The third major strand of news in recent weeks has been the European Football Super League. Why that should be more newsworthy than Russia, America and China facing-off in various parts of the world is something of a mystery to me I must admit but then, unlike me, many people do seem to agree with the ex-Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankley that football is more important than life and death. But amongst all this, one item of news that seems to have slipped under the radar, is the death, last month, of Hans Küng.
I don’t know how many of you have heard of Hans Küng, or have read any of his works but he was, I think, one of the great figures of the Church from the second half of the 20th Century onwards, and one the Church should have paid far more attention to than it did or has. Küng was a Swiss RC priest, but his main claim to fame was as a theologian and author. He was one of the main theological advisors, and the youngest, behind the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 as a result of which, the RC Church acknowledged for the first time that other denominations of the Church are Christian Churches, albeit Churches which, in their eyes, are in error.
And that reflects something of Hans Küng’s own beliefs. His passion was for Church unity, in fact he called disunity in the Church a scandal and a disgrace which should never have happened. But, unlike the mainstream of Roman Catholic thought, he believed that everyone, all Churches, were to blame for disunity. So, whilst he believed that the RC Church was the true, original Body of Christ, he also believed that the RC Church was in error too, and so, equally guilty of causing, deepening and perpetuating disunity in the Church.
Küng set these ideas out in a book published in 1968 called The Church. That was a book he dedicated to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey and he hoped that his book would form the basis of reconciliation between the Church of England and the RC Church that would lead to full communion between the Churches. But we know that didn’t happen and the RC Church were none too pleased about some of the things Küng had written in his book and he was called to explain himself. 3 years later, he published another book called Infallible? in which he called into question the doctrine of papal infallibility. That eventually led the Church to stripping Küng of his license to teach in the Catholic faculty at Tübibgen University where he was professor of theology. Küng called this his experience of the Inquisition, although the university actually got round the problem by forming a new faculty of ecumenical theology that was outside the Church’s jurisdiction and Küng carried on as professor of theology at Tübibgen until he retired in the late 1990s.
In addition to his belief that the RC Church was also in error, perhaps what really ruffled the Church’s feathers was Küng’s understanding of what needed to happen for Church unity to become a reality. The mainstream RC stance at the time was that other Churches had to change and conform to RC doctrine and practice if unity was to be possible. But Küng’s belief was that all the Churches had to change to make unity a reality. He said that Church unity wasn’t a matter of one Church submitting to another or being absorbed into another, but a matter of all Churches submitting to Christ and becoming absorbed into him.
And it was Küng’s belief that, as the Churches did this and grew closer to Christ, they would automatically grow closer to each other and become more united. And that is an understanding that, I think, flows readily from the image of Jesus as the vine and his disciples as the branches that we read in this morning’s Gospel.
The image of the Church as a great vine or tree is a very common one. Christ is the vine, or the trunk, and we, his disciples who make up the various Churches are the branches. But there is a problem with this image if we look at a vine or tree, or at most plants. Because, as we look at a plant, whatever it is, what we see is a main stem, or trunk from which the branches grow, and through which the branches draw their nourishment. But, as we look, we notice that, as the branches grow, they grow outward, away from the stem. And from the big branches there grow smaller branches. From the smaller branches there grow still smaller branches and so on, each branch growing further away from the main stem and becoming smaller as they do so. We also know that we can take cuttings from plants, we can remove them completely from the main stem but, if we plant them, of perhaps graft them into another plant, they’ll still grow even though they’re no longer connected to the stem that originally gave them life.
And isn’t that exactly what we see in the Church? It’s perhaps an oversimplification, but originally, there was the vine, Christ, and one branch, the Church. About 1,000 years ago, the branch split into 2 main branches which we know as the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. 500 years ago, the Western branch split into what became known as the RC Church and the Reformed or Protestant branches of the Church. Our own branch, the Anglican Church grew from somewhere in between these two branches. The Methodist branch of the Church grew from the Anglican branch and then itself split into many other branches. In fact, today, there are 80 independent Churches all calling themselves ‘Methodists’. And so it has and still goes on.
