FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

8/27/12 

This exegete is relieved to return for a season to the normative gospel for Year-B: According to Mark.

Mark is a fairly direct "get-down-to-business" document that begins with the brief appearance of the Baptist in an eight-verse introduction of the main character: a Galilean named Jesus who by verse 16 of the first chapter is in the business of gathering disciples. By the 21st verse, Jesus has encountered "a man with an unclean spirit," and so the battle lines are drawn between the old and the new, the superannuated and the innovative, between the stasis of tradition for tradition's sake and the dynamism of change.
 
If we pay attention, Jesus' arrest and execution will come as no surprise.
 
Mark sets up a confrontation between the Pharisees and some "scribes from Jerusalem" (maybe scribes whose local counterparts had been subjects of scorn in the aftermath of Mark 1:21ff, when the crowds there "were astonished at [Jesus'] teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority and not as the scribes.") The location of this incident is not specifically given, but, among others, C.S. Mann says it was probably somewhere in the Galilee. Whatever, the issue is now the proper eating of food.
 
A number of Jesus' company were said to have been eating with "defiled hands, that is without washing them. Of course, we will not make the mistake of thinking "sepsis," because it would be 1800 years before that phenomenon would be understood. At issue in the passage was ritual purity. The Jew following the then current tradition would ceremoniously have washed his or her hands after coming from the "agora" or public venue, market place or place of assembly. Why? Because who were by nature κοινος or common, or unhallowed or even unclean would have been in the agora, and something of their unclean nature may have rubbed off on the Jew. So the Pharisees and scribes want to know of Jesus why his followers do not "walk" in the way of the "elders," or "old ones."
 
This is the kind of confrontation Mark clearly delighted in depicting: an iconoclastic episode in which he and his community, perhaps in light of the disappearance of the Temple and its sacrificial apparatus after 70 CE, considered such purity rituals irrelevant. Sort of, "Well, we guess we didn't need to do that stuff after all" -- a form of denial of the importance of that which through no fault of theirs was lost and gone. Mark even has Jesus cite Isaiah (29:13) to the effect that outward appearances count for nothing, that it is the inward commitment that is important. Mark goes so far as to say that Isaiah spoke directly and presciently of such a Pharisee or scribe as an υποκριτης, or pretender, play actor, fraud or deceiver. Our English word is "hypocrite." Mark contrasts the "human tradition" with the "commandment of God" (7:8).
 
Then comes the thrust of the rhetorical sword (7:15): "There is nothing outside a person which by going in to him can defile; but the things which come out are what defile" (or makes him κοινος). By this Mark means not only to dismantle what he perceived as an irrelevant and possibly oppressive purity tradition, but to emphasize the necessity of authentic commitment over the mere performance of surface ritual. It is not finally κοινος food or food made κοινος by how it was harvested or slaughtered or prepared or conveyed since, as Mark has Jesus point out so graphically, the bowels take care of that problem (see 7:19, which the delicate lectioneers omitted from the appointed reading).
 
One can imagine the uproar that such an exchange as the one depicted between Jesus and those along the Pharisee-scribe axis would have produced. Think of the liberal and conservative members of the U.S. Congress debating what is really "American" and what is not.
 
It was one thing for Jesus to have dazzled (at least initially) the synagogue crowd with his prowess where evil spirits were concerned, as he was perceived as one with authentic inner strength. It was quite another for him to be depicted as challenging the very power base of the ruling religious authority. To what extent, in the immediate post-70 C.E. context out of which According to Mark probably came, a scribal or Pharisaic party existed with any strength is debatable. It may be that Mark, as Matthew, Luke and John were to do after him, used those old party or faction labels to describe new or different ones. The purity traditions depicted in the passage may have been newer forms of oppression and irrelevance.
 
Footnote: The Deuteronomy reading coupled by the RCL with the Markan passage has got to be read and commented on with great care, because any superficial treatment of it will make it seem contradictory to the iconoclasm of Mark. The Deuteronomist is strong on the keeping of the commandments unchanged by amendment of addition or deletion -- an argument for original intent, we might say. It is the keeping of the mitzvoth, not the foofaraw of ritual that counts.
 
We have more direct help from the Epistle of James as its author deplores religion that is "worthless" due to a lot of talk -- maybe even about the finer details of ritual purity. "Religion that is pure and undefiled . . . is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress . . ."
 
It is an unfortunate datum of the human experience that people give sometimes unthinking obedience to religious and cultural traditions that may at some point been intended to serve them. Often enough people end up serving the traditions. One such tradition for Jews of antiquity was the purification code rooted in a kind of xenophobia of the hoi polloi, or what we might appropriately call "the great unwashed." That is what is at issue in the Markan reading appointed for liturgies this coming weekend.
 
A clearer angle on the issue is the declaration concerning the Sabbath attributed by Mark to Jesus: "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath." As we see time and again throughout the Bible, much legalistic concern was abroad about Sabbath observance that it became entangled in a plethora of rules impossible to remember and to observe. Consequently the very peace the Sabbath was meant to provide was disturbed.
 
Yet neither the purity codes nor Sabbath observance is at issue here. For twenty-first century people trying to make sense of the Jewish/Christian religious persuasion, the issue is how the institutions and traditions of the same serve them, rather than the other way around. The issue is how do we keep what is meant to serve us from becoming our master. This is not only a good Jewish/Christian question. It is a quintessential American question.
 
Banks, for example, are supposed to be convenient depositories for people's hard-earned dollars and places from which the same people can obtain credit. Banks were not intended to be rapacious institutions that essentially appropriate the aggregate of people's deposits to enable risky investing and careless gambling, all for the profit of the bankers. Banks were made for people's money, not the people's money for banks.
 
Hospitals are supposed to be places where the sick and injured may go to be treated and, when possible, cured and mended. People who go there must, of course, pay or have paid for them, the cost of their treatment. But what is its cost? How can one night's stay in a hospital bed, two laboratory tests and a 17-second physician visit end up costing $15,000? Hospitals were made for people, not people for hospitals.
 
The Mark reading is a legitimate basis for a homily or a homiletic discussion about how to make that which should serve human beings actually serve them, rather than requiring human beings to serve them. This point may handily be applied to religious institutions. In no way should any such institution with any connection to the Gospel According to Mark, for example, be permitted to make human beings serve its ends. The church was made for human beings, not human beings for the church. Furthermore, it was made by human beings. You can tell that by its deep imperfections.