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Sermon - The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (B) - 1st February 2009
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7, 8 and 10am
Readings: Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Psalm 111, 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, Mark 1:21-28
Across the world this liturgical year the Revised Common Lectionary directs Christians to read the gospel of Mark. As we read the voice of the earliest evangelist will cry out with his stark and uncompromising vision of Jesus and his clarion call to follow God’s anointed one along a way of conflict and challenge.
Mark’s gospel offers an antidote to domesticated, superficial Christianity: It is a radical manifesto of discipleship. The gospel of Mark is as much about the formation of a discipleship community responding to Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign as it is about Jesus himself. According to Mark, that response requires breaking from the corrupt social order and accompanying Jesus on the way of the cross.
The shortest and earliest of the gospels Mark’s account of Jesus exudes a sense of urgency, crisis and high drama. Whatever the actual setting, one senses between the lines of the gospel a historical cauldron of crisis, civil disturbance and apocalyptic fervour. Mark is calling on a group of believers to stake a claim of ultimate loyalty and radical faithfulness amidst a world of violence, injustice and oppression.
Mark’s language is terse and unpolished. The narrative is action oriented, featuring far fewer discourses of Jesus than do the other gospels. Jesus and his followers are always on the move. Clearly, Mark wants to convey a sense of that mere belief is not sufficient; the gospel must be lived out.
The simplicity of Mark’s narrative should not blind us to a deeper understanding. Mark knows that the radical faith Jesus calls us to is demanding. Mark’s Jesus constantly queries the disciples about their understanding and reproaches them for their failures. The healings from blindness and deafness are Mark’s way of urging us to turn from the illusions of the world and to the truth of God’s reign.
As Fr Ross pointed out a few weeks ago, by calling his work a “gospel,” Mark, is ingeniously de-legitimating imperial power. The word gospel was used to formally announce an emperor’s birth or accession to the throne, or to spread news of a military victory. Mark knows that the gospel is about a clash of two realities: God’s reign verses worldly empire. They cannot co-exist and so we the readers must make our choice.
Mark clearly demonstrates how urgently we need to develop critical skills of biblical understanding. The whole gospel is saturated with references to the Jewish biblical tradition. Almost every sentence of Mark links the reader to Torah, the prophets, the Psalms and other parts of scripture. By not grasping the reference to the manna story in Exodus, for instance, we superficially interpret the stories of wilderness feedings as nothing more than Jesus’ miraculous multiplication of material substances. If we don’t relate with the image of “widow” that is so crucial to Torah and the prophets, we miss the scathing critique of economic exploitation in the episode of the “widow’s mite” and instead applaud the widow for “giving of her all.”
Even the most superficial reading of the gospels reveals Jesus healing, casting out demons and forgiving sins. But Mark’s narrative recounts these deeds so as to draw out deeper meanings. These very actions serve as public critique and social subversion of the authorities. Jesus’ healings and exorcisms act not only to mercifully alleviate personal suffering but also to reveal the oppressive nature of the prevailing political and religious power systems.
Jesus’ first public action is an exorcism that occurs in a synagogue and what is ultimately at stake is “authority”. The compassionate act of liberating a possessed man is also an assault on a corrupted scribal system. In order to open space for the reign of God, Jesus must liberate his community from the evil spirit of religious hypocrisy. This exorcism is the opening act of Jesus’ prophetic challenge to religious authority systems, which culminates in his condemnation of the temple state.
The parallel exorcism in gentile territory represents a second prong of Jesus’ subversion of the social order. For just as Yahweh proved triumphant over the imperial forces of Egypt, so too Jesus proclaims victory over Roman imperialism. No wonder then that Mark constructs his account of Christ’s passion to show that Jewish and Roman authorities, equally colluding in his execution.
