One Man's Web

Reconceiving the Messiah - Mark 1:16 - 2:38

Reconceiving the Messiah

Now we will learn something of what it means to be Messiah. He will fulfil some expectations, but not others. Finally, Peter will say, 'You are the Messiah,' (Mark 8:29) but then there will be even more to learn.

 1:16-20 Choosing the disciples
16 As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee (παρὰ τὴν θάλασσαν τῆς Γαλιλαίας), he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake (τῇ θαλάσσῃ)—for they were fishermen. ¹⁷And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you fish for people.’ ¹⁸And immediately they left their nets and followed him. ¹⁹As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat (πλοίῳ) mending (καταρτίζοντας) the nets. ²⁰Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

1. The Sea? of Galilee:  Paul Davidson¹ points out that no one before Mark talks about a Sea of Galilee. It is² a relatively small lake. This is an important issue in Mark which the NRSV translation covers over in its effort to be "readable." (See  3:7-12 The Sea, Point 1 for more detail.) Davidson says

Mark, then, is giving the lake in Galilee a name that is unattested in any earlier source, and very possibly an invention of his own. And it’s not just the name; ... he treats it in the narrative as a sea rather than the small lake that it is...

Why does he do this? He quotes Elizabeth Malbon,³ who says.

Mark presupposes the connotation of the sea as chaos, threat, danger, in opposition to the land as order, promise, security… The threatening power of the sea is manifest, but the power of Jesus’ word is portrayed as stronger; Jesus stills the storm and walks on the water, overcoming the threat of the sea; Jesus causes the swine possessed by unclean spirits to rush to their deaths in the sea (5:23a, b), turning the threat of the sea to his own purpose...

Finally, Davidson asks why Mark uses the title Sea of Galilee, and not Sea of Chinnereth, the Old Testament name for the lake? He may be inviting us to see a connection with Isaiah.

In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined. (Isaiah 9:1-6)

Much of the action in Mark will be set around the sea, and the mastery of Jesus over the sea will be made plain.

The Greek of the current verses says, "As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee (τὴν θάλασσαν) he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea (τῇ θαλάσσῃ)—for they were fishermen." NRSV changes the second sea to the lake. This removes the repetition. It removes the jarring word sea for any reader who knew there was only a lake. Even now, for a casual English-speaking reader the dangerous sea is muted into the calm of a lake which appears on their screensaver (even though lakes can experience violent storms.) Mark's insistence upon thalassa is because Jesus is passing along a Sea, with all the danger and ambiguity which that implies, and he shows he is its master, making "the way of the sea" glorious.

2. The Call: We are so familiar with this story that we miss the shock of it. Rabbis did not usually call disciples. ⁴ People chose to disciple themselves to a rabbi until they had learned enough to become a rabbi themselves. Therefore, Jesus' calling the disciples is a break with tradition which emphasises his authority over people. It disrupts their lives; they are called to leave everything behind, right in the middle of a task.  Later in Mark (8:34) Jesus recognises that people will choose to follow him but still calls them to leave everything behind, and even more radically: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."

In all the call of the disciples we see the power of the Messiah. It is He who chooses us. We do not judge and choose him. Instead, we are judged by the culture he calls the Kingdom of God, as he calls us.

3. Fishing for people: How did people hear the words "I will make you fish for people?"

"In the Greco-Roman environment a fisher of people is often a teacher." As Marcus points out after making this observation, the very next pericope has Jesus teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.⁵

Some Qumran texts speak of the "three nets of Belial" (Satan) which suggests that the disciples will rescue people from these nets. ⁶

We also see the fishing metaphor in Jeremiah 16:16, Ezekiel 29:4-5, Amos 4:2, Habakkuk 1:14-17. These are images of judgement, against both Israel and other nations where they have rejected God.

Hear this word, you cows of Bashan
   who are on Mount Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
   who say to their husbands, ‘Bring something to drink!’

² The Lord God has sworn by his holiness:
   The time is surely coming upon you,
when they shall take you away with hooks,
   even the last of you with fish-hooks...

The verses are full of sarcasm:

⁵bring a thank-offering of leavened bread,
   and proclaim freewill-offerings, publish them;
   for so you love to do, O people of Israel!
                                          says the Lord God.

And the third and fourth lines of verse 6 are repeated 4 times (in vv8-11.)

⁶ I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities,
   and lack of bread in all your places,
   yet you did not return to me,
                                               says the Lord. (Amos 4:1-2,5-6)

There is an emphasis of justice towards others in this reading from Amos, whereas,  in Ezekiel 29 (see verses 4 and 9,) Pharaoh is hooked because he said, "The Nile is mine, and I made it."

My part of the church has often equated fishing for people with evangelism, which has a certain romance attached to it, and may tempt us to feel "I made it..." if someone feels the call of God in their lives.  I suspect the original audience of Mark saw the image rather more starkly. As Meyers said

...The point here is that following Jesus requires not just assent of the heart, but a fundamental reordering of socio-economic relationships. The first step in dismantling the dominant social order is to overturn the "world" of the disciple: in the kingdom, the personal and the political are one.... This is not a call "out" of the world, but into an alternative social practice. ⁷

4. The Messiah is not bound by convention and "good manners."

In the movie Jesus of Montreal, the Jesus figure chooses as his first disciple is an actor whom we meet dubbing English subtitles over pornographic French movies. I took some people from church. Two of the elderly ladies laughed themselves silly as the actor tried to dub two voices at once in a hot scene replete with the four-letter word. They told me it ''was lucky for me" that one of the other members of the congregation had not come.

The scene nicely captures the scandal of the disciples. We don't see them as slightly dirty figures like a porn actor, but in their time, fishermen were unclean and unsuitable for a proper Rabbi to have as his followers. Mark sets the gospel against what is proper. Disciples are not called on the basis of social respectability. ⁸

5. What is Kingdom?

The word kingdom is used some 16 times (in the context of kingdom of heaven) in Mark; some variations of Mark 1:14 have it that "after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom." (NRSV footnote) We could say that the gospel is an extended explanation of what the kingdom is. But… what does kingdom of God mean for our time and culture?

In a democratic world, we do not talk about reigns any more than we talk about kingdoms.

But we do talk a whole lot about "culture"! So I suggest: "The time is fulfilled, and the culture of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." What does it mean to distinguish God's culture from human cultures? What does it mean to be "called out" (Gr: ekklesia, "church") of conventional human culture and to begin to be disciples of the one who brings God's culture near to us? Why is this such good news? ⁹

A culture demands of allegiance. A culture is a matrix of understandings which we use to function in the world. It can become god-like. It enmeshes us. It can determine us. Where we are unconscious of our culture, it does determine us; we think it is real.

To enter into the culture of God is to step out of and to stop following the culture of Australia, or wherever it is we live. ¹⁰

A Kingdom or Culture enmeshes us; we are not free agents but are hooked into the structures of the culture in which we live. It is easy to say we are called to step out of our culture, but doing it is far less simple.

KC Hanson¹¹ writes on the Galilean fishing industry.  His article is fascinating for its diagrams of the economic and social structures of Galilee and the Empire. Fishermen were enmeshed in the imperial culture and taxation system.

… fishermen received capitalization along with fishing rights, and were therefore indebted to local brokers responsible for the harbors and for fishing leases. The location of Levi's toll office in Capernaum—an important fishing locale—probably identifies him as just such a contractor of royal fishing rights…

The obvious implication here is that these first disciples are called out of a system or culture. As such they are no longer "at home." How much are we at home, and how much are we a bit of a misfit? I think we are called to be a misfit. If we simply fit in, we have not "believed," but have been a religious tourist.

Hanson contrasts the economic structure of the empire with ours:

…economies in the ancient Mediterranean were not independent systems with "free markets," free trade, stock exchanges, monetization, and the like, as one finds in modern capitalist systems.

Despite the differences, we too are enmeshed. We are just as much fisher-folk as James and John. If we do not learn this, our culture will enmesh and determine us in all the neo-liberalism and individualism of our times. It will be our God. But like the fishermen, we are called out of this enmeshment. ¹²

It is vital to remember that when we speak of culture or kingdom in this context, we are not speaking of the differences between the USA and Australia, (which are deeper than a surface glance would suggest). We are really talking about a new way of being, a way so new that it would show that the USA and Australia, and Rome, are fundamentally the same culture, the culture of violence. They live by what Wink termed the Myth of Redemptive Violence¹³ … The "non-sacrificial economy" and "the end of the victim" is the end of violence as a means to establishing and maintaining not merely a local culture, but a new human reality. ¹⁴

6.The disciples are brothers, family. The new community is about close relationships... although Jesus will have more to say about family. (Cf 3:20-21, 31.) Community is a basic feature of the culture of God; from now on we will only see Jesus with his disciples... until that moment when they hand him over. Private faith does not exist; indeed, no-one exists apart from a community or society.

In the current text there is an escalation within the two calls to follow Jesus. Simon and Andrew are called to follow.  James and John are also called to leave their father behind.  Family will be redefined.

7. And immediately... this is a constant phrase in Mark. Mark's gospel is in a hurry. The Greek phrase is kai euthys, and it is sometimes obscured by NRSV's translation. Mark 1:12 has the same Greek καὶ εὐθὺς phrase, for example, but NRSV says and the Spirit immediately. In 1:29 NRSV simply says As soon as... In our current passage, kai euthys is translated literally in verse 18, but in verse 20 the and, or kai, is omitted. In 1:21, kai euthys, is translated out of existence as when. In each case the English reads more smoothly, but we lose the repetition which becomes an echo in the verbal rendition of the Gospel, and heightens its urgency. Mark uses this phrase 41 times in his gospel. It is only used ten more times in the remainder of the New Testament.

We are dealing here with a "Western" cultural expectation, and a "Mediterranean" cultural expectation. My culture would find the constant repetition of and immediately grating, and a sign of badly written literature.  Jesus' culture has an ear for something different: Repetition of phrases and sounds, was a rhetorical tool. It was an aural marker, a kind of verbal bold or italics, to alert the listener (or reader) to an issue of importance.

8. Grammatical subjects vs objects. The text does not say, "Simon and Andrew were fisherman. As Jesus passed by..." In the way the text is shaped, Jesus is the subject of the story, and the fishermen are objects. It is not until they answer the call that they become subjects. Marcus suggests this probably has a "theological point: for Mark, authentic human identity is found only in discipleship to Jesus." ¹⁵ He links this to the next passage where the identity of the man in the synagogue is eclipsed. The unclean spirit will "swallow up the identity of its human host" until the man is freed by Jesus.

9. Mending? the nets: Simon and Andrew are casting nets into the lake, which in the lake fishing environment of the time, implies it is night time. James and John, according to NRSV, are mending their nets, which is a daytime activity. But while the word katartizontas can indeed mean mending, it has the more basic meaning of putting in order.¹⁶ A reader of the time would conclude that Simon and Andrew are already casting nets close into shore, and James and John are just about to cast offshore, or are preparing the nets to cast them over the side; indeed, they leave their father in the boat. The implication may be that Jesus comes in the night into our darkness. He will be handed over in our darkness, and at his dying darkness will come over the whole earth. (Mark 15:33)

10. Passing By, and The Call to War: The choice of words here is interesting. Jesus does not walk down the beach, but passes by. For readers immersed in the Old Testament this echoes God passing by Elijah on Mt Carmel. (1 Kings 19:11) There is a hint of theophany in the phrase. In the same chapter of 1 Kings, in verse 19, Elijah passes 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 culture is about journeying.

What we have been talking about in this tenth point, and the previous point nine, is communication which is occurring through cultural reference points. Overlaying our understanding of the overarching culture of God as distinct from the overarching culture of empire, are all the cultural expressions which are distinct to local cultures. In our time and place, such reference points are well illustrated by the situations where the newcomer doesn't understand why everyone is laughing at a joke, or why something that newcomer has said seems to have embarrassed people.

In studying the New Testament, we sometimes simply fail to see a cultural reference point which was obvious to the original audience. I have never seen a picture of Jesus walking along the sea calling his disciples out of the night, for example. We westerners have missed the cultural reference point. As a consequence, this means I have never wondered about the connection between the first call to discipleship in our current text and the moment when Jesus passes by in Mark 6:48.  (Matthew 14:22-33 makes this connection explicit, calling Peter out of the boat.) In my last congregation there was an elderly woman who, whenever I mentioned an incident in the Old Testament, could give me chapter and verse, and who frequently would say of a New Testament text that it reminded her of a particular Old Testament story.  She had begun to develop a sensibility which was much more developed among the culture of Jesus and his contemporaries. Indeed, where we sometimes wonder if what seems an obscure cultural reference point is imagined, Mark's readers may have wondered if he was "laying it on a bit thick."

