Isaiah 52:7-10



Isaiah 52:7-107?How beautiful on the mountains????are the feet of those who bring good news,who proclaim peace,????who bring good tidings,????who proclaim salvation,who say to Zion,????“Your God reigns!”8?Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices;????together they shout for joy.When the Lord returns to Zion,????they will see it with their own eyes.9?Burst into songs of joy together,????you ruins of Jerusalem,for the Lord has comforted his people,????he has redeemed Jerusalem.10?The Lord will lay bare his holy arm????in the sight of all the nations,and all the ends of the earth will see????the salvation of our God.1?The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah,[a] the Son of God,[b] 2?as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:“I will send my messenger ahead of you,????who will prepare your way”[c]—3?“a voice of one calling in the wilderness,‘Prepare the way for the Lord,????make straight paths for him.’”[d]4?And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5?The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. 6?John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7?And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8?I baptize you with[e] water, but he will baptize you with[f] the Holy Spirit.”9?At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10?Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11?And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”12?At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, 13?and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted[g] by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.14?After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15?“The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."Not so much famous last words as famous first words: the beginnings of classic novels. And if you weren't quite sure, they were (in order):George Orwell, 1984Jane Austen, Pride and PrejudiceThe Go-Between by L.P. Hartley:I was tempted to add this, too:"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)In the Second Lesson we heard the beginning of a book that has outsold them all, and been read by more people, than all of them put together.The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah... yes the gospel of Mark, whose feast day is tomorrow.Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lay on, goes the child's prayer.Outside this Cathedral are four modern sculptures representing the gospel-writers, the four evangelists. Because the Christian New Testament has four Gospels, four accounts of the life and significance of Jesus. And Mark is the simplest, the most accessible and perhaps the liveliest. It hasshort punchy sentences.Not a great deal of complex theologising.Just a story well told.The first half of it is teaching and incidents. All human life is there – paralysed people; hungry people, people at the mercy of the waves...The second half takes on a more intense tone, focussed on the imminent death and resurrection of Jesus.Now the beginning of a book needs in some way to grab the reader. To make them want to know more, to turn the page, to buy the thing, or download it onto their Kindle. Because a book needs to communicate. To tell a story.And the way you told a story two thousand years ago would not necessarily be the way you tell it now.One of the more interesting questions around a book like Mark is: how has it survived? The writer is quite clear about his purpose: to record, to preserve, to share the story of Jesus. And to be a resource for people who want to know more: who might be, or might become, disciples. It’s about communicating and sharing the story.And in Mark’s case, he has succeeded well. His little novella has travelled down the centuries, and around the world. I wonder: could the writer of Mark ever have thought that his scribbly Greek manuscript would end up being known around the world? And would be read and celebrated two thousand years after he put it together?Some other tales from that age – and before – have survived to our time. And I don’t mean the New testament documents only, but Greek and Roman classics. Others have just fallen by the wayside. In Mark's case it raises the interesting question: how does religion travel? How does faith move around the globe? How does it travel down the ages?In the last week I have experienced two, perhaps three, very different ways in which the gospel story has travelled round the world, and through time. I wonder what Mark would have made of them.The first was in a setting a bit like this.A grand abbey church, not in England but in France. And not a cathedral with its choir, but a monastery with its Benedictine monks clad in their black robes.#When I say it was at Solesmes, near Le Mans, those of you who know about these things will l know that this is a community that is world renowned for its excellence in singing Gregorian chant. If our worship tonight is very much in the classic 450-year old tradition of the 1662 Prayer Book, the worship of the monks of Solesmes is more ancient. And even harder to follow.The gentlemen of the choir will be relieved that I don’t intend to go into any technical explanations of Gregorian chant – or demonstrate it. But Gregorian chant is thought to date back to the 9th or 10th century. And the monks of Solesmes sing their whole services in Latin using this musical form, as they have done for a thousand years.It is very beautiful. But also utterly incomprehensible to the ordinary person.One day we attended an evening service of Vespers, and although some of it is similar to our own Evening Prayer, the fact that it was all in Latin, and sung in Gregorian chant meant that without the liturgical handbook given to visitors, we would have been completely lost. Fortunately, although my Latin is long-forgotten, my French was up to enough standard for me to work out where we were in the psalms and readings.And the next morning we attended