A couple of years ago, the Church Times included a review of Love Island.
Somewhat surprising, you might think.
Love Island is on a TV shows I’ve never watched from Downton Abbey to Call the Midwife.
But in the line of duty, the Rev’d Gillian Craig ventured to step into the realms of contemporary culture which I have long avoided.
He wrote, tongue ever so slightly in cheek: Given St John’s focus on agape as the key Christian doctrine, I assumed that Love Island would be a documentary travelogue all about Patmos; but, having watched an episode, I am clear that the love in question is in fact eros. Or possibly porneia.
He goes on do describe the clutch of bronzed, barely clothed young people who, rather than been marooned in a luxury villa, are scrutinised, set up and paired off under the gaze of so called ‘reality TV’.
Craig notes that this set up is less about falling in love, but a series of relationships which as he puts it ‘function for the time being as an adequate substitute for that happy state’.
Since its relaunch the show has been compelling and guilty viewing for many; whilst also generating thousands of complaints to Ofcom. Love Island takes human experience and places it under a microscope; manipulating and exploiting people who find every facial expression turned into a meme; who are left with inadequate psychological support.
From Chaucer to Shakespeare, the Brontës to the latest Zadie Smith level we know that relationships can be complicated; that hurts and desires linger; that love can provoke all sorts of insecurities, rivalries and jealousies.
Our Scriptures themselves range from the unashamed desires of lovers expressed in the Song of Songs; to the more complex love triangle of David, Bathsheba and and Uriah fraught with betrayal, power and remorse.
Today’s readings are examples of the ways in which God’s purposes continue to be woven through the messy stories of human loves; and how those human stories reveal something of what God desires for us.
In Genesis, we meet with Jacob again: after falling out with his brother Esau over placed and misplaced blessings, he is in exile. There he begins to establish himself by hard work and he falls in love.
We’re told in more subtle terms than a Love Island voice over, that ‘Leah’s eyes were lovely, and Rachel was graceful and beautiful’. It’s the younger woman Rachel that Jacob falls for; and he serves her father to earn his bride. Those years fly by, such is his love and devotion.
However, Jacob who hasn’t been immune to trickery and deception meets his match in Laban: and beyond the scope of this passage, we learn of how he substitutes his elder daughter for the younger, and how Jacob works a further 7 years for his true love; and six more for his own flocks.
After two decades, he has two wives, a growing family and because of his good husbandry, is now a man of considerable means.
And yet there is little joy. Leah the unloved wife with lovely eyes hopes to win her husbands affection with the birth of each son. Rachel the lovely and loved wife remains childless; with all the heartache that that involves.
And yet, there is new hope for Jacob: as we’ll hear next week, it is in wrestling with an angel that his future is reshaped and aligned to God’s plan for reconciliation within family and blessing to all nations.
And yet, there is hope in future generations: Leah’s son Levi establishes the line of priests; her son Judah the royal line. Rachel’s Joseph faces both the consequences of favouritism - in his arrogance, dreaming and slavery - and the fruit of calling in his gifts, eventual ability to save his kin.
In our second lesson, Mark draws us into the way in which the disciples are drawn into the work of preaching and healing and making whole. They are trusted with responsibility; and in anointing those they meet, they assure them of the nearness of God’s love.
The risks of travelling light and relying on the hospitality of strangers give a vulnerability as well as urgency to their witness. The nearness of God’s Kingdom feels a million miles away from the vulnerability and physicality of Love Island.
And then we get a sudden change of scene. We return to John the Baptist who has been languishing while Jesus begins his public ministry. His message about love of neighbour, compassion for the marginalised, challenging those in power, setting people free from fear serves as a trigger for Herod.
Herod suffers something of a flashback, haunted as he is by his part in John’s death. He was an insecure ruler, swayed by the whims and passions of those around him; his own whims and passions were denounced by John as being scandalous.
The dance of death had been depicted in various ways by those staging Stauss’s opera Salome: whether that’s using veils or borrowing Beyone’s dance moves.
It is Herod’s fear, instability and weakness that leads to a brutal end. An end more notorious and lurid than anything on Love Island.
Mark continues beyond Strauss’s bloody end: he takes us to the depths of a love so amazing so divine. A love raised on a cross and lowered in a grave only to rise again. A love which in turn raises us up from guilt, despair and isolation; a love which demands our all in lives of service and blessing.
It is a love which enables us to live more fully with one another; a love that heals and does not hurt; a love that builds up and does not destroy.
© Julie Gittoes 2019
