(Mark 6-14-29 )

There is a joke told by Lionel Blue, the famous Jewish commentator. A man goes to his rabbi and says: “Rabbi, my very brainy daughter has gone to Cambridge, and she has met a born again Christian and she wants to be one too.” The other rabbi says, “I have never told anyone this, but my son has gone to Oxford, he has met a girl and now he wants to convert. Look, we can’t help each other so let’s ask God what we should do.” So they go into a synagogue and bend down on their knees and start to ask God what to do.” A voice comes from heaven, “Why ask me; I too had a son…”

I want to use the story of John the Baptist in prison to talk about something common to us all failure - a fear that we have let other people down, a concern that we are not going to be able to cope, a worry that we have done something wrong and we don't want to talk about it, maybe even a feeling that our life has not been what we might have hoped that it would become. There could be something that you have wanted to tell our partner but have never done so and now this lies uncomfortably between you.

John was the cousin of Jesus. He had called people to repentance as a preparation for the coming Messiah. He wore clothing made with camel’s hair and ate locusts and wild honey (Mk 1:7). He had attacked Herod for marrying Herodias the wife of his brother Philip. Herod had retaliated by putting him in prison. John was a man of the open spaces and so for him to be shut up in prison would be horrible. He has gone from being a famous preacher to an anonymous prisoner. He used to be distinctive and different and special and now he is just one of many prisoners. His life had had a purpose and now it seems pointless. He had been confident and clear in what he was saying and doing and now he is not so sure – what was it all about? It appears that everything that he has worked for and everything he has wanted has collapsed around him.

There are two traps that face him as he seeks to adjust to life in prison. He is either prisoner or stranger to the past. The first trap is for John to deny his past. If he does this he is putting himself at the centre of the picture and assuming that he can self-correct the situation. He is trying to blot out his memories and forget that he ever had a previous life as a preacher. In effect he is trying to control his memories and he is asking too much of himself. He is switching off and shutting his mind to what he had done previously as John the Baptist. Maybe he now feels that it was his mistakes that not his forthright preaching that put him in prison. The drama and excitement of his previous life now seems like an illusion. This is flawed as a coping mechanism because he is not be coming to terms with his past. He is not acknowledging what it all once meant to him.

The second trap for John is to wallow in his past glories and to revel in who he once was. In this scenario, John sits and tells stories to anyone that would listen about his previous life as John the Baptist; he wants to convince people that he is different and special. He ends up listless and apathetic because he feels that he will never get his old life back. He is taking too little responsibility for the situation he is in and ends up sad and pathetic as just another prisoner. This is flawed as a coping mechanism because he is not even trying to adjust to his new situation in prison.

His only chance of coming to terms with his new situation is to become a friend to the past. He needs to be able to live out the tension between how things once were and how things now are. If he shuts his mind to his previous life then he is denying himself comfort from the very reason that put him in prison in the first place. It is the one thing that marks his experience as distinctive and provides him with an explanation of why he is in prison and facing execution. If he tries to live in the past and to convince himself that prison is only temporary then he is loses the ability to adjust to and to engage with his new reality. The dialogue between the past and the present is like a conversation between two people where they start off shouting but gradually learn to listen and to understand what each means to the other. Painful memories are difficult and uncomfortable companions. They chaff and rub against the present. It is the discomfort that this produces that will reshape a situation. Hurt, anger and indignation are subversive and transformative as memories.

The same dynamic is in play at the end of a love affair. People become either prisoner or stranger to the past.

One person takes too much responsibility for what happened and blames himself for what went wrong; he will continually go over what happened and think how he might have done things differently; he finds it hard to move on and put behind him what has happened. Inevitably, his new reality will never live up to his idealised view of the past and this eventually ends up as despair or cynicism – the social mask of someone who has given up on a situation. He is trapped in this situation and is unable to forgive.

Another person will want to move on and forget what happened. She will see the break up of the relationship as the other person’s fault or else she will simply put it down to circumstances. She will accept only a limited responsibility for what has happened. She have no loyalty to the past and so will have limited energy for the present. A denial of what the past has meant means a lack of perspective to the immediate; her behaviour then lurches between apathy (so what) and self-indulgence (who cares). She is trivialising the past has not yet realised the need to forgive the other person.

The reality is that the past is never as good or as bad as we suppose. There is always a shared responsibility in coming to terms with things that have happened. It is grief that gives an edge to our need to adapt to a new situation. It is this that enables us to take on the best of what has happened while leaving behind the dross. Unhappiness both purges the past and shapes the future.

Blessed are those who are sad. They will be comforted (Mt 5:4)

It is our memories that offer us a way of understanding the present. It gives us a platform from which to recognise that just as things were different in the past, so too can they be different in the future. It is a different type of future to how it would have been previously but it is always the things that don’t fit or which are uncomfortable that shapes the person we are to become.

There is the same dynamic in play when we feel that we have done something wrong or let someone down. Some of us caught by the past can feel trapped by things we have or have not done. We blame ourselves; we feel that no one will understand what has happened. It is our fault and we feel we can’t tell anyone what has happened. We feel that no one will understand. Others of us wanting to deny the significance of something that has happened and will to try and brazen out what we have done. We tell people as an act of defiance and feel that it is everyone else’s responsibility to appreciate what has happened. They blame people if they feel that they do not understand or accept their situation

When Nelson Mandela was in prison on Robben Island the guards would make the prisoners run to the quarry to start their days work. Walter Sisulu tells the story about how one morning they were going to be taken to quarry and in the usual way. Nelson [made] a decision, which meant a great deal to all of the prisoners, that they would not stand the question of being pushed around. He suggested we must move even slower than we have ever been. There is a story of him telling his fellow prisoners, on arrival, to stop smoking so that they did not e4nd up being imprisoned twice over. He knew that he was going to be in prison a long time. He knew the importance of his life as an ANC leader and so he did not sit feeling sorry for himself or kicking out against the system but set out about strategising so that he could transform the situation he was in.