01. Mark: The Maverick Gospel
Shrouded in secrecy, awash in
symbols, punctuated with ironies, and ended in shocking fashion, Mark’s story
of Jesus, once thought the simplest, most straightforward, and least
theological of the canon’s gospels, is believed to be such no longer. Now
considered a theologian the equal of at least Matthew and Luke and a
storyteller of no little subtlety, his gospel repays careful and close reading
to mine its riches.
Mark is likely the earliest of the
gospels we possess. Matthew and Luke each follow his general outline of Jesus’
life and use substantial portions of his work in their own compositions. The
problem of their order and relations to each other is a long-contested and
still unresolved matter. But I will not be saying much about all that here.
I intend to focus on how Mark tells
his story, the symbolic meanings he encodes into it as he tells the story of
Jesus as the climax and culmination of Israel’s story and God’s new creation he
brings into being.
An
Apocalyptic Gospel[1]
Apocalyptic means revelation: a
secret made known, a mystery unveiled, a curtain pulled back to enable one to
see what’s really going, what it all means. And that’s just what Mark’s story
of Jesus does. Jesus story was a not uncommon one in the turbulent days of the
1st century: a Jewish prophet acting like a Messiah, is abandoned by
his small group of followers, arrested, tried, convicted, and executed by
imperial occupying forces. Yet there is a secret about him hidden under the
commonplaces of his life. Mark writes to tell this story in light of that
secret which is strategically unveiled at key points in the narrative. Yet, as
we will see, most of these unveilings are ambiguous. Mark wants to show his
message more than to tell it. Thus he lifts the curtain enough to intrigue and
beckon the reader to keep following his story to the end before they foreclose
on its meaning. Let’s look at these five unveiling texts:
-(Jesus’ baptism) And immediately, as he was going up out of
the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the spirit descending like a dove
upon him; and there came a voice out of the heavens: You are my son, the
beloved one, in you I am well pleased (1:13-14).
-(Peter’s confession) Peter answered and said to him: You are
the Messiah (8:28).
-(Jesus’ transfiguration) And there came a cloud
overshadowing them, and there came a voice out of the cloud: This is my son,
the beloved one; listen to him (9:7).
-(Jesus’ trial) Again the high priest asked him and said to
him: You are the Messiah, the son of the blessed? (14:61)
-(Centurion at the cross) When the centurion who was standing
by saw that he thus breathed his last, he said: Truly, this man was the son of
god (15:39).
As you can see, these passages
cover the gospel from beginning to end and they are most of the places where
Jesus’ messiahship is discussed. The baptism and transfiguration passages are
unambiguous but the other three show profound misunderstanding (Peter),
disbelief (the high priest does not believe Jesus’ affirmative response), and
unclarity (of what force is a pagan Roman centurion’s statement?). So the
reader must weigh and evaluate all this testimony and come to a decision.
Part of this ambiguity is due to
the subversive nature of the who Jesus was and what he did as Israel’s messiah.
He did not fit the pattern of normal Jewish expectation of messiah, in fact, he
exploded it. Nor was we the usual brand of Jewish revolutionary the empire was
familiar with and adept at crushing. Neither group can really hear Mark’s
witness without considerable static. Nor can we, his readers today, truth be
told. So Mark, in these five unveiling texts allows that ambiguity and
uncertainty to have its say while all the while making it clear through the
divine voice at Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration where the truth lies.
An apocalyptic unveiling, Mark is
telling us, reveal the truth, a divine truth, about Jesus. But that is never a
coercive truth. Rather it is contested and debatable. Faith is still required.
A risk must be ventured. God must be trusted to affirm and seal the truth of
this revelation in our hearts and minds. And Mark trusts God to do just that.
And when we add in Mark’s abrupt
beginning and shocking ending the sense of mystery is heightened even more and
when he ends on the note of the women at the tomb’s fear with no resurrection
appearances narrated his scandal is magnified.
Jesus
and Israel’s Story
Jesus is a Jew, right? That means
he is part of a people with the long, large, and sprawling story with God. A
story that had not yet reached its climax and culmination and left many Jews of
Jesus’ day hungering and thirsting for that long-awaited, long-delayed promised
Day of the Lord when divine justice and divine mercy would link arms and
cleanse and transform this globe into a fit habitation for God and his people
forever.
The story of Jesus’ people is
rooted in God’s intention to dwell with his human creatures on the world he
created and fashioned into a temple for his divine-human fellowship. And in
humanity’s creation in God’s image to be royal priests serving in his temple.