In the calling of these disciples there is another set of cultural references being made: A charismatic military leader calls for Israelites to follow them into "holy war, and they go after him." Marcus references Judges 3:28, 6:34, and 1 Samuel 11:6-7 as examples, noting that in the Judges 6 and the Samuel 11 references, this call is preceded by the coming of the Spirit upon the leader, which is exactly what has happened in Mark, where we have just read of Jesus' baptism. The tradition of summons to holy war can still be seen in 1 Maccabees 2:27-28. Marcus concludes this section by saying it is likely

Jesus is being portrayed ... not only as prophet but also as a leader who demands from his followers the same sort of total dedication that the Jewish revolutionaries in the Markan environment demanded from their followers. ¹⁷

It is here that we must begin to read the subtleties of Mark. Mark can only talk to people enmeshed in the culture of empire by using the words and categories of empire, even if he is also beginning to subvert them. Otherwise, he would be incomprehensible. Mark and Jesus speak of a kingdom, because that's where people lived, and because our cultural reservations about the language of kingdom are an understanding of kingdom which did not exist at the time.  And he alludes to a call to war. The cultural references there are likely clear and obvious. But we do have reservations about the use of Kingdom, and we have more again about the idea of holy war. How should we respond? I think the text begins to subvert the culture of empire.  Mark uses kingdom, and the idea of holy war, in ways that are not imperial, and Jesus will prove to be neither the prophet nor the king people expected. Our reservations about these concepts, and our reservations about the prospect of people being thrown into Ghenna (9:47), for example, are not so much problems with the text as they are a witness to the liveliness of the Spirit. We see these "problems" because the Spirit has been, and is, at work in us. The sensibility behind the text is subverting the grip empire has upon us, and we are being converted. The question for us is to find how to speak and live in ways which are non-imperial, for this speaking and living will form us, and open us to hearing the Spirit, so that this subverting of empire continues.

 

1:21-28 In the synagogue at Capernaum
21 They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came (καὶ εὐθὺς τοῖς σάββασιν), he entered the synagogue and taught. ²²They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. ²³Just then (καὶ εὐθὺς) there was in their synagogue (τῇ συναγωγῇ αὐτῶν) a man with an unclean spirit (ἐν πνεύματι ἀκαθάρτῳ), ²⁴and he cried out (ἀνέκραξεν), ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’ ²⁵But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ ²⁶And the unclean spirit, throwing him into convulsions and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. ²⁷They were all amazed, (ἐξεπλήσσοντο) and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He [Or A new teaching! With authority he] commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.’ ²⁸At once his fame began to spread (καὶ ἐξῆλθεν ⸃ ἡ ἀκοὴ αὐτοῦ εὐθὺς) throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

1. Names: Capernaum is by the Sea of Galilee. The name means the village of Nahum. The village itself had no connection to the Old Testament prophet of that name, but

who was Nahum [the Prophet] and why would he have been of any importance to Jesus and Jesus’ very particular ministry? ... An element of Nahum’s uniqueness is his prophetic name. Nahum means “the comfort of Yahweh” and Nahum’s unique and important prophetic message was to “bring comfort and consolation” to the people of Judah.

Nahum was a prophet at the time of another imperial, aggressor power which was subjugating the people of Palestine. At a time when all seemed hopeless, at a time when there didn’t seem to be an end to the imperial oppression of Assyria, Nahum’s message was to tell the people of Judah that Yahweh had not forgotten them in their distress and that Yahweh longed to comfort them. Nahum’s message gave the people hope and as Nahum predicted, the Assyrian empire did fall and a time of some relative peace did come to the region.< sup>¹⁸

Note that Galilee and Nazareth are emphasised in this text. Neither needs to be named; the text would make sense without them, so Mark is reminding us that the culture of the kingdom is not founded in, or coming from, Jerusalem and the Temple.

2. Kai euthys: Verse 21 in NRSV reduces the kai euthys to when, which is to use it as a modifier for the Sabbath. Marcus considers that a better translation is And on the sabbath... he immediately began to teach.¹⁹

In any event, kai euthys appears 41 times in Mark (out of 51 times in the entire New Testament.) When NRSV makes it invisible it harms the urgency of the text. In the Greek, people hear the phrase, as well as attach meaning to it.  It seems inconceivable that a rhetorician of Mark's time would not be aware of what NRSV obviously feels is a stylistic "overuse." When such a deliberate choice has been made by an author it is unfortunate if we blunt its effect.

Two verses later, kai euthys appears again, but is rendered as "just then." This misses the parallel which is obvious in the Greek: Immediately Jesus begins to teach, and immediately the man cries out, and immediately Jesus' fame began to spread. Marcus suggests the man cries out immediately after Jesus has finished teaching, otherwise what would provoke him? ²⁰ But perhaps what Mark intends with the parallel is for us to see the teaching is embedded in Jesus' very being. Even his presence is a provocation.

3. The Secret: But Jesus rebuked him saying, "Be silent..." We have here the beginning of another Markan theme, known as "the Messianic Secret," where Jesus constantly seeks to silence those who see, or think they see, who he is. The spirit which calls him the Holy One of God, also calls him Jesus of Nazareth. It is this man we follow, not some idealised divine figure. If what we preach would be anathema to this man, then it is not of God.

But why the secret?  How is it that the one spreading the good news of the kingdom wishes his identity not to be known?  It is possible that the expectations around the Messiah were so far from what Jesus was discerning about himself and his calling that he sought to discourage the use of the title. To call him Messiah was to define him by the mores of the culture, rather than to learn that he, and the kingdom of God, were profoundly counter the culture, and a healing of the culture.

Therefore, Hamerton-Kelly says of this text:

"I know who you are, the Holy One of God” (1:24). He misidentifies Jesus as the center of the scapegoating establishment, calling him by the priestly title “Holy One of God” (Aaron is called ho hagios kyriou in LXX Ps 105:16; V. Taylor, St Mark, pp174) and suggesting that he has nothing in common with the outcasts, but belongs with the teaching establishment of the synagogue. Jesus silences the demon not because he wishes to keep the messianic secret but because the demon has deliberately misidentified him as part of the sacrificial establishment, in a foreshadowing of the accusation that he casts out demons in the power of Beelzebub (3:20-30).²¹

The messianic secret may have another purpose. It may be saying to us, on our first reading of the gospel, "You cannot understand what it means to be Messiah until you have seen how the Messiah dies.  Only when you see how he dies, may you say with the centurion, 'Truly, this man was God's son,' and have some glimpse of what you are saying."

4. The synagogue: Jesus' home is Capernaum. ("ἐν οἴκῳ is a fixed idiom from classical times onward."²² Yet the synagogue is not his synagogue. It is their synagogue. (τῇ συναγωγῇ αὐτῶν) Jesus, his teaching, and his authority, are from outside. Indeed, "teaches with authority, not like the scribes," suggests something similar to Matthew 5:21 "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not .... " But I say to you that..." He does not merely repeat what had been said by others; his authority really is from outside.

His difference is highlighted by the fact that it is in their synagogue that evil and opposition first shows its face in Mark's Gospel. (We remember that Satan is previously mentioned, (1:12) but with no details at all.)  Mark is making clear to us that Jesus does not belong to this synagogue/gathering. It is relatively easy for us to see the scapegoat nature of the outcast man in Mark 5:1-20, for he beats himself with that symbol of scapegoating, the stones, and we see the Gadarenes wish Jesus to leave rather than heal them; they want to keep their scapegoats in place. But this man is the same: He is in the centre of the gathering which is the place where the violence is done to the scapegoat,— this is mimicked by his being in the centre of the pericope— and he is designated as having "an unclean spirit." The uncleanliness of the synagogue; that is, its separation from God, is all heaped upon him. It does not come from him.

To see this more clearly, it helps to hear Hamerton-Kelly say, "The forces that make him outcast are the ones that recognise Jesus as their nemesis."— have you come to destroy us? To understand this, we need to understand the source of "unclean spirits."

The forces Mark describes as demonic and as unclean spirits are real. They devastate people's lives and control them. They can result in emotions and behaviour which are terrifying for both the afflicted one, and the observer, who may also be a target.

There are two extremes which will not help us in facing the terror at the heart of our culture. One is a simplistic biomedical and or psychological approach, which takes the symptoms of a mental illness as a problem simply requiring medical treatment. The other ascribes a kind of independent "personhood" to unclean spirits so that they are imagined as some kind of incorporeal beings. The one view reacts against a perceived superstition about spirits and demons. The other reacts against a perceived failure to take seriously the power of that which ails us.

These extremes mean that what we think about the nature of “unclean spirits and demons” can become a kind of shibboleth about our faith on the one hand, or a measure of our intelligence (versus those holding the alternative view) on the other. Both groups holding such views then fail to become a source of healing.  If we hold to either extreme we remain comfortably in that space where the afflicted person remains a scapegoat; they become the problem. We fail to see that the forces which afflict them are forces with which are kept alive by us and by our culture; we do not see that our way of being generates the illness of others (and ourselves). The one with the unclean spirit is within our synagogue— our gathering— and we want them there because they absolve us from our own failings, and indeed, our own ill-health and failure to cope with life. This kind of illness is never solitary. It is always corporate. ²³

Someone once asked me if I thought perhaps their partner "had a demon." The short answer (which would have been pastorally unhelpful) is, "Of course! But so do you... and so do I." Hamerton-Kelly says

The fact that the demoniac appears in the midst of a teaching session in the synagogue shows that the demonic forces are at work within the normal channels and not, as the religious believe, outside them. Religion-as-usual is the place of the demonic, and Jesus is the enemy of both. (I have inserted the hyphens.)²⁴

In Mark's sitz im Leben or "setting in life," there is no real distinction between religion and "non-religion." Everything is religious, and still is in our own time. The mentally ill and anyone else designated "unclean" by society, remain at the centre of our social life. As Hamerton-Kelly says, "The polity lives by its scapegoats." ²⁵

Australia's habit of keeping our scapegoats offshore in concentration camps is not about sending them away.  True, their isolation makes it harder for those of conscience to support them, but it is not to make them forgotten or invisible.  Their isolated location is intended to put them the centre of our consciousness, so that we will feel our government is keeping us safe, and so that we will be less focussed upon other failings of the government.

4b. Their synagogue: Christianity has a long history of demonising Jewish people. The words their synagogue gives no warrant to antisemitism. If the gospel is preached in any church, then in their church there will be those who are en pneumati akathartō and provoked by the gospel. All human institutions are more or less compromised bythe spirit of empire.

5. We begin to see his power: Evil is driven out before him. He will immediately heal Simon's mother in law who "only" has a fever, not an unclean spirit. His power is about restoration of health and harmony in Creation; it is the restoration of what should be. There is no bio-medical vision of health here, but a view of inclusion and wholeness. Have you come to destroy us...The implied short answer is, Yes. But that which is destroyed by this new and different Messiah is not people, and it is not personal. The demonic is the anti-personal forces which grow from our human limitations. The Messiah comes to heal people of these limitations.

6. Sabbath breaking: In this pericope, Jesus is not criticised for breaking the Sabbath! People are too amazed at what has happened. It will not be until Mark 2:23-3:6 that Mark makes the issue of Sabbath breaking explicit. And we will refer back to this first event:

Do you notice how Chapter 3 begins?  Again he entered the synagogue... It's the same story continuing! Then, in Chapter 3, they are alert to the sin from this first healing! They will watch him then, to see whether he will also cure that man on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him... (3:2) They knew what to expect from the last time he was there! This Sabbath breaking was a major issue. It after the healing in chapter three that they begin to plot to kill him.

At the Movies imagines Mark as a movie to communicate the drama of the Gospel, which we tend to lose in the cultural gap between Mark and ourselves— not to mention in our familiarity with the text.

This Jesus was breaking all the conventions about what was right and fitting; they were shocked. But there was delight, because people saw the freedom the good news was bringing. Jesus was smashing through social convention, and breaking its chains, to set people free.... How will we read and re-present Mark to allow the same shock and delight in the healing of the man with the unclean spirit, and then, of Simon’s mother-in-law?  It is there in the original, and we always underplay it.

After the synagogue, the drama moves from the sacred house to the daily house in which we live.  Religion is not for the sacred place alone; it is for all of life.  From the drama of an unclean spirit, we move to the apparently very mundane issue of a fever.²⁶

In rereading this 2012 reflection on Mark 1:21-28, I wonder if I over emphasised people's delight at Jesus, and underestimated their shock. If we understand the "they" of this pericope as a crowd (see Point 7, below), then the subtleties surrounding amazement and astounded—Mark's words, and my words delight and shock, will become clear.

