To Share in the Body: A theology of martyrdom for today’s church
What do you do with books that challenge you?
I find myself most often riveted by them, but unless there is a place for me to explore and live out what has been discussed in real life, memory of it fades…and is possibly even reinvented.
And it would seem that that’s not far off the thinking behind Craig Hovey’s challenging little book (157pp). It’s a book about the Gospel of Mark, martyrdom, and how the two may come together in and through the church today (Brazos Press, 2008).
Mark’s Gospel, Craig Hovey reminds us, is widely thought to be “written for a persecuted church at a violent time in history. It’s aim is to help Christians who are struggling against oppression and forces that attempt to silence the preaching of the gospel….it was written for a martyr-church.”
In short, it might be said that it was written for us. But we’ve been a little deaf, over the years. Easier to domesticate and fabricate than to actually take seriously that the gospel calls us to confront what the bible calls the ‘principalities and powers’, and what we might think of as idols, images and institutions, or as Sin and sin, the power of death…
But the reality is, it’s not out ‘fault’. Orientating the church for mission to transform society and in doing so proclaim the gospel is always going to be subverted by the powers, and just as in times of the First Testament, prophets come and go but the ignorance and seduction of the people of God endures (woe to us).
Our only ‘fault’ is that we have so believed the lie and deception that mainstream incarnations of a church addicted to growth and power and legacy, and Hovey offers us a chance to see again – to see things differently. He offers us a chance to turn towards the light, and towards the cross, in a ‘new’ way. But like all truth that seems to call itself gospel it can be more than a little scary; more than a little intimidating. And like so many writings that provoke, we might find that afterwards there is really no place to explore and live out what has been discussed in the real life of the church.
As Hovey says:
“In the gospel idiom, martyrs die the death of Christ along with him. But as the story of desertion in the garden makes plain, no one actually does this. There is no faithful church at the cross. This is part of the suffering of the cross itself.”
Therein lies the challenge. The church of the institution is not (as a matter of course) the church of mission, not the church of Christ at the cross, and is in fact beset by the power of Death at every turn. The garden can be a very pleasant and aesthetically pleasing place to hang out, but Hovey reminds us in order to learn to see again, to be faithful and just, we must travel from the garden to the cross and dwell in vulnerability at the margins of society and the world, re-learning that which we too easily call gospel but venerate as some idol or other. That’s the journey of faith Hovey (or rather the writer of Mark) calls us to – and an opportunity to practice it in the real world, in normal every day life. Just where we are.
Hovey tells us of a Mark who’s story was provocative, gripping, challenging…
In so doing, he reminds us of a church who deserted. That church is us. We ceased to be a ‘place’ in which the gospel could be lived out, explored, tested, and in which the gospel tested, explored and was lived out through us. Being persecuted is an uncomfortable thing, to say the least. Not surprisingly, and often unconsciously, we’ve spent a lot of years seeking to insulate us from that fate.
Hovey’s book is a gift that will help us get back on the road.
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