The Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 4 July 2021, Eldroth, Clapham
I’m too young to remember what I was doing when the news came through of John F. Kennedy’s assassination - maybe getting my evening bath in the tub by the living room fire. I think the first major world event which impacted me deeply was on the morning of 9th December 1980, when, leaving for work, I was stopped in my tracks by the radio announcing the murder of John Lennon. My head spun with this news as I walked to the corner to be collected by my work colleague Eric, an old and somewhat glass-half-empty sort of guy who nevertheless was generous enough to give this 18-year-old apprentice a lift each day. I’d grown up in Beatle City, I couldn’t help but have been shaped and formed through the melodies of Paul McCartney and by John Lennon’s sass and quirk and delphic pronouncements; these musicians were a part of who I was; so this was a big shock to my young heart. Imagine the impact on me in the moment when after stepping into Eric’s car, he pointed to the car radio, and gave me his chilling judgement on this event: “He’s never done anything for this city,” he said. “Left us for London as soon as he could.” And that was it. Eric had no compassion for a home-town hero: instead he’d taken offence.
Many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ [1]
Six months after Lennon’s assassination I was at Earl’s Court, London to see another musical legend perform: Bob Dylan was no stranger to controversy, having once provoked his traditional folk audience to uproar by bringing out an electric guitar onstage at Manchester Free Trade Hall, reinventing his songs in a rock and roll idiom accompanied by a verbal onslaught from the stalls which famously included one heckler loudly calling him ‘Judas’. [2] The 1981 tour was similarly controversial as Dylan had then embraced evangelical Christianity, and his songs had taken a particularly bible-thumping turn. When Bob followed a traditional gospel group onstage he opened with one of his new songs. ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, it was called: “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody” - he sang, setting the tone for the evening. ‘When you gonna wake up?’ was his gospel refrain, and none of the Dylan fans on the midnight train back north could sleep, for we were buzzing about his performance, some reviling the proselytizing language, others thrilled that musically Dylan and his band were on their best form for many years, seemingly reinvigorated by this revivalist turn in his career. [3]
Anthropologists talk about the complex relationship which we groups of people, whether villages or families, crowds or churches, have with those people we uphold as our ‘models’ - how at one and the same time we attack and cherish them, hate and love them, diminish and exalt them.
“This is scandal,” says the writer Robert Hamerton-Kelly, “and it is the essence of anxiety (and addiction) because it is the love of what one hates and the hatred of what one loves. Mark tells us it is the state of the hometown crowd in Nazareth with respect to Jesus. The proverb that a prophet is honoured everywhere except in his own home sums up the scandal. Envious of this person, we are at the same time attracted and repulsed by them. The crowd wants to be like the ‘other’ and to destroy him, because he is so pleasing.’ [4]
Can we see this in our nation’s complex relationship with the late Diana, Princess of Wales? How we feel love for this fairytale princess, and at the same time revulsion for her moving beyond the expectations of Royal protocol to live on her own terms? Do we not see this time and again in politics where the ones we admire we empower and then wilfully desire their demise? Do we see this happen on a local level with those we choose to lead us and then - when they try to make their mark - we reject or oppose? Have we seen it happen in families where the one who breaks out to do something different with their lives is both admired and criticised for their unconventional behaviour?
They took offence at him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’
The effect of this is to cause people who might make a difference in the world, to toe the line and pull back from the brink of realising their potential, to become part of the crowd again.
The writer and broadcaster Pat Nevin records a recent encounter at his publishers with a young marketing man who tried to persuade Nevin to stop expressing his own interests and opinions and instead to write about the ‘trending’ topics on social media in a way which would reinforce their readers’ views and prejudices. This sort of pressure is felt by all within the media these days. Nevin, however, resists it; he has always been on the one hand a great crowd-pleaser - previously one of the most attractively gifted footballers of his generation, and on the other hand never swayed by the crowd, both admired and criticised for sitting very lightly to his sport - ‘The Accidental Footballer’ who really wanted to be a teacher, expressly as interested in music, arts and culture as in sport. [5]
This sort of resistance to the pull of our home crowd can leave a person isolated. The entertainer and practicing Roman Catholic Frank Skinner has just published A Comedian’s Prayer Book, of which he writes, ‘At least no one can accuse me of being too commercial.’ [6]
It is not a comedy book that merely uses prayer as a vehicle for its gags, he says, for ‘The writer of such a book runs the risk of finding himself exiled to that most desolate of all places: the Humour Section.’ Is it, then, a prayerbook specifically for comedians? ‘No,’ he writes, for in thirty years in comedy, ‘the religious believers I've met among my fellow japesters would, if assembled, just about fill a Vauxhall Corsa.’ Skinner portrays himself as a man on a pilgrimage - in serious pursuit of a God who he speaks with often - but dressed in a jester’s outfit, for comedy is his calling in life. For taking faith seriously, whilst keeping people smiling, he risks being simultaneously loved and derided, admired and misunderstood. He’s at ease with it.
What you take from this talk may depend on whether you place yourself amongst those prophets dishonoured in their home town, among their own kin, in their own house, struggling with following what you might describe as a ‘higher calling’ against the flow of your folks. What is this wisdom that has been given to us?
It may depend on whether you’re more at ease in the crowd with its instinct to reign in the mavericks among us. Is he amazed at our unbelief?
Or finally, it may depend on whether, though you see what crowds can do to people who are open about their faith, you nevertheless determine to respond to Jesus’ calling - to go out, to proclaim, to cast out, to cure and heal. He calls us, sends us out, and gives us authority over the unclean spirits. [7]
Notes
[1] Mark 6.1-13.
[2] Chris Long, Bob Dylan and the Manchester Free Trade Hall 'Judas’ show. BBC News, May 2016.
[3] Bob Dylan Setlist, Earls Court, London, 27 June 1981. See Clinton Heylin, Trouble In Mind: Bob Dylan's Gospel Years: What Really Happened for a forensic account of this period of Dylan’s career.
[4] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred. Poetics of Violence in Mark, pp. 95-97. Quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary. Resources, Proper 9B.
[5] Pat Nevin, The Accidental Footballer: a memoir. Prologue, p.1-4.
[6] Frank Skinner, A Comedian's Prayer Book. Introduction, p.1-2.
[7] The talk concludes with a recording of Bob Dylan, I Believe In You, performed by Alison Krauss on BBC Four Transatlantic Sessions, 24 March 2012. Sourced from YouTube: https://youtu.be/b5dpkBV2ifs.
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