7. The Crowd: his fame began to spread… Fame is fickle, and ambivalent. Fame is endowed by the crowd of us. Soon we will see how his fame results in the presence of crowds which, in Mark, are always close to being a mob. The crowd in Mark will take on a variety of roles. Robert Hamerton-Kelly says in The Gospel and the Sacred

the crowd is the constant background of Jesus' action, even when not specifically mentioned... It is vaguely analogous to the chorus in a Greek drama... The crowd is not on [Jesus'] side; for the most part, it is on the side of the leaders, and only wavers from time to time in response to Jesus' teachings and miraculous power. Even in its waverings, it remains essentially on the side of the leaders, within the order of sacred violence... The crowd [is] the explosive but manipulable source of the authority of the powers... [and] behind every crowd stands the original lynch mob ready to hound the scapegoat to death...²⁷

The crowd is us. Across the Gospel of Mark, the crowd shows how humanity responds, and what humanity is like. Within the culture of empire, the crowd is the ultimate source of authority; Pilate (cf 15:15) and the Temple authorities who nominally hold the power of life and death, all bow to the crowd. The authorities are repeatedly said to fear the crowd. (eg: 12:12) Despite this, the crowd can "itself step out of the crowd" and gather around Jesus, for a time, as we will see in 3:31-35 and in the feeding miracles.

8. What is the emotion of the crowd? The problem which Jesus causes for the crowd is that the delight and hope which he brings to some people, is empowered by and founded in a particular understanding of reality. His living in that reality inevitably says the crowd itself is ill-founded. In this pericope, it is notable that Mark does not say that the crowd rejoices or is delighted. They are astounded and amazed, which we should recognise as emotions which can result in very negative responses. If the crowd were to embrace Jesus with joy and follow him, it would have to recognise this: Because it is founded in violence, the crowd is itself the cause of the illness that he is healing. It can only be healed "by faith" (cf Mark 5:34) which means to step out of itself, and repent. This is why the crowd is on the side of the leaders in the end, and why they together crucify Jesus. The crowd is not being led by the leaders of society; the leaders of society are assisting the self-preservation of the crowd (and of themselves, and of their privilege, of course.)  The Gadarenes (5:17) are the early forerunner of the crowds who drive Jesus out to Golgotha. They are simply quicker to intuit what Jesus is offering, and how he is threatening their society.

9. The crowd knows even though it does not know. Crowds can very quickly flip into panicked violence and rage. But they— we— are not without intelligence. In its casting about for a scapegoat to blame for a hard lockdown due to a Covid-19 outbreak, my home state is at this moment (2020) settling upon a hapless soul who lied to contact tracers. No one is blaming the virus. No one is remembering the times that they didn't wear a mask, broke isolation orders, or had friends around for a pool party during a hard lockdown, or told their own lies to contact tracers, or voted for the successive governments that have privileged themselves and led to medi-hotel guards not having a living wage and carrying the virus from job to job. All this is common knowledge, yet on social media, when people are reminded of these known facts, they wiggle around them with wilful blindness because it is too hard to accept that we too "are doing the very same things" (Romans 2:1) which enable the spread of the virus. We know, and yet we don't know, and can't. It is too hard, and too threatening, to allow ourselves to see the bigger picture of empire, and how the culture of empire controls us. Or, as the colloquialism says: to recognise how empire owns us.

All this suggests to me that we should read the amazement of the crowds much more as consternation rather than a positive reception to Jesus. And where we do see the large crowd was listening to him with delight (Mark 12:37), we should see that their delight is the (very Australian!) resentment of the crowd towards those who have climbed to the top; it is a delight at their chastening, much more than it is a delight in the gospel of Jesus.

Finally, this crowd scene is reprised in Mark 6:1-6, with the same amazement at Jesus (ἐξεπλήσσοντο). 6:1-2 are mean us to recall our present passage, but we will see that things have also begun to change by then.

 

1:29-31 Simon's Mother-in-law
²⁹ As soon as (καὶ εὐθὺς) they [Other ancient authorities read he] left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. ³⁰Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. ³¹He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. (καὶ προσελθὼν ἤγειρεν αὐτὴν κρατήσας τῆς χειρός) (cf 5:41, 8:23)· Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. (καὶ ἀφῆκεν αὐτὴν ὁ πυρετός, καὶ διηκόνει αὐτοῖς.)

1. His credentials are now established: He has followers. In the synagogue he has laid out his agenda, the driving out of evil. His fame has spread. In this man's world, what he does next is important, for what he does as God's beloved Son (cf 1:11) tells us of the nature of God. He goes and heals someone's mother-in-law. He takes her by the hand and lifts her up. Not some important man, not even the daughter of an important man, (cf 5:21-24) but an unnamed mother in law. This is God's style and desire for the Completed Creation that is called the Promised Land. Marcus makes the interesting comment that the kai euthys accentuates Jesus' authority. "He does not remain at the synagogue to savour the applause of the crowd, but straightaway moves on to the next place to which God has called him."²⁸ This movement will continue in verse 38. Jesus is in no way beholden to the crowd.

That Peter's mother-in-law is living with him is unusual and may mean she is a widow without sons. Serving those in the house after being healed indicates that the mother-in-law's place in the family has been restored.²⁹

2. The place of women in the culture of God: We need to take some care with what follows. Much has been made of the position of women in Jesus' time. Amy-Jill Levine suggests that there is an element of unconscious anti-Semitism in such commentary, which has overstated the low state of women in Jewish society. Her book, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, is worth reading.

Ben Witherington says³⁰

Though there are later stories of rabbis taking the hand of another man and healing him, there are no such stories of rabbis doing so for a woman, and especially not for a woman who was not a member of the healer's family (b.Ber. 5b). In addition, there is the fact that Jesus performed this act on the Sabbath. Thus, while touching a nonrelated woman was in itself an offense, and touching one that was sick and therefore unclean was doubly so, performing this act on the Sabbath only compounds the social offense. But this is not all. The service of Peter's mother-in-law to Jesus (and the others) itself could have constituted work on the Sabbath, depending on what was done (.e.g., preparing food). In any case, later Jewish traditions suggest that women should not serve meals to male strangers. The important point about Jesus, however, is that he does not see the touch of a woman, even a sick woman, as any more defiling than the touch of the man with the skin disease.

With respect to Amy-Jill Levine's comments, it is important to see that Jesus is not transcending Jewishness in this text. He is transcending misogyny and male violence. Witherington can only write what he has written; that is, it only has relevance, because he is describing in codified form the exclusionary violence of our own society. If we make Jesus an exemplary Jew, we are simply shifting the exclusion of women onto Jewish and other minority groups in the west.  In Australia today, the major outworking of violence is not found in, for example, alleged Islamic gender hierarchy, but in the killing of women by men on a weekly basis, very often in anglo settings.

Nothing in the text suggests that anything Jesus or Peter's Mother-in-law does, is unusual.  This contrasts with the astonishment and amazement at his teaching and actions moments before in the synagogue, which suggests to me that Levine's cautions are well based.

Of course Jesus heals a woman! Women are human too, fully human, and for that reason alone, the story is important. But the key point to the story is that Godheals us, and that Jesus has the authority of God. Her being a woman is almost incidental, and much less is she there to show us what a good feminist Jesus was compared to Jewish people. (cf the leper in 1:40-45)

2b. The Deacon? Loader³¹ says

Let us not romanticise Mark. He is a man of his time as are those who passed on to him the story. The woman remains unnamed. She is healed to do what women stereotypically did: look after the men. It is spinning a yarn to make too much out of the word, ‘serve’, here, as if she is the first deacon. We can espouse such values without fiddling the text. On the other hand, note that Mark tells us in 15:40-41 that many women from Galilee followed Jesus and they were there at the end when the men fled. (My emphasis)

Loader is correct, and we should add that the women at the end of the gospel are also described by the word diakonein: (hai hote ēn en tē Galilaia ēkolouthoun autō kai diēkonoun auto... Mark 15:41a). Neither Mark nor Jesus are fully formed C21 feminists, although sometimes they are preached as such.  But it is very easy to overstate Loader's caveat:

Our culture is conditioned to think it means she made tea, or similar. The word "serve" has its roots in the word for ministry. She ministered to them. This is seen as a statement that supports the ministry of women. Again, we may feel the argument is forced [Loader's point]. This betrays not so much our misogyny, as our poor understanding of ministry. Ministry is so often seen as a privilege from which women are disbarred. But ministry, privilege that it is, means to serve. The one who serves the others is at the bottom of the table, eating last. The minister (or priest) is our servant (whom we often abuse.) The fact that she served them, is indeed an act of ministry, and an endorsement of the ministry of women. (Peter's Mother in Law) (cf 10:41-45)³²

How much do we who are clergy see that the person making the tea on Sunday morning is ministering (serving) just as much as we are? And how much less would we who tend the tea urn gossip, if we really understood that we are ministering to the wholeness, and the completing-creation, of those who drink tea; that is, ministering to the same end and purpose as was the sermon?

3. Healing: Our culture tends to think about healing in bio-medical terms, and sometimes almost bio-mechanical terms. We consider the person whose bones are mended as "healed," too often forgetting the trauma they may still carry, or the stigma of having had a particular disease, for example.

Malina & Rohrbaugh’s  Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels³³ says

In the contemporary world we view disease as a malfunction of the organism which can be remedied, assuming cause and cure are known, by proper biomedical treatment. We focus on restoring a sick person's ability to function, to do. Yet often overlooked is the fact that health and sickness are always culturally defined and that in the ancient Mediterranean, one's state of being was more important than one's ability to act or function. The healers in that ancient world thus focused on restoring a person to a valued state of being rather than an ability to function.

Anthropologists carefully distinguish between disease -- a biomedical malfunction afflicting an organism -- and illness -- a disvalued state of being in which social networks have been disrupted and meaning lost. Illness is not so much a biomedical matter as it is a social one. It is attributed to social, not physical, causes. Thus sin and sickness go together. Illness is a matter of deviance from cultural norms and values.

Perhaps we unconsciously preserve some of this when we say people who are not helped by our “biomedical treatments,” are invalid. It is still the case that we sometimes expel mentally ill people from the wider society and lock them in "asylums" which are not places of safety or healing but places that keep them away from us "normal" and "healthy" folk.

This also applies to people suffering in ways we don’t categorise as mental illness. There is a profound sense of disruption caused by cancer; such a person is an affront to prosperity gospel.  They embarrass us. How do we relate to them, or to the recently bereaved? The illness is ours, as well as theirs!

Stoffregen³⁴ notes that Jesus restores Peter's mother in law to her proper position in domestic society, and this concisely states the first level of Jesus' healing ministry:  Restoration to our proper place in society. But there is more. For what Jesus often does is free people from society, because the second level of Jesus' healing ministry is that as Son of God, he comes to heal society itself. Healing which never questions slavery, misogyny, homophobia, or economic exclusion is always only a partial healing.

4. Resurrection: The Gospel of Mark famously ends without a resurrection appearance by Jesus. (There are some additions to the text, universally agreed to be later, which seek to "correct" this.) We could read Mark as an invitation to look for resurrection, to add our own ending, as I once heard Dr Michael Trainor say. We could even read Matthew and Luke as responses in this vein. I have written elsewhere:

People are always dissatisfied with this ending to the Gospel. They want to see Jesus.

Other people did as Mark invited them. The pored over the book. They read it and re-read it. They tried to copy what Jesus did.  When they faced an issue, a problem, they asked, “What would Jesus do if he were 42 and had two grumpy teenagers, and his husband was away on business? How would he handle it?”

They found a pattern in the stories in the gospel of Mark, and then, they found the same pattern in their own lives. We can do the same; you probably are!

The pattern starts in today’s reading!

Simon’s mother in law is sick in bed, when she needs to be up and welcoming guests. It says, “He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her...”

Now let’s see more of the pattern in Mark Chapter 5... where the little girl is desperately ill; at the point of death, and Jesus is hurrying to get there in time.

.. [At the house]... he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. ⁴¹He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum’, which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ ⁴²And immediately the girl got up...

Finally, Mark Chapter 9.

²⁶After crying out and convulsing him terribly, [the spirit] came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, ‘He is dead.’ But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he was able to stand.

Do you hear the pattern? Resurrection, for us, is happening in the gospel, not at the end. Resurrection is for everyday life. Jesus comes and takes us by the hand and lifts us up! If we follow Jesus; if we ask what he would do if he were 83 and had arthritis and bad knees, he takes us by the hand and lifts us up.... and we are able to stand.³⁵

5. The house: It is possible that the house is meant to contrast the synagogue, and reflects the early Christian practice of house churches.

