One Man's Web
What is healing?
Our western society has a vastly different understanding of sickness and health to the society of Jesus and Mark. If we neglect this, the significance of much of what Jesus says and does will escape us. In exploring this difference, I will make a distinction between healing vs curing, and illness vs sickness. This analysis also has implications for our understanding of the nature of power.
Despite much effort to work with the whole person, we have a fundamentally biomedical view of health which defines healthiness according to whether our physical organs are working properly; our unprecedented technical expertise constantly lures us in this direction. Many working within western medicine are aware of the limitations of this view, but it still underpins the system. Doctors and patients alike see sickness as basically a case of the body not working. Drugs and surgery are the default solutions we offer the sick. In this view, healing is about being cured; that is, it is about making individual bodies work properly. All this is independent of any cultural definitions of health. Therefore, a doctor in Australia can treat the same sickness in Sudan. We see the limitations of this worldview when people whose organ systems are working properly can still be profoundly ill due to social trauma, for example.
An ethnomedical view of health understands health and illness being intimately linked to social systems. This enables it to see ill-health having causes and healings that are wider than simple biological symptoms and biomedical interventions... Read on >>>>
My partner and I once visited a synagogue and its adjacent museum. One of the synagogue members began to take us through the synagogue itself, reasonably assuming we knew little or nothing of the Biblical traditions. So, I said, "It might help if we owned up to being Uniting Church ministers. We actually know some of these stories!" She looked at us, considering. "Well! A clergy couple! I've heard about such things, but I've never seen one." We had a great time.
Later, our guide introduced us to the museum, and left us to work our way through. Something began to bother me, and eventually I was able to articulate it to my partner: Everything in the wonderful, terrible, story of Israel being told in the museum was cast so that Israel saw itself as the victim.
It took longer for me to realise why I found this quite so discomforting. I knew that characterising ourselves for too long as "the victim"—even if we are a victim—is unhealthy for all sorts of reasons, but my response was not an intellectual judgement. It was something visceral. Eventually, I realised my deeper self was telling me. "This is you! You play the victim...." Read on >>>>
This is a (very) draft extract from my slowly developing book on Mark, as I ruminate on the implications of his words. This extract deals with Mark 1:16-20, which is the calling of the first four disciples. My understanding of the New Testament use of irony to subvert religious and cultural norms is dependent upon the work of James Alison, and if I can find a single quotation that neatly sums up his work on this subject, I'll post it here.
Passing by...
Jesus does not walk down the beach, but passes by (paragōn para). For anyone immersed in the Old Testament this echoes God passing by Elijah on Mt Carmel, (1 Kings 19:11) so that there is a hint of theophany in Mark's saying Jesus passes by. In the same chapter of 1 Kings, in verse 19, Elijah passed by Elisha and calls him to follow. Clearly, Jesus is not being shown to be Elijah; that is John's role. Instead, the allusions are about Jesus having power and authority to call people to follow him. And in the drama of the text, Jesus is "immediately" on the move. This new basileia/culture is about journeying. There is a connection between this first call to discipleship in our current text and the moment when Jesus intends to pass by the disciples in Mark 6:47. Without the cultural reference point, or echo,1 of I Kings 19 we will miss a Markan hint which Matthew 14:22-33 makes explicit: Walking on the sea, passing by, Jesus calls Matthew's Peter out of the boat. Mark asks of us, "Will you follow him?"
The call to war?
Also present in the calling of the disciples is another cultural echo for Mark's contemporaries, that of the charismatic military leader calling for Israelites to follow them into holy war... Read on >>>>
In my Bible there's a heading above this week's RCL reading which says, "The Death of John the Baptist." But that heading isn't in Mark's Gospel. Mark doesn't call it that. In fact, in the early manuscripts of Mark there are not even spaces between the words, much less paragraph headings!! (Codex Alexandrinus – end of chapter 6:27-54)
This is actually important, because that heading The Death of John the Baptist, which some twentieth century editor inserted into my Bible affects the way we interpret the story. It might even direct us away from some of what Mark is trying to tell us about Jesus. Was Mark's main purpose with this story really to tell us about John's death? And... wouldn't we be more accurate to call it The Murder of John the Baptist?
In Mark's world they put "headings" into the text by the way they arranged stories. One way to do this was to put particular stories alongside each other. So, we have today's reading starting at what we now call Chapter 6:14—and those verse numbers were not in Mark either, and then, straight after today's reading, beginning at Chapter 6 verse 30 there is another story. Those two stories are meant to be read together, and if we were to give them a heading, we might call today's reading Herod's Feast, because Mark contrasts it with what follows, which we could call Jesus' Feast. Read on >>>>
