The Cross and Type-2 Fun

Mark 8:27-9:8

The Gospel of Mark is my favorite Gospel for two reasons. (1) It’s direct and to the point, and (2) the disciples are really dumb. Those two things give me comfort because I need to be reminded of what matters most of all pretty much every moment; I cannot hear about the cross often enough. And I’m also comforted by these disciples because if these were the guys Jesus chose as his right-hand men, then following Jesus really is open to anybody. If the disciples had been super big-head geniuses we could never know if we are enough, but since they are complete dunderheads we can all have hope. I can have hope not just for myself but maybe more importantly for those other Christians who never seem to get it either, because, Lord knows, I have seen some Christians justify terrible positions in the name of Christianity.

Like the disciples and the Pharisees both, we are always obsessing about the wrong things. We quickly sort everything into good and bad, success and failure. Meanwhile, Jesus is standing on the mountaintop transfigured, having just told the blockhead disciples that he is more than the messiah they expected; he is, in fact, coming to die for the sake of the world and rise again. And the disciples watch him transfigured and they say to themselves, “Ya know, I think we should put this guy next to Moses and Elijah. He’s almost as amazing as them!”

We shouldn’t be surprised. Jesus called these guys from their work as fisherman and tax collectors, tradesmen and carpenters, merchants, but never scholars of the Torah. Those who practiced trades like these would have lacked even basic literacy. They were elementary school drop-outs, not smart enough to make the cut to continue toward a professional career as a scribe or a lawyer. They were practicing the family trades because they weren’t good enough to do anything else.

In light of their simplicity, it makes sense that the disciples didn’t want Jesus to die. The simplest faith is to say “Death is bad, and life is good.” If it weren’t such a loaded political term today, we could say that the disciples were “Pro-life,” while the life they were in favor of was ultimately meaningless. Their faith in Jesus was misplaced not because they were bad guys but because they could not imagine anything better. Simple faith is not bad faith because it is simple, but simple faith is no assurance that your faith is in the right thing either. The disciples have bad faith not because they believe too much about Jesus but because they believe too little. Yet, far from disqualifying them, this seems to be precisely why Jesus chooses them.

The laws Jesus wouldn't have you follow

Mark 7:1-23

            I want to talk today about the three different types of laws. This is not the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd use of the law in the classical Lutheran sense—(that’s a topic for a dreary day when you want to take a nap); instead, I am going to talk about the three particular types laws that you can find in the Bible and why we only concern ourselves with two out of the three anymore in the Christian Church. Understanding the distinction between laws will help you to grasp what is happening in today’s reading between Jesus and the Pharisees, but even if you don’t care about this particular story because it doesn’t seem all that thrilling, it’s just as important to understand what laws are applicable and why so that you know what God wants you to do here and now.

            In order to wrap our heads around the law, we are going to have to fast forward a bit to another part of the Gospels. In this scene, a legal expert comes to Jesus (when I say “legal expert” I do not mean a lawyer as we would understand them today but an expert on the Torah which was the law of the Jewish people), and this legal expert asks Jesus a rather important question.

“Teacher,” he says, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:25).

Jesus responds, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?” (10:26).

            This is the first thing of note: Jesus answers a question about the law with a question about what the law says. It’s not simply that the Pharisees are pro-law and Jesus is anti-law. In fact, as we discover, Jesus is much more into certain aspects of the law than the legal experts. Back to the scene: The legal expert answers Jesus, saying,

“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself” (10:27), quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and adding that bit about a neighbor. 

Jesus responds, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live” (10:28).

We should note here that an important facet of the law, according to Jesus, namely that it has two parts: Love God and love your neighbor.

Sounds simple, right?

If the question is, “Which laws should I follow?” then the answer is the ones that tell you to love God and to love people. Straightforward enough for us, but this would have created a host of questions in the minds of these legal experts since a good portion of the Torah pertains not just to laws about loving God and loving neighbor but also to laws about being set apart as the Chosen People. This third group of laws is where we find the contention between the Pharisees and Jesus in our reading today.