6. Rereading the gospel: A ritual reinforces the status quo. It is an action, or an enactment, which lays out again or acts out again the way society is and should be. In western society we have a form of literature which is highly ritualistic: This is the detective novel. It does not take many readings to notice this, although we more commonly describe it as formulaic: There is a sense in which if we have read one Agatha Christie novel, we have read them all. We read a book in a series and then move on to the next one. Each novel reinforces the cycle of violence which exists at the heart of our society; it normalises violence. Not for nothing does Ecclesiastes say there is nothing new under the sun. (cf Eccles 1:9)

Girard says

The rite does not provide any real solution, it merely recopies the solution that occurred spontaneously. There is therefore no structural difference between the rite itself and the spontaneous, natural course of the mimetic crisis. Instead of curbing or interrupting the mimetic play of desires, ritual activity fosters and channels it in the direction of designated victims. ³⁶

Of course, there is a solution of sorts provided by the ritual: it pretends to absolve us. We are not the problem; those others ("the designated victims,") are the problem.

Mark rewards re-reading. In the re-reading of Mark we will discover new insights about the rituals of violence; Mark confronts the rituals of society. It is designed to be re-read. In the rereading we learn to celebrate rather than ritualise. Celebration still involves repetition— the Eucharist is an example— but celebration highlights a new way of being which discovers resurrection, being lifted up, and highlights new signs of the Kingdom of God at hand.

In rereading, we discover the depths of the literature; what one might call its poetry. Some of this is surely deliberate on Mark's part, and some of it will be an unconscious reflection of the new reality of the kingdom at hand, as the text and our own mind feel their way around each other. At this point in Mark, still in the first chapter, we are seeing a deep place which will remain unseen by one who moves on to the next book after a single reading.

In Chapter 11 Jesus enters the temple and finds it to be "unclean." That is, it is a part of the violent, excluding, and murdering, sacred. That theme is developed through out Chapter 12 where the woman who gives holon ton bion; that is all the life of her (12:44), and who has been devoured by the temple system (12:40), will now surely starve. She is a foreshadowing of Jesus' own death as he gives "all the life of him." Yes, the resurrected Jesus is not seen in Mark, for Mark instead directs his disciples back to Galilee to meet the risen Christ.

And here, at the beginning of the Gospel, the ending of the gospel is foreshadowed.  There is an unclean spirit in the synagogue which seeks to pull Jesus into the rituals of sacred violence. Jesus leaves the building, and its rituals— that way of being is over. And immediately, as Mark says, there is resurrection as he lifts up Peter's mother-in-law by the hand.

Matthew takes the centrality of Peter in the story of Mark, which no doubt reflects his leadership within the early church, and makes him the rock on which the church is built (cf Matthew) This is present in nascent form in Mark. The first resurrection in the Gospel is of a member of Peter's family. It is the church who are being raised up. (cf 3:31-35)

 

1:32-33 At the door in the evening
³² That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. ³³And the whole city was gathered around the door. ³⁴And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out (ἐξέβαλεν) many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

1. Sunset: To come at sunset means to wait until the end of Sabbath to come to Jesus for healing. In their suffering people still seek to live faithfully. Or perhaps there is a hint of this:

Those who are outside the constriction of the synagogue (it contains an unclean spirit) flock to him at the end of Sabbath. ³⁷

How many of our congregations are constricted by an unclean spirit; that is, by a way of being community which is fundamentally unhealthy because it reflects too much of the world and not enough of the Christ? Anyone who has travelled knows that whilst every congregation has faults and warts, congregations also have a discernible spirit.

2. The whole city was gathered around the door… The mob/crowd is beginning to form. The demons, the manifestation of the ills of the crowd, and the scapegoating violence of our society, are present. Even those who come in need, even the ones who have been driven out of the synagogue or, wisely stayed away (see Point 1 above), bring their own demons.

 

1:35-39 35 In the morning
³⁵ In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, (εἰς ἔρημον τόπον) and there he prayed. ³⁶And Simon and his companions hunted for him. ³⁷When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ ³⁸He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ ³⁹And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

1. Prayer: We are confused about prayer, and what it is. If there is one thing that is missing in our appreciation of this multifaceted placing ourselves attentively before God, it is isolation, or going to a "deserted place." Absent the ever-present distracting screens of our society we then have some prospect of hearing what God is saying to us. Our society is terribly polluted by noise; headphones, the TV in the next room, the roar of the highway. Simply being in a park where the city traffic is a little more distant, or where the noise is running water and birds, and without headphones, is to put ourselves in a precious place before God. And perhaps, without the purposeful distractions of our era and culture, to begin to face our own demons.

2. Going out:

In Mark... the phrase [going out] describes the whole event of his leaving the sacral structures, narrated as his going out to John for baptism, out into the wilderness to be tempted, and coming again into Galilee to preach the advent of the kingdom. The coming out is for the purpose of preaching the gospel, and the link between the two activities is so close that the one is equivalent to the other. To preach the gospel is to come out of the sacral structures and vice versa. From now on, we are to read every reference to leaving and entering as symbolizing the movement in and out of sacred space. ³⁸

In other words, Jesus is not part of the Empire or its derivative structures.  Everything is empire unless we come out with Jesus… unless we are in the boat with him. Everyone is looking for him, but he refuses to be a part of the crowd/celebrity/potential victim matrix, and goes his own way to do "what I came to do."

 

1:40-45 The Crowd arrives
⁴⁰ A leper (λεπρὸς) [The terms leper and leprosy can refer to several diseases] came to him begging him, and kneeling [Other ancient authorities lack kneeling] he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ ⁴¹Moved with pity  Angered (καὶ ὀργισθεὶς, contra σπλαγχνισθεὶς), [Other ancient authorities read anger] Jesus [Gk He] stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ ⁴²Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. ⁴³After sternly warning him (ἐμβριμησάμενος growling at him) he sent (ἐξέβαλεν) him away at once, ⁴⁴saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ ⁴⁵But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus [Gk he] could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country desert places (ἀλλὰ ἔξω ἐπ’ ἐρήμοις τόποις ἦν ); and people came to him from every quarter.

1. Reading leprosy and purity: The word lepra is the translation the Septuagint makes of the Hebrew word sara'at which describes a range of skin (scale) diseases. We bring the word into English as leper and leprosy, which is a little misleading because in our world leprosy is one specific disease, Hansen's Disease. ³⁹

How do we read this story?  We have a long antisemitic prejudice within Christianity. It often influences our biblical interpretation so that Jesus becomes an exemplary Jew, enlightened beyond his peers, hostile towards the Law.⁴⁰ Cecilia Wassen says

Mark does not lead his audience to interpret the story as an example of how Jesus challenged Jewish laws.... Instead, the story is a testimony of Jesus’ healing power. … It is also evident that this record shows Jesus respecting and encouraging observance of the laws concerning the purifications which include examination by a priest and the offering of a sacrifice…. It is evident that Jesus physically touched sick people in the course of his healing activities, even when they were impure. But there is no example in any of the healing stories that Jesus’ touching them is noted as anything strange, or that he in any way would have challenged contemporary norms concerning ritual purity regulations... The reason why no Gospel author notes that Jesus acted strangely when he touched the impure, was probably because they did not see anything odd in his behaviour concerning purity. Furthermore, as Sanders and others emphasize, it was no sin to become impure. Impurity was a common part of life. ⁴¹

Amy-Jill Levine says,

Jesus does not do away with Torah, there's nothing illegal or even improper happening... What Jesus does is not do away with purity laws; what he does is restore people to states of ritual purity which is what cleansing a person of leprosy is.  Or, raising a corpse… you're taking someone from impure states to pure states.⁴²

We want, even need, a Jesus who stands outside his Jewish culture because we still face today exclusion due to misogyny and due to purity concerns.  "Jewish purity" is simply one example of the cultural norms and taboos and exclusions which every culture has, and needs to function.  All cultures fear leprosy, and in all cultures, there are people who will avoid the leper, and heap animosity and even physical violence, upon lepers and others who are sick. And in each culture there are other people who will be compassionate. To make Jesus an exemplary Jew in such healing stories is to talk about all the nastiness of human exclusion and scapegoating as though it was a Jewish⁴³ problem, which neatly absolves us of our abuse of the social lepers of our time, and in our congregations.

One way to read this pericope is to "change the names and dates," so that a smelly street person comes up to us, maybe walks into church morning tea, and seeks compassion. How have we reacted when that happened, compared to what Jesus does in this story? We could wonder if what Jesus did, in the end, with his sending of the man to the priest, is what we could do by inviting the street person to join us at morning tea, and to become part of the congregation.

How do we reconcile all this with the Jesus who steps away from the Temple and Jerusalem, and goes out into the wilderness? Who seems in some ways so at odds with his religion, and yet is quite conservative in others, drawing people back into the religious community?

To be clear, leaving Mark for a moment, it seems Jesus did not come to abolish the Law. In fact, he intensifies it. We see this intensification in the famous saying, "Not one jot or tittle will pass away from the Law" (Matthew 5:17-18), and the "You have heard it said… but I say to you" sayings of Matthew 5.

Jewishness was not some monolithic undifferentiated religion. There were clearly tensions between those who were diligent to "tithe dill and cumin"⁴⁴   and wedded to "ritual without reality," ⁴⁵ on the one hand, and those who were much more aligned with the sensibilities of the prophets: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." Matthew twice⁴⁶ quotes that verse from Hosea 6:6, and we see the same sensibility informing Mark 7:1-23.

Jesus was in the same place as each of us.  He was part of a culture and religion—a faith—which he knew to speak of the reality of God. And I suspect that like us, however he would have described it, he knew that temple and synagogue (and church) inevitably and rapidly become more than the sum of their parts.  In a fallen world of people who, although loved by God, are still being formed, the ecclesia of God's people inevitably fails to be what it could be.  Like us, Jesus must walk a difficult path: He cannot be "owned" and controlled by the failures of the institution, joining in with the ritualised and accepted community exclusions. That is why Mark speaks of "their synagogues." (eg: 1:23,39)   But neither can Jesus react in such a way that he sets up his own system of exclusions. He cannot be a purveyor of a "cancel culture," to use our modern phraseology. Cancel culture is simply the other side of the same old scapegoating coin. I use the cliché the two sides of the same coin deliberately: There is a very narrow way out to freedom from between the two sides, and it's this path I wish to discover.

2. Town and country? The Greek does not seem to me to be talking about town vs country, contra NRSV verse 45. What NRSV calls country is ἐρήμοις τόποις; that is, desert places. Jesus is staying safe from the fame that will bring him into conflict with the authorities. And, as we have seen he is already living outside the parameters of the culture by living in the wilderness.

NRSV Mark 1:28 uses the word fame to translate ἀκοὴ αὐτοῦ, lit. the hearing of him. Jesus seems to have understood that fame is a part of the redemptive violence scapegoating matrix. ⁴⁷ Jesusdidn't need Girard to suggest to him that kingship probably evolved as a cultural control for violence,⁴⁸ any more than we need Girard to notice that when things go bad, the country becomes hostile to the Prime Minister and seeks their downfall. However, perhaps what Jesus understood more than most of us is that fame and celebrity mark a person out in the crowd. The crowd flocks to the famous person, and the crowd often turns on them. In a very real sense, the crowd "owns" those whom it has made famous. In our current text, Jesus is treading the narrow path by staying out in the wilderness, which is to say, out of the crowd.

In the next section, I will say that the authorities are attempting to "ride the crowd." In many respects, there is little difference between an elected politician, an electoral candidate, the Kardashians, or a "wannabe influencer." All of them are seeking the attention of the crowd, knowing more or less consciously, that having that, they may harness forces which will propel them to the top, or to the front of our attentions, but also knowing, if they are wise, that they are "riding the tiger." Fall off, and the tiger/crowd may consume you.

3. Anger or compassion? ⁴⁹ In Mark 1:41, some Greek texts contain the word orgistheis (ὀργισθεὶς.) It means to be moved with anger. Other texts have splagchnistheis (σπλαγχνισθεὶς) which is more to be moved with compassion.

So in this story, Jesus may have been moved with anger, but it could also be that he was moved with compassion! We see this exegetical choice made across a range of English translations:

… moved with pity, Jesus… (NRSV)
 Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand… (NIV) (Note how NIV is softening the anger.)
Moved with pity, he stretched (ESV)
And being angry, stretching out his hand… (Mark Davis)⁵⁰

As with my few examples, the pity-compassion reading is by far the most popular English translation.

Adding to the difficulty in translation, is the nearby word embrimēsamenos (ἐμβριμησάμενος) in 1:43.

NIV translates it as "strong warning"; NRSV says "sternly warning him"; KJV said "sternly warning him." Marcus⁵¹ says "growling at him," and Davis⁵² says in one possible translation: "snorting with indignation."