In this vocation humanity was to reflect God’s character and will throughout
his creational temple and mediate his presence in it and protect and
nurture the creation.
When humanity inexplicably,
irrationally, and heinously, sought to be gods itself and seized creation and
history as its own preserve for fashioning its significance and security
spurning God’s good gifts of just these things, this breach with God began a
process of implosion within, among humanity and between humanity and creation
itself. Humanity became subject to itself in an orgy of solipsism in which, to
use the phrase from the book of Judges, “all the people did what was right in
their own eyes” (Judg.21:25). Humanity devolved into sub-humanity and creation
became a cruel parody of its created glory and role in God’s plan.
God, however, never acquiesced in
humanity’s foolish perfidy. A divine plan of reclamation and restoration of
both creature and creation was launched. Its linchpin was one people, a new
family God called out of the now idolatrous pagan world to be his own people,
Adam and Eve writ small, in the persons of Abraham and Sarah and the family God
miraculously wrought out of its spiritual and physical barrenness. This family
was be God’s royal priests in their own Eden, the promised land and it temple,
and through their modeling God’s character and will before the watching world
declared and demonstrated the life God intends for all his creatures to live
(Dt.4:5-8). The agreement solemnizing this divine initiative to redeem the
world we call covenant.
This people would serve as what I
call God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement (SCRM). They would subvert
the attitudes, actions, practices, patterns, and institutions which sin had
inscribed into the fabric of God’s world and stand against humanity’s sinful
revolt against God by demonstrating the life and way of people obedient to him.
Thereby, living under the kingship of God, they would attract and draw
the world back to him and thus provide it the divine blessing it had become its
vocation and destiny to transmit to it. Israel’s royal priestly vocation
morphed into this subversive, counter-revolutionary mode and remained such when
Jesus came on the scene.
Now, sadly, Israel was seldom more
than sporadically faithful to this calling. Too often more like the world from
which God called than a people called out to reach and bless it with God’s
gifts and goodness, Israel ultimately became a part of the problem of a world
run amuck than a divine antidote to it. Faithless to God’s covenant, restive
under his kingship, and disloyal to their covenant with him, the crisis of Israel’s
calling and vocation was to come to its head in Jesus’ time and swirled around
his person.
Though we hear little of it in Mark, Jesus
grew up and into this story of his people and their calling to be God’s SCRM.
He imbibed its scriptures and ethos and gradually he gained a sense of his
calling and role with his people and his Father’s world. In short, he came to
see his mission as calling and reconstituting God’s Abrahamic people around
their covenantal calling, their loyalty to God’s kingdom, and a passion to
mediate God’s presence throughout the world. His messianic vocation, as he came
to see it, wove itself around these three foci constitutive of God’s SCRM. When
Mark begins his account of Jesus’ life by citing Old Testament prophetic
passages (1:2,3) he is telling us that Jesus did not appear de novo or
“out of the blue” but comes as a participant in this story. It’s climax and
culmination, to be sure, but nevertheless a participant. This is his people,
his story, and by the of Mark’s gospel we’ll learn that it is our story too,
and that of the whole world.
Jesus, then, fulfills the promise
of God to the world through Abraham and Sarah’s family to bless all its nations
and peoples. He does so as the one faithful Israelite, God’s subversive,
counter-revolutionary movement in person.
He come primarily to Israel to gather and reconstitute Abrahamic Israel
from out of ethic Israel which had forfeited its brief to serve any longer as
the bearer of God’s redemptive movement through the world.[2]
This reconstituted Israel which will end up a Jewish-Gentile body through his
work will take to the world, still as God’s SCRM (because the world is still
hostile and resistant to God) but now bearing the “good news” that God’s reign
has come and God’s purposes have been fulfilled through Christ in anticipation
(Pannenberg) assuring that it will one day be the reality of the cosmos.
Mark tells us about this decisive
final decisive outreach of God to Israel, portending either judgment or mercy
depending on their response to Jesus. He writes a generation after Jesus just
before the sword of judgment in the hands of Rome falls in a cataclysmic finale
for the nation. And he writes as well for coming generations who will live in
the same freighted time as his own but who still need to see and hear Jesus
living out his vocation as God’s SCRM in person and recruit others to follow
him and embrace his way of being Israel. Succeeding generations in their own
time and place need to encounter him as well for though the dynamics will
differ for each the call to embrace Jesus and his way of being God’s people
remains the same.
