Secrets are hard to keep.

It’s not that we aren’t trustworthy people. It’s just that when something’s hidden, we are just bursting to uncover it. It is such a relief to get a secret out into the open.

But secrets, because they are secret, aren’t well known. They get misunderstood. And they take on a life of their own.

When Mark wrote his gospel, he was doing something that by all accounts was altogether new. ‘Gospel’ as a genre of writing had never been done before. ‘Gospel’ as a word was well known – it accompanied the proclamation of Caesars’ victories; ‘good news’ to all, supposedly. But Mark’s way of writing was stirring something revolutionary. It was an act of defiance, a new gospel, a proclamation of the good news of Jesus the Christ.

I personally think that Mark’s Gospel is the most theologically revolutionary book of the whole Bible. Paul did some pretty incredible things with Jewish theology – we’ll read about those during the second half of the year. But in the wake of Paul’s death around 65 CE, this first gospel – with rumours of its origin in Peter – finds its way into Christian communities with a secret message. A secret bursting to be set free.

Last week we looked at Leviticus from the perspective of Israel’s community life and their national development. This week I want to explore what some of these laws and rituals meant to the Israelites and how it expressed some of their beliefs about God and about their relationship to him.

One of the common misconceptions about the sacrifices described in Leviticus is that they were to do with the removal of moral guilt, i.e. sins, from the people. This is understandable as many of the laws are expressed in terms of what is right and what is wrong and much of the sacrificial system is construed in terms of ‘atonement’ for ‘sin’. The easy mistake, however, is to assume the meaning we give ‘atonement’ and ‘sin, in this context,’ is the same as the meaning the Israelites would have understood.

In actual fact, as we find in reading Leviticus carefully, the sacrifices prescribed there are for a whole raft of occasions. So there is a fellowship offering to consummate reconciliation between two parties. There are offerings for spontaneous thanks to God e.g. for the safe arrival of a child or a good harvest and there are offerings made in supplication for safe passage or physical healing. Then there are the sin and guilt offerings, which, we must note, are specifically for unintentional offences (the sin offering for the unintentional breaking of one of the Lord’s commands, 4:2, and the guilt offering for any unintentional offence in regard to any of the Lord’s holy things, 5:15). Indeed some of the offences requiring a sin or guilt offering are very clearly amoral (i.e. they have no particular morality one way or the other). For example, you must offer some lambs, flour and oil as a sacrifice once cleansed of an infectious skin disease; offer a lamb and a pigeon after childbirth; bring a couple of doves after each monthly period; offer a couple of pigeons for a bodily discharge.

The simple fact is that for intentional sins, there is no sacrifice! So we have to understand the ‘sin’ that the ‘sin offerings’ and ‘guilt offering’ dealt with as only part of the whole Israelite understanding of ‘sin’ and certainly as something very different from how we understand ‘sin’ today.

Leviticus is certainly one of the most laborious books in the Old Testament. Basically full of laws, the majority of which relate to ceremonial rites, it cuts off the narrative flow of Exodus to espouse further the commands given to Moses at Sinai and their subsequent additions. As there is no obvious break with which to split the two weeks-worth of readings, we’ll simply deal with the whole of Leviticus twice, from two different perspectives.

In many ways, Leviticus is also the most foreign of the Old Testament books. Its regulations about regular animal sacrifice, with blood sprinkled here and there and, even more pointedly, its God who appears inaccessible without them, seem alien to our ‘civilised’ modern world. And rightly so. Yet, without an understanding of the mindset behind these ancient rituals we can never fully appreciate the faith of Israel and the context into which Jesus would be born.

Whenever I read Proverbs I remember one of my Old Testament lecturers, in his thick French accent, insisting, ‘ze fear of ze Lord, zis is ritual observance. You must chrémember zis!’ I have indeed ‘chrémembered’ and he’s right! It is impossible to understand Proverbs properly apart from the spiritual life of Israel: the Cultus (sacrificial system) and the Law

When we get further into the Israelite saga we’ll explore just how integrated the Israelite spirituality was with everyday life (at least in theory). Whatever the downsides of the Cultus, it kept them in mind of God and prompted their hearts to gratitude or contrition. And whatever the binds of the Law, constant obedience ensured that Israel wouldn’t forget her Saviour. This sort of whole-life faith kept God in the picture, and not as a bully, but as a friend.

Into this context, two attractive women make their claim on the impressionable mind (and heart) of the teacher’s ‘son’. Lady Wisdom, who calls from beside the city gates to instruct all who would listen to her words, and the Harlot, the adulteress, shameless in her lies to tempt away to destruction those who would be captivated by her charade.

