Holy Week = Homiletic Bonanza
 By Harry T. Cook
3/30/09
For the parish minister, the time span from Palm Sunday through Easter Day offers unparalleled opportunities to engage intellectually attentive congregants in serious consideration of the gospel narratives of Jesus' last days, his death and its aftermath.
I mean by "consideration" not so much a recounting of "events" for which historical attestation is slim to none, but for what the stories that reference such "events" may say about life in the last third of the First Century C.E. among what I call "Jesus Jews" and the context within which they were working out what it meant to be associated with the memory or the legend of an itinerant street speaker of an earlier generation.
The conventional approach to biblical literature is to view it in some sense as actual history -- an obvious example being the reading of Daniel as Israel's struggle with Babylon (ca. 587-545 B.C.E.) instead as what it is: an apocalyptic take on how Israel-Judah was dealing at the time of its writing with the pogroms of Antiochus Epiphanes (ca. 167-164 B.C.E.).
In the same way, the canonical gospels are generally taken uncritically as "the story of Jesus" but are, in fact, mostly about the times in which they were written (Mark: 70-72 C.E., Matthew: 75-85 C.E., Luke: 85-90 C.E. and John anywhere from 90-120 C.E.). For example, the whipping boys of the synoptics are termed "Pharisees and Sadducees" when in all probability they were the competition of Jesus Jews, namely the synagogue-oriented Jews of the late First Century C.E. You could say that the gospels are the first chapters of church history.
Not many of us who ply the trade of New Testament research at the journeyman level are willing to say, as I am, that the first gospel, as such, may be the Gospel according to Thomas -- a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. A number of those sayings occur in some form here and there in the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke). The Thomas collection may be related in that connection to what is known "Q" or "The Source," being a floating collection of sayings and teachings attributed to Jesus, which appears in Matthew and Luke.
That Q and Thomas constitute the earliest oral and written traditions of Jesus Judaism is not an unreasonable hypothesis to pursue. The more common hypothesis is that the passion narratives in all four canonical gospels represent the first traditions. No less a monumental figure in New Testament scholarship, the late Father Raymond Brown, pursued that hypothesis very convincingly, though I am not among those thus convinced.
What follows, then, is founded on the proposition that Q and Thomas and other such saying traditions partially effaced by time and circumstance are what propelled the Jesus movement from its inception to the appearance of "According to Mark" some time soon after 70 C.E. That date, of course, is key to understanding the timing of Mark's appearance.
It is my hypothesis that the destruction of the Temple and the dismantlement of the cultic apparatus of Judaism was the 9/11 of Palestinian culture and had a shocking effect not only on those who followed some form of traditional Judaism but on those in such movements as Jesus Judaism that had aggressed against the Temple and its priesthood much as any break-off group aggresses against that from which it broke off.
Once the aggressed-against was gone for good, Jesus Judaism needed its own cultic apparatus and a story or stories to go with it. No longer would the mostly ethical teachings of a dead street speaker suffice to carry the new movement. The Temple cultus resembled in some ways the Graeco-Roman mystery religions that were very popular well into the First Century C.E., suggesting that every religion needs a story and a rite or rites to go with it.
After 70 C.E., neither continuing Judaism on its way to becoming rabbinical-synagogue Judaism nor Jesus Judaism had a cultus or cultic site. And Jesus Judaism had no story, other than the ones it inherited from its parent religion.
Enter Mark with the first set of stories about Jesus, founded almost certainly on lore enhanced by the need to invent a more or less comprehensive story to complement the ones about Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, Joshua, David, etc. Thus did a whole new cast of characters begin to appear in roles supporting that of "Jesus of Nazareth" in this new drama: Peter, Andrew, James and John, et al., Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate (one of the two characters in the narrative for whom there is definite but scarce extra-biblical attestation, the other being John the Baptist). (1)
Mark, from which come the gospel readings that book-end Palm Sunday and Easter, is the briefest of the four canonical gospels with fewer narrative passages about the person of Jesus and his life than Matthew and Luke.
