Poor ngaltatjaras us
Mark 6:1-6 Poor ngaltatjaras1 us
He left that place and came to his home town (πατρίδα), and his disciples followed him. 2On the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many (πολλοὶ) who heard him were astounded. (ἐξεπλήσσοντο) They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary [Other ancient authorities read son of the carpenter and of Mary] and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence [Or stumbled] (ἐσκανδαλίζοντο) at him. 4Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ 5And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. 6And he was amazed (ἐθαύμαζεν) at their unbelief (ἀπιστίαν).
Six skilful verses bring this section of the gospel to its conclusion. They are a pathos-laden final word on seeing but not seeing. (cf Mark 4) And they point us the "small things" which undo so much of the life of the church: Simple envy2 blinds us to the life of the culture of God more effectively than all the military power of empire! Not because it is some more powerful thing intruding into empire, but because it is a key element with the culture of empire. Where there is envy, there is empire.
Mark introduces Chapter 6 with words deliberately chosen to remind us of Jesus' earlier reception in Capernaum. There is a clear parallel between Mark 6:1-6 and Mark 1:21-28.
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1:21: And on the Sabbath he went into the Synagogue and immediately began to teach |
6:2a: And when the Sabbath had come he began to teach in the Synagogue |
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1:22 And the people were amazed at his teaching... |
6:2b: And many people, when they had heard him, were amazed, |
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1:27a: "What is this? A new teaching with authority!" |
6:2c: saying, "Where does this man get these things from? What wisdom has been given to him!" |
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1:27b: "He even gives orders to the unclean spirits, and they obey him!" |
6:2d: "And such works of power are performed by his hands!"3 |
Mark introduces Chapter Six in such a way that we expect the story to result in similar praise as the story of Chapter One which concludes with the words, "At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee." (Mark 1:28)
But there is a contrast: Jesus is identified as "the son of Mary."
Patridis means hometown; that is, we are in Nazareth. And in his hometown of Nazareth, he is called by his mother's name, rather than identified as "the son of Joseph," which would be usual Jewish practice.4 The use of Mary's name is likely to be a "slur against his legitimacy."5 The sensitive reader of Mark's time immediately recognises a whiff of scandal. And recognises that we can very easily be Nazareth.
There is also the introduction of an ambivalence which is almost invisible to us, but obvious to people of the time. James (Jacob) and Joses and Judas and Simon (vv3) are all names of the Patriarchs.6 This careful naming heightens the tension between slur and praise in this pericope. By identifying him through his mother, Jesus is defamed while the family itself is shown to be pious. What we may have overlooked here, or thought of as a subtle defamation, or as the introduction of some ambiguity about Jesus, was almost certainly not subtle. It was the hometown rivalry and resentment which we also call envy.
Envy is a behaviour which empire seeks both to limit, because of its destructiveness, but also to exploit, because it is so potently destructive of initiatives towards human growth. So those who are at the top of the pecking order seek to groom—to foster and direct—communal envy to ensure their continuing dominance. In this respect, envy is similar to violence, which empire also seeks to ameliorate, but then also uses to ensure its own survival.
The shape of envy.
It has not been great evil or violence which has undone things in the congregations I have served, but ordinary, grubby7 envy. And where there has been even reprehensible behaviour or abuse, envy has been at the root of it.
Already in this commentary, I have said death is the underlying fear of all human beings, a fear which we manage with the scapegoat mechanism.8 We remove, or at least redirect, both the general fear of death and its consequent violence which is rampant in the crowd of us, by focussing our violence upon one unfortunate individual. But where does death come from? Not the predictable death of old age—we can resign ourselves to that; not death from a wild beast—we can take precautions; not even from the tribe in the next valley, but the unexpected explosions in our own home town which so terrify us, and against which we have so little defence?
Death comes from those who are close to us. It comes from the crowd, the tribe, and the family, which is around us and has given us a life. Death comes from our friends.
Understand that, at least at first glance, this anxiety about death and its sources was much more obvious to early humans than it is to those of us who live in a death denying culture, where people do no longer die, but "pass." We live in a developed culture of empire where the underlying structures have a certain invisibility. This is by design: Things work better if we can distract ourselves from the naked threat of death, and can hide the fact that we have been guilty of the murder of another. Yet if we pause to think about where death comes from in our situation today, most murderers are known to their victims, and are too often from the victim's own family. The put-downs and betrayals of life, the "little deaths" of our lives, come predominantly from our workmates and family.
