Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’ (John 14.27).
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4. 35-41).
Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. After saying farewell to them, he went up on the mountain to pray.
When evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea. He intended to pass them by. But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be
afraid.” Then he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.
Healing the Sick in Gennesaret
When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed. (Mark 6.45-end).
Jesus Heals the Gerasene Demoniac
Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me”— for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him. They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.
Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
A Girl Restored to Life and a Woman Healed
Now when Jesus returned, the crowd welcomed him, for they were all waiting for him. Just then there came a man named Jairus, a leader of the synagogue. He fell at Jesus’ feet and begged him to come to his house, for he had an only daughter, about twelve years old, who was dying.
As he went, the crowds pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years; and though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her. She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. Then Jesus asked, “Who touched me?” When all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you.” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me.” When the woman saw that she could not remain hidden, she came trembling; and falling down before him, she declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
While he was still speaking, someone came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead; do not trouble the teacher any longer.” When Jesus heard this, he replied, “Do not fear. Only believe, and she will be saved.” When he came to the house, he did not allow anyone to enter with him, except Peter, John, and James, and the child’s father and mother. They were all weeping and wailing for her; but he said, “Do not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. But he took her by the hand and called out, “Child, get up!” Her spirit returned, and she got up at once. Then he directed them to give her something to eat. Her parents were astounded; but he ordered them to tell no one what had happened. (Luke 8.40-end).
The admonitions of Jesus not to be afraid are no glib assertions. They are made against the background of a time and place of extreme distress. First century Palestine was a time of disease, terrible poverty, hideous levels of violence, and all this on a scale of regularity that the modern liberal west can hardly conceive. We are, today, faced with something that is frightening at least in part because it is so exceptional. In our contemporary environment we are simply not used to dealing with eruptions of nature of this kind. It is our general sense that we have left these things a long way behind us. These are the sorts of things our ancestors had to deal with and speaking for myself I have grown up with a fairly snug, safe and warm sense that in our time and in our part of the world there is no longer any need to be frightened of such things as waves of disease flooding over whole communities.
It has to be said that popular culture perhaps has not prepared us too well for a moment like the one we are facing now. Scarifying films about impending apocalypse or dystopian futures coming off the back of social break-down have been the meat and drink of cinema since at least the late 60’s. Back then there seemed to be starting a kind of shadow of discomfort that followed rich, powerful western liberalism around. For the first time in the history of human civilisation there were millions of very ordinary people that were not only lifted out of poverty, but dwelling within a standard of living that meant there was no longer any fear of not knowing where the next meal is coming from, or whether they will have a bed to sleep in at night, and it was beginning to worry us. There was the very real threat of nuclear war, of course, but sometimes there seemed to be just a kind of doom laden sense that something terrible was bound to happen even if it wasn’t a Soviet missile attack.
Nowadays we generally have the comfort of being able to worry about whether or not we possess the latest frivolous consumerables. Increasingly we are well off enough just to have to concern ourselves with whether we have the latest games or entertainments, phones and iPads etc. But as a society, as that popular apocalyptic film and book culture testifies, we seem to have been terrifying ourselves that this will all come to an cataclysmic end by the hand of some fearful and wrathful storm-god, for some time. We have worried about whether it could possibly last.
I have tried, only intermittently successfully, to remember to thank God as often as I could that I have never been hungry or homeless and that I enjoy not only the fulfilment of my basic needs but are happy and even entertained way beyond them. As well as possessing my material fill, if I am sick I have a magnificent health service; I am protected and made safe by police and fire services, and there are various other social services that surround me with systems for my protection, health and general safety. What a distance we are from the insecure, often violent and disaster strewn the lives of our ancestors. And I think this is what God wants. He wants us to be well endowed, happy and unafraid.
The God of Jesus Christ, who was notoriously moaned about by puritanical clerics for spending too much time eating and drinking with friends, would want that we could all live in the land of plenty. I’m quite sure it was what God has intended for all humanity from before creation. God does not want us to be afraid for our lives, cowed by disease and poverty and the evidences for this, especially in our time and in our part of the world, are legion. My hope and prayer is that as the years go by humanity is given, not only the technology to house, feed and cloth every man, woman and child on the planet, because that already exists, but that we learn to use these vast, productive recourses we now have justly, equitably and responsibly. Our spiritual and moral sense has yet to catch up with our technical, scientific abilities.
