Monty Python & The Gospel of Mark

Earlier this month our family went to laugh and clap along with the audience at the Stratford Festival’s rendition of Spamalot. It was a raucous, cheerful, disrespectful echo of Monty Python’s various shows and films. The ridiculous and absurd story lines around King Arthur’s adventures in search of the Holy Grail left us laughing and gave us plenty to replay over dinner. Underneath it all we were really laughing at ourselves because  many of our own blind spots and preoccupations can be a bit absurd in their own right.
 
I was thinking about that as I watched Jesus in action as he moved from place to place confronted by honest seekers and hypocritical challengers. I thought his audience might have begun laughing like the Stratford audience when some religious leaders came and spun a yarn to show him the absurdity of the idea of resurrection.
 
I thought Spamalot’s writer Eric Idle (an original Monty Python member) couldn’t have written a more ridiculous piece. They spun a tale about an unlucky woman who had seven husbands who all died on her before having any children, and then she too died. “At the resurrection, whose wife would she be?”, they asked with smirks on their faces.
 
Jesus ignored their smirks and probably had the crowd laughing with this reply; “‘ Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. Now about the dead rising – have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush, how God said to him, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!’” (Mark 12:24-27 NIVUK)
 
He challenged their very identity, tied to a preoccupation with obscure points of doctrine about God that missed God and God’s power. I wondered that morning how much I am guilty of the same preoccupations that leave me missing the story of God among us in Jesus and the power of God to expand our vision about life, death and resurrection.
 
In our 24 hour news cycles and social media frenzies we get caught up in arguments that miss one another’s humanity and lose our sense of perspective in our own failures to have compassion for the pain of the world around us.
 
Summer is a good time to restore our perspective by listening to God in quiet contemplation in creation, Scripture, and prayer. Our Prayers for Deck and Dock (scroll to the bottom to download) are Touchstone’s offer of prayers and a Gospel story to encourage that process of releasing unhelpful preoccupations with self and release us to the loving embrace of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. May you find God’s mercy grace and peace in your recreations. Our weekly thoughts will resume in September.
 
Goodness of friendship grow among us,

Norm