Reading
Mark
The
Gospel’s Purpose
Ched Myers, in his groundbreaking
commentary Binding the Strongman, is right to claim that
“Mark was written as a manifesto for radical Christian
discipleship, and, I believe, remains one today. In contrast to other writings
of its time, it is a story about and for the poor and the common folk. Its narrative
strategy is clearly subversive of the social status quo of Roman Palestine.
Mark’s Jesus – through symbolic action, word and deed – systematically
challenges the dominant order, with its assumptions about power and piety,
sacred space, and social class. This Jesus forges a model of new social
possibilities, in which the socially disenfranchised are welcomed to table; and
Jew and Gentile struggle to overcome the powerful ideologies of enmity between
them.”[3]
Did you hear that? “Systematically
challenge the dominant order” – that’s what I am calling “subversive.” And
“forges a model of new social possibilities” – that’s what I am calling
“counter-revolutionary” (countering the sinful social models humanity developed
in the wake of the fall. So I contend he is calling Jesus and his followers
God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement!
Myers further situates Mark’s
readers within the “double plot”[4]
by which he tells his story:
- the showdown between Jesus and the
Jewish and Roman authorities that ends with his cross, and
- the persistent, increasing failure of
the disciples to understand Jesus and his way.
These two plots reach their
dramatic climax in Mark’s story when Jesus’ disciples forsake him just as the
authorities take him captive (14:50). Mark confronts readers with two decisions
in his story: “Will we, as readers, allow this Jesus to challenge the dominant
social ideologies that condition us in our world? And, most importantly, will
we enlist into that terrible journey to ‘Jerusalem’?”[5]
Cross-Cultural
To read any document from an
ancient time and place is a cross-cultural enterprise. It can hardly be
otherwise.
-other cultures have customs, mores, and
institutions very different from ours.
The primacy of shame and honor, the
patronage system, purity laws, tenant farmers and absentee landowners in 1st
century Palestine, the plight of widows, the Roman tax system are among
examples of cultural items foreign to us we ought to have awareness of in
reading Mark.
Perhaps the most difficult hurdle for modern western
readers to overcome is the reality that there was no separation between
religion and politics in Jesus and Mark’s world. I once heard N. T. Wright say
one couldn’t slide a razor blade between the two in that ancient world. Or, as
Myers puts it, “It is simply historical nonsense to argue that Jesus’ disputes
were “religious” and not “political” or to describe his social world as a
“theocracy” (as is commonly done).[6]
The two were not identical but they were inextricably and mutually implicated
in each other.
-even when similar practices or words and
ideas are used in each culture they may well mean something different to each
culture.
For us today the word “gospel” is a
religious or churchy word having to do with Christian preaching and teaching.
But its original use was as a regular secular term in the wider world meaning
any kind of good news typically delivered by a messenger. Emperors would
dispatch messengers throughout the empire with “good news” of his accession to
the throne, the great military victory, the birth of a successor to the
emperor, and the like. When Christians took over the term for its preaching, or
for the accounts of Jesus’ life they intended it to connote news that would
affect the ordinary everyday world of its hearers like the secular
announcements above. In particular, when Christians announced their gospel it
as a direct challenge to the Roman gospel that the emperor was Lord and that
the church not Rome was the kingdom that mattered. In other words, for the
early Christians the gospel was front page news about major happenings in the
world, not fodder for the religion or op-ed sections of the paper.
-they have different histories and
historical contexts than we do.
Mark is written “from below” (as it were).
He writes for communities that are minority outcasts in their world. They are
viewed as losers, not winners. They bet on the wrong horse in the struggle with
the Jewish and Roman authorities, a traitorous blasphemer rightly executed by
these powers (or so they thought). We read Mark as winners (from above) living
in the “winner of all winners” empire of our world. And that difference in perspective
makes a great deal of difference in how we hear and respond to Mark’s Jesus and
call to follow him. Some basic awareness of the history of the Jesus and the
early church in the Roman empire can help us read with greater historical and
sympathy for what Mark tells us.
Crossing cultures in reading
ancient texts requires the sensitivities and sympathies that allow us to “stand
in their shoes” for a spell before we try to discern what they might mean for
us “standing in our own shoes.” It requires a bit of work but is necessary and
repays such labors abundantly.
What
Kind of Readers Need We Be?
