Wednesday 17th March
St Mark 14: 1- 2
It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; for they said, ‘Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.’
Reflection
It’s two days before Passover and the chief priests theoretically should be preparing for the festival, yet instead, they are scheming and plotting to have Jesus killed…not exactly the definition of right holiness…and they recognise that it could cause a riot if handled badly. This passage could have come straight out of a newspaper in the last 12 months…
You might be sitting there wondering “what can I do about how the world is now?” But I want to challenge you to make the small changes, read the news with a critical eye, ask what bias the writer, editor and paper have. If you see something derogatory on Facebook, challenge the author of it. If you think your local council has poor policies regarding homelessness, speak to others in your church and community, challenge the local council to change things. If you don’t like the government’s approach to asylum seekers and refugees, write to your MP, get your whole church to write to the MP for the area the church is in, join in a campaign and write to the Home Secretary. If you feel called, march in protests, remembering we may feel called to civil disobedience, shouting, chanting and waving placards but we should never resort to violence. Raise your voice with those on the margins, but never raise your fists.
We can’t change the past, we can’t stop the chief priests from plotting, we can change that Jesus was arrested, falsely charged, tortured and murdered by the state. We can’t change this but neither should we, but we should do something about the injustices we see now. The chief priests were letter of the law folk but we have been called by God to be spirit of the law folk, we are called to walk an authentic, and holy life and to live with integrity with the world.
Prayer
God of Justice
Challenge us to live and act with integrity and authenticity.
Enable us to be spirit of the law people, and to act with love in all we do and say.
Help us each day, to see the world through the eyes of the marginalised, not through eyes of privilege so that we can hear the call of need in the world around us.
Amen.