Powerful people who play the victim

Mark 6:1-29

Last week I mentioned that at least four churches still claim to have the head of John the Baptist. Well, this week we get to find out why John the Baptist is missing his head.

There’s a lot to unpack here but I want to start a bit with Herod. There is this long tradition in scripture of powerful men being portrayed as victims. Two of the most powerful people in the land where Jesus did his ministry were Herod, who was the political leader of Galilee, and Pontius Pilate, who was governor of Judaea. Pilate served under the Roman Emperor while Herod ruled Galilee as a client state of the Roman Empire. This Herod was actually Herod Antipas, the son of the King Herod who so famously sent those kings to find Jesus so he could have him killed.

The historical account of these two powerful men is deeply intertwined. For example, when Jesus first comes before Pilate in the trial scene after he is betrayed Pilate sends him back to Herod Antipas since Jesus was most active in his territory. At this point, the Bible tends to lean apologetically toward these two men. Pilate famously washes his hands of Jesus’ fate handing him over to “his own people.” Herod Antipas similarly is “deeply grieved” by the request to murder John the Baptist. It’s as if the Gospel writers are trying to excuse their actions to soften the blow of their characters, but you have to understand the history.

Both these rulers are attested to in other historical documents. Josephus, the most well-known and prolific historian of the period, mentions both. Pilate is attested in historical records as one of the cruelest rulers of the age. He is eventually removed from his governorship after slaughtering a group of Samaritans on an archaeological dig. Herod Antipas, on the other hand, is hardly a lover of this movement of Jesus-followers. He had John the Baptist arrested simply for telling him that his incestuous marriage was not kosher. So, when Herod excuses himself because he took an oath to Herodias, the young girl he loved (and was related to), the reader has to be awfully naïve to take this at face value. We should ask ourselves: Why is it that powerful men are excused for terrible actions because of an oath when those same men are constantly violating their oaths?

If you can’t uphold oaths consistently then any oath you take is worthless. To swear an oath is not to promise to do something unless it is inconvenient. Oaths either matter to you or they don’t. This was particularly true for Pilate in the scene surrounding the trial of Jesus. After all, Pilate had been particularly cruel to these people. So, in that famous scene when he presents Jesus or Barabbas and asks, “Which one shall I free?” the people know the correct answer. It might seem awfully egregious of the crowds to shout “Barabbas!” but perhaps less so when you understand that at an order Pilate could have his soldiers raid and kill everybody in the court. If you believe the crowd has the power, then the story means one thing, but if Pilate has all the power, then it means something altogether. History suggests that this was exactly the kind of governor he was, dangling what the people want but demanding what would best serve him. He was not a sympathetic character—he was a brutal authoritarian.

So, we have these witnesses several times in the Bible where powerful men are excused for the worst kinds of actions, but that doesn’t answer the question of “Why?” I believe this is a probably of time. Readers of scripture in the 1^st century would have known exactly who these men were and the substance of their character. Pilate’s name would have been Mussolini to them or Stalin; they would have known exactly what it meant. So, too, we have Herod Antipas, who abuses his power to marry whoever he wants, flagrantly flaunting the Jewish law practiced by so many in his territories, and then he turns it around and blames the murder of John the Baptist on his mistress and niece. Stand up guy. And yet you wouldn’t be alone if you felt an ounce of remorse for him. Powerful people abuse their power to bend the narrative toward feeling sorry for themselves. Powerful people have blamed victims for as long as there have been victims to blame. Scripture portrays them this way, because that is how life works. Powerful people play victims over and over again.

Follow after Jesus, because you aren't Jesus

One of the most difficult parts of following after Jesus is learning how to be both a servant in the way Jesus served and to admit we cannot be Jesus. This is a more difficult line to walk than we might realize at first.

