In today’s Gospel we heard Mark giving us a part of a photo snap of a typical day in Jesus’ adult ministerial life.  Indeed he is describing Jesus’ first day in his new job.

In his Gospel, Mark is telling the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God as a challenge to all his readers to believe in Jesus as the Lord, and to give an impression of what the phrase “kingdom of God” means.  Jesus begins his ministry proclaiming, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent, and believe the good news.”

Now I wonder as we listened to today’s Gospel reading what impression it made upon us.  Imagine that for a moment we were able to listen to this account without all our modern critical faculties at play.  How would we feel about this man Jesus?  Everywhere he goes he seems to bring peace, harmony and goodwill.  He heals people; he calms those who are mentally disturbed; he heals a leper and restores him to his community; and he tells of the good news of God.  He is a pretty impressive individual.  We might think of him as some kind of superman.  I suspect we would feel drawn to him, though we might be somewhat sceptical (those critical faculties at work again) and we would be wondering where those powers came from.

Mark is not writing a historical account of what Jesus did.  Nor, though it might seem so, is he seeking to amaze us with Jesus’ miraculous powers.  Rather he is telling us of Jesus’ actions to demonstrate that this was indeed Jesus the messiah.  So the healing he performs and the casting out of demons, the two are closely related, demonstrate that Jesus is a man with special healing powers.  He is indeed a man of authority.  He is the Beloved Son of the Father.

Mark portrays a world where the well being of humans is under threat from the temptations of sin, the influence of Satan, demons, sickness, and leprosy.    All are related.  In Biblical times sickness and leprosy were often seen as related to the influence of the devil.  For Mark, the good news of Jesus Christ’ was that Jesus offered a complete counter to the disorder of the world he knew, using the powers given him by God.  The prevailing belief among that ancient Jews was that sickness and leprosy were punishment for sin or symptoms of the influence of demonic forces.   Jesus had come to proclaim that the ‘Kingdom of Godwas near’.  The Healing Miracles and Exorcisms he carried out were proof of this.

There seems to be little doubt that Jesus did perform miraculous healing and exorcisms, this seems to have been part of what brought him to public notice.  Mark speaks of the whole city gathering around Simon’s house to witness Jesus’ actions.   The language of miracles was something which the society of the day were able to speak about with relative ease.  And Jesus was not the only person of Biblical times to be described as having such powers.

And surely there is a real sense that if we believe in miracles then miracles happen, and that is true today as it was two thousand years ago.  I went with our Year 11 students to a very powerful talk this week by someone who had lived as a child in Nazi occupied Poland, and whose telling of her story was one of a series of miracles which enabled her self, her older sister and her mother to survive the Holocaust, though her father was exterminated in the Camps.  This included an account of how her mother and herself travelled in disguise overnight from Lvov to Warsaw in a train compartment accompanied by four high ranking SS officers.

The Language of miracles has not totally disappeared from our society.  We are aware of individuals who have a special gift of healing, able through touch or word to restore people to health.  Others we may know carry with them a quality of real integrity which in itself seems to destroy any evil influence they come into contact with.  They bring a calming touch, bringing peace into a place where there was disturbance before.  Such may be interpreted as “exorcism” of demons and may be seen as the work of the power of good over evil.

But though miracles were evidence for Mark that Jesus was the Son of God, in themselves they were not proof.  More importantly they demonstrated that Jesus had come to offer liberation from human distress and from a sense that disease was a punishment sent by God.  Jesus through his healing and exorcisms demonstrates that God desires to heal rather than to punish.

The Miracles were also not in themselves a proof of the permanent power of God working in Jesus, though they were evidence of that power.  As we see repeatedly, Jesus finds time to pray on his own, to spiritually refresh himself.  Through that prayer he is enabled to proclaim the gospel and to heal.

But Jesus does not exploit these powers.  When he was asked by the Pharisees to prove he was the messiah through a sign of his power, he refuses to give it.

For the primary purpose of the miracles is to demonstrate the nature of the kingdom of God.  And a consistent theme in Jesus’ portrayal of God’s kingdom is service and an identity with the weak and vulnerable.

The debate over the power of God and how it actuates itself through humanity and the church is an issue picked up by Paul in one Corinthians and is very relevant to us today.

For there are those who claim that the powers of healing are evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives and in their church’s lives.  And evidence of healing is seen as evidence of the success of the power of prayer.   Now it may be true that healing is evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit, but the absence of healing is not proof in itself of the absence of God or of any failure on a person’s part in their ability to pray.  For what does that say to all those good people who pray devoutly each day for healing miracles to take place and no such healing does take place.

