FINDINGS II
Proper
19- B - September 13, 2009
Mark 8: 27-38
(Isaiah 50:
4-9a; Psalm 116: 1-8; James 3: 1-12)
 By Harry T. Cook
9/07/09
RUBRIC
The question is "identity." Post-9/11, Americans in
particular understand how important identity has become. Everybody from the
bank teller to the security guard at the airport want to make certain a person
is who he/she says he/she is.
Mark's Jesus is made to wonder who it is people say he is.
Mark seemed to have thought his version of Jesus knew exactly who he was: a determined
challenger of business as usual with an eye to the future. It is only after most
of eight chapters that Mark raises the question of Jesus' identity -- that is,
what people in general thought about him. Jesus' associates suggested that,
typical of uninformed masses, some people thought he was John the Baptist, who by
then was quite dead. Others were said to have gone farther to say he was
Elijah, the always-but-not-quite-returning figure of history finally come back.
And if neither John nor Elijah, then one long-gone prophet. Matthew's version
of the story gives a name to one of them: Jeremiah.
It is left to Peter to declare, apparently for all his
colleagues, that Jesus is "ho christos," the anointed one or messiah. Was the Peter
of Mark's informed imagination saying what he thought Jesus may have wanted to
hear? Could the small company that had gathered around Jesus actually have come
to that conclusion? If they had, and if they had entertained thoughts of some
triumphant take-over of the world, they were soon to be disabused. That's how
it is with "messiahs."
WORKSHOP
One can understand what must have been a persistent notion
that John the Baptist, while apparently executed by Herod, would somehow return
to frustrate his executioner. Perhaps there had been as late as Mark's time the
belief that the actual messiah would be a resurrected prophet come back to
settle hash.
Not content with either Elijah or the Baptist redivivus
Mark's Jesus is made to probe his friends further until he gets "the answer."
No sooner does Jesus get it then Mark has him shift into an admonitory posture,
warning his friends "not to tell anyone about him." We are to assume, I think,
that in Mark's imagination Jesus was concurring in Peter's discernment, but
that, for one reason or another, it was not yet the time to publish it abroad.
The word that appears in the Greek text and translated as "sternly ordered
them" is "epetimaysen" from the verb "epitimaō," which has the vehemence of one
challenging an undesirable force.
That the "messiah conversation" was set in the region of
Caesarea Philippi is not to be overlooked. Caesars and their minions were not
fond of messiahs and rumors of messiahs, that is to say, of potential rivals
for power and popular attention. Whatever better location could there have been
-- right under the noses of power -- to speak of a messiah, yet where a more
dangerous one to do so?
Or more realistic, which Mark, through words he put on
Jesus' lips, must explain. He must explain what "messiah" means. It means
facing up to power while being seemingly powerless. It means being acted upon
by that power because to avoid facing up to it would be to give in to it. (No
wonder Gandhi found in the New Testament inspiration for his life of witness.)
There is, of course, a price to pay for such facing up. And
so Mark first enunciates the passion prediction in which eventually Matthew and
Luke follow.
So "messiah" does not mean "save, deliver and conquer" as in
the popular imagination. Messiah must "suffer many things," be rejected and
killed. All, though, is not lost, for this messiah must "after three days rise
again" -- this latter prediction unheard by Peter who wanted it all to go away,
being supposedly the content of his reported rebuking of Jesus.
Messiahs are not supposed to suffer such an end, unless they
happen to be the dying and rising sons of the gods with which Graeco-Roman myth
religions are rife. Surely the Jewish messiah is to be victorious. Yet if one takes into consideration the
work of Israel Knohl (The Messiah Before Jesus, 2000,
University of California Press) there may be precedent for a suffering messiah
type. Knohl finds hymns in the Qumran literature, which celebrate a messianic
leader who lived only a generation before the time in which Jesus is said to
have lived.
The earlier messianic figure was believed by his following
to be a redeemer and deliverer. According to what Knohl was able to piece
together, that "messiah" was executed by the Roman military during a 4 B.C.E.
uprising and left unburied by order of the Romans -- not, according to J.D.
Crossan, an unusual thing at the time. According to Knohl's analysis of one of
the hymns, the followers of the earlier messiah figure came to believe that he
was raised from the dead after three days. The real story probably was that
feral dogs disposed of his remains, which story was too gruesome to
acknowledge. Might as well say of him what the writer of Daniel said of those
who died in the Maccabean uprising: "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the
earth shall awake, some to everlasting life (12:2)."