For example, I was looking through the library this past week as we are getting ready to clear things out for the daycare, and I noticed a DVD from a certain charismatic preacher that will go unnamed. I don’t doubt that this preacher—like many TV evangelists—got into ministry for good reasons—helping people, following after Jesus, the whole drill—but at some point things went awry. This man is most famous for bringing folks up on to the stage, dramatically striking them down with the purpose of healing them from their afflicions, but he’s equally famous for not allowing people with actual verifiable conditions (i.e. those who obviously need healing) to ever be among those who are on the stage.

I want to be careful with what I say about this because there are two things that may be true about healing ministry. 1) God can work miracles out of anything, and 2) Those who make it a show are likely to be frauds. The road to following after Jesus is wrought with pitfalls where we might imagine we are Jesus.

Lions and Tigers and Demons, oh my!

Mark 5:1-20

Today is everybody’s favorite biblical story—the Gerasene demoniac! You know, when all of you are thinking about your favorite Bible stories, there is Noah’s Ark, and Adam and Eve, and the birth of Jesus, and, of course, the Gerasene demoniac. OK, maybe not, but this story is in the Gospel of Mark, and it isn’t a quick aside either. Mark spends 20 verses out of only 678 in the entire book. That’s about 3% of the entire Gospel story on this particular demon possession.

            If we’re going to understand what’s going on here, then we need to know a few things about the Jewish faith. First of all we should know that Jesus and the disciples were Jewish. As a teacher, literally a rabbi, Jesus would have been charged with observance and interpretation of the Jewish faith. So, when they come across this demon-possessed man, everyone would have understood all the ways in which he was religiously impure—he lived in the tomb among the corpses, he likely eats from these nearby pig herds, and he cut himself, likely creating scars that also would have run afoul of Jewish law. From a modern perspective, we could label this man with any number of mental illnesses, but I’m not sure that helps us. At least, both can be true—he can be demon-possessed and mentally ill. We don’t necessarily know the difference.

If we’re going to read this scripture from a Jewish perspective (which was the perspective both of Jesus and those who would have first read it) we need to understand something about the law. In Judaism, there are three components to the law. One is to love God, summed up in the first three commandments; the second is to love other people, summed up in the final seven commandments; and the third is the holiness code that is written throughout the first five books of the Bible, which are laws that pertain to national identity and purity within religious practice. If you want to understand why a story like the Good Samaritan, for example, was so jarring for Jewish listeners, you need to understand that stopping to care for the bloodied man on the side of the road would have made the priest and the Levite impure. It was against the holiness code that was the very thing that made them Jewish.

The demon-possessed man in our story today would have presented similar problems. Besides being terrifying, he represented an affront to their laws. He takes it even a start farther by calling himself “Legion,” which was a Roman term for a regiment of six thousand soldiers, suggesting both that he is very demon-possessed and also that he is some kind of bodily representation of the pagan empire that ruled over their world. Everything about this man would have been offensive to the Jewish sensibilities.

So it is that Jesus comes into the picture. He exorcises the demons—after all, that’s what Jesus does throughout the Gospel of Mark!—but he does something interesting with them here. They beg him not to be sent out into the world. Firstly, this presents a notable picture, because we learn that exorcising demons does not mean that they are gone. Jesus doesn’t kill demons; he just removes them. Having done that, the demons beg to go into the pigs on the hillside.

Our modern Gentile sensibilities catch us off-guard here. If you are like me your first thought may be “Poor pigs!” What did they ever do to deserve this? But when we read this from a Jewish perspective, we should note that pigs are also ritually unclean. The deal that the demons strike with Jesus not only frees the man but removes a sign of the Gentile-nature of Gerasene as well. Having seen this, the locals beg Jesus to leave. These were their pigs, after all. It looks to them as if Jesus is coming as a kind of Jewish magician, which cannot be good news for the non-Jewish (Gentile) people of Gerasene. They are in awe of Jesus but that awe barely conceals their fear.