With Mark, I shall be writing a different way. Rather than dividing the story into sections as we did with Matthew, we’ll be looking at it as a whole, over four weeks.

There are two reasons for doing this. The first is that Mark is very similar to Matthew; it can look like a smaller version of the same story. So in order to unpack the differences (which I think are quite significant) it makes more sense to compare both gospels as a whole. The second reason is that I believe that Mark deliberately invites his readers to re-read. In fact, I think it is the failure to re-read Mark that has led to it being so monumentally misunderstood.

In Exodus 1-12 we have the remarkable story of the liberation of the people of Israel. In Exodus 13-40 we see this travelling people face the challenges and pain of their very long journey to the Promised Land. What is striking about this book in the context of the Israel story is that, despite the very clear intention to bring the Israelites into the land of Canaan (Exod 3:6-17; 6:2-5) Exodus is primarily a story about God’s intention to bring Israel to himself.

Once the Israelites have left the land of their oppression they face a very difficult journey to freedom. Faced with multiple opportunities to rebel and turn back, their journey so poignantly mirrors our everyday experience of trying to follow God. There is no linear path to faith; we do not ‘grow’ on some sanctification scale until, at last, we hit the ‘perfect’ plateau. We fly straight from triumph to trough, from mountain-top to mire without warning and find ourselves, once again, battling new fears and facing the choice to trust our liberator afresh.

What an amazing story! The gospel of Matthew ends with these three chapters – I’ve read them hundreds of times before but I feel alive with excitement having dived in again. These are the twists and turns of a master-novel. Only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows compares to this!

I read the last in the Harry Potter series in a twelve-hour epic (from 7:45pm to 7:45am on 21–22 July 07). No interruptions, no pestering children, just me, Harry, and the silent night. For this devoted Potter fan the climax to the story brought together years of previous readings; the background to the ending making its meaning all the more spine-tingling. With Matthew, however, I feel robbed of that first read; the story – engrained in my mind since childhood – is too familiar.

The importance of this story for Israel is impossible to overstate; that it was God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt was absolutely foundational to Israel’s national identity. In fact, this story is crucial for us to understand how Israel understood itself.

Three things from this story would shape Israel’s character: oppression, liberation and exclusion. Firstly, Israel was an oppressed people. Hundreds of years of slavery had understandably forged a kind of persecution-complex amongst the Hebrews, which they would never really shed. As a fledgling nation in an unfriendly world, they had every cause to be scared. Bigger and badder bullies than Egypt lurked at their borders; feeling small and vulnerable would be inevitable. But the Israelite sense of oppression goes deeper than just feeling intimidated; the Egyptian experience would come to characterise their religious complaint. Israel, once exiled and subject to foreign rule, would long for a Messiah who could once again ‘release the oppressed’ and spread Jewish faith by decree. The problem, of course, with oppression is that it often breeds clones. Israel would itself become the oppressor and have to face the prophets' wrath.

The Jews had been dreaming for a long time, about six hundred years in fact. Since Jerusalem was razed by the Babylonians and her elite carried off into exile, the imagination of the children of Israel had been reaching far beyond her continual oppression into the hope of a glorious future. An empire with its centre in Jerusalem; the Temple as a beacon to which all the nations would journey to bow in submission to Yahweh. The Babylonians (and then the Persians, and then Greeks, then Syrians, then Romans) would be overthrown by the Lord’s Messiah. The kingdom of heaven would reign.

It was Passover festival in Jerusalem and Jews from all over the Empire had travelled to the holy city for the occasion. There’s a commotion. Out goes the cry ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ The heir to the throne is here to take his rightful place; a king has come to herald this new dawn. The crowds heave to see the Messiah; eyes and ears strain to detect the sound of his army. And they hear the cheers, and the ‘clip clop’ of hooves. The chosen one has come, riding on a baby donkey!

Job is a script. Imagine a West-End stage. At the front right sits the Lord, high up on his throne beside a courtroom dock. The Satan (the Accuser – or in our terms, the council for the prosecution) presenting his case before the Judge of all. In the centre of the stage will lie Job, broken and ravished, lit only by a single white spot; the place from where he’ll argue his case. And from the shadows on either side will emerge his council, a cowardly defence, urging an early out-of-court settlement to save embarrassment. What will the verdict be? Job refuses to admit defeat; he will have his appeal heard, yet he has no support from witnesses and the Judge remains silent.

And so Job explores what all men and women across time and space have asked: Why is this evil come to us? This is not a treatise on ‘why does God allow suffering?’ It is a full-on rant entitled ‘why me?!’