Mark begins with a brief 14-verse passage that has John the Baptist coming out of the wilderness to call Judea to repentance through his water baptism and to herald the coming of one who would baptize them with "the Holy Spirit." Mark says Jesus submitted to John's baptism and was immediately propelled (the Greek is έκβάλλει -- literally "thrown out") into the wilderness from which John had come. There, of course, Jesus is depicted as encountering "Satan" (Σατανας) from the Semitic root s-t-n meaning "obstruct" or "oppose."
Mark's Passion gospel set the standard for Matthew and Luke, though Father Brown and others suggest that both of the latter had sources of their own or shared sources beyond Mark's more attenuated outline of "events." At the end of each, however, the event is death: Jesus'. There the resemblance ends, for Matthew, Luke as well as John depict dramatic occurrences which come close to but never succeed in being eye-witness accounts of Jesus' actual resurrection.
A hint as to why that was not possible is provided in the very last verse of the Easter gospel for Year-B (Mark 16:8) -- and of Mark itself -- which depicts the women who had come to the place of temporary burial to anoint the corpse for permanent burial. It is said that they found the tomb open and upon entering it encountered "a young man in a white robe, sitting on the right side" who told them Jesus was not there but had been raised. Their reaction? Mark says: "They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."
So "alleluia," my foot. That is scary and mostly unbelievable stuff, yet the resurrection is often believed with such breezy alacrity as to make its believers a study in abnormal psychology. More soberly then, perhaps Mark was attempting to convey in the image of the empty tomb the message that one can find signs of life or even life itself in a venue devoted to death, or that dying may be living (see Mark 8: 35).
That Pontius Pilate engineered the execution of Jesus, as Tacitus reported, albeit a century after the event would have occurred, is not impossible to believe because the figure of Jesus, especially as depicted by Mark, stood in opposition to so much, e.g. certain Jewish traditions and the malign exercise of imperial power. (2) Mark was the first evangelist to depict Jesus processing into Jerusalem riding on a colt, perhaps a purposeful mockery of Caesar's well-known triumphal processions. Thus did Mark set up Jesus as a martyr to a cause. Why, then, did Mark leave the ending of the story in the hands of those who fled in "terror and amazement?"
Within that question lies the homiletic opportunity for the preacher on Palm Sunday, any time during Holy Week and most certainly on Easter itself, to wit: that the Jesus Judaism movement in the years immediately following the destruction of the Temple and its cultic apparatus was as much in disarray as the other branches of Judaism. The Roman persecution went on, culminating but not ceasing with the taking of Masada ca. 73 C.E. It is doubtful that the Roman military much discriminated among the variously organized Jewish groups.
Thus what Mark and the other evangelists depict as happening to Jesus (but not right away to his followers, see Mark 14: 66-72) would have been happening to Jesus Jews at and after the cataclysm of 70 C.E.
The so-called "resurrection narrative" of Mark 16: 1-8, as conflicted as it is, is the homiletic basis upon which preachers in 2009 can rally their congregations to fight the good fight while keeping the faith, that is to array themselves individually and as communities against useless or harmful religious tradition and intolerance; against the principalities and powers of imperious politics, hierarchical economics and malign social policy; against the making of war for war's sake; against that which robs individual human beings of their innate dignity.
The Good Friday reminder might be that such oppositional stands may result in social opprobrium or, in some nations, arrest and imprisonment, if not outright death. Mark was honest enough not to reiterate the promise of Daniel 12:2 . (3) The only reward for emulating the Jesus of Mark's gospel is to have done it.
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Footnotes
(1) Pilate is mentioned by Tacitus ca. 115 as having executed a Jesus-type. Both Philo and Flavius Josephus mention Pilate as well. Josephus mentions John at 18.5.2 and Jesus only once in the Antiquities 18, 3., and that in connection with Pilate.
(2) See Binding the Strong Man by Ched Myers (1988, Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY), esp. p 87
(3) The first clear mention of resurrection in the Bible. It is said here that "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake." Many scholars believe this refers to those (maybe the troops of Judas Maccabaeus) who battled for the faith against the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes.
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