Outsiders who think we are in

Mark 4:1-34

There’s a line in this reading from Mark 4 that has always bugged me. It is the part where Jesus is supposed to be explaining things to the disciples and the other people in his inner circle, and he says, “The secret of God’s kingdom has been given to you, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables. This is so that they can look and see but have no insight, and they can hear but not understand. Otherwise, they might turn their lives around and be forgiven.”

I wonder if this bugs some of you as well? I mean, shouldn’t Jesus want people to understand, to turn their lives around and to be forgiven? Is he saying here that that’s not the goal?

On the surface level, this passage offers us an excuse to be the worst versions of ourselves. After all, if Jesus didn’t intend for other people to understand because they are no-good rotten jerks, then presumably those are the people we don’t like already, because we know we are the insiders, ergo the people I don’t like must be the outsiders. If we understand it this way, Jesus may be suggesting that we are on the inside, they are on the outside, and that’s how it’s always going to be. ]

But there’s a huge problem with that interpretation. Fast forward only fifteen verses and Jesus tells the disciples and the other wise guys, “Listen carefully! God will evaluate you with the same standard you use to evaluate others.”

Listen carefully! If you evaluate others and determine they are the ones on the outside, then Jesus is going to hold you to the same standard. And what is that standard? Well, he already told us! The standard is that we understand and interpret the parables correctly. And how shall we interpret the parables correctly? Again, Jesus has already told us the interpretation: He is the Son of God, he is the one who embodies God’s word for the world, he is the one coming to die for the sake of the world, so follow him. And how do the disciples do with this interpretation?

Uh oh. Here’s the big problem: The disciples fail every single time. In Mark’s Gospel, the disciples are the biggest blockheads of all. Whenever Jesus tells them that he has come to die they laugh it off and start preparing his throne for the eventual overthrow of the Roman government that they are expecting. Every time he tells them not to share about the miraculous healings because the only miracle that matters is the empty tomb they laugh him off and tell anybody and everybody about the super cool miracle they just saw.

Secrets and Demons

Mark 1:21-45

The Gospel of Mark catches your attention from the very first chapter. The first thing to notice is what’s missing. No birth story. No Jesus in a manger; no Bethlehem; in fact, no Mary at all. Instead, you get grown-up Jesus and the makings of a Hollywood thriller. There are demons everywhere, and Jesus goes around casting them out like he’s the t-shirt guy at a sporting event—everybody gets a demon cast out of them! This will prove to be just how Mark tells the story, and it is probably my favorite Gospel, but it’s not to everybody’s tastes.

One thing to note about the demons in Mark’s Gospel: they know who Jesus is. One thing to note about the disciples, the lawyers, the priests, and everybody else in Mark’s Gospel: They don’t have a clue who Jesus is, even when he tells them to it straight. Now, about those demons. The demons are part of daily life in a way that is foreign to the rest of the Gospels; in fact, it’s hard to find a corollary for all this demonic stuff anywhere in the Bible. Sure, there are instances of demons in some places, but nobody envisions a world crawling with them quite like Mark. The demons in Mark’s Gospel have two defining traits: 1) They know who Jesus is, and 2) They can do nothing against Jesus’ power.

Meanwhile, the people in the Gospel of Mark are all idiots. I’m not remotely being harsh either. Jesus spends the entire life of his ministry in Mark’s Gospel dealing with people who blatantly ignore everything he says. Every time he heals one of them he says the same thing, “Now, don’t go telling anybody about this!” And every time he does that what do they do? They go blabbing to everybody! This is a central point of Mark’s Gospel: The people never listen to Jesus; the demons always do. This is the first lesson of Mark’s Gospel: A mark of discipleship is not having a correct understanding of who Jesus was, because nobody did, but, rather, discipleship is about following Jesus even when you are getting it wrong.

This point will be brought home many times over the next few months as we read through Mark’s Gospel, because the disciples are the biggest blockheads of them all. They never get it. Not once do they recognize Jesus for who he really is. Jesus preaches a very simple message. He says: I’ve come to die for the sake of the world. And the disciples hear, “I’ve come to rule the world.” The people never listen, but the demons do.