Two unlikely characters came to my attention during the week.
A Chinese photographer called Li Zhenshang. I read about him because a book of his extraordinary photographs will be published next week. He's in his sixties now and living in New York, but 40 years ago found himself as a young staff photographer for a Communist Party controlled newspaper, forced to record 10 years of horrific torture and execution at the hands of the Red Guards during Mao's cultural revolution. In the introduction he writes of one assignment:
I had to get very close. I could smell the fishy smell of their blood and brains. Afterwards I could not get their faces out of my mind. Whenever I woke up at night I would keep my eyes closed, trying not to think of the dead. As I enlarged the photographs of these executed people in the dim red light of the darkroom, I quietly spoke to them: 'if your souls are haunted, please don't haunt me too. I'm only trying to help. I'm making your pictures because I want to record history. I want people to know you were wronged'. And to this day – even when I printed the images for this book – I always say that.
By hiding around 30,000 negatives Li committed a highly subversive and dangerous crime – often being censured for photographing 'beyond the assignment' – eventually sentenced to two years hard labour – although the Red Guards never found his hidden negatives. When the New York Times called him a hero on the 30th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, Li said 'It is not for me to say – I was very frightened'
I was in town one morning this week and crossed Princes St at the National Gallery – where as you know there is a huge amount of building work going on – tremendous noise – at that particular spot a very loud compressed air/generator machine made a deafening noise on one side, and about five or six feet to the other side, the continual roar of bus after bus. The swarm of hundreds of people passing. And there on the pavement, at that very place, standing with her back to the wrought-iron fence, an old woman. A very respectable looking old woman – mid 70's – white hair neatly set – dapper, well cut casual clothes. She was posed in a stance of meditation – eyes closed in serene concentration – hands clasped in a receiving/offering shape. My first thought was that she was a street performer – one of the kind who stand perfectly motionless, fascinatingly frozen in a frenzied world of moving people. I noticed her neat cream slip-on shoes. I noticed the shoes because I was looking down where she stood on a roughly torn sheet of white paper, about a yard across, - the kind that comes on a roll that we would use at the Sunday's School – which she was standing on to hold down. Written carelessly in black marker pen across the length of the paper were the word 'Join me in praying for the peace of the world'. So I did briefly – so briefly no one would have noticed – and then for ages afterwards found my imagination racing with the possibilities of what her story may be – some very bonkers religious sandwich-board type? – or an ex-diplomat survivor of the Cultural Revolution, or of torture at the hands of Pinochet whose brutal revolution was also commemorated this week? A mother of the disappeared? A retired banker from Morningside who has decided to commit herself to a life of prayer? Perhaps she's your auntie and you can decide whether you want to tell me.
Gifted and well organised preachers will often do a series of sermons – in a planned sort of way. Being neither of those, it only occured to me as I began to prepare this, that it followed on very well from last week. So inspired by the unlikely advocates I encountered, I'd like to go further with the imagery of advocacy. I said last week that if we would be spiritual advocates, advocates for Christ on behalf of others then:
a) it may involve being a voice for the voiceless beyond boundaries that we may feel comfortable with and familiar in, and may involve refusing to collude with other people's dismissal of us....
b) inspired by the stories of Jesus response to the advocacy of the dying girl's mother and the friend's of the deaf man, we should embrace the spiritual reality that someone else's micrcosm might be redeemed, rescued, made glorious by God's response to our advocacy – by God responding to the petitions of our hearts on behalf of others.
The thought that I would offer today is that in today's passage from Mark Jesus reponds to Peter's naming of him as 'Messiah' by saying that there is no choice about how his followers should order their lives. i.e. If last week's story demonstrated the nature of spiritual advocacy, then that served merely to set up Jesus's teaching before us today - that there's no other way to be a follower of Christ than to walk the road of 'perpetual advocacy' (not meaningless self-denial as a form of aetheticism) – but to walk this earth (fleetingly) with a core purposefulness that is shaped by the belief that the needs of others and the well-being of God's world are more important than even our own lives. Too obvious to say? - even if it is , then that doesn't prevent it being the kind of 'fundamentalism' that could shape every remaining thought of our lives. What kind of life might that be?
Jesus dismantled his disciples' ideas
of what a Messiah might be by identifying himself with the prophet
Isaiah's 'Suffering Servant'. We heard one of the four famous
'Servant Songs' from Isaiah read this morning. This is the model of
being a 'servant of God' that Jesus feels is appropriate to articulate
his destiny – Is 53 – He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with grief – Is
50 (today's) vs 6 - I
gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who
pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and
spitting.
50:7 The Lord GOD helps me; therefore I have not been
disgraced; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I
shall not be put to shame;
50:8 he who vindicates me is near. Who
will contend with me? Let us stand up together
- and using this model Jesus speaks plainly for the first time about his own servanthood and his suffering. And says clearly and bravely that there are implications....
Vs 34 - If any want to become my followers - what kind of life might that be? The word used by Jesus for 'life' (that which may be saved or lost) is 'psyche' – one's very being, one's true self. Here's the message - Our very being, our true self has been given to us spend, and not keep. In other words, if our sole aim (as our culture assails us with) is to make life as long and trouble free as possible, and if we will make no effort except for ourselves, we are losing life all the time. But if we embark on the road of 'perpetual advocacy', and deprioritise time and wealth and comfort in our desire to do something for Christ's own, for whom he died, then we are winning all the time.
Here in these verses from Mark we are very close to the heart of the Christian gospel - and so, I suspect, in their own ways, were my two unlikely advocates.