A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on February 18, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Mark 1: 14-15
In all my growing up and in plenty more years of being a parent of young children, I’m guessing I’ve watched the 1967 Disney cartoon adaptation of The Jungle Book around a hundred times. But I must confess for the first 80 times I failed fully to understand the pun in the title of the song ‘The Bear Necessities of Life.’ You’ll remember that Mowgli, the young orphan man-cub, is left alone in the forest by the panther Bagheera, whereupon he meets Baloo the bear, who communicates to Mowgli in this famous song that so long as you concentrate on the bare necessities, life will come to you. What I never grasped is the point of the song is that ‘bear,’ the animal, B-E-A-R, sounds exactly the same as ‘bare,’ simple, stark and plain, B-A-R-E, which arises in the phrase ‘bare necessities,’ referring to those basic rules of life you back to when it’s all getting too confusing. The whole joke is that Baloo changes stark bare necessities to animal bear necessities, and then promotes his laid-back philosophy of life as a guide for young Mowgli to follow. I was so mesmerised by Baloo uprooting a tree and using it to scratch his back that the pun never dawned on me.
Nonetheless the term ‘the bare necessities,’ in the sense of the stark, plain reality, is a suitable place to be on the first Sunday in Lent. Lent is about paring away the vain, the unnecessary, the indulgent and the distracting, and concentrating on the only things that matter: the bare necessities, we could call them. I want today to ask the question, what are those things? I’m moved to do so by the last couple of verses of today’s gospel, which happen to be the first words Jesus speaks in Mark. Since it’s now widely assumed Mark was the first gospel to be written down, it’s no exaggerated claim to say these are the first recorded words of Jesus. Which means they’re well worth considering in significant detail.
We’ll come to those words in a moment; but first, let’s reflect on the context in which these words are said. This is how Mark puts it: ‘After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.’ Before we glaze over with the familiarity of biblical language, pause for a moment and see how this sentence is shaped. The middle of the sentence is Galilee. Galilee is somehow the definitive context for the gospel: Jesus’ natural habitat. But feel the contrast between the beginning and end of the sentence. The ending is this: ‘proclaiming the good news of God.’ That’s pretty exciting and exhilarating. God is in this story, and in this story as good news, news to shout from the rooftops, to broadcast far and wide. Good news to people under enemy occupation, who haven’t known national independence for 500 years, who have no rights and few opportunities and are subject to violence and live in semi-permanent fear.
Stay in that place of joy and delight and then switch back suddenly and painfully to the beginning of the verse: ‘After John was arrested.’ That’s a very different story. That’s about horror and oppression and danger and the threat of sudden death. We know how John’s story ends, with his head on a platter after a seductive dance in Herod’s palace. So here, in the introductory words to Jesus’ first utterance in the Bible, we have our context. An almost indigestible contrast between prison and good news, fear and hope, cruelty and love, murderous intent and glorious release. What this is telling us is, this contrast, this combination of ghastliness and beauty, is where the gospel is set, where it happens. This is the context of God’s people in first-century Palestine, this is our context in twenty-first century London, this is the nature of existence: poised between terror and wonder, between threat and promise.
Ok, given this context, now let’s look at the very first words Jesus says in the Bible. ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ Again it’s easy to sweep these words aside and say, ‘There’s a lot of these kinds of phrases in the gospels.’ But remember: these are Jesus’ first words in the first written gospel; they’re the oldest recorded words of Jesus we have. Let’s scrutinise them together. What we see is they answer four central questions about locating ourselves in the mysterious universe we find ourselves in. I’m going to suggest those four questions are the four bare-necessity questions of Lent – the four questions of what it means to be a person of faith in the midst of confusion and fear and discovery and hope. They are, quite simply, when, where, what and who. The question ‘when’ refers to time – at which point in the story do we find ourselves? The question ‘where’ refers to space – at what location are we? The question ‘what’ refers to us – how are we to live? The question ‘who’ refers to who this story is really about. Let’s take them one by one.
