Permission to Speak - Sermon for 20th November

Mark's Gospel - a new way of interpreting?

This is not so much a sermon - it is part of the text of a lecture concerning reading and interpreting the Gospel of Mark as social commentary rather than as the 'Word of God'. And although I am not a Quaker I remind myself often of part of Quaker Advices #17:"Do not allow the strength of your convictions to betray you into making statements or allegations that are unfair or untrue. Think it possible that you may be mistaken."

In my experience, too many Christians often over-spiritualise the Gospels and thereby misinterpret and misrepresent what the writers were actually saying. Over the past two centuries the quest for the historical Jesus and for an authentic Jesus message has given rise to an increasing number of new insights that radically challenge the post-Constantine creedal versions and interpretations of the Church concerning Jesus of Nazareth. None of the Gospels were written as sacred text although that is what they eventually became. The Gospels were above all else, social commentary.But, how do I define 'social commentary'? It has two major meanings:

a spoken or written act of rebellion toward an individual or group;
a commentary on social issues or society.

The more I research Mark's Gospel as social commentary rather than as an intended sacred narrative, the more I interpret it as meeting both of these definitions. But out of necessity, being a despised, oppressed and often persecuted Judeo / Christian sect, the writing also needed to be a coded narrative reflecting a social commentary on the times of the Peter / Mark community in Rome. But more than social commentary Mark's Gospel has become for me a myth narrative [i.e. individual incidents may not be historically true but are always true in experience] based upon Peter's interpreted logos memories [i.e. factual events that happened once and should not be cherry picked and applied directly into life today]. These mythos and logos 'events' of Peter were then re-told by Mark into a narrative of choices that had been made by Jesus and his movement. This narrative was designed to encourage individual members of the Jewish / Christian community of Peter / Mark in Rome to make their own choices in the face of persecution and oppressionleading to a final momentous choice that climaxes this whole 'tribal' myth narrative: the golden thread that Jesus is not to be found amongst the dead but amongst them as the living!

This Gospel was told and written to a set of themes [e.g. confrontations; the process of healing; Peter's major concern of the cost of discipleship; etc] and the major plot of individual and corporate choices was part of Mark's on-going literary device. Mark Chapters 1 - 3 contain examples of both spoken and written acts of rebellion against political and religious exploitation rampant at that time. These chapters also represent a commentary upon the contemporary Roman social issues and political / religious society. In particular these chapters deal with the rules and regulations of the religion, along with the Law of Moses rigidly applied, as not being what Kingdom living was really concerned with. Mark has selected stories concerning the choice of Jesus to work on the Sabbath, intentionally bringing confrontations with the Pharisees. In Mark's mind this was setting the direction of the ministry of Jesus as he told these stories of confrontation. Indeed,Mark has barely written 12% of the Gospel before the Pharisaic intent is clear, "Jesus has to be killed."

The scene is now set and the rest of the narrative will unfold with events that will inevitably end in an execution. But more than that - this is speaking directly to followers of the Jesus Way who are standing watching as their friends and family members are thrown to the lions and the gladiators, or covered in pitch and torched like candles. The message is that of uppermost importance to Peter - discipleship is costly. The implication of the "Jesus has to be killed" is a warning and an encouragement to Jesus followers in the Peter / Mark community: "following Jesus will be costly but the temporary cost is far outweighed by the glory that will follow."

It is important to note that Mark's Gospel begins, not with Jesus of Nazareth but with John the Baptist representing a particular social commentary on the political and economic situation of the time.Crossan says that the real underlying issue of both John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth was Herod Antipas' privatisation of the fishing on the Lake of Galilee. Jewish fishermen believed that God, as a birthright, had given the Lake and its fish to Jews.Herod Antipas founded the major city of Tiberias on the shores of Lake Galilee in 18 C.E. and paid for its construction by privatising the Lake and its fish and charging a tax upon all the fish caught.