It interests me, though, that so many people have always worried that that there would be something like the arrival of Covid 19 as though like some avenging death angel to cow us for all our hubris and overreaching, and have expressed that worry in book and film etc. It interests me how popular such stories about such scenarios have been. Maybe, it suggests a sense that in the course of our progression to such a standard of living there have been things that the rich west has done which make us feel guilty and now we are waiting for some sort of punishment. Well, our society should feel some guilt about some of the things we have done along the road to affluence. We have hurt others, robbed and killed them. Even in our own society we have thought and acted selfishly; we have not helped the stranger, the refugee, the poor people in our own midst. All we tended to do has been to worry about how well healed we are, how well our career is going and how much we have. If we feel some guilt for all that then it is appropriate; we should repent, turn our lives around and strive to live for God, or if you prefer, for Love – since God is Love. We should turn from self-centredness to Love-centredness; we should turn around our lives and live for Love and for each other instead.
But it also seems to indicate something of what humanity feels about God’s attitude to the world, or if you prefer the universe’s attitude toward us. It is as though God simply does not want us to be so happy and well cosseted; secure and unafraid. Look, God does not condem the world, he wants to save it (John 3). But there has always been this darkness in the human soul that thinks of itself as being deserving of violent punishment. This is rooted in a guilt we all have about the times when even by our own standards we have fallen short. That is all mixed together with socially engendered notions of what we should have done and should have been. It is mashed up with the times we have felt humiliated and told we were stupid, hateful, bad and ugly by other people. We bury these terrible hurts deep down inside and they are overlaid by more superficial layers of everyday consciousness that we might simply be able to get on with things, though some of us are better than others at such self denial. Some of us become ill, suffer personality disorders and other horrible mental ailments. I suffer from depression, anxiety and obsessive, compulsive disorder. But sometimes as a society we batten down the sense of self loathing and inadequacy individually and collectively, but still need to release the dark violent energy this produces. And so we go to look for others to be our guilty, disgusting selves for us, instead of us. The stranger, the odd ball, the criminal, the ‘pervert’: these become hated not only for their sin but are loaded up with ours as well and if we can hurt and punish and even send some of them to their death then this will be therapy for us. It will act as a release and a channel for the expulsion of black-bile energies.
Let us be clear, the sacrifice of God is a broken spirit, a man or woman that regrets what they should regret, repents and starts again to try to follow the God of Love in Jesus Christ. God in Christ became our scapegoat, offering himself to be the one we poured out our violence upon, but being assaulted he did not give like for like.
Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.
“He committed no sin,
and no deceit was found in his mouth.”
When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.
(see 1Peter 2:21-24).
The point is that God in Christ stands and absorbs our self loathing violence; our hurt and our terror. We flail and punch and kick and spit, pouring out our self hatred on Him. But all that we have in return is a Love that forgives, waits and offers itself for us still. It says: ‘when you are finished and exhausted, come to me and rest’. Look, God is not interested in visiting punishment, death and fear upon us; he offers Himself as Love instead of some dreadful, divine retribution.
God would not have us live in fear and penury. Rather quite the opposite. Jesus talked a great deal about feasts to come, images of plenty adorn his preaching on the Kingdom of God and until these days all we have had to envisage such a state has been our imaginations. Now we have started to see this dream coming to pass in our post-war society of plenty. The God of Jesus Christ is the one that led his people from slavery to freedom in a land flowing with milk and honey. The God of Jesus Christ was even said to have oversupplied a wedding feast in Cana, this God does not skimp and he does not hate or resent us because we are safe, happy and well supplied; this is the happy state that He is moving creation toward.
I am frightened of this disease-thing coming toward us as I know many of you are. But do not be mistaken, God wants us to come through this and conquer it, and we will. God has graced humanity with the most powerful technologies for dealing with this; humanity is more geared up for dealing with this than it has ever been and is already making considerable forward movement on vaccines and antivirals. God would not have you be afraid. But for the moment he would have you wait and pray to him and let a Him enter your life to help and strengthen you. I pray that you all come to know him, that your fears are allayed and you all find the ‘peace beyond all understanding’ at this difficult time.