Do you think we’re about to face tougher times with this worldwide financial meltdown? How will Anglicans manage with fewer resources to draw on in our mission? How should we cope with this crisis as people of faith? Luckily we have Mark’s gospel to keep us company on our liturgical journey through the coming year. Mark is an expert on crises – he cut his teeth on one of the big ones.

Whatever comes our way will be nothing compared with the situation Mark and his fellow Christians faced while he was writing his gospel, around 70CE. In that year a Roman army put an end to a four-year siege of the city of Jerusalem, slaughtering its defenders and razing the holy city and its temple to the ground. Roman citizens may have seen this as just another spot of bother in the colonies, but for the Jewish nation it was a huge disaster, challenging their identity as a chosen people trusting in God’s protection. For Jewish and Gentile Christians, finding a place to stand between the colliding forces of Jewish nationalism and Roman “peacemaking” operations was crucial – a wrong move in either direction could wreck the fledgling movement.

Enter Mark, gospel writer. How he tackles this situation can provide lessons for us, two millennia later. Here are three relevant themes…

We need to get our story right

All communities sustain their inner life through shared stories linking their origins with their present situations and promoting shared values that enable community members to work together to face new challenges. One of the worst ways of getting the story wrong is when we flatter ourselves that we are special while ignoring hard realities we should be facing.

We know from Paul’s writings that from the beginning the Christian movement proclaimed Jesus as risen from the dead, a life-giving presence among his people, and coming judge of all peoples. So why is the resurrection almost absent from this gospel, or at least incidental to the storyline?

We can best understand this as a deliberate policy, that Mark is giving his fellow Christians a clear message: This is no time to be preaching a victorious, powerful Messiah. What he does, in fact, is to give narrative expression to Paul’s theology of the Cross. Miracles, judgment, and resurrection do feature in his story, because they are essential parts of the community’s faith, but they are reduced in importance by placing them within a narrative whose overall theme is Jesus’ relentless journey towards death in the holy city, sharing his nation’s agonized question, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” During a disastrous war and its immediate aftermath, what other presentation of the Messiah could have as much integrity?

In a time of economic calamity, we too should carefully re-examine our shared beliefs. Have our expectations of prosperity and comfortable sense of entitlement blinded us to faults in the international economic system? Does our naïve hope that God will protect and rescue us from harm prevent us from seeing what must be done to mend the situation? Whatever happens next, we must avoid presenting ourselves as God’s favourites who float above all trouble.
We don’t need more heroes

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going” ... or so they say. Those who feel the urge to be heroes call others to follow them, as though they really know the best way out of the mess, and others who trust them encourage their self-important delusions. This is a recipe for further disaster, and is certainly what happened in the Jewish-Roman war, according to Josephus’s history. A succession of would-be messiahs rose up to channel Israel’s defiant nationalism, encouraged by religious leaders who should have known better, and the effect was to destroy any chance of a negotiated settlement.

Mark’s main way of addressing such folly is found in the way he portrays Jesus’ disciples throughout his story, especially when it comes to the big showdown in Jerusalem. His treatment of Peter is significant, for this is the eyewitness Mark’s community relied on most to authenticate its preaching about Jesus. Cutting him down to size will serve very nicely to counter any call for new heroes, and Mark goes about it with a will.

Peter was the first to recognize Jesus as Messiah, but this inspired insight is immediately followed by “satanic” opposition to Jesus’ purpose. Peter’s heroic impulse to join Jesus walking on the water is quickly shown to be delusive, and his macho “I will never deny you” loyalty turns out to be just as weak-kneed as the rest.

And just in case the Christian community is tempted to engage in some sort of collective heroics, like joining the Jewish patriots in their futile last stand in Jerusalem, Mark’s “little Apocalypse” (chapter 13) includes specific instructions about fleeing while the opportunity lasts. God’s purpose for his people includes their survival, then and now. That means we have to learn new ways of thinking realistically about the crises we get ourselves into, learning from our mistakes, and not always waiting for the divine cavalry to rescue us.
We need to make friends, not enemies

In social crises it is important to find ways of bringing people together rather than making divisions worse. No doubt there were plenty of Christian preachers in Mark’s time expressing a view that the Jews in Jerusalem were getting their just deserts for rejecting their Messiah – a common belief to this day, but not an effective way of winning Jewish friends. An equally off-putting message would be to ask your Roman neighbours how their ruling authorities could have been so stupid as to crucify the saviour of the world.

Mark takes careful steps to rein in both these ways of being needlessly offensive. What scholars have labelled “the messianic secret” seems to be Mark’s way of saying that Jesus’ identity was not something an average Jew could be expected to spot at a distance – Jesus took steps to keep it hidden and even his disciples had trouble spotting it. As for the Roman authorities, they are generally presented as interacting with Jesus on mutually respectful terms. Even Pilate’s execution order seems to be negotiated with Jesus’ cooperation and assent. Jesus is the one truly noble character in the story, and the rest are frail humans making mistakes rather than deeply evil in their motives. That seems a good starting point for good news to be heard.

In any time of social or economic crisis, we need to find new ways of bringing people and nations together. Showing respect for our common humanity is a good starting point, as Mark seems to have realized. I suspect that we will find other ways in which he prods us into becoming better Christians as we listen to his gospel amid the difficulties we face together in the coming year.

Howard Pilgrim is Vicar of Holy Trinity, Gisborne.