Sunday Mass. Again, all in Latin – apart from the lessons and the homily, where the thousand-year reign of Latin made a concession to the congregation. And again, all sung in the deep and mysterious tones of Gregorian chant.And that is one way of ensuring the gospel travels: finding a way of singing it that works for a community, and then sticking with it for centuries, knowing the essential purity is there, though it requires explanation and patience for those unversed in it. It communicates to some, but not all. What might Mark, the story-teller, make of that?My second example of how the gospel story might travel is related to the monks of Solesmes, but could not be more different. All this week, the Glastonbury and Street Musical Comedy Society – yes there is such a thing – has been presenting their production of Sister Act at Strode Theatre in Street.If you’ve seen the film, which starred Whoopi Goldberg, you'll know the plot: a good time girl called Dolores, who is a singer, sees a gangland murder in Philadelphia. To protect her, the police send her to live in a convent... where she completely rejuvenates the nun's chorus by turning their traditional chant into some soulful gospel.The Street production was astonishing. But behind the quickfire costume changes and the slapstick with the gangsters and the police is an essentially religious discussion: The Mother Superior resents the way in which Dolores is able to give her nuns a new zest for singing, and bring in 'from the outside' a way of praising God that bears no resemblance to the tradition she was brought up with.The real-life monks of Solesmes would have recognised the nuns' traditional singing as like their own. But not once Dolores had taken over: her music is very 20th century. Gregorian chant it is not. Latin is most definitely is not.Of course it's very American and schmaltzy. But at the heart is this: Dolores discovers that true religion is found ina love she did not think possible for and from other people,a sisterhood with a most unlikely bunch of friends – the nuns - -and that faith can travel in deeds and in music, as well as in words.What might Mark, with his urgency and passion for the gospel have made of the Mother Superior and Dolores conflict? Because, by contrast to the monks' chant, Sister Act does communicate something of the gospel; but not all of it, by any means. But it does it in an infectious musical way that had the staid citizens of Street yelling for more at the end.But there is something else thirdly, something Mark may never have thought of: but would surely have welcomed. This time it's not about music, but pictures. It's generally thought that in mediaeval times, the interiors of churches had large and graphic wallpaintings, that either showed images of Bible stories, or related themes like heaven and hell.This Cathedral, as you may know, once had all the statues on the great West Front painted, and in a number of parish churches you can find remnants of these paintings if you are lucky.The tiny village of Asnieres-sur-Vegre in France has, miraculously, got huge spreads of its wall-paintings left on its West, North and South walls. They are not in great condition, but in a half-hour visit I was astonished to seeJoseph and Mary taking the infant Christ to safety in Egypt, pursued by King Herod's soldiers (who, strangely, were dressed like the Norman soldiers we associated with William the Conqueror. But then the paintings are about 800 years old.)On another wall, the baptism of Christ,and on another, the crucifixion,and yet another, the Presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple.The one that really caight my eye was a huge painting showing rich people going down into hell. There's someone stoking the fires, and a three-headed beast waiting to devour them.Mark would not have been impressed with the last one: his accounts of heaven and hell have been somewhat magnified and expanded by the mediaeval church.But his principle is there: in a pre-Reformation and pre-printing age, for peasants who could not read, vivid strip cartoons along the church wall tell the story (with varying degrees of accuracy).And so the good news about Jesus the Messiah travelled– in a sparse and ascetic way to the Benedictines,- in an entertaining and completely over the top way to Dolores and Sister Actand in a visual way to the peasants and serfs of 13th century Franc,How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, said Isaiah in the Old Testament lesson set for tonight, the eve of St Mark. Of the four gospels,Matthew is riddled with references to Jewish faith and practice that require a bit of cultural translation;Luke tells a longer story, though with compassion and charity,while John has deep layers of meaning that make it something of an 'A' level text for many of us.But Mark, dear Mark is the one that has the immediacy in many cultures.Not for nothing is it Mark's gospel that is often used as a “way in” to the Christian story. Missionaries, schoolteachers, vicars and ordinary people in small groups turn to Mark when they want to get an accessible introduction to the Jesus story. If you’ve never read a gospel all in one go: pick up Mark and try it. It'll take you about an hour, that's all.The story of Jesus can be presented in so many ways. The traditional worship of the monks, the throwing into confusion of the convent in Sister Act, and the graphic exaggerations of wall paintings are but three of them. The good news of which Mark speaks cannot be confined to the covers of a book. It can be replayed and illustrated in a million ways.If we truly understand it to be good news for ourselves, we will become gospel bearers to others. I am reminded of an old preachers' saying. Never mind the books: you may be the only gospel some people ever read.Or as Mark chapter 1 verse 1 puts it: the beginning of the good news about Jesus. ................
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