A general rule of biblical translation is that, other things being equal, if there is a variant among the Greek texts, the more difficult reading is to be preferred. The logic here is that easier readings may reflect later editing which seeks to avoid, or soften, a difficult text. (We can perhaps see an example of this within the NIV translation, which accepts orgistheis, but then softens it to indignant.)

Is Jesus moved with pity, or is he angry?  There is no settled answer to this question. In one sense, it does not matter: Jesus heals.  But taking the difficult reading of the angry Jesus allows us to see the choices he was beginning to make:

Mark's first showing of Jesus is as a disrupter: (cf the unclean spirit in the synagogue, and the people who recognise his different authority but can only ask, “What is this?”)

Mark also shows us Jesus was centred in God, coming from, and returning to, the wilderness.

Jesus as healer raised the woman by the hand, and now stretches out his hand to touch the leper. He crosses boundaries which restrain many of us. And, in contradiction to the usual psychology of uncleanliness, healing flows from him whereas most cultures expect and assume that the impurity would flow from the leper, and they organise themselves on that assumption.⁵³ We still think impurity contaminates rather than that purity cleanses; witness draining 38 million gallons⁵⁴ when someone pees in a reservoir!  So, for Jesus to send the leper to the priest "as a testimony to them," (1:46) is a direct confrontation.

In a sense, the leper cornered Jesus; this is a truth seen by those who read not "if you choose you can make me clean," but sense something of "if you dare⁵⁵ ..." in the leper's request.

Constantly, I am reminded of Bill Loader's⁵⁶ word that "the life of grace must dodge between the powers." I take it that the life of grace not only receives from God, but also gives of God to others, and that eventually, this giving will bring the life of grace to the notice of the powers. If I do not ever come to the notice of the powers, it raises the question of whether I have been dodging anything; indeed, I might wonder if I have merely been acquiescing in a pious kind of way, living out the blancmange discipleship of an equally bland Jesus.

Jesus has been seeking to fly below the radar; the demons have been silenced. The leper will be instructed to be silent, but it will be too late. Even if the leper were silent, to heal means to touch, to let the love of God flow, and... to heal means also for Jesus to be interpreted as the unclean one^* as he destabilises all the boundaries people have drawn to remain safe. Such a one cannot be tolerated. ^*(Because our faulty cultural assumption is that impurity contaminates.)

So, the leper pulls Jesus into the limelight in a new way. I think Jesus was unconcerned with his own perceived uncleanness. Instead, he knows that to touch this man is to come to the notice of those in authority, who can harm him. And I suspect he sensed that celebrity itself brings us to the attention of forces which are even greater than the authorities of our culture.

But, after a week in eremos, he chooses anyway to take the costly route, and goes to Synagogue anyway where, in chapter 2 he will be on full display. And the authorities, those who are attempting to ride the crowd, will be waiting: In the first pericope of chapter two, the scribes are there, (2:6) and the whole chapter shifts from wonderment and confusion among the ordinary people, to hostility and suspicion from the authorities. By Chapter 3 his rejection by those in power will be complete: "The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him." (3:6) And still Jesus chooses to go on. Will I practice following him? ⁵⁷

We have discovered here another key theme in Mark, which is the theme of choice. Jesus chooses to go to his death. We will find throughout Mark that he challenges us to choose to follow him, which is always to risk our own death. We are called to actively change our way of being human, which is to repent.

3b. Anger: As well as Jesus being angry, it is also notable that when Jesus "sent him away (ἐξέβαλεν ) at once," the Greek word exebalen is related to the word used in Mark 3:22 for casting out demons. Mark is using language with exorcistic overtones. The use of the word heightens the sense of Jesus' anger. It could be (1.) that he is angry that a person should be ill with such a cruel disease. But (2.) his insight into the nature of culture means he is as likely angry at what culture does to such a person.

The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be dishevelled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp. (Leviticus 13:45-46)

Remember, again, what we have said about scapegoating Jewish people here. All cultures do this one way or another, and contrary to the unending exclusion of some folk in our culture, we might note the text of Numbers 12, where Mirian is white as snow with a leprous disease.

¹⁵So Miriam was shut out of the camp for seven days; and the people did not set out on the march until Miriam had been brought in again.

We, too often, think we can move on without the afflicted, as though leaving them behind will heal us.

(3.) We deny Jesus' humanity if we ignore his possible anger at being, as it were, "outed" (See Note 3, above) and should note that he chooses to make the man clean in any case.

(4.) Hamerton-Kelly notes that the man does not ask to be healed! He asks to be made clean.⁵⁸ Which is to say, he asks not for the freedom of the culture of God, but to be made able to be readmitted to the cultus of his people which is, in Mark, an expression of empire. To be "made clean" is the language of the purity cult. It has nothing to do with hygiene but is a measure of one's rightness before God. We know it is also a part of the culture of empire and part of the scapegoat system because those who were designated as unclean were expelled from society to varying extents, and perhaps none more so than those who were labelled as a lepros.

On this reading, the man is asking Jesus for the wrong thing, hence Jesus' anger. Jesus' compassion, despite his anger, is clear because despite the man's ill directed desire, Jesus heals him. We should note, however, that although Jesus says be made clean, the man is immediately (kai euthys) cleansed by God, and without and before, the judgement of the priests. The priests can only ratify what God has done. (Marcus says, Be made clean is "probably a 'divine passive,' a reverent Jewish circumlocution used to suggest God's action without mentioning [God] directly, and it thus implies that God is the active agent in the cure." ⁵⁹

But why send the man away in such an exorcistic fashion that comes close to a driving out? Perhaps the one who wishes only to be made clean and acceptable to society, rather than to be healed, cannot yet follow Jesus. But, against that, we see that not only does the man ignore Jesus' call to silence, he also does not go to the priests. Instead, he is a prototype of the early church "proclaiming and spreading the word." The priests are entirely absent from the good news.

Finally, what is behind that man's statement, "If you choose...?" Is it merely respectful piety, or something else? Ean thelēs (Ἐὰν θέλῃς) is, at root, if you wish. If you wish... if you... care.  Are you better than the gods of Babylon for whom we were convenience or nuisance, depending on their mood? Oh, yes... you are the one who created the earth, who rules the chaos, who pronounces the Creation good, yet I still have leprosy.  Do you care? Or are you the God who put Job through hell, and let his family be murdered, for the sake of a bet, and when he stood up to you, spent chapters belittling him, crushing him into submission. And don't go all scholarly on me, and say the beginning and ending of Job were later additions. It's the whole book we have revered as scripture. Do you care, are you better than the God in Job?

We pass too quickly over the issue of human suffering.⁶⁰ The man with leprosy asked the question all of us should ask: God, couldn't you do better than this? Is the suffering of the innocents ever justified by your mooted kingdom?

If Jesus were truly compassionate, he would care about this. He would choose. And he would be angry: At God, at life's inhumanity, even at the hint in the man's question that perhaps he, Jesus, is like the lofty and remote God whom it so often seems does not care.  To be other than angry would be to make light of human suffering, failing to see its horror and depths. It would be, in my case, to ignore the fact that the three people I know who have so suffered terribly that I wonder how they can be still alive, were abused in the church of God. Who are you, Jesus?

4. The Crowd: The word is now out about Jesus; he can no longer go into a town openly. And the crowd is now fully visible in the narrative. Hamerton-Kelly makes this extraordinary statement: "The behaviour of the cleansed leper arouses the inquisitiveness and the acquisitiveness of the mob."⁶¹ The crowd/mob may be disinterested in a person. But it is never "only interested". Once the crowd becomes aware of an individual person, it seeks to own them. The crowd cannot co-exist with a differentiated person, it must control them. Once a person is not "lost in the crowd," or undifferentiated from the crowd, they enter the place of either victim or servant of the crowd, and such servants are always liable to become victims. The person the crowd has noticed submits to the will of the crowd, or is driven from the town into the wilderness. Hamerton-Kelly says, "It does not matter if one is execrated or celebrated, the attention of the mob and the sacrificial system make it impossible for the victim to exist within the system."⁶² Unless, of course, they submit to it.

We see today that celebrities are owned by the crowd of us, which very often turns upon them. The celebrity fall from grace is the scapegoat mechanism at work. We vent our rage upon our idols when they disappoint us and no longer provide us with a way to avoid our own shame. Celebrities are already victims, because they are being used by the crowd to avoid its own pain and vacuity, and may be further sacrificed.

When we read Mark as the story of the Messiah who is a victim, we see that Jesus comes and goes as he pleases. He is not driven out of the towns, he chooses not to remain there, and returns to the wilderness. He chooses when to return. But, for the culture and its crowds, he is always the victim, even in his moments of fame and goodwill from the crowd. Eventually the crowd will demand that he be expelled utterly; that is, crucified as the scapegoat, and then we will see that empire is ultimately powerless, because even death cannot expel him from life.

 

2:1-12 Going into a town
2:1 When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home (ἐν οἴκῳ). ²So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them. ³Then some people [Gk they] came, bringing to him a paralysed man, carried by four of them. ⁴And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic (man) lay. ⁵When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic (man), ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’ ⁶Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning (διαλογιζόμενοι) in their hearts, ⁷‘Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ ⁸At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing (διαλογίζονται) these questions among themselves; and he said to them, ‘Why do you raise such questions (διαλογίζεσθε) in your hearts? ⁹Which is easier, to say to a (paralysed person) paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven”, or to say, “Stand up and take your mat and walk”? ¹⁰But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—he said to the paralytic (man)— ¹¹‘I say to you, stand up (ἔγειρε), take your mat and go to your home.’ ¹²And he stood up (ἠγέρθη), and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them; so that they were all amazed (ἐξίστασθαι) and glorified God, saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this!’

Note: The word for paralytic is παραλυτικὸν , and the same word is used in verses 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10. Only in the first case does NRSV translate the text as "a paralysed man." In the other four cases he is reduced to his disease; he is the paralytic. Surely part of Jesus' healing is that someone can say, "I am not a cripple, I am a person. I am more than my disease." (I note that KJV used the (one) sick of the palsy in each case.)

1. Mark chooses to highlight Capernaum again. (cf 1:21-28 In the Synagogue Point 1, above.) The name means: the village of Nahum. The town had no connection to the Old Testament prophet Nahum, but that prophet's message fits with Mark's gospel.

Nahum was a prophet at the time of another imperial, aggressor power which was subjugating the people of Palestine. At a time when all seemed hopeless, at a time when there didn’t seem to be an end to the imperial oppression of Assyria, Nahum’s message was to tell the people of Judah that Yahweh had not forgotten them in their distress and that Yahweh longed to comfort them... ⁶³

2. The Crowd: As at the sea (3:7) so many are gathered that there is not room. The crowds are growing. The house is so crowded that people could not even see through the doorway from outside.⁶⁴ The obvious observation that the crowd is getting in the way of the sick man has particular significance in Mark. In Mark, stepping out of the crowd and coming to Jesus is a sign of faith, and is necessary for following him, which means to model ourselves upon him, so that we begin to be healed, and begin to live in the new culture he calls the kingdom of God.

3. When Jesus saw their faith: Eight times in Mark, Jesus will see faith or note that it is missing. (Including once in the later endings.) Much is made of "having faith" in our churches, often without consideration of what this means. Our culture tends to see faith as intellectual assent to a claim (often in the face of evidence that questions the truth of the claim being made,) whereas Jesus' culture seems much more to see faith as an active trust; that is, faith is trust which is acted upon. Our great sin is to guilt people; if the man had not been able to walk, some of us would say, "He did not have enough faith."

4. Dialogízomenoi: This word occurs three times in the pericope. It has the "connotation of calculation and is almost always used in a negative sense in the NT." ⁶⁵ Marcus directs us to its use in the hostility of the leaders in 11:31 (They argued with one another...) and to its use by the disciples in 8:16-17 where they do not understand about bread, and in 9:33 where Jesus asks them what they had been discussing, which was who of them was the greatest. In the current text, the scribes' negative calculating dialogue is in their hearts, which means that at the very heart of their being they are failing to see or understand what is being done by Jesus. (But see the commentary of Point 6 below regarding what they fail to see.)

5. Perceived in his spirit: To perceive something in one's heart or in one's spirit is essentially the same thing. (cf the parallelism, or hendiadys, of Psalm 77:6) In each case, the seat of emotions and being is arriving at an understanding. But the heart was sometimes seen as liable to corruption, (Marcus points us to Genesis 6:5, 8:22, and Jeremiah 17:9) whereas the spirit "because of its association with the breath of God... usually has a more positive nuance."⁶⁶ So Mark's use of "in his spirit" subtly distinguishes Jesus from the scribes who calculated "in their hearts," and uses this to show Jesus' deep insight into human reactions while emphasising the blindness of the scribes.

