Friday: Week 1 in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 1: FRIDAY...

...I suspect, of course, that if we’d sat these poets down in a cool, easy moment and asked them, ‘Did you really think God was asleep?’, they might have said, ‘Well, no; he is God, after all; but it certainly seemed as though he’d gone to sleep at the time!’
That, it seems, is a fairly typical expression of what we might call biblical faith: faith in a God whom we believe at one level to be all-seeing, never-sleeping, omnipresent and omnicompetent – but who, at another level, seems, from the perspective of our muddled and messy lives, to have gone to sleep on the job.

That’s why I find this passage in Mark so wonderfully encouraging. Right from the start the early Christians, reading this short but remarkable account, found it to be a great source of strength and comfort. The little ship of the church is tossed to and fro by the wind and on the waves. There are many, many times when both church leaders and rank-and-file Christians really do feel as though all is lost. All they can do at such times is to pray in the way the first disciples did on the boat...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright