Imagining the Lectionary: it is through our brokenness that we glimpse another world (Epiphany 5B)

Imagining the Lectionary: it is through our brokenness that we glimpse another world (Epiphany 5B)

Reflection accompanying image “looking through the knot hole in the fence with face and text”

That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons (Mark 1:32)

Right from the start of his ministry Jesus is confronted  by the full and unremittingly dreadful spectrum of human anguish. Of course none of this would have been surprising to him; like all of his contemporaries he had grown up surrounded by the ever present suffering, pain, sickness, loss, torment, despair, poverty and heartache that was the daily lot of people in the first century. This world of his, without advanced medicine, healthcare or welfare systems, is almost beyond our comprehension, unless that is we belong to our world's poorest people, in which case it will be all too starkly familiar.
The harsh realities of family life beset by sickness and the tragedy of early death were commonplace, and in a way that is easily recognisable from even a casual perusal of the old weathered headstones in a church graveyard. Death was very much part of life. Paradoxically today, with ever increasing longevity, death seems somehow 'unnatural', even though, as then, for each of
us it is entirely inevitable.

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