What makes this situation worse, is that these branches shoot and grow because those who found them, tend to think that the branch of the Church they grew from is in error. They think that the branch they grew from has lost its connection with the stem, with Christ the vine. And so they try to grow in a different direction which they believe will bring them closer to the vine. What can make matters even worse is that these branches of the Church can start to believe and act as though they’re the branch which has the closest and most direct connection to the vine, perhaps even that theirs is the only branch that is connected to the vine at all. This seems to have been the pre-Vatican 2 RC understanding, that the RC Church was the only true Church, the only branch that was really part of the vine of Christ. But the RC Church can’t be singled out for adopting that kind of attitude. In one parish I served in, ourselves, the Anglicans, and the Roman Catholics, were effectively excluded from the Churches Together group in the area when a new Baptist minister took over its leadership and refused to include us in any communications or invite us to any events because, and I quote, “Roman Catholics are not real Christians and you’re too close to them.”
It must be said that this situation has existed for a long time and the Church has suffered from people with this kind of attitude throughout its history. In the early Church when the Church was far less divided than it is now and, in effect, the Church could speak with one voice, small branches which wanted to grow in their own way were usually asked to return to the main branch of the Church and only if they didn’t, were they denounced as heretics. Often, because it was obvious that these small branches had separated from the main branch of the Church, they died out. But over the years, the Church has become more divided. The number of small branches of the Church has grown and grown and now the Church can’t speak with one voice.
This in fact is one of the main problems with the doctrine of papal infallibility. In principle, the Pope can only make an infallible statement when he speaks for the whole Church because then he speaks with the authority of the whole Church. But in practice, the Pope doesn’t speak for the whole Church and so he can never speak with the authority of the whole Church.
And it’s this lack of the Church’s ability to speak with one authoritative voice that makes Hans Küng’s words so powerful and so worthy of our attention and respect. Ultimately, there is only one authority in the Church, and it is the vine himself, Jesus Christ. And so, if we want to be connected to the vine, either as individual Christians or as a Church, we need to be connected to Christ. We need, as the saying goes, to be rooted in Christ, to be grafted into Christ, and to draw our nourishment from Christ so that we can grow from him and in him. We need to make sure that we’re not growing and drawing our nourishment from some distant branch of the vine that’s grown far removed from the vine himself, and the way to do that is to make sure that we grow closer to Christ.
Hans Küng said that division in the Church was a scandal and a disgrace that should never have happened. His words echo the words of the Church Fathers, those Christians who were closest in time to Jesus and the Apostles. For the Fathers, disunity in the Church, schism, was the worst of all sins because it was caused by a failure of Christians to do the very thing they’re called to do above all else, it was caused by a failure of Christians to love one another.
The closer we are to Christ, the less likely it is that we’ll fail to love one another and so the less likely it is that Christians will fall out with one another to the extent that it will lead to divisions and disunity in the Church. And the closer we are to Christ, the more likely we’ll be to remember and take to heart his prayer that his Church, and we must always remember that it is his Church and not ours, that his Church will be one. Perhaps then, there will be enough people in the branches of the Church who share Hans Küng’s passion and desire for Church unity to bring it closer to the reality, not only that Hans Küng wanted it to be, but that Christ, our vine, intended it to be.
Amen.
The Propers for the Fifth Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.
This icon of St. Mark the Evangelist is found at St. Mark Parish in Phoenix. (Ambria Hammel/CATHOLIC SUN)
Today, as we know, is the feast day of St Mark, the patron of this church and parish, and we’re here tonight to give thanks for his life and example. But, having said that, there’s not a great deal that we actually know about Mark’s life, and what we believe about him, is based largely on tradition rather than hard historical evidence.
St Mark may have been the young man who fled naked from Gethsemane on the night of Jesus’ arrest. None of the other evangelists mention this and there’s seems very little point in mentioning it, so it’s sometimes seen as perhaps a little autobiographical insert by the author. If that was St Mark, then he must have been one of Jesus’ earliest disciples. St Mark is also often identified as the Mark, or John Mark, we read about in the Scriptures, and so we believe that he was a cousin of St Barnabas, that he accompanied St Paul on his first missionary journey, and later he made missionary journeys with his cousin, Barnabas, and was with St Paul again, when Paul was imprisoned in Rome. It’s believed that St Mark was St Peter’s interpreter and that the Gospel he wrote is based on St Peter’s teaching and witness in Rome. Church tradition also credits St Mark with founding the Church in Alexandria in Egypt. And that’s about it as far as St Mark’s life goes but, of course, his great claim to fame, and his greatest influence in the Church, is that he is the author of the Gospel that bears his name, which was almost certainly the first of the Gospels to be written.