And Mark too faces this in the gospel for Jesus’ story is ultimately not one of power, but one of weakness and surrender.  Jesus on the Cross does not use miraculous power to save himself, rather he acknowledges his powerlessness in the face of death.  And in doing so he lets go of all power and acknowledges his ultimate human vulnerability and surrenders himself into God’s hands.  It is this apparent failure which Mark and all the gospel writer’s want us to face. And as we begin to approach the season of Lent this is something we might reflect upon.

For paradoxically the cross reveals the true power of God and that can only be understood in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  In letting go to death Jesus becomes the Messiah.  In letting go to our death we find life.

So the gospel of Jesus which Paul and all who follow Jesus are called to proclaim is not a gospel of control, but rather one of service.  Seeking to share Jesus’ concern for the weak and vulnerable, communicating with them through human touch.  And as Paul says that requires us to meet people on their ground, to communicate with them in their language, to go into peoples homes and workplaces and be alongside with them where they are.

The prediction was apparently made on the grounds of their study of scripture, and numerology within scripture, their prayer life and their reading of the signs of the times.

Not that this is of course the first time. Over the centuries there has been a smattering of such predictions, including, so I`m told, one in the 16thC in the Netherlands, that included a large end-of-time party, presumably with a more than usually dispiriting clear-up, next morning.

Though it may have been the first `apocalypse-now` with a pet plan, which this apparently did, for loved ones left behind.

I wonder what leads those one imagines and hopes to be otherwise sensible people of faith, into such extremes?

Reasonable speculation could suggest many possible factors, going far beyond our time this morning. One such, seems to be include a quest for certainty – to know, to know definitively, to be able thus to predict and to plan accordingly.

While for all of us a level of strategic planning is needed as we seek to move forward in the life of faith, taking into accounts life`s practical realities within which we seek God`s way, we cannot know – absolutely know for sure – however uncomfortable that may be.

It seems to have been uncomfortable for Thomas and Philip, as we have heard in today`s Gospel. Thomas says to Jesus `We don`t know where you`re going – how can we know the way?`

Philip says `Show us, and we will be satisfied`.

Not unreasonable. We want to know.

Jesus says beguilingly `I am the way`. He offers a process and a path and elicits trust rather than offering knowledge.

Early Christian heresies were often grouped under the term from the word knowledge – the Gnostics, who purported hidden knowledge that sorted things. Follow their way and you would know.

Meanwhile the people of the mainstream early church were described rather as `People of the Way`. Process. Open ended.

Our trust is in God, and through baptism we are incorporated into the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is our example.

Risky stuff – trust and forward movement via a path and way – as we discover all too powerfully in our other reading this morning, and what happened to Stephen.

Stephen`s witnessing to this trust, led to his martyrdom.

The word translated as witness is the one from which we get the word martyr. A martyr witnesses to the faith via the ultimate sacrifice of their own life.

With the death of Stephen we have the death of the first Christian martyr – St Stephen.

The first saints with a capital `S` were `canonised` informally through their self giving – and many of the all but innumerable local saints still found and revered around the eastern Mediterranean became saints through their martyrdom.

In the first three hundred years of the Christian church there were no fewer than ten major persecutions of Christians. Strangely – or perhaps indeed not so strangely – these persecutions, far from weakening the Christian community and communities, seemed rather to strengthen them, through their giving of themselves in open trust – rather than seeking to sort life through fixed knowledge.

We were reflecting over our post Morning Prayer cup of tea the other day, about how Christianity in places like China, where it is now more allowed but still closely watched and monitored, is growing at an exponential rate – while it is often tailing off a bit in the liberal easy west.

To the point where we can be left asking ourselves – if at the heart of the life and a pivotal measure of trust  within the life of Christian faith, is the way of the cross – the way of our self-giving in and through and alongside our Lord Jesus Christ – just what, in our circumstances, may that amount to? In what real day to day sense are we manifestly people of the way (as opposed to seeking a sort of knowledge or control to help us `sort life`)?

Well – there are those all too quantifiable ways whereby we do put ourselves out for our faith and manifest out trust. We are for example currently involved in our annual review of our giving, and you will be hearing from our Treasurer in due course.

At the other end of the scale, there will be those all but entirely unquantifiable ways, known only to each one of us, whereby our journeying in faith and in trust, gradually enables our dispositions and attitudes and approaches, slowly to be `conformed to the mind of Christ` as St Paul puts it.

And between those two extreme points of easily quantifiable and all but indiscernible, are to be found the many examples in church and domestic and neighbourhood and work and other life, through which our faith, our growing trust in God, enables us to be ever more open to the transformative power of God in our lives.

Much as we may feel for the disappointed group that have woken up to find another day, as opposed to what they had predicted, we are bound to challenge such and all oversimplifications of the life to which we are called. We pray God`s presence with us and his blessing upon us in our own place and time, as we seek to deepen our life in him, moving forward not so much in apparent knowledge as in real developing trust ; people of the way, the way and the truth and the life of our Lord Jesus Christ.