The reign of God is not bound up exclusively in the person of Jesus. Integral to his mission is calling and forming a community of disciples. As he embarks on his ministry, he empowers them to likewise heal, exorcise and forgive to join him in challenging a corrupt system and forging a new one. This means the disciples too will provoke the wrath of the powerful which would seem to be the reason Mark places the tale of John the Baptist’s execution right after the commissioning of the Twelve.
A major portion of Mark’s gospel is instructing the disciples in the nature of the new community of God’s reign. Mark’s Jesus calls on his followers to break from socially defined kinship structures and instead form new covenantal bonds of family with outsiders. They were to join Jesus in practicing new forms of “table fellowship,” defying social divisions based on purity and debt codes. Relations that were inclusive rather than exclusive, serving rather than dominating, would mark the Jesus movement.
In fact, a profoundly significant dimension of the discipleship community is evident in Mark’s many stories of women. While these women are often nameless they are in almost every case models of authentic discipleship. Like Jesus, they assertively break boundaries and defy social codes, attuned to the liberation of the reign of God.
The prominence of women as models of discipleship was central to Jesus’ critique of patriarchy.
A related practice of the discipleship community is economic. Like the most ancient practices of the Jewish community, the disciples are to live in the economy of God’s grace, in which the goods of the earth are shared and all are assured enough. It is an economy that Jesus promises in thoroughly practical terms will be sufficient.
The economic teachings of Mark are similarly threaded throughout the various seed and land parables, the wilderness feeding stories, as well as in the recurrent food and meal imagery. Mark’s Jesus is doing nothing more than re-articulating the original Jubilee economics of the ancient covenant.
Mark’s gospel is bluntly honest about the cost of heeding the invitation to discipleship. Peter’s full assertion of faith, at the midpoint of the gospel, is linked to the announcement of the cross. Jesus makes it clear that the cross is not only his own glorified vocation, but also the very condition of discipleship. More than any of the other gospels, the story of Jesus is overshadowed by conflict and a harrowing sense of ultimate showdown with the authorities. Similarly, it is marked by an incessant critique of the disciples, who are unable or unwilling to accept the reality of the cross.
According to Mark, the cross does not mean a sanctified suffering for its own sake. It is the inevitable outcome of opposing the domination system. Jesus’ followers must recognize that the reign of God and the discipleship community that seeks to live out that reign stands as a radical alternative to the world’s injustice, violence and oppression.
The answer to the apparent tragedy of the cross is the mystery of the empty tomb. Mark has his own unique angle on the Easter story.
The earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark end at 16:8, with the women running off in awe, terror and apparent silence. As startling an ending as it is, it is thoroughly appropriate for a manual on discipleship. The tomb is empty, yes, but the story is still open. Divine grace has wrought a miracle but now it is up to us. The divine messengers tell the women to go look for Jesus back in Galilee, where the story began. They are to return to the margins and take up the journey all over again.
Mark’s gospel forces us, the hearer, the reader, to take the next step. Will we now take up the cross and follow the risen Jesus? Modern day Christians might want to distance themselves from the radical fervour of Mark’s gospel. Perhaps Mark isn’t for us maybe we’ll look for another gospel with a kinder, gentler Jesus.
Mark will not let us off the hook so easily. His challenges are pointedly relevant to us. Do we who call ourselves Christians participate in an economy in which it is acceptable for 48,000 children to die each day while a handful enjoys prosperity? Do we accept the subtle social codes of clean and unclean, or do we break down barriers and practice table fellowship with outsiders and enemies? Are we seduced by “family values” that encourage us to take care of our own, or are we willing to recognize sisters and brothers among society’s marginalized? Have our church institutions opted for social pattern of power rather than abiding by Jesus’ new definitions of servant hood?
Just as Mark’s Jesus will not allow his followers to turn him into a triumphant, militant messiah, so too Mark shows us that we can only know Jesus by committing ourselves to active discipleship and following him on the way of the cross, which is ultimately the way of resurrection.
This sermon is based upon Dare to Preach This Gospel. by William O’Brien. Sojourners Magazine, January-February 2000 www.sojo.net.