John the Baptist, far from being the deeply religious person calling for spiritual repentance so beloved by the Christian tradition, was leading a highly political / religious movement against the Roman appointed tetrarch Herod Antipas.Unless we understand this key information - social commentary - we misread the life and message of John the Baptiser and also that of his early follower, Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of Mark is set out from the beginning within the social commentary on a love and servant hood Judeo / Christian sect based within a deeply political / religious context. Unlike those of us brought up in traditional and institutional Christianity, such a context would not have been lost upon the early, mainly Jewish listeners and readers of the narrative created by Peter / Mark!

This political / religious context is also implicitly indicated in the first chapter of Mark's Gospel where the writer presents Jesus as making his choice of intentionally setting himself up against the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees were those who failed to see the sacred Presentness of the Kingdom that, according to the developing understanding of Jesus, was not of this world. Instead, the Pharisees saw it as a political / religious / economic future time reward of self-determination for once again keeping all the laws of Moses. The Sadducees were seen as agents and collaborators with [a] Herod's privatisation of the Lake and [b] as those appointed by the Roman Imperial occupation force who ruled for their own ends rather than for the Kingdom envisaged by Jesus.As a by the way comment, we also need to remember thatthe Jesus choice was not even remotely the setting up of an alternative Christian Church!

Significantly, in speaking and writing to both Jewish Christians and the increasing number of Gentile followers of Jesus within the Peter / Mark community in Rome, in the early part of Peter / Mark's account, Jesus did not choose to 'attack' the Law itself but the way in which the Law was followed. After many exorcisms and then that first healing of a leper, Jesus chose to uphold the requirements of the Law of Moses by telling the healed leper to go to the priests and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for cleansing, as a testimony to those priests. So the early Christian context of pre-70 C.E. was not a separate Christian community but an open and welcoming sect within Judaism.

Peter's interpretation of the developing actions of Jesus was that Jesus had set out within a narrow traditional Jewish context of holiness by separation [very Pharisaic!] to develop a much more open and inclusive united and reformed Judaism that would not be concerned with the Pharisaic slavish maintaining of the Law of Moses to decide who was 'in' and who was 'out'.The Jesus choice became a counter cultural individual and corporate transformation based upon compassion rather than the religious legalism of the time.Inthe memory and interpretation of Peter, Jesus had subsequently chosen to develop himself and his ministry as a religious reformer who came to understand that 'holiness' was not in the structures but in living justly. Even so, Jesus remained within the long tradition of prophetic Judaism.

However, in retrospect Peter concluded that the Jesus attempt to unite and to reform Judaism could not and did not succeed. It was as Peter looked back over the intervening 30 years, he realized that what he had experienced with Jesus was that legalistic Judaism could not be reformed:it was the old cloth that could not cope with the new cloth of Jesus and it was the old wine skin that could not accommodate the new wine of Jesus.

Another very important point to ponder is in Mark 1:15 - "Repent". What did Peter / Mark mean when they said that Jesus chose to call fellow Jews to repent? We often make 'repent' into a spiritual event when, in the matrix of the 1st century C.E. it may have had a political and religious significance that is lost upon us.

Once again, to use the word 'repentance' was a social commentary. The Kingdom for 1st Century Judaism was a form of political and religious nationalism and self-interest.Jesus is attributed as challenging this by saying that the Kingdom is within: it is internal and transformational regardless of the social and political world 'outside'. Repent was not a response because "the end is near" [part of the socio/religious thinking of the time] but because this was the new beginning and people were invited to be part of it."Repent because the future is coming" was the primary message of John the Baptist but the message of Jesus was "Repent because the Kingdom of God's reign of justice has come."

Mark Chapters 4 - 8 are part of the skilled storyteller's literary development as they deal with the nature of faith, unbelief and the impact upon the training of the Disciples.As I understand these stories of Jesus on the Lake, the Jewish listeners and readers were able to associate their contemporary chaotic predicament of Roman Imperial oppression and persecution with that of their former Babylonian exile. And God managed to get them out of Babylonian captivity and, in a similar way, God would again get them out of Roman captivity. But to say so openly was to summon their own death sentence!

