John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

The disabled God, fully alive

“In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God,” wrote Nancy Eiesland. God remains a God the disabled can identify with, she argued - he is not cured and made whole; his injury is part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing....

- from The disabled God, fully alive, my talk today. The inspiration: Nancy Eiesland's The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability’.

 

Easter: unreliable witnesses

... here is one of the strange ironies of the Christian faith, one among many ironies we juggle with at Easter time. God chooses unreliable witnesses to reveal the truth to the world. The people least likely to be listened to by polite society, are precisely the ones who hold the key to real understanding. 

Mark’s gospel is full of them. From the wild-haired, wild-eyed, halitosis-mouthed John the Baptist, shouting in the wilderness, to the squabbling rabble of disciples who hardly ever seemed to get what Jesus was about, from the demons who Jesus exorcised to the centurion at the foot of the cross, who each proclaimed his deity with unwavering certainty, Mark provokes us to take their witness seriously. For they, not the scribes and priests and governors, but the ones on the ground who met him, the ones whose eyes he physically opened and whose hearts he left strangely burning, they are the bearers of the strange truth that this Son of Man has come to bring about an irreversible change in the world. ...

- from my Easter Sunday talk, Easter: unreliable witnesses. 

He Never Said a Mumblin' Word

Why was Jesus silent before his accusers?

After all, wasn’t this the Jesus who had spent his entire public ministry confronting the authorities:

• reminding the scribes, priests and elders of their proper place as servants of God, and their dereliction of their duties through their abuses of power;
• making Rome constantly aware of the impermanence of their empire in contrast to the everlasting kingdom of God which Jesus came to inaugurate, and keenly announced;

Wasn’t this the Jesus who had turned over the tables of the money-lenders to clearly make his point to the Temple authorities, and who had put the Roman Empire in its place when he said, ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what belongs to God…?

Why, now, in the High Priest’s courtroom and the Governor’s palace, the most public and influential platforms on which Jesus had ever stood, why now his silence before his accusers?

And why was Jesus silent in the company of the accused?

After all, wasn’t this the Jesus who had spent his entire public ministry liberating the accused ones of his society:

• bringing into his company those who society kept outside: tax-collectors and sinners; Samaritans; a woman caught in adultery; 
• bringing healing and release to those who society condemned as unclean: lepers; the possessed; a menstruating woman;

Wasn’t this the Jesus who looked on those who stood accused of being the bad ones, the causes of society’s ills - and chose them to be his companions, dinner-guests, friends - affirming their humanity, their equal status before God?

Why now, with the opportunity to demonstrate his innocence before his accusers, did Jesus stay silent and permit them to condemn him into the category of ‘the accused’? ...

From He never said a mumblin' word: my Good Friday talk, inspired by The Welcome Wagon.