First the question ‘when.’ The answer lies in the first thing Jesus says: ‘The time is fulfilled.’ In just four words Jesus transforms our whole notion of time. We’re accustomed to seeing history as just one thing after another. We’re used to the claims of astrophysics and evolutionary biology that existence doesn’t have a particular shape or purpose. And if we imagined a purpose, presumably it would be at the end of the story, that everything was leading up to. But Jesus turns all of that on its head in four words. One word, really: ‘fulfilled.’ What he’s saying isn’t as simple as finding lots of predictions of things in the Old Testament that come to pass in the New. It’s much more than that. He’s saying this moment is the vortex of existence. If you imagine standing on St Martin’s Lane outside when a famous film star has just finished performing an stage and makes her way from the stage door to a car waiting on the road, then you see an extraordinary crowd re-formation as almost everyone on the street turns inward to face the celebrity. That’s what ‘fulfilled’ is saying. It’s saying this is the central moment in history, in the universe, in existence. Everything before it looks forward to it and everything after it looks back to it. Things don’t have their own integrity, their own meaning, their own significance: their integrity, meaning and significance is in relation to this moment. This moment is the fulfilment of the reason for the creation of time, of the universe, of existence. Behold, God is with us in Christ. That’s what it was all for. That’s what creation is created for: as a theatre in which God is with us in Christ, from which we come to understand what it means to be with ourselves, one another and the creation. This is the fulfilment of the reason for everything. That answers the ‘when’ question.
Now to the ‘where’ question. Where are we? The answer is the second thing Jesus says: ‘the kingdom of God has come near.’ Remember the beginning of Charles Dodgson’s book Alice in Wonderland. Alice is bored, and is considering ‘whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.’ Then she sees the Rabbit actually take a watch out of his waistcoat-pocket, and look at it, before plunging down a rabbit hole. Alice heads down after him, and enters Wonderland. At the start of this story Alice is near Wonderland. The White Rabbit brings Wonderland near to her. Alice is like us. She’s near. She’s on the brink. Again, this is where the people of God were in first-century Palestine. This is where we are. This is where existence is. The kingdom or we might say realm of God is near. I call this realm of God essence. It is that original, transcendent and eternal realm that preceded existence, is far beyond existence, and will abide even when one day existence comes to an end. It’s the realm of mystery, delight, enjoyment and glory. And we can come near it. We come near it when we behold the work of the Holy Spirit – and the greatest work of the Holy Spirit is to enable us to be with Jesus. That’s where we are: near to the realm of God.
Next to the ‘what’ question. What am I to do? You know the question, ‘What are the three hardest things to say? “I’m sorry.” “I love you.” And, ‘“Worcestershire Sauce.”’ Well let’s just stick to the first one. This is the third thing Jesus says. Don’t miss it because it’s just one word. ‘Repent.’ Most of us have had our share of guilt and condemnation, and come to embrace a faith that’s not just a trade-off between our many ghastly mistakes and God’s mercy and grace. But before we dismiss repentance, let’s focus a moment on what repent really means. It means turn towards the truth. Stop pretending. Stop lying. Stop living in a false story with yourself at the centre and the rest of the universe a mere tool in your fantasy drama. No one’s really fooled. You’re not fooled, other people aren’t fooled, God’s not fooled. Start telling a truthful story in which you’re truly and utterly loved for who you are, and you don’t have to make up a story to grab all the candy from the sweet-shop before you’re inevitably finally exposed. Live in God’s story and behave like you belong there. Repentance isn’t the whole gospel, but when it comes to the bare necessities, try living without it.
And finally, the ‘who’ question. Jesus’ fourth line is, ‘Believe in the good news.’ Why is this a ‘who’ question? Because the good news isn’t a message, a book, a manifesto, a golden ticket or a newspaper headline. It’s a person. Here’s the whole gospel in one sentence. This is a story about God. God longs to be with you, comes in Jesus to be with you, and prepares a place to be with you always. You can anticipate and embody those things by the way you’re with yourself, one another and the creation. What that sentence doesn’t say but assumes is this isn’t fundamentally a story about you. It’s a release from the prison of a story about you and discovery of the glory of a story about God. And Christianity is about finding that’s actually incredibly good news. To believe in the good news is to say, ‘I trust that this story about God being with us in Christ is way truer than any fantasy story I can make up about myself.’ The answer to the ‘who’ question is isn’t you; it’s Jesus.
So here are the bare necessities. The four questions that take us through Lent, and through life. When, where, what, and who. Christianity, as revealed in the first 19 words Jesus says, reorients our sense of time, places us on the brink of eternity, relocates us in a truthful story, delivers us from a false story about the world and ourselves and sets us free to belong in a true story about God in Christ. Whether we’re in despair or joy, in prison or ecstasy, proclaim the good news: in Jesus, the bare necessities of life have come to you.
