John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

After the waters, the wilderness

It is said that ‘the wild beasts’ who troubled Jesus in the wilderness is a figure of speech which Mark used to describe all these secular forces of the volatile world in which Jesus lived. Like the wild beasts in Daniel and Revelation, these wild beasts in the wilderness were the powers of the kings of the world ruled by the Prince of the power of the air - Satan. The context for Jesus in the wilderness was a world conflicted and broken by the forces of evil.

And Mark wants to show us this - that when Jesus presented himself to John and was immersed in the waters of the River Jordan, that full immersion symbolised a full and total abandonment of the influences of the world, of Satan and the wild beasts; and a full and total abandonment to the will and purposes of God. Jesus’ full immersion has been described as a ‘death experience of repentance’. In that total submersion Jesus ended his participation in the structures and values of society. In those waters his debts to that society were cancelled. ‘He became totally unobliged’. Renouncing the old world order Jesus emerged from the waters signalling the creation of a new humanity.

From After the waters, the wilderness, my talk today. I admit, very Ched Myers.

On mountaintop experiences

Mountaintop experiences are sometimes a mystery to us. I can’t explain what really happened on the day that two friends and I were caught in a white-out on a peak in Snowdonia, where we couldn’t see our way any more because all there was before us was snow - in the sky, in the air, on the ground - we were surrounded by white, in the blizzard our footsteps had disappeared, and we knew that whichever way we headed we were in danger of stepping off an edge into a drop of hundreds of feet. Our minds play tricks with us now as we recall the moment that a man emerged from nowhere, and greeted us as we stood stranded and stricken there in the white-out, an old man, ill-equipped for a winter mountain climb with a string bag hanging from his shoulders. Was he real? He was real enough to help us overcome our fears that day. Did that incident actually happen? All we know is that he guided us down into safety.

- from my talk today, On mountaintop experiences (which also features a reworking of my M62 Ainley Top poem Junction 24: thanks for the high places in Walking the M62, and an extract from Martin Luther King's last speech). All to do with The Transfiguration, of course.

Mark 1 - The slow unveiling of the man of mystery

We are with the gospel of Mark for quite some time now. Which means that the Ched Myers season begins - and what a great inspiration Binding the Strong Man will be. Mark 1 - The slow unveiling of the man of mystery, today's offering.