FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

 

  

Lent I - 2012    

Mark 9: 9-15             

 

 

 

   

  

  

Harry T. Cook
Harry T. Cook

Leave it to Mark to dispense with something as profound as Jesus' baptism in 61 words, so that we go from the scene of John the Baptist in the wilderness to Jesus in the wilderness in eight verses. Ernest Hemingway has nothing on Mark for brevity and concision. The speed with which Mark moved is deceptive. We need to read more closely and deliberately that which he wrote so rapidly and wove so tightly, else we will miss a lot that is crucial to understanding what was being depicted.

 

We might begin by observing that the presence of the Baptist in a document that is clearly intended to promote Jesus is a puzzlement in itself. But it acknowledges that the Baptist was a major Judean figure in the second and third decades of the first century C.E., and that Jesus may for a time have been one of his entourage, and perhaps even his successor and therefore needed to be legitimized by being connected to the Baptist and his major work, viz. baptism. If that needed to be accomplished in those first post-70 C.E. days, Mark has done with what appears -- and only appears to be -- a footnote.

 

Meanwhile, the baptism of Jesus itself is bookended by the two of them in the wilderness, apparently -- the natural habitat of the locust eater. If the Baptist had been an Essene or associated in some way with an ascetic group, he would have arisen out of the wilderness (έρημος -- deserted or desolate place). Mark selected it as the ideal place for Jesus to go aside and figure out what should be the means and manner of his challenge of tradition.

 

Previously Mark has given the Baptist this line to speak: "I have baptized you with water, but he (the one who is more powerful and is coming after him) will baptize you with the holy spirit." These last words "with the holy spirit" may be an interpolation in the narrative made by second or third century C.E. Christian theologians trying to square the circle.

 

The upshot of Jesus' baptism is that he is literally "thrown out" (έκβάλλει -- think "ballistic") into the έρημος whence the Baptist had emerged. We get our word "hermit" from έρημος.

 

The importance of water as a symbol in the passage is not to be missed. Jesus' own reported immersion in water recalls the myth of the Exodus and Israel's more historical return from exile. Mark depicts the spirit coming down on Jesus as a dove (would swoop down) after Jesus came up out of the water. But as the refugees from Egypt, having forded the Sea of Reeds at low tide, are depicted as having their 40 years in the wilderness left to go, Jesus is to have 40 days there where, it will be said, he will encounter many a difficulty that would, if not dealt with, divert him from a clear path.

 

Mark attributes the diversions to Satan. "Satan" is from a Hebrew root stn and in general it means "opposing force." The Greek picks that up with διαβάλλω (diaballō or "throw across"). Mark does not dwell on the testing in the wilderness with such great detail as does Matthew in chapter 4 of that document.

 

Returning to the issue of the Baptist/Jesus relationship, it seems significant that the first words Mark puts on Jesus' lips are basically a restatement of the Baptist's one-note message: μετανοεϊτε -- "change your mind" or "get beyond where you are in your head." The Baptist meant his hearers should renounce the world and get ready for the end. Jesus wants them to substitute for whatever is in their minds a belief or trust in the εύαγγέλιον -- usually translated as "good news" but more probably a kind of enthusiasm for victory, e.g. the messenger sent from the battlefield comes running breathlessly with the news of conquest.

 

* * * * * 

 

What could it have meant for Mark, post-70 C.E., to depict Jesus, a Galilean peasant, as succeeding the imprisoned firebrand, the Baptist, with what was essentially a shout of victory, and to do so in a time of great uncertainty and considerable suffering of Palestinian Jews? What was "good" about what Jesus had to say of victory? Whatever it was seems to have been engaging enough to make credible what the narrative says happens next in Mark 16:20, viz. the recruitment of willing conscripts: Andrew, Peter, James and John.

 

Consider for the moment that the "stories" Mark tells about the beginnings of Jesus' public career might actually represent a narrative of expectations for the recruitment of post-70 C.E. Jews and Gentiles to the movement of Jesus Judaism. How credible would it have been, with the dust still in the Judean air from the fall of the Temple, to announce victory, or even just good news? It is probably true that the Temple with its sacrificial apparatus was not exactly the favorite hangout for Jesus Jews, yet the place was the locus of their whole orientation. Mark, in the name of the dead Jesus, could not have been calling for the celebration of a desecrated cultic site. What then was the εύαγγέλιον where Mark and Mark's community/ies were concerned?

 

Or was it a shout of defiance and determination to become, as it were, a portable Temple -- a building not made with human hands but a people bound together in a covenant to survive, to endure and prevail, freed from the shackles of old burdens -- for example, to make Shabbat work for them instead of working for Shabbat?

 

Let us hear the late Reinhold Niebuhr on this subject. From the manuscript of a sermon Niebuhr gave to the congregation of his Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit circa 1925: "Man has a curious weakness for giving such unthinking devotion to the institutions ... which are meant to serve him that he tempts them to assume arbitrary power over him ... . Human history is filled with evidences of this curious perversity. Jesus encountered it in the institution of the Sabbath ... . The Sabbath, according to the best Jewish thought was made for man; but so great was the concern of the legalist for the keeping of it and so great was the fear of the people that they might violate its sanctity that it became hedged about with a hundred and one laws calculated to enforce rest and quiet. These laws interfered so much with the natural, wholesome and even necessary activities that to keep the Sabbath became a burden rather than a boon ..."

 

To declare victory in obtaining freedom over such religious drudgery would be good news, indeed. The gospel is about doing rather than not doing. It is about doing good unto others, not praying that God will do that good. To know that what one does for good makes a difference in there here-and-now is worth a victory shout.

 


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


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