And the influence of St Mark’s Gospel has been a great one. We believe that both St Matthew and St Luke used it as the basis and starting point for their own Gospels because they both contain all of St Mark’s stories, which they expanded on and added to, with stories that St Mark didn’t use. So, whichever of the synoptic Gospels, as these three are collectively known, we read, we are, in many cases, reading St Mark’s Gospel.
That’s the general influence of St Mark’s Gospel, but his Gospel has also had a great influence on individual Christians through the years. And I include myself among those individuals because, when I returned to the Church in my late teens, I was advised to read St Mark’s Gospel before I moved on to any of the others.
I must admit that I was told not to expect too much from St Mark’s Gospel because his Greek wasn’t very good, and his writing wasn’t up to much either. I’m sure that at least some of us here will have been told at school that, when you’re writing, you don’t string parts of your story together simply by putting the word ‘and’ in between them. I know I was. But St Mark does it constantly. As in this passage from chapter 1 of the Gospel:
‘Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.
And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him. And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee.’
Something else that we notice in this passage from the Gospel is St Mark’s tendency to use words and phrases such as ‘immediately’ and ‘at once’. What that does, is keeps the story of Jesus’ ministry moving at a very fast pace and makes St Mark’s perhaps the most exciting of the Gospels to read. I certainly found that when I first read it. After what I’d been told about the Gospel, I must admit that I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from it when I started to read it for the first time. But once I’d started, I couldn’t stop reading and I read it through in one go. Having spoken to other people over the years, I’ve found that many others had the same experience of reading St Mark’s Gospel for the first time.
Something else I’ve found out over the years too, is that academically speaking, St Mark’s Greek wasn’t all that bad, and neither was his writing. In fact, St Mark’s style, if we can call it that, simply reflects popular storytelling of his day and we find it in the works of Homer, for example, which are regarded as classics of Greek literature. So St Mark was by no means a bad writer. His style might not be very good when we translate it into English, but in Greek, it’s a perfectly acceptable way of writing that was used to create a sense of urgency and excitement.
Something else we also notice in St Mark’s writing, is how the pace changes after Jesus enters Jerusalem. In Galilee, when Jesus is in full control of events, he moves around from place to place, very quickly. But, after he enters Jerusalem and opposition to him grows, the pace slows down dramatically. And when it comes to the final day of Jesus’ earthly life, it slows almost to a crawl that some people have likened to a death watch, a vigil kept with someone approaching death or awaiting execution.
So St Mark’s Gospel is far more than simply the basis of the longer and more detailed Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke. It’s a well thought out and well written portrayal of Jesus’ life and ministry that both set the scene for the later Gospels and has also inspired countless numbers of Christians since it was written almost 2000 years ago. It may lack some of the Gospel stories that we know and love, but that doesn’t mean St Mark’s Gospel is in any way inferior to the others. People remember stories and especially well told, exciting stories and St Mark wrote his version of Jesus’ story well and in an exciting way. So through the Gospel he wrote, St Mark’s also teaches us that we don’t have to know everything about Jesus to tell people about him and bring them to him. St Mark shows us that the way we tell what we do know about Jesus is just as important as how much we know about him.
St Mark was the first of the evangelists, and the work of an evangelist is to proclaim the Gospel and bring people to Christ. That’s something St Mark has been doing for most of the past 2000 years and is still doing today. We may not know very much about St Mark’s life, but we do know about the great influence he’s had, and continues to have on the Christian faith, on the Church and on individual Christians, through the Gospel he wrote.
He is worthy of our thanks and praise for that. He’s worthy that we should recognise his work for the Lord and remember him and praise him for that. He’s a worthy example to us and to all Christians of the proclamation of the Gospel that’s an essential part of our calling as Christians. For all reasons, St Mark is a worthy patron of this church and worthy of this feast day commemoration in his honour.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 