In his popular co-authored
commentary on Mark Ched Myers speaks of readers becoming “spec-actors” rather
than “spectators.” This involves becoming “so engaged by a story that they want
to become part of it. Spec-actors are open to allowing the story to challenge
their own life-scripts—to let the story ‘read them.’”[7]
Mark’s double plot we noted earlier is a main way he works toward this goal.
But there’s more to it than that, I
believe. Mark is not the lone author of this Jesus story. God has a hand in it
as well. Through Mark’s word God’s Spirit is issuing a call to his readers to
follow the Jesus to whom Mark bears witness. Michael Ende’s wonderful novel The
Neverending Story nicely illustrates this self-involving character God
gives to his Word.
A young boy, Bastian, is suffering the
loss of his mother, his father’s emotional distance, and his feeling of not
fitting in anywhere, especially at school. He loved to read, though. One day he
skipped out on school and went to bookstore and nicked The Neverending Story
from it. He returned to school and took refuge in the attic to read the book. Bastian
got caught up in the travails of the book’s magical country Fantastica and its
losing battle against an encroaching Nothing. Reading further Bastian
discovered that he himself is in the story and characters in it summon him to
come to the troubled country’s aid. Finally he heeds this summons and joins
Fantastica’s struggle. Through the adventures and misadventures he undergoes
there Bastian discovers his true identity and capacity to love. He returns to
our world a changed, more mature boy, and reconciles with his father.
So in Mark, Jesus calls to you and me
to become his follower, allow his story to become ours, be transformed through
it, newly able to live that story out in the midst of our own time and place.
By absorbing ourselves in Mark’s version of his story, Jesus is able to live
out his life through us in our world. This, I take it, is akin to what Myers
means by “spec-actor.”
Outline of
Mark
PART I:
LIBERATING SPACE FOR CHANGE
The First
Call to Discipleship (1:1-20) Jesus the
Healer (1:21–2:12) Jubilee
(2:13–3:6) Binding
the Strong Man (3:7-35) Sowing Hope (4:1-34)
PART II:
JOURNEY OF SOLIDARITY
Unmasking
Oppression (4:35–5:20) The
Priority and Power of the Poor (5:21-43)
Enough for Everyone (6:1-56) Lessons
in Inclusivity (7:1-37) Do
We Understand Yet? (8:1-21)
PART III:
THE DISCIPLESHIP “CATECHISM”
The Second
Call to Discipleship (8:22–9:1) From
Vision to Impotence (9:2-29) In
Defense of the “Least” (9:30–10:16) Repentance
as Reparation (10:17-31)
Leadership
and Service (10:32-52)
PART IV:
JESUS THE QUESTIONER
“Say to This
Mountain” (11:1-25)
Turning
the Question Around (11:27-33, 12:13-17) Revising
the Song of the Vineyard (12:1-12) Arguing Scripture (12:18–13:2) Revolutionary
Patience (13:3-37)
PART V: THE WAY OF THE HUMAN ONE
Intimacy and Betrayal (14:1-25) Prayer
as Staying Awake (14:26-52) Denial
and Confession (14:53–15:20)
The
End of the World (15:21-46)
The Third
Call to Discipleship (15:47–16:8)
This is Myer’s outline in Say to
This Mountain. I use it here because it is the most luminous breakdown of
the text I am aware of and I cannot improve on it. The comments are my own
based on my own research and aided by Myers, Eugene Boring, William, Placher,
and Rikk Watts. I will try to produce one post a week with the 25 sections Myer’s
outlines taking four months and a week. Allowing for a week or two slippage
along the way I hope to finish this series by the end of the summer.
So, on to Mark we go!
[1] For this section, see N T. Wright, New
Testament People God V1: Christian Origins And The Question Of God (pp.
394-396). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.
[2] This does not mean, of course, that Israel of the
flesh is no longer God’s people or has been rejected by God (Rom.9-11). It
means that ethnic Israel as a whole has proven incorrigible and thus, finally,
not a body God can use to advance his purposes. Jesus comes as its final chance
to turn this fate around by embracing him and his way of being God’s people.
Alas, most Jews did not, and in the destruction of the city and the temple by
Rome in the Great War of 66-70 a.d. reaped what they had sown.
[3] Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s
Story of Jesus (Abridged Version) at https://martinnewellcp.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/ched-myers-and-binding-the-strongman-a-political-reading-of-marks-story-of-jesus/, 4.
[4] Ibid.
[5]Op. cit. 5.
[6] Op. cit. 4.
[7] Ched Myers, “Say to This
Mountain": Mark's Story of Discipleship (Orbis Books. Kindle Edition):
109.
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