What we bring to the Gospel of Mark (1)
What We Bring to the Gospel of Mark
What we see in a gospel is unavoidably shaped by the theology, and the social conventions, we bring to the gospel from outside and from before. All preachers and readers do this, as do all academics. We impose a view upon the gospel, and we never come as a "blank slate" who is not bringing an opinion. One definition of a fundamentalist is that they are the person who doesn't think they have an hermeneutic1 ; that is, that don't have a pre-existing way of interpreting what they read and hear. Our best defence against our bias, and the best way of being open to the gospel changing us, is to be as aware as we can of what theology we bring to the gospel.2 This allows us to ask if the text is really saying what we think it is, or whether we are imposing our own presuppositions. We can't do this if we don't know what our assumptions are!
Mark is symbolic literature
My first understanding is that the Gospel of Mark is symbolic literature. It uses a narrative to teach a theology. It is not seeking to be an historically accurate narrative in the way Westerners popularly imagine biography to be. It takes the stories about Jesus which were circulating within the Christian community around Mark, and re-tells them, re-shapes them, and orders them, to build up a picture of Jesus and his message. Our problem is too often, as John Dominic Crossan said,
not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.3
The sensibility of Jesus
My second understanding is that Jesus had a sensibility about the nature of humanity which is still news for most of us, and difficult to live out for all of us. This sensibility is shared to varying degrees by the gospel writers who, like us, are still being formed as human beings. This sensibility sees that all human systems tend to the violent domination of people that was exemplified in Jesus' time by the empire of Rome. It sees that this includes Jesus' own religion as it was practised at the time, and that given the chance, his own Jewish religion would become one more empire which ensured its survival by violent force. I refer to this tendency throughout this book as the culture of empire, or simply as empire.
This sensibility also understands what we can see as an historical fact: "all human systems" includes the church—us.4 The church tends to violent domination of those it designates as other.
I use the word sensibility deliberately. A shared sensibility is where people of different language, culture, or time, nonetheless have some substantial agreement about how to be human, and similar agreements about what damages our humanity. We might imagine Jesus saying, "I never said that 'all human systems tend to the violent domination of people that is exemplified by the empire of Rome,' but that statement does understand what I was trying to say." He might also say, "I know you have used exactly the words I used, but you have drawn conclusions completely different to those I intended." In other words, "We do not share the same sensibility."
Violence and the Sacred
In seeking to understand how this sensibility about violence is worked out in the Gospel of Mark, I make a distinction between what our culture calls the sacred and what I have chosen to call the holy.5 Following René Girard's6 interpreters, I understand that the sacred is actually a humanly conceived system for controlling violence, which is itself violent in its attempt to control violence. The culture of the transcendent God who knows no violence at all is what I shall call holy.
Jesus' gospel calls us out of living according to The Myth of Redemptive Violence7 into a new way of being human—a way of being which is fundamentally different to the way people have lived throughout the history of Homo sapiens.
Violence always threatens, at base, to kill people. Punishment is violent; that is, it always has, in reserve, perhaps out of sight, but still there, the threat and the ability to kill. Violence leverages our fear of death; if we were not afraid of dying, violence would have no hold over us. Jesus offers us a way towards freedom from the fear of death.
Most, if not all of us, were brought up being punished by our parents, and most, if not all of us, who are parents, have punished our children. The controversy caused by the proscription of corporal punishment in some countries, and in some education systems, shows just how novel to us is the idea that punishment is violent and always has death at the back of it. We can barely imagine how to live without violence as our backup option. Even when we talk about non-violence, we are describing something which is ultimately defined and circumscribed8 by violence! I think Jesus offers us a sensibility where we begin to see a way of being which, when the creation is complete, will not be non-violent, but will simply not know violence at all.
Jesus' way through our violence is to forgive rather than retaliate, for retaliation seeks to heal the effects of violence through even more violence, which is why any peace after an armed conflict never comes until people stop the violence and begin to talk. Jesus' way of living is forgiveness and compassion which, of course, leaves us at the mercy of violence… which has no mercy. Jesus gifts us with a life which will be spent "dodging between the powers," and will always at the risk of death9 . But the acceptance of this gift, the attempt at living this gift, begins to set us free from the fear of death.
Jesus felt this was so fundamental that today he would say the important issue is not about deciding that the Chinese are wrong, and we should align ourselves with the USA, for example. Rather, all nations are systems underpinned by violence and injustice. He would say it's not that we should be Atheist rather than Hindu, or Christian rather than Jewish, but that all philosophies and religions, including the one of our upbringing, suffer the same fundamental failings and are powers (in the sense of Ephesians 6:12) which tend towards violence because that is where they begin.
He understood at some level that we do not have a philosophical or intellectual problem. We have a problem of being—of how we live, from the very basic underpinnings of what makes us Homo sapiens onwards. I suspect he might say we have not yet become fully human.
The good news (gospel) about this new way of being was that the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near (Mark 1:15), and here we immediately see the immense problem that Jesus, and we, have in spreading the good news. Even the language we use is founded in violence! Kingdoms are bastions and hierarchies of violence that wield the fear of death as a weapon to ensure their own survival at the cost of those they deem expendable.
Since the language we use is founded in violence, Jesus cannot directly bring us a non-violent intellectual message that would make sense to us. We have no such language. He can only use language and, more especially, action which slowly subverts our accepted ways of violence, and patterns of behaviour, and which allows a new language and way of being human to develop. He can only teach us to be compassionate by being compassionate. He can only teach us how to face death by facing dying himself. And we can only learn these lessons by following his actions which, of course, may lead to our own deaths.
Andrea Prior (February 2025)
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1. See Richard Beck: http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2015/10/emotional-intelligence-and-sola.html
2. This part of the text is reworked from my article: https://www.onemansweb.org/theology/a-thematic-approach-to-matthew.htm
3. John Dominic Crossan, Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus. pp79
4. Hence Wes Howard-Brook's comment "to live the authentic Way of Jesus, leaving behind the legacy of “Christian” empire. " Come Out My People pp15-16
5. A distinction by no means original with me.
6. This is not to say that Jesus and his disciples were "Girardians." Girard and his expositors seek to express in our terms Jesus' sensibility about the violence and exploitation in which he lived. Girard does not claim to have developed something new about us, but to have systematised many human insights, including those of Jesus, which are visible across a wide range of culture, and have slowly become more clear through the influence of the Spirit. A shared sensibility is where Jesus might say to Girard, "Well... I'd never have put it like that, but you have understood what I was seeing."
[7] See: www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/cpt/article_060823wink.shtml In this article, Walter Wink says, "In short, the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favour those who conquer... The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has even known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialised in the process of maturation. Children select this mythic structure because they have already been led, by culturally reinforced cues and role models, to resonate with its simplistic view of reality...."
8. I mean by circumscribed that when we say non-violence we are still thinking in, and surrounded by, a world view which is defined by violence. To be circumscribed by something is to be at least partly formed by the thing we oppose.
9. See: https://billloader.com/MtChristmas1.htm (Retrieved 10/8/2024)
Good people.
