Marginal Christianity

Jesus: A Counter-Temple Movement (9:2-8) Back home again (9:1), Jesus encounters a paralytic carried on a bed by some friends to him. This man and his body are imprisoned by guilt and shame. We call them psychosomatic illnesses. Body and mind are intricately and inextricably connected. These afflictions are as real and debilitating as any nerve or muscular damage. Jesus knows this and upon seeing this scene immediately offers him forgiveness for his sins, the source for his guilt and shame. The heresy detectors present, the scribes, immediately go into high gear. “Who but God can forgive  sins? And where is that forgiveness dispensed but in the temple?” they say to one another (v.3). “This is blasphemy,” they cry. Jesus knows their thoughts and declares them evil (v.4). They are committing what Jesus will later call the “unforgiveable sin,” blasphemy against the Spirit (Mt.12:31-32). Nevertheless, they challenge his claim to act in God’s stead, forming in hims...

The Story So Far Jesus has been born, inaugurating a new creation and reasserting God’s rule over the rebellious nations of the world. Visitors from the pagan East come to worship him even as the King of the Jews tries to use them to find the infant Jesus and kill him. John the Baptist has appeared announcing the imminence of God’s New Exodus. Many Jews have come to him to be baptized and prepare those Jews who will to participate in the new redemptive movement. Jesus himself has come to John for baptism and it hears the divine affirmation of his identity and vocation as King, Servant, and Sacrifice. In the wake of this experience the Spirit leads Jesus into the desert for another, very different experience at the hands of the devil. Jesus vanquishes this enemy and that brings us to the passage we look at in this post. Jesus has retraced Israel’s steps as it sought to be faithful to God who graciously rescued them from slavery in Egypt. The people failed at almost every ...

Mark 9:14-31 Four scenes comprise this section: 9:14-19/9:20-24/9:25-27/9:28-29 9:14-19 Jesus and James, John, and Peter come down the mountain to demon-possession and debate with the scribes. Their arrival moves “the whole crowd” to “awe” (v.15). Why? Mark doesn’t say specifically. But this “awe” creates an expectation that Jesus’ presence will transform the situation for the kingdom of God. Jesus wades into the fray. A father has brought his possessed son, driven by a spirit that renders him mute, physically harms him, paralyzes him, and causes him to foam at the mouth and grind his teeth (v.18). The description leads us to believe that this is the most difficult exorcism he has faced thus far. Maybe that’s why the disciples, who previously had effectively exorcised demons (6:13), failed here. And their failure is symptomatic of the nation’s failure (v.19). The great crisis of Israel’s existence and Jesus’ life loom right ahead and he feels the pressure of this acutel...

The Story To-Date We have seen so far that Mark has demonstrated Jesus’ authority and the scope and spread of his ministry. Opposition has sprung up to meet him, both human and supra-human, a mortal threat. Jesus gathers his New Israel and they join him in his New Exodus procession. The time has come, though, for them to fully participate in the work. The FoK is Launched As he teaches in the villages, Jesus summons the twelve. He pairs them up and sends them out to exercise his authority over his mission’s spiritual opponents (v.7). The Fellowship of the King is launched. Jesus sends his people out to face the real enemy behind all human ills and evils. That’s why he gives them his authority to prevail over them. Elrond’s words to the dwarves on the eve of the Fellowship of the Rings’ departure parallel, I suspect, something of the weightiness of Jesus’ call to mission to his Fellowship of the King. "You do not stand alone. You will learn that your trouble is bu...

Flight and alarm accompany Jesus’ exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac. This is the rest of the story. The swine herders race everywhere, probably to the herd’s owners, to tell them this incredible news. Not surprisingly, inquiring minds want to know so “people” (v.14) come to see for themselves. When they saw the former demoniac sitting with Jesus, cleaned, clothed, and in right mind, “they were afraid” (v.15). Eyewitnesses give them the gory details about the demoniac and the pigs. And they want Jesus gone! Elsewhere in Mark so far people have clamored to get to Jesus. But not here. And if we remember the demoniac story’s coded significance as prefiguring Jesus’ victory over the pagan oppressors, the Romans, it’s not hard to figure why. Messing with the Romans, tweaking their symbolic noses, does not generally end well for those who do it. This area’s residents did not want to be on the Roman’s radar for that sort of thing. Thus Jesus, with power over the infamous demoniac, terrifi...

The Second Campaign Begins If the disciples thought braving the sea was frightening, just wait till they get across the sea to Gentile land. Scarcely having caught their breath, a new and terrifying sight comes toward them. A cemetery-dwelling, demon-possessed man of uncommon strength approaches. In Isaiah God condemns those “who sit inside tombs, and spend the night in secret places; who eat swine’s flesh” (Isa. 65:4). It is an unclean space, a place of death. Eugene Boring notes: “The man here is a picture of death, of one already banished from the land of the living, from human community that makes human life possible.” (Eugene M. Boring, Mark. NTL. [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006], 150.) In the first campaign Jesus began with an exorcism in a synagogue (1:21-28). He begins the second campaign with an exorcism as well. Comparison with the earlier exorcism story shows their close parallels (Myers, Say to This Mountain , 58). Conflict    ...