6. Authority to forgive sins: The scribes are correct about the tradition: God is the one who forgives. There is a Qumran fragment which may imply that in Jesus' time "some Palestinian Jews thought that a human being on earth could remit sins for God," ⁶⁷ but generally a priest was seen to intercede with God on behalf of a person. In this case, when Jesus says your sins are forgiven he seems to be speaking in the divine passive, which indicates this intercession or brokering. Until this moment, and including when he says the sins of the man are forgiven, Jesus has acted exactly as Malina and Rohrbaugh suggest:

Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus say, "I forgive you." Instead, as in 2:5, Mark is careful to show that God does the forgiving and that Jesus is acting as a broker on behalf of the forgiving Patron. Patrons were often absent and designated brokers to distribute favors on their behalf. What is being questioned in the challenge to Jesus, then, and what he demonstrates in his careful response, is his authorization to act as God's designated broker. ⁶⁸

If Jesus is a designated broker of God's forgiveness, then the monopoly of the current brokers is under threat. No wonder they were jealous, as Pilate perceived in Mark 15:10. They understand exactly that "if the sacrificial monopoly on forgiveness is lost, then so is the institutional power of guilt." ⁶⁹ Sit through any "hellfire and brimstone" sermon, and it is clear that it is guilt and fear of the consequences of guilt which first of all move people, not the offer of freedom.

However, Jesus is not competing in the same system as the religious authorities. He is coming into the town from outside; he is not a part of the system, but is already living and being in the wilderness. Indeed, although the scribes may perceive a competitor, there is no competition. For Jesus to be in competition would be for Jesus to be circumscribed by the culture of empire. His gospel states that the entire cultural system is misconceived. We see him make that quite clear when he speaks of himself as The Son of Man, and bluntly claims to have authority to forgive sins. He claims more than the religious authorities can claim.

When he makes this claim and demonstrates its truth by healing the paralysed man, the crowd is "all amazed", for the man who was paralysed, stuck, and unable to move, can now move and live freely. It is not accidental that Mark chose paralysis, and demonstrated its totality by the man being brought to Jesus on the pallet, instead of choosing a man who was healed of the flu.

Hamerton-Kelly⁷⁰ points out that the word translated as amazed is existasthai, and we can see a family connection to our word ecstasy. The crowd is at flashpoint because its intelligence recognises it is in the presence of something... altering. It instinctively understands it has met an alterity, an "otherness," which can change everything. 

A crowd in this state is a dangerous crowd for those whose skill is to manipulate the crowd and to suggest a scapegoat in order to enable and preserve their own power and security. This is because despite a certain intelligence which recognises an alterity which may be healing and freeing, the crowd is also ecstatic; that is out of its mind.  Amazement is a word which is mostly positive in our culture, and we often seek ecstasy as an escape from the mundane or, indeed, the unpleasant aspects of life. We forget that when ecstatic, (or just drunk,) we are not ourselves. We are out of our minds.

In the story of the paralysed man, existasthai does double duty. No doubt there were some who were saying, "Wow! Awesome! What was that!?" But a first hint of fear can arrive with that last question, so that the amazed person joins those who have instinctively recognised that something other is happening, and are afraid.

Crowds which are out of their mind instinctively seek a scapegoat to restore sanity and calm; in other words, to burn off the emotional overload, as it were, and restore the safety of the status quo. Those who are the designated leaders of society are very vulnerable at such moments, because they are already differentiated from the crowd and highly visible, which makes them a likely target if the mob panics. By the time we reach Mark 3:6, the religious authorities will have decided to destroy Jesus, but this decision begins here, for with his claim to be The Son of Man Jesus is not merely competing with the religious authorities. He is claiming that they are no longer relevant. The Son of Man, as we shall see, turns the religious system on its head.

But does it not say that the crowd glorified God? Of course. But the mood of a crowd can change in an instant. (I can only say that if you have been a respected person of status at one moment and, seconds later, feared for your life, then this apparent contradiction does not exist!) Generations of Christians have wondered what happened to change the mind of the crowds between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Mark's sensibility about the ecstasy and violence of crowds, says to us that Jesus (and his opponents, indeed) were always vulnerable to such a change. We might remember Luke 4:29 where "They got up, drove [Jesus] out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff."

Mark will make much of people's ability to see or not see, particularly at 4:10-12, but also in the stories of healing from blindness (8:18-28 and 10:46-52)  which bookend the teaching in between. There is a subtlety to the metaphor of blindness which is quite evident in the current pericope. The scribes see exactly what Jesus is doing. They are neither blind nor stupid, and can see that he is destroying the system to which they have given their lives. What they cannot see is that this destruction is freedom, because they have not given their lives to God, despite all their best efforts, but have been enslaved by a system which always destroys people, and which must destroy people in order to survive.

There is one more thing to say about the crowd and its manipulators here.  Hamerton-Kelly notes that the crowd in 3:21 is said to be exestē which NRSV translates as out of its mind. Yet when we "do due diligence" and read 3:21, exestē is, in fact, being said of Jesus! But Hamerton-Kelly has not misread the text; he has seen that the crowd, so much a crowd that Jesus and the disciples cannot eat, is out of its mind. The phrasing for people were saying, "He has gone out of his mind shows us the scapegoating has begun; the fear and vulnerability is already being tipped onto Jesus, even if at this moment we tend to see him more as a celebrity than a victim, and do not see that a celebrity is merely a victim postponed. The other way to put this is to say that the guilt assigned to the scapegoat is the guilt the crowd knows at an unconscious level is its own guilt, but cannot bear to face. What the crowd says about Jesus is, in fact, the truth about itself.

7. Son of Man: This is the first time in Mark that Jesus calls himself "the Son of Man." It is his chosen self-reference, and occcurs 14 times in Mark. This is a deliberate choice by Mark. Jesus could simply say "I..." What does Mark wish to tell us with this title? In the trial, where the meaning of Jesus is being laid out in full, it says this: 

Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’ ⁶²Jesus said, ‘I am; and

“you will see the Son of Man
seated at the right hand of the Power”,
and “coming with the clouds of heaven.”’

The reference is to Daniel 7:13— he makes the same reference in Chapter 13:26. Walter Wink had an insight into the Son of Man which I find immensely insightful.

Gerhard von Rad suggests plausibly that Genesis 1 is directly prompted by the revelation God gave Ezekiel, [he was a priest of the Exile to Babylon] and is the first elaboration of it. Scholars have long noted that Genesis 1 is too rational and abstract to really be a myth. It was a polemic made possible by the unprecedented breakthrough of Ezekiel’s vision. (pp105)

In his vision, Ezekiel saw "seated above the likeness of a throne … something that seemed like a human form." (adam)  Wink notes that, in the gospels, Jesus called himself "the son of the man." We use it as a title; we say The Son of Man. What if in leaving out the second "the" which is in the Greek texts— the son of the man— we are obscuring the fact that Jesus identified himself not as human or as a mortal man (which is what son of man can mean), but as a son of the man of Ezekiel?

Wink is clear that Ezekiel's vision is not a projection of himself upon the Divine. Rather, Ezekiel is experiencing revelation; a vision of what really is.

This is really what God is: HUMAN. It is the great error of humanity to believe that it is human. We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can dream of what a more human existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrived at true humanness. Only God is human, and we are made in God’s image and likeness—which is to say, we are capable of becoming human… (Walter Wink Just Jesus - My Struggle to Become Human, pp102 quoted in And it was Good,⁷¹ edited)

In the context of Mark, to be healed is to become "more human." It is about a release from the purity cults which empires construct to maintain themselves. And in Daniel 7, God transfers God's power to one like a son of man

I saw one like a human being [Aram: one like a son of man] (ὡς υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου ἐρχόμενος LXX)
   coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One [Aram: the Ancient of Days]
   and was presented before him.
¹⁴ To him was given dominion
   and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
   should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
   that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
   that shall never be destroyed (NRSV)

To use Wink's words, the one who is the son of the Human One is bluntly claiming by his act of power that he does have authority on earth to forgive sins. (In Mark's culture, when one met the chosen or designated son of a ruler, it was effectively to meet the ruler himself. The son had all the power of the father. cf 1:1 The beginning, Point 5)

8. Judgement: Jesus' use of the title The Son of Man changes the pericope from an argument about forgiveness to something more eschatological in nature, yet Marcus notes that in this first appearance of the Son of Man in Mark, Jesus is a forgiver of sins rather than the one coming to judge sinners.⁷² In this Markan sandwich about healing, judgement is at the centre. The forgiveness of the paralysed man is interrupted by the scribes, whose calculating hearts beget a negative judgement of Jesus. Treating the sandwich as a rhetorical form where the "meat," or the interruption, provides an interpretive condiment (as it were,) we might first think that this is a judgement flavoured sandwich. But what we find is that judgement is a human artefact coming from the scribes and, like the crowd, getting in the way of people's access to Jesus. God (through the Son of Man) forgives, which is healing, and the culture of empire—which is us—judges. "The judgement is not inflicted by God, but is rather self-inflicted by means of the free response one makes to Jesus." ⁷³

9. Resurrection: The word for standing up (v12, ἠγέρθη) literally means: he was raised up⁷⁴ . We could read the text as is the man, freed of the paralysis of his being, stood up "on his own," but the word ἠγέρθη is the same as that used where Peter's mother-in-law was lifted up by Jesus. It is thus one of the symbols of resurrection which sit in the text of Mark. (cf 1:29-31 Peter's Mother in law, Point 4, above for more details on this.) Jesus not only heals, but he raises us to freedom so that we may enter into a new culture, and a new way of being. The paralysed man is a contrast to the leprous man in the preceding pericope who only asked to be readmitted to the old culture, but then seems to have realised that something much greater had happened to him. (cf 1:40-45 The Crowd Arrives, Point 3b (4.), above.)

10. Preaching imagery:

The imagery of the story is full of riches. We find Jesus within ourselves as we dig through the upper floor of our ''house,'' our self. I am tempted to say "as we dig through our upper stor(e)y." The digging and healing is sometimes a community thing; our friend's love and concern brings us to Jesus.

And, of course, paralysis is an issue in much sickness. In so many ways we feel paralysed, stuck, disempowered, powerless to act, blocked, unable to move. Jesus, says the story, enables us to get up and walk.

He gives to us. The paralytic did nothing to deserve the healing. He was brought unable to do anything for himself. He could have refused to stand up and walk; sometimes we do refuse, but the gift was given.⁷⁵

The text reminds me of Jesus' baptism when the heavens are opened and the spirit descends upon Jesus. Carroll calls the lowering of the man from the roof a parody of the descent of the spirit at the baptism of Jesus. "The paralysed man is the human condition... In the horizontal, the plane of the corpse he is unable to move until the transforming pneuma settles on him." ⁷⁶ It is Jesus who is the mediator here, the one who opens our eyes and ears to healing. Otherwise, all our efforts for our own healing remain a parody of what might be.

 

2:13-28 Eating
¹³ Jesus [Gk He] went out again (ἀνεχώρησεν) beside the lake sea (ὴν θάλασσαν); the whole crowd gathered around him, and he taught them. ¹⁴As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.

¹⁵ And as he sat at dinner [reclined] in Levi’s [Gk his] house (ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ αὐτοῦ), many tax-collectors and sinners were also sitting [Gk reclining] (κατακεῖσθαι) with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. ¹⁶When the scribes of [Other ancient authorities read and] the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat [Other ancient authorities add and drink] with tax-collectors and sinners?’ ¹⁷When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’

¹⁸ Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people [Gk they] came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ ¹⁹Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. ²⁰The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.

²¹ ‘No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch (πλήρωμα) pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear (σχίσμα) is made. ²²And no one puts (βάλλει, pours) new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.’[Other ancient authorities lack but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins]

²³ One sabbath he was going through the cornfields; and as they made their way his disciples began (μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ ἤρξαντο ὁδὸν ποιεῖν τίλλοντες – and his disciples began to make their way, plucking... so Marcus pp239) to pluck heads of grain. ²⁴The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?’ ²⁵And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? ²⁶He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’ ²⁷Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; ²⁸so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.’

1. Jesus went out again: He steps out of the culture again. (cf 1:4-8 John, Point 6,  and 1:40-45, Point 2, above on this page.) This particular going out is not to the wilderness, but a variation: He is by the sea which is a place of danger. (Not the lake of NRSV cf 3:7-12 The Sea, Point 1 HYPERLINK TO COME) Everything which follows is a separation from the accepted cultural mores of religious observance; he goes out from them. And he is teaching; the implication is that he is teaching the culture of the kingdom of God. The whole crowd gathers: Empire is being taught— challenged— to see itself with new eyes. How much freedom can it stand?