That said, Mark turned to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would
eventually call (and personify) "the cost of discipleship." Those who would
follow Jesus will "take up their cross" (we might say, "take their chances")
and figure out what is important and what is not.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
Set before the courageous preacher (is there another kind, I
mean, really?) in this gospel are two words that stand out: kosmos and psychay
- "world" and "vital principle" (sometimes translated limply as "soul.") The
question concerns what is accomplished by gaining the whole of "kosmos" and, in
the process, losing hold on "the vital principle" or the animating strength of
life.
Other exegetes may well disagree, but the word "kosmos" has
a long history, and it was used in the Greek of Homer and Plato to account for
"adornment" or "cosmetic treatment" and only later came to mean worldly affairs
or possessions. The Greek of Mark is not the most polished, and it may be
doubtful that he or his community would have known of the earlier and perhaps
more authentic meaning of the word.
The "vital principle" is not a material thing, though it may
enable and empower human beings to, shall we say, incarnate such values of love
and care by helping others in material ways. To accomplish such a thing means
digging into the finite store of material substance which is, after all,
adornment of the inner life. Man may not live by bread alone, but he also needs
bread to live.
Herewith the preacher has the opportunity to say that
following the suffering messiah mean -- must mean -- embracing the suffering
that will surely come in some form when one undertakes to practice distributive
justice in the marketplace, to liberate from those with much sufficient
resources to lift up those with little or none.
All of which is to say that the Christian religion is a
humanist concern having to do with the vital principle of securing the joy of life's
"adornments" for all, and not just for a privileged few whose privilege comes
neither of merit nor deserts but of being in a right place at a right time.
None of those accidents entitles them to unending bounty while others are condemned
to poverty in the extreme or destitution beyond belief.
Some one will say, "Well, that's just the social gospel." I
will say, "There is no other kind."
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READERS WRITE
Rev. Barb Schmitz, Cave Creek, AZ: I wanted you to know [that] reading your FINDINGS is now part of my Monday morning getting-up routine. It gets me off to a solid start, thinking about the lessons for the next Sunday. I just want to say thanks.
Robert Halsey, Spearwood, Australia: I enjoyed your post of Proper 18 - B - of Sept. 6. Thank you for it. But I don't see Jesus being undone or going for a fall. I feel your take on the Marcan story is unnecessarily negative.I believe that the Marcan community was expressing the courageous inclusiveness of the "new" Jew who was beginning to move away from regimented orthodoxy. I don't believe they were being critical of Jesus but were some of the few who approved of the development that they hoped was taking place. Or should [have been] tak[ing] place. It must have been something that kept playing on his mind but the fateful meeting with the Syro-Phoenician woman saw the penny fall...The time had come. She proved to be the trigger. He saw the pluralism that the new Judaism needed. It enabled him to tell the story of the Good Samaritan. Imagine hobnobbing with a Samaritan woman alone, at a well sharing water with her!! It enabled him to visit the home of the Roman Centurion, a reprehensible gentile and an active member of the occupying forces and symbol of repression that destroyed the Temple and massacred all the priests and then heal his daughter. Among other such liberalizing tendencies his followers noticed this about his teaching and his personal example. He was leading from the front not merely sketching out the details in some distant and vague sort of way but letting people see by his own actions what he meant, what should be happening. It was the direction that later Ebionites embraced after Jerusalem was razed and Jewry was facing extinction. "Resurgam!" was what Jesus meant. This was what the new Jewish religion should be based on. The fateful run in with the establishment was inevitable, one he didn't shirk. This was far more positive and vital to the people than all the rubbish Paul had written about. And he claimed Jesus as his own, the lying sod! What Christians have made of it all is a load of codswallop.
Michael Howard, Palm Springs, CA: Interesting biblical analysis. I already accept and favor the conclusions of your interpretation. Hopefully someone who does not will read your words and get it. A former parish of mine currently has as its slogan the phrase "More love." That is the ticket to peace and happiness in the human condition: more love, more consideration of the needs and concerns of others, more compassion, more work to redress wrongs and resolve inequities, to heal, to cure. A simple idea, difficult to practice but definitely worthwhile.
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