Sharing some thoughts

  The church is often the subject of controversy. It seems there are lots of people just waiting for us to get things wrong - and sometimes we oblige of course! One of the great challenges for the church in this is to balance the spiritual and secular. How much do we fit into society and how much do we stand separately?   This is a challenge that, as Christians living in a modern society, we constantly have to be aware of. Just because society does something it doesn’t mean the church should, but similarly just because the church has said something for years doesn’t mean it can never be thought through again and again…   And this conflict is one that has gone back to the times of Jesus himself, as we have seen in the gospel reading today (Mark 8:27-38). Jesus, travelling with his disciples, asks them who people say that he is – and Peter replies, ‘You are the Messiah’. It could have been a gold star for Peter, but then, as Jesus moves on to speak of the suffering that he must undergo

  Today’s gospel reading (Mark 7:24-37) gives us the account of a persistent woman begging Jesus to heal her daughter. We are told that the daughter had an unclean spirit, perhaps today we may recognise it as something like epilepsy, but whatever it was it was damaging her life. And so the mother approached Jesus who initially seemed to reject her. But she persisted and eventually her daughter was healed. And so in a way this just goes down as another miracle of Jesus, but actually there is a little more to this account as well. The first thing to look at was the attitude of the mother. This was a very pushy woman - perhaps the sort of ardent feminist found on a bus one day. When she was getting on a man just in front of her got up from his seat. She thought to herself, "Here's another man trying to keep up the customs of a patriarchal society by offering a poor, defenceless woman his seat," and so she pushed him back onto the seat. A few minutes later, the man tried to