2. Food and Sabbath: There is a common theme of food in Mark. Food is not merely fuel. Food is where the status quo is fed. Food is ritual; that is, meals reinforce the way a community lives. Meals, particularly special meals, expose the structure and hierarchy of society; indeed, even how Eucharist is celebrated will tell us much about the nature of a congregation.

A key distinguishing mark of Jewish faithfulness is the observance of food laws, and yet, here, Jesus over-rides these laws. Verses 23-28 cleverly use food, the heads of grain, to bring Sabbath observance into the discussion. And as Malina says, "Sabbath observance was one of the fundamental characteristics of the house of Israel, marking it off from other groups of the day." ⁷⁷

The more thoughtful observers in the crowd see that everything about accepted behaviour is being overturned.

Perhaps the essential take-away is that the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath. Jesus is Lord over even the most important identifiers of our culture, and of our gathering as church. (2:27) In the saying on the Sabbath we see something quite remarkable: The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.  For a religion which speaks so much about grace, we often girt ourselves with an enormous number of rules and restrictions, and seem to be only another little empire of shibboleths and exclusions.  But the Sabbath, and the Creation, is made for us! We are free. God has not set us here as some kind of test with rules to keep.  We imagine God too little as an indulgent grandparent and far too much as a hard school master.

3. The Meal at Levi's House: Jesus did not sit at dinner. The Greek word is reclined. This implies a meal of some luxury, rather than the meal of a poor family, who would sit.⁷⁸ Such luxury meals were hierarchical in their layout. In our imagining of a meal we should bear the following from Malina and Rohrbaugh in mind:

The usual way of dining was to recline on couches or mats. This diagram shows one arrangement for nine guests at such a dinner. The mensa is the table. The diners lie on the left side, supporting themselves on the left elbow. Of the three couches or mats (see diagram), that in the middle (in medio) was regarded as the most honorable; of the three places on it, that on the left (the summus was assigned to the guest of highest rank, and no one was reclining behind him on the couch. The couch to his left (in summo was the next in dignity; that on the [his] right (in imo), being held in lowest esteem, was occupied by the host and his family. These arrangements explain the necessity of refraining from occupying the highest place, which had perhaps been reserved for a "more distinguished" guest (14:8). ⁷⁹

Malina makes a crucial point about such meals: They are

predictable events in which roles and statuses in a community are affirmed or legitimated. In other words, the microcosm of the meal is parallel to the macrocosm of everyday social relations... eating together implied sharing a common set of ideas and values, and frequently a common social position as well...⁸⁰

We will do well to remember his comment about social position as we come to the meals of Jesus and Herod later in Mark.

Note that in their full text, Malina contrasts meals as ceremonies rather than rituals. He and Rohrbaugh say rituals introduce new behaviours. That is not how ritual is used in this present commentary, which understands that a ritual reinforces the status quo.

Ritual is a carefully scripted re-enactment of the original murder. Ritual's deep foundation is sacrifice. Rituals are cooperative acts which reinforce the solidarity of the group. They remind us of the power of the scapegoating event even, in a sense, "taking us back there." Rituals are different to celebration. Rituals, at base, are always about reinforcing the status quo: affirming it. So, a birthday party can be a celebration of what is new—another year of life; a lynching is a reinforcement of white supremacy. But in the entanglement of our whole being with the culture of empire, even a birthday party can be ritualistic, inviting only the white kids on the street.

I am making a distinction here, rather like the one I made between the sacred and the holy. If we celebrate communion, we remember Jesus' death, but we are looking and living to the new freedom promised in Christ. A ritual communion would still be compromised with some kind of violence...  (See What I bring with me, Ritual for more detail.)

Jesus is subverting the status quo in no small way at Levi's house, which we can see by the careful listing of those who are present at the meal. He and his disciples are there. Then there are tax collectors.

As a tax collector, Levi is fully embedded in the Roman system, one of a group renowned for their corruption, and their extortion of the poor. "There⁸¹ were 'sinners and tax collectors'; tax collectors were bad enough to have their own special category!" Yet Jesus chooses even him, and eats with him!  We might note that in choosing Levi, Jesus includes one of the scapegoats society excludes, and the scapegoat is usually mostly innocent; indeed, Malina says "Many, if not the majority, of toll collectors remained poor. Those who did not were universally presumed to be dishonest." ⁸²

The complexity of the social situation is that although outcast in many people's eyes, Levi is likely to have been a Levite, "whose hereditary job was service in the temple." ⁸³

Also present are sinners. One suggestion has been that sinners were those whose poverty meant they were not able to keep the purity laws. But this identification fails in Mark, because in this very section, Jesus himself did not keep many of these laws. Here in Mark, sinners is more likely to mean those who were "flagrant violators of the Mosaic covenant." Marcus⁸⁴ suggests this would include those mentioned in Mark 7:21-22: " For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly." The story not only has it that many of these followed him, but that he chose to eat with them.

The problem for the scribes of the Pharisees is that association with sinners would drag you down. "A scholar should not recline in the company of ritually impure common people... 'lest he be drawn into their ways.'"⁸⁵ Eating with these people, as Malina and Rohrbaugh say above, implies Jesus shares their ideals. Yet Jesus claims he will not be influenced by them but, instead, be a source of healing for them. In the context of Judaism, and this has just been raised in the previous pericope, "God is the only true healer." God is "the only doctor for the sicknesses of the soul." ⁸⁶ In this scandalous meal Jesus claims that he will not be dragged down and made impure (or separated) from God, but places himself very close to the role of God.

We should be careful here not to read this in an anti-Jewish fashion.  Jesus is disrupting the polite conventions of the religious social elite, who today still very often exclude tax collectors and sinners, as too many congregations demonstrate. A religious social elite is not a Jewish characteristic but a characteristic of the culture of empire.

4. Challenge-Riposte: In the case of the man and his pallet, the detractors do not verbally question Jesus, but now we see a pattern emerging. There is a challenge and a response; for example, "Why does he eat...?" answered by "When Jesus heard this, he said to them..." This pattern repeats at vv 16, 18, and 24. In each case, whether it be eating with sinners, not fasting, or doing 'work' on the sabbath, Jesus exerts his authority over the older law, and in each case his mindset is that the Law is for people, and not people for the Law, as he states explicitly in verse 27. This key insight will challenge everything we do as church from the shifting of pews onwards: What is God's good desire for the healing of people? We should note here that he is reinterpreting how we relate to the Law, not abandoning or abolishing the Law. (For more detail here, see 1:40-45 The Crowd Arrives, Point 1. Reading leprosy and purity, above on this page.)

Challenge-Riposte is culture and crowd working to settle upon a status quo. It is more, I think, than simply making sure that I am "on top" in the social order, for it also defines those who are lesser. It brings them to the notice of the crowd. Winning in one of these exchanges makes the loser a person that I might direct the attention of the crowd towards, in order to deflect "scapegoating attention" from myself. Malina and Rohrbaugh say of this text

Just as concern about money, paying the bills, or perhaps affording something is perpetual and pervasive in American society, so was the concern about honor in the world of the Gospels. In this competition for honor the game of challenge-riposte is a central phenomenon and one that must always be played out in public. It consists of a challenge (almost any word, gesture, or action) that seeks to undermine the honor of another person and a response that answers in equal measure or ups the ante (and thereby challenges in return). Both positive (gifts, compliments) and negative (insults, dares) challenges must be answered to avoid a serious loss of face. ⁸⁷

We know that the poor, those without money, are often targeted as scapegoats: relative lack of money means, in our culture, a lack of power, which means less ability to avoid becoming the victim should the crowd need one: witness our constant scapegoating of refugees and the constant punishment within Centrelink structures of those who are old, or sick, or unemployed. In Jesus' situation, the same applies to honour and the loss of honour. Jesus is not merely being criticised in these incidents; his critics are seeking to reduce his honour, and so erode his power, whilst building up their own. He has disrupted the status quo by eating with sinners, and now a new status quo must be established; preferably one that excludes the disruptor.

5. Fasting: In Jewish law wedding guests were exempt from religious obligations which would clash with the joyous nature of a wedding. So here, at the beginning of this new relationship and new age, the disciples, the guests, are not called to fast. This image fits the language Jesus uses: "The days will come... then they will fast on that day." This has a sense of the end. It matches the imagery of Amos 8, in particular:

⁹ On that day, says the Lord God,
   I will make the sun go down at noon,
   and darken the earth in broad daylight.
¹⁰ I will turn your feasts into mourning,
   and all your songs into lamentation;
I will bring sackcloth on all loins,
   and baldness on every head;
I will make it like the mourning for an only son,
   and the end of it like a bitter day.

Mark uses the same language in Chapter 13: "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Marcus suggests that Mark's readers may have seen an allusion to the early church habit of fasting on Fridays, the day of Jesus' death.⁸⁸

6. Patching the Garment: The segue from fasting to patching garments is more seamless than we recognise today. The cosmos was often thought of as a garment. Psalm 102 says

²⁵ Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth,
   and the heavens are the work of your hands.
²⁶ They will perish, but you endure;
   they will all wear out like a garment.
You change them like clothing, and they pass away;
²⁷   but you are the same, and your years have no end.
²⁸ The children of your servants shall live secure;
   their offspring shall be established in your presence.

Hebrews 1:10-12 quotes the LXX translation of Psalm 101 (the Psalms are numbered slightly differently within LXX⁸⁹ ) which includes the line "and as a vesture shalt thou fold them"; NRSV translates the line from Hebrews as "like a cloak you will roll them up."

No one patches up the old order of the world with the new culture of God.  The difference is too great; the new wine demands new wineskins. Sometimes we are tempted to think that faith means we can have our cake and eat it too; we can have the comfort of trust in God and the reassurance of Jesus that we are saved, but that nothing else need change apart from a few surface habits— fasting perhaps— which we can wear as a kind of badge of identification. But this is not faith. This is religion. Trusting that a new order is at hand is to allow the Christ to tear us out of the old cloth and remake us.  Marcus points out that the tear of NRSV is schisma, which is the same root as the tearing open of heaven at Jesus' baptism: schizomenous.⁹⁰ (Mark 1:10) The allusion to baptism here is quite strong, because Jesus is driven out (ekballei) into the wilderness following his baptism, and when the wine is poured into new wineskins the word used is ballei. (And later, in 15:35, the curtain in the temple will be ἐσχίσθη )

As a preacher my heart quickens when I notice that the word for the patch which tears away is plērōma which in other contexts means fullness! (eg Mark 6:43, Galatians 4:4)

7. The righteous and sinners: Suddenly Jesus' words to the scribes become clear. It remains true that it is the sick who need a physician, but there is a barb in the tail of the saying, for the ones who trust they are righteous are the truly sick. They are the real sinners who need him, and think they can patch up their lives with religious observances which aim to be "good" but which are truly trite in the face of our enslavement under empire. Perhaps some of the tax collectors and sinners who have followed Jesus to Levi's house have taken as yet unknowing steps "on the way," but the scribes are refusing to move.

8. The Sabbath: As an outsider in a small First Nations community, I would sit in a calm community meeting dealing with windmills and bores and hunting, and understand perfectly well what was going on. A week later the same issues could be under discussion, but with apparently undeserved emotion, and I would be mystified about what was happening. I began to realise the surface discussions were carrying deeper conversations which I did not have the cultural background to understand. The Sabbath in the grainfields feels like such a conversation.

To get some sense of what is going on, we need to remember our chapter breaks are artificial and date from well after Mark's time.  The flow of this narrative begins with a man who is paralysed, and therefore disempowered, who is healed by Jesus. It ends with a man with a withered hand, and who is likewise, therefore, disempowered, even paralysed (cf 3:1-6 The Die is Cast, Point 2 not yet posted,) and who is healed by Jesus on a Sabbath. The religious authorities, who show us the hierarchy of empire, are present and casting judgement all the way through. By Mark 3:6, Jesus will have poached "the religiously enthralled of the synagogues and, from the Herodians, the prisoners of avarice and expediency in their toll booths."⁹¹ So, the Pharisees and the Herodians, usually enemies of each other, will plot to kill him.

Jesus' healing concentrates on the two key and visible planks of Jewish distinctiveness: religious obligations around food and the Sabbath. Mark seems to be suggesting that these, like any cultural distinctive, can be dangerous blockages to healing and freedom. He introduces the subject of the Sabbath with a formulaic phrase we particularly recognise from the KJV Old Testament: "And it came to pass... on the Sabbath." (NRSV simply says, "One Sabbath...") The wording and it came to pass... on the Sabbath is a little signal to think back to the tradition and, for Mark's readers, this little signal will be amplified by the name Abiathar.

