Preached at the Eucharist in St. Cuthbert's & St. John's Churches
(Jonah 3.1-5,10; Mark 1.14-20)
The Revd. Martin Jackson
Fish and fishing play a large part in the Gospels. Jesus calls those first disciples from their nets – from their day-to-day work of catching fish. The final time we see Jesus meet with those disciples in St. John’s Gospel, it’s by the Sea of Galilee, where he feeds them with a breakfast of fish.
In a few hours that I was able to take off the other day, I went for fish and chips on Hartlepool Headland – very near the fish quay where the daily catch is landed and processed. Afterwards I walked through the Sandwell Gate in the Town Wall, across the Fish Sands as they’re known, then back onto the Promenade to the lighthouse and the Heugh Battery. A cannon stands there pointing out to sea – taken from the Russians at Sebastopol during the Crimean War. But more poignantly, this is a place of memorials to those who died in what is described as the only United Kingdom Battleground of the First World War – memorials also to those who perished in the battle against the German fleet that day and in the days following. German ships fired on Hartlepool and West Hartlepool on Wednesday 16th December 1914. A clock can be seen in the local museum, the time of the bombardment recorded as shrapnel stopped it. Fire was returned from the Heugh Battery and the adjacent Lighthouse Battery. A town built on fishing and shipbuilding became a battleground.
You can still visit the Heugh Battery with its lookout tower, gun emplacement, a tank parked on the car park and other reminders of past wars. The entrance at this time of year is decorated with poppies, wreathes will be laid at the nearby memorial today. The names on them will be looked on and recited.
Today in our community here, we do what goes on in cities, towns and villages throughout the country – Acts of Remembrance from the Whitehall Cenotaph to the memorial in Castleside Churchyard and Memorial Cottages in Shotley Bridge, as well as in our churches. The names on those memorials are often familiar names: local people, members of families who still live here. To remember them is not merely to look back to long-ago past events. It’s to remember that we are one with them. Loved-ones who we know were our grandparents, great-grandparents or still more distantly removed but whose blood we share – those who, like my great-uncle, would never have a family of their own, but whose name is now recorded amongst hundreds of thousands of others on a more distant memorial in a Belgian battlefield. For people, like me, from Hartlepool - the reminder of how a peaceable community suddenly found itself made into a battleground.
I know so many people these days are reluctant to turn on the News. The uncertainties and fears of the last week with the brashness and braggadocio of a new re-elected President of the world’s most powerful nation – with all the weaponry which is put at his disposal – after a campaign fuelled by hatred, dismissiveness and the wildest of claims. The ongoing strife in the Middle East and inflicted upon Ukraine – as well as all those conflicts which go unreported. We look back on the wars of the Twentieth Century and see houses destroyed in the Blitz. We look at pictures from Gaza and see almost an entire country reduced to rubble – over 44,000 dead, so many of them women and children. We add that to more than 1,200 Israelis killed in the October 7th massacre, the hundreds of hostages and those who have since died in the ensuing conflict – and still more thousands of Palestinians on the West Bank and Lebanese in their own country.
When I was living in Jerusalem in 1978, Israeli forces entered Lebanon for the first time. We didn’t hear much of what was going on. The conflict seemed contained. I was actually on the Lebanese border in the town of Metulla on the day when many of the forces were withdrawn. I remember it as a quiet, warm, early summer’s day – though a press photographer warned me as to where I was pointing my camera. Everything seemed quite peaceful. In fact, several hundred thousand Lebanese had been displaced. In the present conflict over a million Lebanese have had to leave their homes and about half a million have fled to Syria. We see aerial bombardment destroying huge swathes of residential areas in their capital, Beirut. Imagine if that were London or any other major city! And the Israeli town of Metulla like most of the border area has been evacuated of its residents.
War kills – and it kills people like us, people who love like us. If we think of them as different, if we categorise them as the enemy, then we have no ground on which agreement and reconciliation may be built. And the result is cities, towns and villages destroyed, lives and livelihoods wrecked, children deprived of parents, communities without schools and hospitals – how can the children who have been so afflicted ever expect to grow with a fully-formed vision of humanity?
To go back to today’s Gospel: “The Kingdom of God has come near… believe the good news,” says Jesus. But how can we make it a reality? That’s Jonah’s question - who resists the call of God to preach to the people of Nineveh. He doesn’t believe that he can be heard. He doesn’t believe that he can bring any positive change for good. Yet when he finally goes to them it makes a difference - we’re told they repent and turn from their evil ways. We cannot give up on our resolve that this world should be a better place, that there should be moral purpose, justice and peace for all.
Jesus sees Simon and Andrew casting their nets, and calls to them - and they follow. Further on he calls to James and John, the sons of Zebedee. The Gospel tells us that they were in their boat, “mending the nets.” I’m struck by this observation. The call to us as Christians - as disciples of Jesus - as people who work for a better world - is not merely to cast the net, to be at the sharp edge of things; it’s also to have patience, to be net-menders. And that way we may honour those who have gone before us in their task.
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