FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

9/10/12 

The question is "identity." Post-9/11, Americans in particular understand how important identity has become. Everyone from the bank teller to the security guard at the airport wants 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 the uninformed, 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-yet-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 the χριστος, 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."

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.
 
Content with neither Elijah nor 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 επετιμηςεν from the verb επιτασσω, 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. What 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 "savior, deliverer and conquerer" 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, we return to Mark and 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.

Set before the courageous preacher (can there be another kind, I mean, really?) in this gospel are two words that stand out: κοσμος and ψυχη -- "world" and "vital principle" (sometimes translated limply as "soul.") The question concerns what is accomplished by gaining the whole of κοσμος and, in the process, losing hold on "the vital principle" or the animating strength of life.
 
Other exegetes may well disagree, but the word κοσμος 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 that is, after all, adornment of the inner life. Man may not live by bread alone, but he also needs bread to live.
 
Herewith the homilist 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 ask, "Is there is another kind?"