FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

 

  

Epiphany III 2012   

Mark 1: 14-20        

 

 

 

   

  

  

Harry T. Cook
Harry T. Cook

 

Mark's gospel may be obvious for its brevity, but make no mistake: it is tightly packed. No word or progression of words should be taken lightly. In 1:9, Mark tells us with seeming nonchalance that "Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee." That in itself is a large mouthful. The primacy and chauvinism of the south and of Judea are part and parcel of the Tanakh, the Hebrew bible. To say that Jesus is "the anointed one, the Son of God" and has come from Galilee, and, what's more, from Nazareth (a settlement with no prior mention in the literature) is to say that, contrary to Nathanael in John ch. 1, something very good can come out of Nazareth wherever and whatever it may have been. Even ex nihilo? Now again in the passage at hand, Jesus places Jesus back in the Galilee after and maybe as a result of the arrest of John the Baptist (1:14). Mark says Jesus came preaching (κρύσσων το eύαγγέλιον τοϋ θεοϋ), the gospel of God. eύαγγέλιον may mean "good news" to us, but to some of Mark's hearers it might have meant something like a declaration of victory or vindication, almost even a taunt or an in-your-face kind of assertion.

 

The content of το eύαγγέλιον is a logical extension of what Mark placed on the Baptist's lips only a few verses ago. There the Baptist is made to quote Isaiah 40:3, applying to himself the image of "the voice crying in the wilderness" calling the people to repentance and preparation for the coming of "the Lord." Now is the time; the time is fulfilled -- or "the moment is pregnant, full to capacity with possibility." The rule of Yahweh is right in front of you. Change your mind and your ways.

 

Was it John's arrest that caused Jesus to return to Galilee? Did the one have to do with the other, or was Mark simply setting Jesus' reemergence in the Galilee in some historical context? Typically, Mark was covering a lot of territory in one verse (14). Plenty of people who work with these texts believe that Jesus had once been a disciple of the Baptist, and, for one reason or another, broke with him - either because his arrest put him out of commission and/or because Jesus ended up not quite buying into the Baptist's world-renouncing apocalyptic. From Ch. 1 v.14 on, it is Jesus, not the Baptist, who dominates the pages of this gospel. Jesus even takes over the preaching of the imminence of the rule of God.

 

What is the "gospel" in which Mark's Jesus calls people to believe? The answer to that question becomes more apparent as the narrative progresses over the next few chapters. Even before the appearance of Mark as a narrative, the Q Gospel embedded in Matthew and Luke and the 114 sayings comprising the Gospel of Thomas (some of them with parallels in Matthew and Luke) were in circulation as the earliest oral and written tradition of Jesus Judaism. You can count the epistles of Paul as part of that tradition.

 

It is my hypothesis that the humanist ethic represented in so many of those sayings, including those that served as calls to liberate people from onerous social and cultic burdens, constitute that eύαγγέλιον. The call to repent was an invitation to think again, to undergo a reprogramming so that one would be able to see the world through a different set of lenses. The world should be a venue of justice and peace and of fundamental fulfillment for everyone, not just the privileged and high placed. The rule of God is that venue in which such justice and such peace are the rule rather than the exception.

 

That, then, is a radical proclamation calling for a radical implementation. To attain its realization will demand more than business-as-usual. Thus the next scene in the Markan narrative: "And passing by the Sea of Galilee, he (Jesus) saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea because they were fishermen. And Jesus said to the, 'Follow me, and I will make your catch people rather than fish.'" Again the narrative is deceptively sparse as if the story were already well-known. In fact, it is a giant mouthful that needs thorough chewing and digesting to get all that Mark is conveying. Galilee as the location is important for reasons we have stated above. The men Jesus encountered were engaged in their fishing enterprise. Jesus asked them to leave what they were doing. They do just that, which is the point of the story. Whatever it was Mark imagined Jesus might have said to them must have made it impossible for them not to walk away from their lives. The same applies to the Brothers Zebedee who do the same. It is in the Zebedee narrative that we find an important clue that they probably owned their boats and nets because "hired men" are mentioned. That ups the ante, of course, since it is one thing to quit one's job and quite another to walk away from one's investment and business and, in the case of the Brothers Zebedee, their father.

 

The phrase "fishers of men" in the hands of the evangelical fundamentalist runs quickly to Matthew 28:16-20 and the alleged commandment to preach and baptize the world into submission. Ched Meyers wants us to believe that Mark borrowed the image of "fishers of men" from Jeremiah 16:16 where it is used to illustrate a kind of dragnet Yahweh is depicted as intending to use to snag and pull every errant one of the people of Israel back to him. So what manner of "men" did Mark have in mind when he depicts Jesus' new entourage being told they will become like fishers of people? Hook and line? Net? Spear?

 

* * * * * 

 

Two men hire a boat for a day of fishing. They row out into the lake. The one, obviously an experienced fisherman, fusses over his rod and reel, his lures, leads and sinkers and after some delay prepares to cast his line astern. He nearly jumps off the boat when he sees his companion pull out a large stick of dynamite, light the fuse and throw it overboard. The result is a loud report and an eruption of water that rocks the little boat to and fro. As the water calms down, dead fish float to the surface, which the companion handily nets into the boat. The experienced fisherman is thunderstruck, and it takes him a minute simply to say to the other, "What in the hell are you doing?" The response: "Did we come out here to talk or fish?"

 

The Episcopal Church had intended the years between 1990 and 1999 to be "The Decade of Evangelism," by which was meant "10 years to get people back to church and more of the unchurched signed up." It didn't happen largely, it seems, because no one ever really defined what "evangelism" means. Does it mean large and emotion-filled rallies tilted in form and content toward the suggestible? Does it mean a Sunday school kind of religion which chips away at biblical illiteracy? Does it entail a hard-sell, or-else kind of appeal? If το eύαγγέλιον is the announcement that the rule of God is at hand, and if that rule is one of peace and justice, then those religious enterprises specifically conceived of, designed and implemented as effort to attain both is what "evangelism" is.

 

My friend the Rev. Edwin Rowe, long-time pastor of Detroit's Central United Methodist Church, clearly embodies that sense of evangelism. His historic edifice is known to the entire community as "the peace-and-justice church." Two huge banners flank the front of the nave, one with the legend PEACE and the other JUSTICE. It is clear that anyone who joins up with Pastor Rowe's church will have to understand evangelism to be the pursuit and doing of justice and the making of peace. A person who will go to and stay with Central Church will soon come to see that works are necessary if faith is to mean anything -- works that attain justice and encourage peace, that is.

 

 

 

 


� Copyright 2012, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.


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