From our perspective, the Chapter 3:1-6 healing in the synagogue may seem to be the major trigger for Jesus' enemies, but the current pericope is equally radical. For in Chapter 3 Jesus, at first glance, appeared to have some justification: It was lawful to save life on the Sabbath. But here in the grain fields, "mere human hunger warrants such freedom; what is more, in the face of human need, the category of the sacred dissolves." ⁹² That is the connection with the Old Testament story where hunger and need over-rode the sacred rules about who could eat the Bread of the Presence.  This connection suggests the conversation is happening within the early church about its arguments with the scribes, rather than reflecting an actual conversation between Jesus and some scribes, for there is nothing about the Sabbath in the story of Abiathar and, in that story, the point was about who could eat the food, rather than the breaking of religious observance by plucking food; that is, working, on the Sabbath.

Abiathar is the amplification of Mark's hint to look back into the tradition, and is the gateway into a conversation that we modern readers can only glimpse. For, on the face of it, Mark has made a mistake. The priest to whom David came was Ahimelech, the father of Abiathar. I wonder if this is, not a mistake, but a signal; a signal for the reader to go on from the initial story of David eating the Bread of the Presence (1 Samuel 21), to the story of Abiathar.

Abiathar was the sole survivor of Saul's massacre of the priests at Nob, and he fled to David (1 Samuel 22). He took to David the ephod (1 Samuel 23:6) which was a symbol of spiritual legitimacy being transferred from Saul to David.⁹³ And much later, when David was fleeing the uprising of Absalom, Abiathar sought to go with him from Jerusalem, taking the Ark with them. The Ark is sometimes called the Ark of the Presence; it symbolises the active presence of God. When David saw Abiathar and Zadok with the Ark, he said, "Carry the ark of God back into the city. If I find favour in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me back and let me see both it and the place where it remains" (2 Samuel 15:25).

What is happening here in this series of connections which seem to us so convoluted and arcane that we wonder if they are imaginary? Marcus suggests that for the readers of Mark, well aware of the story of the church fleeing Jerusalem as its end drew near—we could wonder if some of his intended readers were among the refugees— perhaps in all this there is an identification of David and Jesus, and a promise of vindication for those who had fled Jerusalem like David. A promise that God would bring those who were the spiritually legitimate heirs home.

Added to this is an interesting issue of translation at the beginning of the pericope. The Greek says mathētai autou ērxanto hodon poiein tillontes which, word by word, is the disciples – of him – began – the way – to make  –  plucking... Do we translate this as: "as they made their way, they began plucking..". (NRSV) or as: "and they began to make the way, plucking...?"⁹⁴ In the second translation, the disciples are beginning to make the way, the hodon, that way which will become very clear to us, as healed of his blindness, Bartimaeus followed Jesus on the way to Jerusalem. (cf Mark 10:46-52)

Many of us know the experience of prayerful reflection upon a scripture or hymn where the Spirit makes a connection between our situation and the words of the page. If we seek to write that connection out in words for somebody else to read, it can seem as convoluted, if not imaginary, to someone not of "our culture" as the connections of Jesus, David, and an old story about the Bread of the Presence sound to our culture. It most certainly does not follow the rules of C21 rationalistic argument. 

At the end of the pericope Jesus says the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath. Again, he was on firm ground for similar traditions could be found in the rabbinc traditions: "The Sabbath is handed over to you, not you to it" (Mekilta on Exodus 31:14; b Yoma 85b.) ⁹⁵ The problem with Jesus was that he went so much further: "The Sabbath was made for anthrōpon, and not anthrōpos for the Sabbath; so the son of anthrōpou is lord even of the Sabbath." The punning is obvious, but there is no logical connection between the two statements. The problem with Jesus was that he was simply laying claim to being the Son of Man, and his power to heal and his flaunting of the shibboleths of the culture, made it impossible to ignore him as a mad man. He would have to be destroyed.

 

Footnotes

1. https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/did-mark-invent(Back)

2. Google suggests 166sq kilometres. Ontaria, the smallest of the Great Lakes is 18,970sq km. (Back)

3. (Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, “The Jesus of Mark and the Sea of Galilee”, JBL 103/3 (1984), pp. 363-377) (Back)

4. Ched Meyers, quoted by Biran Stoffregen. http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/mark1x14.htm(Back)

5. Marcus pp184(Back)

6. Marcus pp184. He notes Qumram Damascus Document (CD) 4:15-16, Thanksgiving Document (1QH) 3:15(Back)

7. Ched Meyers Binding the Strong Man, pp. 132-133, and Marcus pp180(Back)

8. https://www.onemansweb.org/act-now-mark-1-14-20.html(Back)

9. http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/epiphany3b.htm (Back)

10. https://www.onemansweb.org/jesus-begins-the-journey-mark-1-14-20-jonah.html edited (Back)

11. http://www.kchanson.com/ARTICLES/fishing.html(Back)

12. I quote Hanson at https://www.onemansweb.org/jesus-begins-the-journey-mark-1-14-20-jonah.html edited.(Back)

13. http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/cpt/article_060823wink.shtml, and see also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_redemptive_violence (Back)

14. https://www.onemansweb.org/remember-the-loaves-and-the-fishes-mark-114-20.html , quoting Michael Serres https://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/contagion/contagion1/contagion01_serres.pdf(Back)

15. Marcus pp182 (Back)

16. Marcus  pp181(Back)

17. Marcus pp183-4(Back)

18. Rev. Robert Coats, http://www.progressivechristianalliance.org/Blog/articles/i-put-a-spell-on-you/ quoted by Prior at https://www.onemansweb.org/at-the-movies-mark-1-29-39.html(Back)

19. Marcus pp 186, 159 I think his statement is based on the adverb modifying the verb rather than other words in this sentence. (Back)

20. Marcus pp187(Back)

21. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred pp75(Back)

22. Marcus pp215 (Back)

23. I am, or course, a theologian and not a psychiatrist. But I have never worked with anyone struggling with a mental illness where social pressures were not obvious.(Back)

24. Hamerton-Kelly pp75. I have added the hyphens in "religion-as-usual" to clarify what I think he means here. (Back)

25. Hammerton-Kelly pp75(Back)

26. Prior: At the Movies, https://www.onemansweb.org/at-the-movies-mark-1-29-39.html  edited (Back)

27. Hammerton-Kelly pp21-23, edited (Back)

28. Marcus  pp198(Back)

29. Bruce J. Malina Richard l. Rohrbaugh. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels pp Matthew 8:1-17)(Back)

30. https://www.onemansweb.org/at-the-movies-mark-1-29-39.html Edited. The quotation was originally taken from  http://crossmarks.com/brian/mark1x29.htm(Back)

31. http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MkEpiphany5.htm (Back)

32. https://www.onemansweb.org/mark-1-29-31.html (Back)

33. Malina, pp (section on Mark 5:21-43.) Possibly pp210 in print version?(Back)

34. http://crossmarks.com/brian/mark1x29.htm (Back)

35. https://www.onemansweb.org/the-first-resurrection-in-mark-1-29-39.html (Back)

36. Girard, The Scapegoat, Chapter 11(Back)

37. Prior, https://www.onemansweb.org/just-one-more-healing-mark-14045.html (Back)

38. Hamerton-Kelly pp76(Back)

39. Marcus pp205 (Back) 

40. Amy-Jill Levine gives numbers of examples of Christian authors who "invent a bad Judaism" in her book The Misunderstood Jew.(Back)

41. Cecilia Wassen, " The Jewishness of Jesus and ritual purity" Jewish Studies in the Nordic Countries Today, Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 27 (2016), pp. 11–36 In this quotation she references: Levine, Amy-Jill, 1996. ‘Discharging responsibility: Matthean Jesus, biblical law, and hemorrhaging woman’ in Treasures New and Old: Recent Contributions to Matthean Studies, eds David R. Bauer and Mark Allen Powell (Atlanta, GA, Scholars Press), pp. 379–97(Back)

42. Levine https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8cXz1Ocoe3E (Back)

43. There is controversy about how the Law was observed in Jesus' time, but we should beware making the simple that people of Jesus' time read Leviticus in the way we do. Wassen (op cit) outlines some of the controversy.(Back)

44. Matthew 22:23 (Back)

45. I owe this phrase to https://www.gotquestions.org/corban.html (Back)

46. Matthew 9:13, 12:7(Back)

47. Hamerton-Kelly called this the GMSM: the generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism (ppxi) which I find so much of a mouthful that it becomes unhelpful. What I am referring to by saying redemptive violence,  scapegoating matrix is the way of being which comes out of mimetic rivalry and violence and which underpins our cultures and corrupts all our efforts to control it.(Back)

48. "René Girard made the fascinating argument that kings originated as designated victims of human sacrifice... " George Boreas https://www.georgeboreas.com/blog/ren-girard-ix-origin-of-kings (Back)

It would make sense that a society would groom a designated sacrificial victim to have on the ready in case of a crisis.

49. Point Three is a heavily edited version of my post Just One More Healing. There is more detail in that post which may reward reading if you are interested in the translation dynamics, but I have made some significant changes in my thinking since then. (Back)

50. http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/compassion-or-anger-how-do-you-read-it.html (Back)

51. Marcus pp205-206(Back)

52. Davis https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2012/02/compassion-or-anger-how-do-you-read-it.html (Back)

53. A fascinating and informative text on the subject of cleanliness and impurity is Unclean: Meditations on Impurity Richard Beck, Cascade Books. (Back)

54. http://time.com/66459/portland-reservoir-pee/(Back)

55. Eg Davis: https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2012/02/compassion-or-anger-how-do-you-read-it.html (Back)

56. http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MtChristmas1.htm (Back)

57. Point Three has been a heavily edited version of my post Just One More Healing. There is more detail in that post which may reward reading if you are interested in the translation dynamics, but I have made some significant changes in my thinking since then  https://www.onemansweb.org/just-one-more-healing-mark-14045.html(Back)

58. Hamerton-Kelly pp77(Back)

59. Marcus pp206(Back)

60. I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men--but though all that may come to pass, I don't accept it.  I won't accept it.  ...

“Listen,” Ivan says, “if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible  …. Therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to ‘dear God’ in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!”

“I don’t want harmony, for love of mankind I don’t want it. I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on my harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket …. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.”

“That is rebellion,” Alyosha said softly, dropping his eyes.

“Rebellion? … Answer me: Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears — would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.” (The Brothers Karamazov) (Back)

61. Hamerton-Kelly pp77 (Back)

62. Hamerton-Kelly pp77 (Back)

63. Rev Robert Coates. http://www.progressivechristianalliance.org/Blog/articles/i-put-a-spell-on-you/(Back)

64. Marcus asserts that "the unexpressed implication" of no room even in front of the door is "much less inside the house." pp215(Back)

65. Marcus pp216(Back)

66. Marcus pp217(Back)

67. Marcus pp217 (Back)

68. Malina, from the section: Commentary on Mk 2:9(Back)

69. Hamerton-Kelly pp 78(Back)

70. Hamerton-Kelly pp78 (Back)

71. https://www.onemansweb.org/and-it-was-good...-14-23.html (Back)

72. Marcus pp22 (Back)

73. Hamerton-Kelly p78(Back)

74. See Marcus pp218. Also, ἠγέρθη is aorist indicative passive. https://biblehub.com/interlinear/mark/2.htm Passive means the subject is the "recipient" of the action. One could say object, but that is also a grammar term 😊 (Back)

75. https://www.onemansweb.org/mark-2-1-12.html, edited. (Back)

76. John Carroll, The Existential Jesus, pp32-34(Back)

77. Malina, Textual Notes: Mark 2:23 - 3:6(Back)

78. cf Marcus pp 225 (Back)

79. (Parrot Graphics) (Malina, Social Science Commentary, from the Textual Notes on Luke 14)(Back)

80. Malina, Reading Scenarios: Mark 2:13-17 (Back)

81. https://www.onemansweb.org/mark-2-13-17.html (Back)

82. Malina, Textual Notes: Mark 2:13-17(Back)

83. Marcus pp225 (Back)

84. Marcus pp226(Back)

85. Marcus pp227 (Back)

86. Marcus pp228. The second quotation is from Philo. (Back)

87. Malina, Challenge-Riposte, 2:1-12(Back)

88. Marcus pp254(Back)

89.

Septuagint       Masoretic Text
1-8                      1-8
9                         9 and 10
10-112                11-113
113                     114 and 115
114                     116:1-9
115                     116:10-19
116-145            117-146
146                     147:1-11
147                     147:12-20
148-150            148-150 (Back)

90. Marcus p238 (Back)

91. Hamerton-Kelly pp80 (Back)

92. Hamerton-Kelly pp79 (Back)

93. Marcus pp239 (Back)

94. Cf Marcus pp239(Back)

95. Quoted by Marcus pp245(Back)