Mark 6
In order for us to cope within any given context we need to know something about the rules of engagement of that particular context. You would not do well in a rugby match if you think you're in a soccer match. Even animals adapt their behaviour when they realise their context had changed. If unable to adapt, they perish. We have tried to make sense of our context - the reality we find ourselves in, this life on earth - since the beginning of time. We refer to our understanding of how this reality really works as our worldview. As Christians, we try to fashion our worldview as closely as possible from what we learn from reading the Bible. For thousands of years people have wrestled with what we find in scripture, attempting to reconcile it with our life here on earth. We still build on the insights of some of the great interpreters like Augustine.
If the reality we find ourselves in can be pictured as a swampy, marshy landscape of treacherous quicksand, our biblical worldview gives us solid, secure places to put our feet, a bit like stepping stones across a rushy river. Some of the stepping stone-paths are familiar and obvious. They make sense and we walk across them daily without even looking down at what we're standing on. Some of them are more tricky - perhaps just under the surface of the murky water, and it is hard work to negotiate our way through there. It is even harder to convince a skeptic to follow us across. An example of this could be our theology of suffering - the great "evil-in-a-world-created-by-a-good-God" dilemma. We can read the clever peoples' books and offer answers, but it still leaves us uneasy. It is counter-intuitive. We lack the eternal perspective to find any form of justification for the magnitude of the collective human evil and suffering through the ages. We walk across these paths if we really have to but we avoid it as far as possible.
Every now and then though, we encounter something that really messes with our heads. The Bible is infallible, but it seems our worldviews are not. We are confronted with something, and when we step forward on the stepping stone of our worldview, we can feel it slowly sinking away under the weight of reality. We have to step back and we stand: stumped. What we are confronted with has implications, and the implications have some more implications. We are left looking around. Where to now?
"And because of their unbelief, he couldn't do any miracles among them except to place his hands on a few sick people and heal them." (Mk 6:5)
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