The generator of all this, in the beginning, is rivalry. Rivalry is not a high-level emotion and behaviour. It is a foundational affect, a deep seated emotional state and response which underpins and drives other behaviours. This is because although we are hardwired with a desire for food and drink, we have no instinctive understanding of who we are, or our meaning and purpose.9 "What is hard-coded into our DNA and hard-wired into our brains is the desire to be; and to belong." And that means "we are [necessarily] evolutionary supercharged to do one thing [more than any other species]: learn by watching and copying others."10
We have to learn what it is to be and we do it by imitating those round us. The benefit this "supercharged" ability is that we are an extraordinarily adaptive species. If someone makes a discovery, or has a new idea, it spreads "like wildfire." The downside of our ability and need to imitate is that a little reflection can leave us with the terrifying sense that there is nothing concrete beneath us. And in dealing with that fear, we discover something about imitation that is difficult to escape: Our imitative model, the person who shows us how to be, becomes our rival. We often obscure this, even from ourselves. It is embarrassing and "uncool" to be seen to be an imitator.
I now wish to re-emphasise all this because my sense is that as a society, we are gaining a keen sense of our tendency to scapegoat, even as we find new scapegoating realms in "cancel culture," but are much less able to understand rivalry. So, I wish to highlight our existential angst.
For it seems indeed as if, in order to be themselves, a person must first be expertly informed about what the others are, and thereby learn to know what they themselves are—in order then to be that. However, if they walk into the snare of this optical illusion, they never reach the point of being themselves... For from "the others," naturally, one properly only learns to know what the others are—it is in this way the world would beguile a person from being themselves. "The others" in turn do not know at all what they themselves are, but only what the others are. (Soren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses pp42, quoted by Bellinger. I have modified the original to be gender inclusive.)
Charles Bellinger, who quotes the previous lines, says "When human beings are looking to each other as models of being, the pathway of life is a treadmill ... rather than an actual road," whereas Mark will talk about following Jesus on the road or on the way. (cf Mark 10:12)11
James Allison bluntly tells us what we would rather hide from ourselves in this respect; namely that "we always learn to see through the eyes of another. The desire of another directs our seeing and makes available to us what is to be seen. What is 'out there' is already, inescapably, a construct made real by human desire ... We desire according to the desire of another, that is the eyes of another teaches us who we are by teaching us what we want."12
All this may be inescapably so, but we humans desperately wish to escape it. It is an affront to our sense of autonomy, and to our sense that there is a concrete 'out there' world. It is an affront because take away our personal autonomy, and take away a concrete world to which we have direct unmediated access, and who are we!? All that is left, inescapably and incontrovertibly, is death.
So how do we survive? How do we be?
Firstly, we crave staticity or stability. Right here, we can see one problem when Jesus comes home. He is disturbing the status quo. Things are unstable. We have learnt that disruption is dangerous.
But Jesus is not painted as a disruptor in Mark 6. He is drawn as a model, someone to admire and to imitate. He can show us— his hometown—how to be. And that's where the rivalry begins. If a great rabbi had "come down" from Jerusalem, there would be no problem if we aspired to be like him. He is clearly quite "differentiated" from us. He is an "external mediator."13 There is no real possibility of rivalry; we could never be him. But Jesus has not "come down" from Jerusalem. He has "come home." He is one of us. Rivalry is almost certain. Jesus is "an internal mediator." First, we want to be like him, and then, because he is one of us, close to us, we see we could be him, and even surpass him, and then scandal begins. Hamilton-Kelly says
Scandal begins with the assumption that we are potentially our model's equal and can always be the same as [them.] We want not only to equal but also to surpass the model [but] if we achieve that [they] would [cease] to be a model. We do not want that, however, because the tension of our desire depends on their modelling, and so we desire a contradiction, to surpass and to be surpassed by our model.14
Put bluntly, if you have been my model, if you have been effectively showing me how to be, and if I surpass you, who am I? Suddenly, I am on my own. I have no model. I do not know how to be! (This also means I do not know how to live, but perhaps the phrase how to be better indicates how foundational all this is for our survival.) It is that simple, that ridiculous—in the sense that it seems laughably implausible—and that critical. Our hardwired need to imitate propels us into a crisis of violence as we lash out at the one we both love and hate.
But initially, this crisis of violence is partially hidden. Hamerton-Kelly notes how the hometown crowd "recognise his wisdom and miraculous power, but are unable to believe it because of their preconceptions... They know his family and therefore it is impossible that he could be what he appears to be."15 But no one is laughing at him. They cannot discount him and let him go. There is something, for them, which is truly admirable about him, and this they resent. Perhaps you have been in a situation like this, a time when there was jeering and ridicule, but not the easy laughter that comes when someone is fatuous and never going to be the sort of person we would imitate. Instead, there has been an edge to everything, and the sneers and laughter were thinly covering anger. Luke's telling of this event clearly sees the violence roiling under the surface of things: "When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him 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."16 (Luke 4:28-9)
So, Hamerton-Kelly continues on from the indented paragraph above:
We attack and cherish, hate and love, diminish and exalt [our rival]. This is scandal, and it is the essence of anxiety (and addiction) because it is the love of what one hates and the hatred of what one loves. Mark tells us it is the state of the hometown crowd in Nazareth with respect to Jesus. The proverb that a prophet is honored everywhere except in his own home sums up the scandal. Envy is the power of the model/obstacle to attract and repel at the same time. The crowd wants to be like the other, and to destroy him, because he is so pleasing.17
The affect, or emotional colour, of the word eskandalizonto (ἐσκανδαλίζοντο) is that his home-town folks were "jealous and angry at him,"18 but underlying the word is the sense of stumbling. Skandalizó 19 has the sense of setting a snare, which evokes exactly the problem of envy. The more the snared or scandalised person struggles, the tighter the noose of the snare becomes.