Also, Mark tells the miracle stories according to a literary formula that does not require that the stories to be historically true, although they may well have happened.But there is so much more social commentary / coded narrative to the story of the haemorrhaging woman and the young girl. As part of Mark's literary style there are coincidences such as the use of '12', and aspects of male domination and ownership of the female. In the growing experiences of the early Church communities, especially those who had been influenced by the Apostle Paul directly through his presence or indirectly through his writings, all were equal in the community of Christian fellowship. Galatians 3:28 said, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

This literary approach was counter-cultural in religious terms [a challenge to traditional Judaism] and in social terms [unmarried girls and women being the possessions of the father, and upon marriage the woman became the possession of the husband]. Mark 9 then continues with a further social commentary on the lack of importance of women, children and servants. Within the counter-cultural life style of the Jesus followers there is an exploration of being first, last, servant, small child, and the story jumps around between servant hood, possessive pride and millstones around the neck.Peter /Mark arenow well into a section of the narrative concerning family life that began at Mark 9:36 with a child, and continues to Mark 10:16 with the blessing of children. Between these two 'book ends' there is some difficult teaching on the subject of divorce [Mark 10:1-12]. In this further counter cultural sectionJesus refers to the teaching of Moses that reinforced the situation that the man could divorce the wife almost at the drop of a hat, but the wife had no right to divorce her husband.Whereas the Pharisees saw nothing wrong in a man disposing of his belongings in such a way, Jesus opened up a whole new social commentary based upon compassion for the divorced woman.

There is a very significant episode in the narrative ofMark Chapter 6vv 1-6 where Jesus visits his original hometown. Once again we need to be aware of the context of that time rather than interpret this event in the context of our contemporary over-spiritualised Christianity. When Jesus spoke in the synagogue, the good news that he was proclaiming to the downtrodden, poor and oppressed was not substitutionary atonement! In the context of the Peter / Mark community, but for safety's sake told through this event in Nazareth three decades before, the hidden coded message was simple:

There is an alternative to the oppression of Rome!
There will come a time when adequate food will be on every table!
There will be a fair share of all God's good gifts!
God does not love the healthy, the rich and the important more than God loves the sick, the poor and the unimportant!

This latter point is a particular counter-cultural attack upon the Pharisaic influence upon the synagogues and their brand of Judaism in which there was a kind of 'prosperity gospel' being preached: to be healthy, wealthy and influential was proof of God's blessing upon you, but to be sick, poor and unimportant was proof that God did not bless you.

So why did his hometown people who grew up with him turn against him? For whatever reason, the people of Nazareth made their choice and the people of Peter / Mark were, once again, being invited to make their choice about the cost of following the Jesus Way!

In Mark Chapters 13-16 the emphasis moves to proclaiming that the old ideas of a political Kingdom were coming to an end so the followers of Jesus were encouraged to find the Kingdom in ways of living rather than in any national political self determination.The followers of Jesus in the Peter / Mark community were being encouraged to experience the Kingdom of God byloving God and loving one's neighbour; by doing to others what you wish them to do to you; by knowing that lasting peace does not come through violent victory in war but through the power of unconditional compassionate love.

And so we arrive at the climax of the Peter / Mark narrative. It has been a wonderful creative story, an interpreted biography of the life and death of Jesus. And here comes the golden thread of the entire narrative being made explicit in the experiences of the followers of Jesus, captured in the empty tomb [Mark 16:1-8]: "Jesus will be found amongst the living, not amongst the dead!"

In conclusion, when we read Mark's Gospel we need to cease over-spiritualising it and get back to what it was: a counter-cultural social commentary told within interpreted mythos that had been developed upon logos events experienced by Peter while he walked with Jesus three decades before. And by exploring the Peter / Mark contexts and struggling with the same Spirit that was in them and applying the narrative to our lives today, so we, too, will find the sacredness of the narrative for our selves and for our contemporary times.