I’ve just finished getting ready for the first of our
evenings in church looking at ‘Mark’s Big Story,’ three sessions of discussion
and study on the major themes in the Gospel. We’ll be thinking about freedom in
the Gospel, focussing on the various ways in which people were trapped or
oppressed in 1st century Palestine, a combination of Roman
occupation, high debt caused by Roman taxes and the tithe system, and the
strict purity rules policed by the scribes and Pharisees.
We’ll also be thinking how people feel trapped today. During
my preparations, I came across the ‘Nomadic Hive Manifesto,’ a statement
written by a group of art students and lecturers who occupied the National
Gallery in December 2010, as part of a protest against increased tuition fees. The
manifesto begins like this:
A spectre
is haunting Europe – the spectre of debt slaves refusing to pay. All the powers
within Europe have entered into a holy alliance to regenerate a failing
economy, to realise a lethal dream of returning to business as usual, and to
level the education and culture, to transform the educational and cultural
sectors into a consumer society success story.
And then later
it says:
If you
listen carefully, all that moaning, the sound that can be heard just behind the
drone of everyday life, cars and the slurping of lattes, has become a little
more urgent: a humming of dissatisfaction becomes dissent. The Holy Alliance
fears that this noise has become a song on the lips of all?
What’s fascinating is the way the protestors speak about the presence
of ‘the powers,’ which lies behind so much of action in Mark, and
throughout the rest of the New Testament. Often, it’s those outside of the
church who are best placed to speak truth to it. I haven’t come across a better
description of the spiritual forces which lie behind the financial crisis, the
sense that we’re owned by a markets model which has failed us, but which we can’t
get free from.
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