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Sunday 26th September, Mark 9.38-end

‘WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?’

Whose side are you on? Which side are you on? Often they amount to the same thing. Imagine you’re back in the English Civil War: which side are you on? The fate of the country and the fate of your family hang upon your answer. Black Lives Matter: will you boo or cheer when the players take the knee? There’ll be an election eventually: whose side will you be on? Will you vote tribally or in conscience? And, tragically, the Taliban may want to know of the Afghan people: which side are you on? In Afghanistan, lives may depend upon it.

And lives certainly did for the first Christians, all of them Jews in the very early days. Whose side were they on? The penalties could be ejection from the synagogue and local society by fellow Jews, or else flogging or death by the Romans. It was a serious business being on the Christian side in those early days.

Jesus issued this kind of challenge from time to time. In one episode recorded in Matthew and Luke’s gospels, Jesus says to the Jewish crowd: ‘Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters’. But in today’s reading from Mark’s gospel, he says: ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’.

Now there’s a puzzle for us. Which do you think is true: ‘Whoever is not with me is against me’, or ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’? Well, Jesus loved to set people thinking, and he was very fond of exaggeration or over-statement to make his points. So I think they could just both be true . . in different ways.

But my preference is for ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’. It’s much less censorious, more generous, more inclusive. What prompted Jesus to say this was John, one of the disciples, telling him they’d seen someone casting out demons in Jesus’s name, and had tried to stop him because he wasn’t one of Jesus’s followers.

Casting out demons was a culturally based term for healing: healing people from physical and mental

afflictions. We shall never know for sure what was going on when people were healed in this way. The contemporary culture was worlds away from ours. Illness, particularly mental illness, was attributed to demons, the devil, a cosmic power that had to be defeated.

Coronavirus has brought home to us the almost cosmic power of infection: an epidemic, a pandemic. Sometimes, the language of politicians and their advisers has made it sound as if covid actually is a demon, a personality to be out-run, defeated by stealth and cunning. What would Jesus have made of it, I wonder? How would he have reacted to coronavirus?

In truth, it’s not much good speculating. Because the culture, the underlying beliefs and expectations of the people were so different from ours. To what extent were the sicknesses that were healed by casting out demons psychosomatic? To what extent were the healings psychological? We really don’t know.

What we do know from these stories, though, is that Jesus is on our side. The love of God is stronger than sickness and all evil. And now, in the 2020’s, God’s love is being demonstrated by those who devise vaccines to defeat covid, and by the hospital and community staff who care for us when we are physically or mentally sick.

That’s why ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’ is so pertinent. Some pharmaceutical researchers know they are on Jesus’s side, some doctors do, some nurses do, some community and care home workers do. Others do not know they are, but they still are. Jesus raised to life several people apparently dead. I watched a friend brought back to life with a defibrillator recently. So defibrillator manufacturers and operators join the list of those to whom ‘Whoever if not against us is for us’ applies. They are continuing the healing work of the Lord in the current culture, the prevailing practice, the modern mode. They are sacred skills in which they engage.

Now: today is a Cathedral Community Day, with the Dean and Chapter convening a meeting to which all members of the cathedral community are invited. The Cathedral Community is vast. Well, huge – regular worshippers, paid staff, Close residents and around 800 volunteers. They may not all turn up for the meetings. But they are all members. It’s a truly inclusive organisation. It embraces believing worshippers and worshippers struggling with belief; it embraces believing staff and volunteers, some of whom attend other churches; it embraces staff and volunteers who struggle with belief or find God through routes parallel to Christianity. It is a fantastic community, a microcosm of society, held together by a shared commitment to this amazing building, its music, its worship, its corporate life and its visitors. And it all betokens love of the Lord.

This is a community to which Jesus’s saying relates: ‘Whoever if not against us is for us’. And, more than that, it is a community committed to healing; the healing of relationships with God and each other, the

healing of society through our daily commitments and activity. ‘Whoever if not against us is for us’. May we be worthy of that awesome calling.