Scandal, stumbling, or taking offense at— all words used to translate eskandalizonto— is to see a person with the eye of empire rather than from the perspective of the kingdom of God.20 It is the opposite of faith. It is to be trapped into our rivalry.
There is a startling implication from of this. As we have said, violence is one of the outcomes of our universal fear of death, and violence stems from rivalry. But, at the same time, the path to violence arises21 from, of all things, our desire to do good in the face of death. This point alone should make us deeply suspicious of any spirituality which is rooted in doing or being good. Any attempt to be human; that is, to be authentic and find meaning, by being good will inevitably lead to violence, and prove be founded in violence. The nature of us means a life based in being good becomes a life based in rivalry with those who are our models. Unless... unless we can find a model who is not going to be a rival; that is, one who is clearly differentiated from us. One we can't ever realistically compete with. Perhaps even someone like the Messiah, the Son of God.
There is a critical distinction provided to us by Mark at this point in the text. It is not a distinction between the people of Nazareth, and the people in the villages where the disciples " cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them." (Mark 6:13) Rather, the people of the villages are a vehicle by which to contrast the people of Nazareth with the disciples. The faith contrast is that the disciples' "faith" Jesus by trusting his example. They model Jesus' example in 6:6b-13, rather than seeking to surpass him.
Footnotes
1. Ngaltatjara is a Pitjantjatjara word which loosely means "poor old thing." It can be a deeply sympathetic expression of a person's difficult situation. In this text, Narareth can mean us.
2. Cf Galatians 5:19-21 "Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these."
3. This table is taken from Marcus pp 378, using his own translation of Mark.
4. Even if the father were dead. Marcus pp374
5. Marcus pp375 Note that both the parallel texts of Matthew 13:55 and Luke 4.22 use the normal nomenclature which Marcus calls their "apparent embarrassment."
6. James is Jacob, the father. Three of his sons were Joseph, Judas, and Simon.
7. "Grubby" is a colloquialism where I live. It's a mix of small, petty, and nasty. And it has the sense of something that, if we were decent people, we wouldn't be involved with.
8. See https://onemansweb.org/intro.html#scapegoat
9. At the time of writing, those who walk around the lake near our house are fascinated by four ducklings of an unusual species which have been left to their own devices and are surviving quite well, including avoiding the pelicans suspected of eating many baby birds. If we were left alone we would die, or be severely emotionally damaged. Cf, for example, the Romanian orphans.
10. Alex Danco https://alexdanco.com/2019/04/28/secrets-about-people-a-short-and-dangerous-introduction-to-rene-girard/
11. This reprises the text at https://onemansweb.org/intro.html#kierkegaard
12. Alison, on being liked, pp1-2
13. See https://onemansweb.org/intro.html#mediator
14. Robert Hamerton-Kelly The Gospel and the Sacred, pp 95-97.
15. Hamerton-Kelly pp95
16. Cf this commentary at https://www.onemansweb.org/theology/intro/living-by-the-sea-mark-435-543.html " Point 14. The herd: (vv13) Hamerton-Kelly says the herd "is an eloquent symbol of the mob in pursuit of a victim. The herd's drowning means the violence ceases when the mob disappears." Australian English clarifies his understanding: here, a herd is often called a mob. And there is something mobbish happening here. The word used for the steep bank is krēmnou, a steep bank or cliff, or an overhang. Such places are sometimes used for the killing of the scapegoat; eg the Tarpeian Rock37 in Rome. In Luke 4:29, for example, the mob tries to cast Jesus over the cliff. The word there is katakrēmnisai which means to cast off a cliff or cast headlong. It comes from krēmnos. In the Gerasene story where "Normal relationships are reversed. The crowd should remain on top of the cliff and the victim fall over; instead, in this case, the crowd plunges and the victim is saved. The miracle of Gerasa reverses the universal schema of violence fundamental to all societies of the world."
17. Hamerton-Kelly, pp 95-97
18. Robert G. Bratcher and Eugene A. Nida, The Gospel of Mark, pp184 (UBS 1961)
19. https://biblehub.com/greek/4624.htm
20. See https://www.onemansweb.org/theology/parables-mark-41-34.html
21. To belong is to be good. It is to fit in, to be approved, and not to be the scapegoat.
